Lopezelpesado
Space worm best worm.
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And we dont really know what it does with the grief seeds, for all we know they break them open like nuts.
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
- Thread starter Firnagzen
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- puella magi adfligo systema puella magi madoka magica be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist bad decisions dating mami tomoe (tomoe mami) diabolical laughter friendship is the best ship handholding identity crises microwaving tea gets you put in the bad place names are important the body is the fursona of the soul this is not the baked goods thread we don't talk about rionna what could possibly go wrong? who in the world is azure sanfrancisco?
And we dont really know what it does with the grief seeds, for all we know they break them open like nuts.
I agree that this is probably a case of Alien Morals
Specifically, I suspect that the "No Lying" thing is a core, likely engineered, aspect of their species that is integral for their society. Kuybey can't lie because he *can't change that trait*, or specifically *even if he was able to he'd likely be killed*.
There's probably something different going on with the lack of interference, and trying to reduce knowledge of magic stuff.
In the end, I don't think that Kuybey is entirely unreasonable. If it's mutually beneficial, he'll go for it. And the core issue with <gestures at the setting> is that Kuybey is misaligned with what people want.
If we can figure out how to reconcile, then we can move forward easier. We don't want Kuybey as an enemy, that makes everything *much* more difficult, and it's not like we can actually kill him.
noahgab1133
Fluffy?
My reread ends with a new update? Glorious! Can't wait to see what happens next.
Romka
Master of Stealth
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- In a barrel
Maybe he feeds them all to a Hamster witch that runs around in a wheel real fast.
While I think it's unlikely that Kyubey will agree to this unless we can offer him something even more valuable in exchange (and depending on what he does with them it may not even be possible for him to say yes), I'd like to contemplate the logistical hurdles involved for a second
- First, the sheer number of them. I'm not going to try to estimate how many magical girls have lived across all of history but it has to be in the millions. The physical space required to store them all would be enormous and unless Sabrina can push her multi-processing abilities to the level of absurdity it would take her months and months of doing nothing but moving grief around just to clear them all out
- Second, supposing we found some method of effective dewitching we'd then have to figure out what to do with millions of girls from all over human history all of whom had the worst day of their lives, turned into a monster for an extended period of time, and then woke up in 21st century japan. This is a challenge bad enough to make the mess we're about to deal with with the Soujus' victims look like the easiest thing we've ever done
- Third, what exactly are the implications of familiars here. A familiar who eats enough people eventually turns into a copy of the witch that created it with its own grief seed. Do some of the seeds in Kyubey's collection have thousands of copies? If we could dewitch them would they all turn back into the same girl who now has thousands of clones?
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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All of these will still be the case if Kyubey doesn't hand them over peacefully.
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No reason not to ask. If he says no, we're no worse off.
I don't think Kyubey has a concept of "enemies". He will happily work with us one minute, try to kill is the next minute, then go right back to working with us if his murder attempt fails.
I don't think we'll ever get to the point of "reconciled" with him, but I do think we can get better at meeting him on his own terms, working with him where our goals align and working against him where they don't and limiting how much our interactions in one area color our interactions in another.
I actually did do the math a while back. I took the total number of humans who have ever lived as an unrealistic maximim then looked up how many eggs you can stack in a given volume. There were a few more things I did after that I don't recall immediately, but I remember the result was a lot, but not enough to fill our 3D control zone so we technically wouldn't even need to use 4D rotation to store them all while we worked through de-Witching them. Obviously we would use that since we wouldn't want them lying around everywhere in the spatial dimension we live in, but it isn't completely untenable either.
