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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Torgamous said:
Same thing. Egg in one space, ring in the other.

I think. I don't remember this as clearly as the basic answer and finding the post without any more specific keywords than "soul gem" and "Mami" would take a while.
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I remember expecting that to be how it worked when we ran that test and being surprised that the Soul Gem's different states weren't expressed simultaneously within the hypergeometry, but still looked like whatever "mode" they were in when we looked at it from within the three normal spatial directions. That itself was interesting since it demonstrated that the shape of a Soul Gem is naturally hyperdimensional with some interesting symmetry to it.

I might have misremembered or misinterpreted, but I know my intuition when we started looking into hypergeometry was that we'd see the ring form and the gem form from different angles, and was curious to see if we'd also be able to see the Grief Seed form or potentially even other forms like the Dark Orb or its earring form. And I remember being surprised that wasn't the case, and somewhat disappointed since if the other forms were all there, that would have offered us another angle to pursue de-witching from.

Still, looking at a Grief Seed from different 4D rotational angles might be a thing we should try at some point to see if there are any clues hidden in its 4d geometry that we can't see just looking at it from our 3d cross section.
 
You know I was re reading Homura's confession to Mami, and I realized that, Madoka killed Walpergisnatch every time they've fought. Obviously later on that was more due to her handily overpowering the witch. But she managed a double kill as a fresh rookie on her first match. And later, with Homura she almost lived through it. And later still, she managed to kill the thing while freash off her contract!

Which is weird, because Mami fought Wally before her, and lost! Despite being significantly older, much more experienced, a better long ranged fighter, and just a better fighter in general.

How? What quality does Madoka have that Mami with her years of experience can't replicate or over come?

Hope. It's the only thing I can think of. Some quality of Wally makes it so unless you can envision a future where you can win, you can't. Something that Mami with her then feet of clay couldn't overcome, But Madoka, the future goddes of hope could.

We should ask Homura about what fighting Wally is actually like, and what she remembers about the times that it was defeated. Because I don't think it occurs to her that we wouldn't know.
 
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DataSnake said:
Given that the Incubators had no idea that someone like Homucifer was even possible, I doubt either of those is something Soul Gems are designed to turn into.
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It's hard to say how much of the design is Kyubey's.
Ariesthegolden said:
You know I was re reading Homura's confession to Mami, and I realized that, Madoka killed Walpergisnatch every time they've fought. Obviously later on that was more due to her handily overpowering the witch. But she managed a double kill as a fresh rookie on her first match. And later, with Homura she almost lived through it. And later still, she managed to kill the thing while freash off her contract!

Which is weird, because Mami fought Wally before her, and lost! Despite being significantly older, much more experienced, a better long ranged fighter, and just a better fighter in general.

How? What quality does Madoka have that Mami with her years of experience can't replicate or over come?

Hope. It's the only thing I can think of. Some quality of Wally makes it so unless you can envision a future where you can win, you can't. Something that Mami with her then feet of clay couldn't overcome, But Madoka, the future goddes of hope could.

We should ask Homura about what fighting Wally is actually like, and what she remembers about the times that it was defeated. Because I don't think it occurs to her that we wouldn't know.
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I've said it before. Madoka is a natural. This is her calling and was before Homura started ramping up her potential. It's yet another tragedy she ends up needing to be a god instead of pursuing that calling.
 
More than just Walpurgisnacht runs on rules that can look like narrative rules. Magic in general runs on emotionally-resonant-intuitive rules, of which narrative rules are a subset. It's why sudden shifts in personal outlook can completely destroy and potentially reforge a magical girl's wish-magic or worse, because the entire character of their emotional-intuition shifts, with redefining the emotional valence of actions or memories being able to have an outsized impact on magical girls because of how quickly it can result in feedback loops as changes in interpretation catalyze further changes which aren't limited to mundane effects.
 
Ariesthegolden said:
You know I was re reading Homura's confession to Mami, and I realized that, Madoka killed Walpergisnatch every time they've fought. Obviously later on that was more due to her handily overpowering the witch. But she managed a double kill as a fresh rookie on her first match. And later, with Homura she almost lived through it. And later still, she managed to kill the thing while freash off her contract!

Which is weird, because Mami fought Wally before her, and lost! Despite being significantly older, much more experienced, a better long ranged fighter, and just a better fighter in general.

How? What quality does Madoka have that Mami with her years of experience can't replicate or over come?

Hope. It's the only thing I can think of. Some quality of Wally makes it so unless you can envision a future where you can win, you can't. Something that Mami with her then feet of clay couldn't overcome, But Madoka, the future goddes of hope could.

