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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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If Sayakiel ever gets confirmed, there'll be a whole new level of meaning behind that. Moreso as our Homura moves further and further away from the edge that made her Akuma. Seriously, the character development in this fic is astounding.
 
I feel like we've forgotten something pretty important. Our goal isn't to give everyone a clear seed, our goal is to ensure every meguca has access to cleansing. Handing out clear seeds was the best option available to us, but it's really not anymore. Setting aside the issue of giving every single meguca team in the world a pocket fusion reactor and then just hoping none of them start a nuclear war, every single clear seed we hand out is one we're going to have to fight tooth and nail to get back once we figure out de-witching. If we turn this 'embassy' option we've grudgingly accepted into our new default going forward, then we sidestep that issue by not having anymore clear seeds leave our custody in the first place.

Between Yuki, Sayaka, and Kazumi we can create and staff as many embassies as we want, they'll be heavily defended, and we don't even need to keep a clear seed onsite when no one's using them with how Yuki's power works. And once we crack grief cubes or some equivalent it'll be much easier to repurpose the existing infrastructure to distribute them.

Am I missing something?

Edit: In a lot of cases we don't even necessarily need to negotiate rights to set up shop in a meguca's territory. Most meguca seem to claim relatively urban environments, we can just claim places near cities that are outside of established hunting grounds and let the neighbors know we're open for business. I mean we'd want to warn them ahead of time to be polite, but still.
 
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memoryofglory said:
Am I missing something?
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Emergency cleansing is an issue. Girls undergoing grief spirals or dealing with severe emotional issues like Oriko went through can't be away from their Clear Seeds while that's happening. A central distribution system means they have to have their emotional breakdowns and process difficult emotions in a single centralized place instead of being able to do so where they're comfortable and where their non-meguca support network is. One of the things we've seen is that due to the way grief spirals work, girls like Mami and Kyoko survive by repressing their issues rather than dealing with them because actually processing those difficult emotions is expensive in terms of cleansing. That lets them survive in the short term, but leaves them brittle and easily pushed over the edge by Kyubey. Giving girls access to Clear Seeds means they can start actually processing those emotions in a healthy way.

There's also the issue that limiting our cleansing services to something that firmly locked down and under our control, we're making them more reliant on us. Girls get used to having free cleansing on tap, get used to that security and maybe a little rusty at witch hunting, then suddenly Sabrina starts charging... Sure, Sabrina would be disgusted even considering that, but the girls we're helping don't know that. Plus, as our organization expands, new management might get involved. Maybe Yuki starts playing hard ball. Again, Sabrina will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tried to pull that, but look at it from the prospective of people who don't know just how dedicated Sabrina is to her humanitarian mission, and what they do know about how other Grief Controlers have historically behaved. By making the offer to put the resources under the individual girl's control, it makes the "no strings attached" part more obvious and sincere. It makes girls more likely to accept our help.

And, of course, once there are enough Clear Seeds out there, the risk of theft goes down immensely because no one has any reason to steal if they're already living in a post-scarcity situation.

That said, I do think we should absolutely bring up this as a new option on our menu when we make our cleansing trips to groups that haven't accepted Clear Seeds already.

As for collecting Clear Seeds after we crack de-witching, I don't think we can justify collecting them at all until we have a substitute anyway. Otherwise, we'll be dewitching one girl only to have a half dozen other girls witch out because of it. And once we get something like Grief Cubes in a state to be mass produced, the value of Clear Seeds will plummet to the point we'll have a much easier time simply buying them back from girls who are no longer reliant on them.
 
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Nerevar said:
Emergency cleansing is an issue. Girls undergoing grief spirals or dealing with severe emotional issues like Oriko went through can't be away from their Clear Seeds while that's happening. A central distribution system means they have to have their emotional breakdowns and process difficult emotions in a single centralized place instead of being able to do so where they're comfortable and where their non-meguca support network is. One of the things we've seen is that due to the way grief spirals work, girls like Mami and Kyoko survive by repressing their issues rather than dealing with them because actually processing those difficult emotions is expensive in terms of cleansing. That lets them survive in the short term, but leaves them brittle and easily pushed over the edge by Kyubey. Giving girls access to Clear Seeds means they can start actually processing those emotions in a healthy way.