Do we actually have the ability to take them by force? From a moral standpoint we have to save those girls no matter what but if Kyubey won't bargain for them we start having to look at plans like 'find a magical girl whose power will let us trace a grief seed back to wherever Kyubey is sending them and then once we have a location go physically invade the Incubator homeworld'. It's not completely out of the question given what magical girls are capable of but it starts to get implausible
Another question in the same direction of 'what the heck is up with Kyubey's weird understanding of gender' is how exactly he determines who counts as a girl for the purpose of making a contract in the first place. Special entropy-defying emotions experienced only by girls are such a weird concept in the first place that I have no idea how it interacts with trans people, intersex people, all of the other places where gender isn't straightforward, etc. Candidate answers here: a. just the basic boy-girl emotion-related difference of whether your hormonal system is primarily estrogen or testosterone, b. Kyubey defines gender in the first place by whether you're capable of experiencing the special magical potential emotions and a girl is anyone he can contract, c. some kind of bizarre alien understanding of gender that makes no sense to us
Oh neat! So it would be physically possible after all albeit inconvenient (Technically speaking familiars who turn into witches complicate this count but it only matters here if the number of familiar grief seeds per original witch seed is high enough to compensate for the fact that magical girls are only a small fraction of humans which seems unlikely. If it were that high we'd be crawling in witches and there wouldn't be grief seed scarcity)
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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Yes. We just need to find a magical girl whose power will let us trace a grief seed back to wherever Kyubey is sending them, and then once we have a location go physically invade the Incubator homeworld.
It's not a thing to do during the quest, but then neither is dewitching every magical girl who has ever lived.
Lopezelpesado
Space worm best worm.
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Thats assuming it has a 'Homeworld', we know nothin about the little rat, for all we know it has thousands of planets worth of bases.
I dont mind trying but these fuckers have clarktech, Id say we go with a bit of caution.
Romka
Master of Stealth
- Location
- In a barrel
If we're going to ask him about possible improvements to his energy system in exchange for grief seeds, we should ask him straight up how his energy processing works so that we can figure out what arrangement works better for both of us.
Without more information, the idea I think is most likely to work goes like this: Sabrina's grief seems to have no physical limits, meaning it can generate and release arbitrary amounts of energy. The Incubators do seem to have physical limits on their ability to extract energy from grief, otherwise they'd already have all the energy they need. To get around the limits of their ability to extract energy from grief, they would need more of it to extract energy from, hence the despair farms.
The Incubators don't actually care about the grief itself though, they care about the energy generated by the grief. So if Sabrina can generate any amount of energy from any amount of grief, and the Incubators cannot, she could conceivably outproduce the entirety of the Incubator grief energy extraction industry. This would mean she is the best source of power, which would be an incredible bargaining tool. We could offer to supply his civilization with more energy than they could otherwise produce on the condition that they hand over every grief seed. Then just set up an Incubator portal and a speck of grief in hammerspace, or a shielded bubble of grief, or even a witch's barrier, and collect the seeds we're owed.
I don't actually know if it would work out, but that would be my best bet. It will depend a lot on Kyubey's ability to collect large amounts of energy from incubator portals, so if it does fail I suspect it will be because of throughput reasons. Well, that and the whole Madoka thing. They might still want her more.
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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We can't verify any answer he gives there. We can only verify whether or not he gives us a grief seed to clear out.
Any arrangement that doesn't have all its terms immediately and obviously fulfilled leaves room for incubator fuckery and alien morality loopholes. In Nerevar's scenario, we get all the grief seeds eventually because the Incubators prefer us draining them to just keeping the grief seeds, and there's no way to both have that cake and eat it too. In your scenario, at best we get whatever amount of grief seeds Kyubey can convince us is "all of them". At worst, pointing the other end of the arbitrary energy portal back at us doesn't violate whatever is keeping the Incubators from just shooting us because it's categorized as suicide.
ExploerTM
Ruin has found you at last!
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- Russia, Perm
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They absolutely would tell us to fuck off if we try to pry them away from Madoka. They were willing to sacrifice all of Earth's future grief production just for Madoka, it doesnt matter how much energy Sabrina can produce, she is not Madoka. With all their tech and social fu skills they can realistically keep Earth running indefinitely and they STILL chose to sacrifice it all to get Madoka.
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- Netherlands
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The issue with that theory is that in that conversation where Kyubey makes the "you'd probably still be living in caves" comment, he does also pretty explicitly say "We have been involved with your civilization since before your recorded history".
Plus, he showed a bunch of images of historical magical girls in that conversation too, and I don't think that he just made those up or that they were from alternate timelines or something.
...But yeah, that does leave us with canon being pretty weird in regards to magical girl media and the butterfly effect.
