I mean, he's an amoral alien whose only goal is to subject Sabrina and all of her friends to fates worse than death. There's not exactly a lot of common ground to be found there.
I think you've misunderstood which part I'm bitter about. When somebody's 100% only in it for the money, and has a proven history of taking incredibly reckless existential risks in pursuit of that (i.e. Homura in the isolation field to bring back the witch system, or for that matter encouraging potentially cosmos-altering wishes in general), and knows that you know things they don't... feels like it really ought to be possible to influence their strategic behavior with the right bait. I can wrap my head around "in it for the money," analyze that thin sliver of common ground mathematically
If they pass up logical bait in favor of whatever cruelty would be more inconvenient for the protagonist, though, that's a very different situation. Tilts the aesop closer to 40k-style "humans can be converted, aliens must be destroyed."
If we needed a vast quantity of grief on short notice, having Homura try to produce it all from scratch by just sitting and meditating would be silly. Start with spiral-pattern searches of major cities, find every cache of grief seeds and convert them to clear seeds. Stripmine the whole witch ecosystem as part of the same pass: every kiss, every familiar. Dissoluzione Bianca, grab seed (if any), move on. Anything significant to such a sweep can be spotted from hundreds of meters away, through walls, so none of that room-by-room decision paralysis which bogged down the hunt for Oriko. Once the vicinities of big cities are tapped out, follow coastlines, railways, major roads. Earth's got an intimidating total surface area, but skipping places with less than one person per square mile cuts it way back down.
I'm just going to cut in and be blunt; that's not happening in quest. It's not something Sabrina's interested in doing, it's not something Homura's interested in doing, it's not something I'm interested in doing without extraordinary reason. Getting a big payout for Kyuubey isn't something Sabrina can generate like that, especially not by abusing Homura's timestop.
Addendum: Also, that's still underselling the scale of the payout that Kriemheld Gretchen is.
And even if we ignore literal Word of the God that just dropped, ignore all logic and reason and somehow against everything generate the absurdly baffling amount of energy and make Kyubey agree to fuck off...
Then the next day Quebey would show up and keep harassing Madoka. We cut a deal with Kyubey after all.
You trying to cut a deal with a bunch of greedy scammers. The only way to win is not to play.
Have you ever had a simple project that kind of ballooned out of control as you kept working on it? I have. It started out as a simple idea to experiment with the perspective mode of Krita's transform tool, and it ended up being, well, this:
I call it Sabrina's Art Corner.
The Mami painting is taken from a second project I was working on, generating portraits of the main cast. I left the Mami one as-is because having it look 95% done felt right for the "Sabrina is still working on it" aesthetic, but I touched up the others by hand to smooth over some rough edges. I'm especially happy with how the Homura one turned out.
I also made one for Oriko, but due to technical issues the art style ended up looking drastically different. Upon further reflection, I decided that was fitting since Sabrina wasn't exactly the character most likely to paint a portrait of Oriko. That gave me the idea to make a second meta piece, which I call Kirika's Art Corner. As a side note, Kirika's eye color is surprisingly odd in a photorealistic picture.
Finally, some technical details for people who care about that kind of thing:
The paintings of the holy quintet were all done from scratch using character LoRAs, with the Chronos 1.0 model and a prompt combining the art styles of Annie Swynnerton, Mary Cassatt, and Georgia O'Keeffe (or at least the model's interpretation of their styles, which doesn't exactly match the real thing). Since Sabrina isn't a canon character, hers is instead a heavily modified img2img of the piece I posted last Christmas. The Oriko LoRA didn't play nice with Chronos, though, so I made that painting with DreamShaper 8, using the prompt expansion tool from fooocus to get something at least vaguely Oriko-shaped while still looking like a painting.