There's also the issue that limiting our cleansing services to something that firmly locked down and under our control, we're making them more reliant on us. Girls get used to having free cleansing on tap, get used to that security and maybe a little rusty at witch hunting, then suddenly Sabrina starts charging... Sure, Sabrina would be disgusted even considering that, but the girls we're helping don't know that. Plus, as our organization expands, new management might get involved. Maybe Yuki starts playing hard ball. Again, Sabrina will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tried to pull that, but look at it from the prospective of people who don't know just how dedicated Sabrina is to her humanitarian mission, and what they do know about how other Grief Controlers have historically behaved. By making the offer to put the resources under the individual girl's control, it makes the "no strings attached" part more obvious and sincere. It makes girls more likely to accept our help.

And, of course, once there are enough Clear Seeds out there, the risk of theft goes down immensely because no one has any reason to steal if they're already living in a post-scarcity situation.

That said, I do think we should absolutely bring up this as a new option on our menu when we make our cleansing trips to groups that haven't accepted Clear Seeds already.

As for collecting Clear Seeds after we crack de-witching, I don't think we can justify collecting them at all until we have a substitute anyway. Otherwise, we'll be dewitching one girl only to have a half dozen other girls witch out because of it. And once we get something like Grief Cubes in a state to be mass produced, the value of Clear Seeds will plummet to the point we'll have a much easier time simply buying them back from girls who are no longer reliant on them.
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Only thing I'd say is that clear seeds will probably remain a compact source of huge amounts of cleansing, and will so retain their use in allowing meguca to avoid having to work with our incredibly low standards. Ideally it'd be nice to develop a long range witch radar that can ping seeds, so we can find any that get stashed or are in use if need be.
 
Nerevar said:
Emergency cleansing is an issue. Girls undergoing grief spirals or dealing with severe emotional issues like Oriko went through can't be away from their Clear Seeds while that's happening. A central distribution system means they have to have their emotional breakdowns and process difficult emotions in a single centralized place instead of being able to do so where they're comfortable and where their non-meguca support network is. One of the things we've seen is that due to the way grief spirals work, girls like Mami and Kyoko survive by repressing their issues rather than dealing with them because actually processing those difficult emotions is expensive in terms of cleansing. That lets them survive in the short term, but leaves them brittle and easily pushed over the edge by Kyubey. Giving girls access to Clear Seeds means they can start actually processing those emotions in a healthy way.

There's also the issue that limiting our cleansing services to something that firmly locked down and under our control, we're making them more reliant on us. Girls get used to having free cleansing on tap, get used to that security and maybe a little rusty at witch hunting, then suddenly Sabrina starts charging... Sure, Sabrina would be disgusted even considering that, but the girls we're helping don't know that. Plus, as our organization expands, new management might get involved. Maybe Yuki starts playing hard ball. Again, Sabrina will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tried to pull that, but look at it from the prospective of people who don't know just how dedicated Sabrina is to her humanitarian mission, and what they do know about how other Grief Controlers have historically behaved. By making the offer to put the resources under the individual girl's control, it makes the "no strings attached" part more obvious and sincere. It makes girls more likely to accept our help.

And, of course, once there are enough Clear Seeds out there, the risk of theft goes down immensely because no one has any reason to steal if they're already living in a post-scarcity situation.

That said, I do think we should absolutely bring up this as a new option on our menu when we make our cleansing trips to groups that haven't accepted Clear Seeds already.

As for collecting Clear Seeds after we crack de-witching, I don't think we can justify collecting them at all until we have a substitute anyway. Otherwise, we'll be dewitching one girl only to have a half dozen other girls witch out because of it. And once we get something like Grief Cubes in a state to be mass produced, the value of Clear Seeds will plummet to the point we'll have a much easier time simply buying them back from girls who are no longer reliant on them.
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Emergency cleansing is a serious issue that isn't really solved by every team having a clear seed, after all even in Mitakihara with us offering cleansing practically every 10 seconds Mami and Kyoko have had worrying spikes in grief generation a few times. The best way around this is to add house calls to the system I suggest. Keep track of how often people come by for cleansing, and if someone starts coming by less often, or more often followed by a worrying stop, or shows up looking particularly distressed, etc send someone over with a clear seed to check on them.