I am kind of curious about this too, though. Kyubey's wording in the translation I watched is:
Which, to be fair, "experience the greatest fluctuations between hope and despair" isn't exactly the same as saying "girls are more emotional"... But even then, the idea that girls undergoing puberty just universally experience greater fluctuations between hope and despair than boys and adults to such a degree that it's not worth performing the process on anyone else is still kind of absurd.Kyubey in episode 9 said:
This probably isn't the intended way to read that line, but one could read the "who experience the greatest fluctuations between hope and despair" part as not intending to explain why teenaged girls are most effective, but rather as further specifying what kind of teenaged girl is most effective. Aka, "And the most effective of all are those who both 1: are girls in their second stage of development, and 2: experience the greatest fluctuations between hope and despair."
In that reading, Kyubey considering teenaged girls most effective could be for a completely different reason than "girl experience the greatest fluctations between hope and despair". Like, their tech just being generally best adapted to working with teenaged girls or something, in which case that says more about the limitations of their technology than about the nature of teenaged girls.
As one example, maybe they need to do some medical trickery to both rip the soul out of a body and keep the body functioning with its soul ripped out, but whatever trick they use doesn't work as well on bodies that diverge too much from particular hormone balances or sets of sex characteristics or something. In which case whether it would work on intersex people would fluctuate wildly, it would probably work on someone AFAB if they're not taking hormones, it would maybe work on someone taking estrogen, and would probably not work on someone AMAB and not on HRT, though it might if they wish for bodily changes or something?
(Ultimately, though, when it comes to the "why does kyubey only do magical girls" question, I tend to mostly just go "eh, genre conventions" and just try not to think about it too hard)
Torgamous
Aspiring Gynoid
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Or they'd say "sure," take whatever payment we offer, and keep trying to contract her anyway because they decided whatever words were used in the deal have a loophole. Nerevar's proposal only has the potential to work because them following through is how paying them happens. It's not a trade or even a bounty, it's one of those "we'll cook the fish you catch" restaurants.
noahgab1133
Fluffy?
What caused the walpurgis class witch again in kazumi manga? Because I think there is a connection there and the soujous grief management thing
Hyades Daybreak was created by Hijiri using her connection magic to combine multiple soul gems on the verge of Witching out into one single amalgamation in the vein of Walpurgisnacht.
Honestly, I like how it's framed
As in, the basics for the power system were explained in a sentence and that's basically half of what we're working off of
It makes sense while still being mechanical
Honestly, I can think of only one piece that does it better, that being NS (the one that I mentioned before). As in, the powers all make sense but their logic is based on the one who wields them, so much so that you can't really separate it from the person in a meaningful way
Edit:
I'd rate the Madoka system as partway between NS and one with set rules. There's definitely a consistent logic that everyone follows, but the details can vary and are based on thoughts, emotions, etc.
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I tend to look at those common elements as likely to be things Kyubey wants there, and suspect things would be even more personal without his involvement.
He's explicit that removing the soul from the body was one of his additions to the system as a method of improving combat capability, and I suspect his ear tentacle in the other combat oriented elements that Magical Girls have in common like the weapon summoning, combat instincts, and basic healing powers.
He's explicit that removing the soul from the body was one of his additions to the system as a method of improving combat capability, and I suspect his ear tentacle in the other combat oriented elements that Magical Girls have in common like the weapon summoning, combat instincts, and basic healing powers.
Lopezelpesado
Space worm best worm.
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It seems like having the soul out of the body is neccessary for witching out to work properly.
Like witches can be created from normal people via those nut things but they seem to return to normal after they are defeated.
Its looks like Kyubey just seems to remove that when he makes a magical girl.
Kinda scary to think that Sabrina can just start pumping ANYONE near her with grief and turn them into witches.
Also for that bit about Kyubey's ear, I still unsure if it can use magic properly or if what he does he does it with technology.
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I was using it as a substitute for the more common phrase "I suspect his hand in this". Kyubey doesn't have hands.
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I really want to dissect a Kyubey drone at some point or another.
. . .
I have my doubts that *turning someone into a Witch* is easily reversible.
But the infusing people with magic . . .
That implies that there are ways to jumpstart magic in people using other magic, which could prove beneficial for us. Well, after Walpurgis for the "turn the world into a Flower that Bloomed Nowhere style post-scarcity utopia" project
Edit:
Flower being a setting that is . . . Reminds me more of Perdido Street Station more than anything else.
Basically, I couldn't tell wether it was a sci-fi or fantasy for the first few chapters and I've kinda given up putting it into one of those boxes
I guess . . . Magitech? Maybe?
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