We should ask Homura about what fighting Wally is actually like, and what she remembers about the times that it was defeated. Because I don't think it occurs to her that we wouldn't know.
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Narrative rules, if that is indeed how Waldo operates, aren't going to favor the old timer who knows what they're doing. Madoka contracting just to beat the unbeatable gives her power a much greater narrative boost over somebody with the same potential making a more generic wish. We also get to see that Mami may look great on the outside, but she is a nervous wreck barely functioning on the inside, to the point that she may very well be managing to avoid becoming a Witch is because she is too depressed and worn out to feel despair.* There's a reason the Witchbomb broke canon Mami, and while she is in a much better headspace now, she's still not up to her peak performance, I think, and against a Witch of that power, you have to be at your best.

*Depression takes many forms. For many of us, it is an endless gray nothingness where any emotion at all is grasped desperately because for one, brief, moment you get to feel again. Canon Mami isn't there yet, but she was far closer than anybody around her realized.

Nerevar said:
I've said it before. Madoka is a natural. This is her calling and was before Homura started ramping up her potential. It's yet another tragedy she ends up needing to be a god instead of pursuing that calling.
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Kyuubey wouldn't have bothered trying to ramp up her potential so much if it didn't see something special in her to begin with. It seemingly usually shows up at a moment of crisis to get a wish from somebody not thinking clearly. Yet, despite this, it spent weeks convincing Madoka to contract.
 
So, I've been rereading PMAS for the whateverth time and it occurs to me that there isn't much difference between a soul gem and a clear seed sufficiently filled with magic. Soul gems are magic surrounded by a speck of grief/witch. A clear seed filled with magic instead of grief would be the same or nearly the same.

Grief seeds, as we've noted, have enormous amounts of grief. Soul gems have enormous amounts of magic. Grief seeds go quiet when all their grief has been removed, like a soul gem separated from the body.

If everything can be fixed, I think it stands to reason that the result of the "feeding hope flavored magic to a clear seed" experiment will either be a soul gem or failing that, soul gem adjacent. The resulting girl will have issues (because being a witch is suffering), but she won't be a witch anymore.
 
Wyrd said:
We also get to see that Mami may look great on the outside, but she is a nervous wreck barely functioning on the inside, to the point that she may very well be managing to avoid becoming a Witch is because she is too depressed and worn out to feel despair.* There's a reason the Witchbomb broke canon Mami, and while she is in a much better headspace now, she's still not up to her peak performance, I think, and against a Witch of that power, you have to be at your best.

*Depression takes many forms. For many of us, it is an endless gray nothingness where any emotion at all is grasped desperately because for one, brief, moment you get to feel again. Canon Mami isn't there yet, but she was far closer than anybody around her realized.
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To chip in with my own take on Canon Mami...

I'd say she was suffering from the enormous burden of being all alone in trying to make her existence as a magical girl be something positive and heroic... but she was still clinging on to the hope of finding someone to share that burden, and was overjoyed when Madoka said she would.

But in episode 10, the witchbomb broke her dream, her hope of magical girls being capable of being positive influences on the world, and thus she fell to despair.

(Also, you're totally right about depression there, though I'd say that "despair" is actually pretty compatible with that sort of depression.

Despair, after all, isn't a feeling, but rather the absence of a specific feeling: that feeling being hope.)
 
Nerevar said:
I've said it before. Madoka is a natural. This is her calling and was before Homura started ramping up her potential. It's yet another tragedy she ends up needing to be a god instead of pursuing that calling
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Madoka is also a natural killer so I wouldn't say pursuing what you good at is necessarily a good thing.

(Yes, this is me again going on how Meguca Madoka is Bad End. Actually, being meguca is bad in general for everyone but since we havent figured out depowering - hopefully yet - we at least can stop those who yet to make this mistake)
 
I mean from the captain talk the next obvious question is since we boarded and seized their ship without the authorisation of any governments are we a pirate crew?
 
ExploerTM said:
but since we havent figured out depowering - hopefully yet -
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Depowering is pretty straightforward, actually. All you have to do is get a magical girl to reject all her hopes and dreams without her developing any new ones. Kyoko did it by accident, and Oriko almost managed it but tragically failed at step two.

Obviously this is the healthiest possible state for a girl and should be implemented universally as soon as possible, but it does require a personal touch that we simply don't have the time for at the moment. It's probably gonna have to be one of those "after Walpurgisnacht" things.
 
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The solution to Grief is to create a society of dreamless and hopeless drones. The solution to Grief is to become the Incubators.
 
Ariesthegolden said:
Hey, question. Is now a good time to bring up telling Homura about the potential pumping? It's a bright sunny day in the middle of the afternoon, Mami knows about homura's time stop and can help smooth things over, and it's been our biggest weak point for the incubator to strike at. So it feels to me like the best time for it.
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The current proposal is not to tell Homura that she's the reason Madoka can destroy the world, we're just suggesting using the fact that she can as an argument against contracting. Homura already knows that Madoka can destroy the world because Kyubey told her in timeline 4, she just doesn't know why Madoka can.