Yes they'd be reliant on us, but that's a better thing in most ways. We're not going to start charging. Sayaka's general ridiculous utility means we can potentially run a massive operation with a tiny amount of people, no need for vast numbers of subordinates we can't personally trust. Not that we won't recruit more people, but we can afford to keep things personal. If Yuki starts trying to abuse her position Sayaka and/or Kazumi can replace her. Or we hire a new girl, it's a big world and Yuki knows her powers are a lot more replaceable than ours. Letting girls have control over the source of their cleansing is great for building trust, but they're still going to be worried it's too good to be true we're handing out free stuff. What if clear seeds get them addicted to grief heroine? It might put some girls more at ease if there's a visible benefit to us in things. And the only way to really build the trust we need is to be consistent, say we'll cleanse anyone who comes to one of our bases, and follow through for years. There's not really any shortcuts to trust.

You say that we can't justify collecting clear seeds until we crack de-witching, but that's the wrong way to think about it. We can't justify spreading the souls of hundreds or thousands of girls all around the world as a commodity, even as a stopgap, unless we have a plan to get them back once it's no longer necessary as a stopgap. And no it's not clear that grief cubes will make clear seeds plummet in value. We'll be trying to get people to give up pocket fusion reactors and trade them in for AA batteries that we have a production monopoly on. Every girl that isn't witch-bombed will think we've finally shown our true colors and are making power grab to centralize control of the meguca world under us. Better that we go into this building the expectation that we'll be the source of cleansing in the future whether it's with clear seed hubs or grief cube distribution centers. Access to cleansing must come before de-witching, but we still need to plan to make de-witching feasible. The current plan will just lead to us making a surprised Pikachu face when we have to fight a world war to get back all the clear seeds.
 
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All this talk about grief spirals made me think of something: is there a way for us to increase the grief capacity of a soul gem? Grief spirals are a threat because they allow a Meguca to go from fine to witch out super quickly, so the answer might be to make it so it takes far more grief to trigger the transformation. A, say tenfold, increase in storage without danger could allow a meguca to have emotional breakdowns when a clear seed isn't present and then go get cleaned up after the fact. Having one present could then be saved for therapy sessions.
 
memoryofglory said:
Every girl that isn't witch-bombed will think we've finally shown our true colors and are making power grab to centralize control of the meguca world under us.
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Part of the clear seed recall will be witchbombing a lot of people, but that's necessary anyway since nobody's going to trust us enough to give us all their grief seeds in addition to having sole control of their clear seed access.

You call it "spreading the souls of hundreds or thousands of girls all around the world", but so far we've exclusively cleared out seeds that were already in the possession of the group that'll be using them. We're not adding any seeds to the system, and the one seed per group policy means they're not even moving around.
 
Torgamous said:
Part of the clear seed recall will be witchbombing a lot of people, but that's necessary anyway since nobody's going to trust us enough to give us all their grief seeds in addition to having sole control of their clear seed access.

You call it "spreading the souls of hundreds or thousands of girls all around the world", but so far we've exclusively cleared out seeds that were already in the possession of the group that'll be using them. We're not adding any seeds to the system, and the one seed per group policy means they're not even moving around.
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Or once we set up our cleansing infrastructure we let people know we'll buy/trade for excess grief seeds. Need a hundred bucks? give us a grief seed. Want a trip to Hawaii? Give us some grief seeds. Clear seeds are valuable enough we'll have a hard time getting them back but grief seeds are definitely going to tank in value. Sure some people will hold onto 'just in case' stockpiles for a long time, but it's actually feasible to get people to give those to us eventually. After all we won't start de-witching until we have grief cubes, and they can just start stockpiling those instead of grief seeds. Clear seeds are power though, and people don't like giving up power.
 