The photorealistic pictures were trickier. Each started out as a piece from PixArt Sigma, since it's the only model with good enough prompt adherence for something as complex as "girl holding a paintbrush and standing next to an easel." Even then, the results for Sabrina weren't exactly anything to write home about (though, to be fair, that's mainly because I took the first one that looked halfway decent and ran with it instead of generating multiple versions and picking the best):
The general "girl on one side, easel on the other, pose that more or less resembles holding a paintbrush" composition was all I needed from that step, though, so I was able to get something workable after a few rounds of img2img:
Cutting out the canvas required multiple layers. I started by just cutting a trapezoidal hole in the picture, then overlaid a version that I had run through a background-removal tool to put Sabrina's left arm back in position over the canvas. Actually, I had to use a few different background removal options and superimpose them because each treated different parts of the paintbrush as "background", but the basic idea stands. Giving Sabrina a messy smock and changing her face to one that better matched her description were both fairly straightforward bits of inpainting. Then I slipped the Mami painting into place behind the other layers, and at this point the picture was about 80 percent done:
Which is, of course, where the 80/20 rule comes into play. I solved the brightness issue by slapping a filter layer over the painting to darken it a bit, while using some other filters to brighten the rest of the image without washing out the colors too much. When that didn't work, I exported a version of the picture with a transparent section where the painting would go and ran in through auto-enhance in Windows photo viewer. From there it was mostly a matter of going through the picture with a fine-toothed comb and fixing bits that didn't look quite right, generally via the two-step process that I maintain makes the Krita AI extension a killer app even for people who don't have any interest in generating images from scratch:
Apply a crude fix manually, such as cutting off bits of the paintbrush to change it to the correct shape.
Select the affected area and refine it at 30-40% strength to seamlessly blend the changes into the rest of the picture.
The trickiest part is that Stable Diffusion can't handle transparency, so I had to put a layer of solid RGB green between the painting and the rest of the image and then chroma-key the green away from the refined versions. Well, that and the fact that even with a ControlNet layer that exists solely to draw non-deformed hands, the concept of "a hand holding an object" is a tricky one for the AI to grasp. Still, I eventually got it to a point that I was satisfied with.
Next came upscaling. The paintings were easy: since the changes I had made to them were fairly minor, I used a workflow that doubled the size of each image and then put the result through img2img at 40% strength using the same model, prompt, and LoRA that had created it in the first place to reduce the resulting blur. Upscaling the non-painting part was tricker. I ended up using SUPIR twice: once on the full image and once on a version with solid green instead of the painting. Since even SUPIR isn't sophisticated enough to grasp the idea that part of an image should have a different art style than the rest, the former didn't exactly turn out great. However, it worked beautifully when combined with the transparency mask of the latter: since it wasn't quite pixel-perfect, having the extra bits approximately the same as the painting was a lot less noticeable than leaving them all solid green. After that, I opened the upscaled picture in Krita, slipped the painting into place, and then fixed a few minor errors in the upscaling process, like the fact that Sabrina's eyes had ended up different colors.
When I went back to PixArt Sigma to get a starting point for Kirika, the result was actually a lot closer to what I wanted:
Since the back of her hand was facing the camera and I had to cut out the canvas anyway, all I had to do to get her to hold the paintbrush was rotate her wrist a bit, then download a png of a paintbrush and stick it on the layer behind her hand. Her eyes were a bit trickier: I cut out the eyes from the picture, then drew some crude ones with yellow irises on a layer behind the rest of her face, then refined it several times at low strength to get them to look more like photorealistic eyeballs while roughly preserving the color. Then I put the Oriko portrait into place and upscaled two versions of the picture again, this time using StableSR because I had heard that it was faster than SUPIR but just as good and wanted to see if that was true. It wasn't quite, but the mistakes it made (namely messing up the shape of Kirika's irises and turning her paintbrush into a tiny flag with different-colored stripes) were easy enough to fix that it wasn't a huge problem.
Okay. So, forget all the accounting stuff. Starting from zero.