And yeah, Madoka's survival and any other improvements over the first timeline can be attributed to Homura.

On Walpurgisnacht, perhaps she allowed Madoka to defeat her. Remember, she wants the world to be a tragedy, and the hopeful young magical girl dying to defeat her while leaving her non magical friend behind would certainly be tragic.

Wyrd said:
Kyuubey wouldn't have bothered trying to ramp up her potential so much if it didn't see something special in her to begin with. It seemingly usually shows up at a moment of crisis to get a wish from somebody not thinking clearly. Yet, despite this, it spent weeks convincing Madoka to contract.
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Kyubey never tried to ramp up Madoka's potential, he just took advantage of it when it happened. Before that he treated her like any other magical girl.
 
Wally running on narrative rules wasn't exactly where I was going with this, but it's not a bad idea.

Madoka at her best is a frighteningly smart and determined opponent. With a knack for holding on to hope and keeping her head in impossible situations. My guess was those two qualities combine to make someone who is scary good at fettering our weak points and paths to victory, like how eye of the mind in fate is about seeing the possibilities in a fight and acting in a way to ensure the most optimal out come.

Madoka is as far as I know, the only person who has managed to kill Walpurgisnacht despite multiple attempts by Homura. It could be due to Wally running on narrative rules, or something about its magical makeup that Madoka instinctively understands. It could just be that there is a very narrow path to victory when dealing with Wally. Like it has an achilles heel and until you know what it is and strike it. Any one of those possibilities would explain how Madoka was able to do it in when Homura couldn't even after all her attempts, but especially the magic explanation.

Homura struggles with magic and emotions in general. So an opponent that requires an emotional intuition would be her own achilles' heel. You don't send Wolverine to fight Magneto after all. But it makes me curious about what fighting Wally actually is like. Because I don't think we've talked to Homura about it.

Interestingly it hasn't been until she got potential pumped that Madoka was able to survive the fight against her. So power does still play a major part. Or if you're strong enough to flip the game then Wally's protections stop mattering.

Short and long of it though, I'm really curious what exactly Homura remembers of her earliest matches against Walpurgisnacht. Hers and Madoka's.
 
Kaizuki said:
@Redshirt Army thoughts on Toshimichi Akane given the revelations about the Law of Cycles? The implication that she and we are a similar type of existence is... Relevant.
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I'm doing last-minute trip prep, so I don't really have the time at the moment to do a full deep dive.

On the plus side, I'm about to be on a 5 hour flight, and I've already downloaded the last 6 years of PMAS as my reading material for the flight, so I should hopefully have some insights once I'm back? :V
 
Kaizuki said:
@Redshirt Army thoughts on Toshimichi Akane given the revelations about the Law of Cycles? The implication that she and we are a similar type of existence is... Relevant.
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Definitely feels relevant, especially given the comments Mika made after one of Akane's teammates, the one Niko theorized was responsible for her soul, called herself a shinobi:
Firnagzen said:
"Body, magic..." Niko's attention moves from Aoi to Megu, and then to Akari. "... and soul. So what is your power, Miss Matsui? Are you a soul mage of some kind? I've never met a proper soul mage before."
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Firnagzen said:
"Merely a shinobi," Akari says with a hint of a smile, one mirrored by her friends - even Aoi, the faint smile cracking through her displeasure. "A very good one."
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Which, as Mika pointed out, basically means she's a thief:
Firnagzen said:
"Shinobi are known for two things," Mika says, tilting her head slightly. "If we discard a certain show, anyway. Assassination, and... theft."
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If Akane is made from a piece of either the Law of Cycles or Homucifer, that would definitely explain why she considers their daughter a cousin.
 
Romka said:
Kyubey never tried to ramp up Madoka's potential, he just took advantage of it when it happened. Before that he treated her like any other magical girl.
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You misunderstand. Kyuubey has spent significant amounts of time to convincing Madoka to contract, which suggests there was something different about her even before ramping up her potential got involved. Homura wishing for time travel magic is what let Madoka reach "world ending" potential and may be why the rat is so focused on Mitakihara at present.
 
Wyrd said:
You misunderstand. Kyuubey has spent significant amounts of time to convincing Madoka to contract, which suggests there was something different about her even before ramping up her potential got involved. Homura wishing for time travel magic is what let Madoka reach "world ending" potential and may be why the rat is so focused on Mitakihara at present.
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Has it? I don't think there was ever any indication it put more effort into contracting her than any other particular magical girl in the first timeline.
 
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