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memoryofglory said:
Emergency cleansing is a serious issue that isn't really solved by every team having a clear seed, after all even in Mitakihara with us offering cleansing practically every 10 seconds Mami and Kyoko have had worrying spikes in grief generation a few times. The best way around this is to add house calls to the system I suggest. Keep track of how often people come by for cleansing, and if someone starts coming by less often, or more often followed by a worrying stop, or shows up looking particularly distressed, etc send someone over with a clear seed to check on them.
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I do like the idea of adding some tracking to the cleansing stations and doing the needed data analysis to identify when emergency services need to be sent. Since we'd be setting up a sign-in sheet to help mitigate Tokyo's concerns anyway, making use of that data for our humanitarian projects like this feels right to me.
memoryofglory said:
Yes they'd be reliant on us, but that's a better thing in most ways. We're not going to start charging. Sayaka's general ridiculous utility means we can potentially run a massive operation with a tiny amount of people, no need for vast numbers of subordinates we can't personally trust. Not that we won't recruit more people, but we can afford to keep things personal. If Yuki starts trying to abuse her position Sayaka and/or Kazumi can replace her. Or we hire a new girl, it's a big world and Yuki knows her powers are a lot more replaceable than ours. Letting girls have control over the source of their cleansing is great for building trust, but they're still going to be worried it's too good to be true we're handing out free stuff. What if clear seeds get them addicted to grief heroine? It might put some girls more at ease if there's a visible benefit to us in things. And the only way to really build the trust we need is to be consistent, say we'll cleanse anyone who comes to one of our bases, and follow through for years. There's not really any shortcuts to trust.
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I do want to make sure I point out, this isn't about Yuki. She's dealt with us fairly and been a great ally, so I don't distrust her in the slightest, nor am I worried that she'll try to pull something. She was just a convenient example of someone who isn't Sabrina who's got a vital role in the cleansing infrastructure we'd be setting up. I know no one really said anything about it, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression about that. I like Yuki.

Anyway, this isn't about whether the threat is real. We're going to do everything in our power to make sure everyone gets the cleansing they need even if we have to fight a Type-IV Civlization to do it. That's not in question. My point is really about whether the girls in question are going to be willing to trust that we don't have ulterior motives, and to trust that the people we rely on won't be subverting our humanitarian mission.

And given the stakes involved, I'd say asking them to trust us with whether or not they'll witch out is a bigger ask than us trusting them not to abuse the magical powers they already have anyway.
memoryofglory said:
You say that we can't justify collecting clear seeds until we crack de-witching, but that's the wrong way to think about it. We can't justify spreading the souls of hundreds or thousands of girls all around the world as a commodity, even as a stopgap, unless we have a plan to get them back once it's no longer necessary as a stopgap. And no it's not clear that grief cubes will make clear seeds plummet in value. We'll be trying to get people to give up pocket fusion reactors and trade them in for AA batteries that we have a production monopoly on. Every girl that isn't witch-bombed will think we've finally shown our true colors and are making power grab to centralize control of the meguca world under us. Better that we go into this building the expectation that we'll be the source of cleansing in the future whether it's with clear seed hubs or grief cube distribution centers. Access to cleansing must come before de-witching, but we still need to plan to make de-witching feasible. The current plan will just lead to us making a surprised Pikachu face when we have to fight a world war to get back all the clear seeds.
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I didn't say we can't justify collecting Clear Seeds until we crack de-Witching. I said we can't justify collecting Clear Seeds EVEN AFTER we crack de-Witching if we don't already have a substitute. The instant we have Grief Cubes, the drive to recollect Clear Seeds and replace them starts, whether we've figured out de-Witching by then or not. I don't think anyone here has any objection to that.

memoryofglory said:
Or once we set up our cleansing infrastructure we let people know we'll buy/trade for excess grief seeds. Need a hundred bucks? give us a grief seed. Want a trip to Hawaii? Give us some grief seeds. Clear seeds are valuable enough we'll have a hard time getting them back but grief seeds are definitely going to tank in value. Sure some people will hold onto 'just in case' stockpiles for a long, but it's actually feasible to get people to give those to us eventually. After all we won't start de-witching until we have grief cubes, and they can just start stockpiling those instead of grief seeds. Clear seeds are power though, and people don't like giving up power.
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I kind of want to make swaps of Grief Seeds for Clear Seeds in our cleansing stations. Drop off any number of Grief Seeds, get as many of them back as Clear Seeds as you want. Include suggested charitable donations of Grief Seeds to the cleansing station to help out girls who don't have Grief Seeds to trade.

Every Grief Seed we get out of circulation is one that doesn't go to Kyubey, so incentivising them to come to us instead of to him is a really important thing. Getting Clear Seeds back from groups that don't want to give them up is going to be a million times easier than getting Grief Seeds back from Kyubey, even assuming the Grief Seeds Kyubey collects are even in an intact state after he's done "processing" them.
 
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Nerevar said:
I do like the idea of adding some tracking to the cleansing stations and doing the needed data analysis to identify when emergency services need to be sent. Since we'd be setting up a sign-in sheet to help mitigate Tokyo's concerns anyway, making use of that data for our humanitarian projects like this feels right to me.

I do want to make sure I point out, this isn't about Yuki. She's dealt with us fairly and been a great ally, so I don't distrust her in the slightest, nor am I worried that she'll try to pull something. She was just a convenient example of someone who isn't Sabrina who's got a vital role in the cleansing infrastructure we'd be setting up. I know no one really said anything about it, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression about that. I like Yuki.

Anyway, this isn't about whether the threat is real. We're going to do everything in our power to make sure everyone gets the cleansing they need even if we have to fight a Type-IV Civlization to do it. That's not in question. My point is really about whether the girls in question are going to be willing to trust that we don't have ulterior motives, and to trust that the people we rely on won't be subverting our humanitarian mission.

And given the stakes involved, I'd say asking them to trust us with whether or not they'll witch out is a bigger ask than us trusting them not to abuse the magical powers they already have anyway.

I didn't say we can't justify collecting Clear Seeds until we crack de-Witching. I said we can't justify collecting Clear Seeds EVEN AFTER we crack de-Witching if we don't already have a substitute. The instant we have Grief Cubes, the drive to recollect Clear Seeds and replace them starts, whether we've figured out de-Witching by then or not. I don't think anyone here has any objection to that.
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I apologize for misrepresenting your case, but I stand by my own case. Unless we've given up on de-witching we need to plan for getting all those seeds back before we give them out, even if we don't implement it for years. And the easiest way to get seeds back is to give out as few as possible in the first place.

And I feel like we're talking past each other, why is setting up a food bank/salvation army/homeless shelter in each city less trustworthy than handing out clear seeds? Either option the only way to build true trust is time.

Edit: I'm not really getting my point across well here. What is our ultimate end goal? Seeds turned back into real girls and everyone using grief cubes. Which we are most likely going to be the only source of. Our ultimate end goal is the cleansing system being dependent on us anyway, so why so much focus on giving meguca cleansing independence from us when we're going to want to convince them to give that up later?

The perfect is the enemy of the good enough, so I don't have a problem relying on clear seeds now, but that's no excuse for setting up a system using them that's going to be a billion headaches dismantling in the future.
 
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memoryofglory said:
I apologize for misrepresenting your case,
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Don't worry about it. I know this wasn't intentional, and clarifying our positions to one another is a normal part of having a civil discussion. I do apologize if the caps came off as me being upset. I was just trying to emphasize where I thought the disconnect was.
memoryofglory said:
but I stand by my own case. Unless we've given up on de-witching we need to plan for getting all those seeds back before we give them out, even if we don't implement it for years. And the easiest way to get seeds back is to give out as few as possible in the first place.
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I understand your position. I think it's a matter of trade-offs. I think fewer girls witching out now is a good trade for troubles down the road re-collecting Clear Seeds. Sort of like how breaking someone's sternim is a good trade-off for getting them resuccitated with CPR. I conceptualize us as being in an emergency situation, and the distribution of Clear Seeds being an emergency measure. Emergency measures usually do involve trade-offs like that, where we would do things differently if we were in an ideal world and could get everything set up just the way we want it from the beginning.
memoryofglory said:
And I feel like we're talking past each other, why is setting up a food bank/salvation army/homeless shelter in each city less trustworthy than handing out clear seeds? Either option the only way to build true trust is time.
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Because every one of those food banks also doubles as an impenetrable forward base from which we can deploy an unending army of Sayakas to enforce our tyranical rule? I mean, it's an explicit selling point that no one will be able to attack it and win.

I'm reminded of an old sci-fi show called Earth Final Conflict. There's an episode where the equivalent of a nuclear terrorist attack is thwarted when the alien embassy raises its defesnes and deflects the blast into space. Afterward, there's some considerable allarm on the news that the aliens had put fortified strongholds in every major capital capable of shrugging off the most powerful weapons humanity had.
memoryofglory said:
Edit: I'm not really getting my point across well here. What is our ultimate end goal? Seeds turned back into real girls and everyone using grief cubes. Which we are most likely going to be the only source of. Our ultimate end goal is the cleansing system being dependent on us anyway, so why so much
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We don't want cleansing dependent on us. We want to be able to find a way to make cleansing available to everyone even if Sabrina were to poof out of existance. Our hope is we'll find a way to produce Grief Cubes in a way that other girls can replicate.

Cleansing being forever dependent on Sabrina is a bad thing, since the moment we die, Kyubey gets back to his normal business.
 
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