The entire future of humanity, or Earth, or whatever's being sacrificed, is worth a number. It's a very big number. Maybe it's literally infinity. What's important is it's a number.
Homura took the number and tied one of it to Madoka every time she looped. I don't know how many times Homura looped, but it was a lot. Madoka is now worth a lot of the number.
Sacrificing one of the number for a lot of the number is an easy decision, if all you see is numbers.
Okay. So, forget all the accounting stuff. Starting from zero.
The entire future of humanity, or Earth, or whatever's being sacrificed, is worth a number. It's a very big number. Maybe it's literally infinity. What's important is it's a number.
Homura took the number and tied one of it to Madoka every time she looped. I don't know how many times Homura looped, but it was a lot. Madoka is now worth a lot of the number.
Sacrificing one of the number for a lot of the number is an easy decision, if all you see is numbers.
It doesnt matter how big of a number it is, if you think in infinites - which Incubators imply they do - any number less than infinity is worthless to you. Madoka's output by definition is one and done deal. Hence its less than infinite.
This is the reason why I think Incubators are blatantly bullshitting with the whole heat death thing. Because then it means they do NOT think in infinities. In this new context them choosing Madoka over sustaining species makes sense.
Have you ever had a simple project that kind of ballooned out of control as you kept working on it? I have. It started out as a simple idea to experiment with the perspective mode of Krita's transform tool, and it ended up being, well, this:
See, this is the "purge the unclean" part that I have a problem with. If we can't afford the right bait, or just don't want to run the quest that way? Fine. I'll keep reading, I trust Firn to have a better idea how things ought to be resolved.
But if it's impossible even in principle to hammer out any such deal and see it through to satisfactory completion, if the incubator's time horizon is so short, or impulse control is so bad, that it would say plainly "yes, I'll do as you ask in exchange for that payment" and then flagrantly do otherwise while half the payment was still pending... that seems like a level of incompetence or spite which is inconsistent with many of the things it has canonically accomplished.
It doesnt matter how big of a number it is, if you think in infinites - which Incubators imply they do - any number less than infinity is worthless to you. Madoka's output by definition is one and done deal. Hence its less than infinite.
I mean, I think you're just too insistent on Earth's future profitability being mathematically infinite, but still. Magic.
Whatever Earth is worth, Madoka is a multiple of that. If Earth is worth infinity, her grief seed has thirty infinities of grief inside, or however many times Homura looped.
See, this is the "purge the unclean" part that I have a problem with. If we can't afford the right bait, or just don't want to run the quest that way? Fine. I'll keep reading, I trust Firn to have a better idea how things ought to be resolved.
Look, man, I'm doing my best. Kyubey is best modeled as a capitalist, as long as you don't go into this with assumptions about capitalism having a maximum badness level. We really can't afford the right bait.
I mean, I think you're just too insistent on Earth's future profitability being mathematically infinite, but still. Magic.
Whatever Earth is worth, Madoka is a multiple of that. If Earth is worth infinity, her grief seed has thirty infinities of grief inside, or however many times Homura looped.
"Its magic" works both ways. Also Madoka's potential big but NOT infinite. How do I know that for sure? She ascended to godhood and managed to rewrite some aspects (aspect, really) of the universe but not ALL of it. If she'd become truly THE GOD then yes, it means her potential was limitless.
Kyubey spend a lot of time basically explaining to Madoka how evil his species are and he legit didnt expect for Madoka to make a Wish that would screw him over in some way. Like, she straight could've wished for his species to go extinct immediately and total destruction of Earth probably wouldn't have made Kyubey's day any better.
"Its magic" works both ways. Also Madoka's potential big but NOT infinite. How do I know that for sure? She ascended to godhood and managed to rewrite some aspects (aspect, really) of the universe but not ALL of it. If she'd become truly THE GOD then yes, it means her potential was limitless.
She never tried. Maybe that was her bad, since Homucifer sure didn't seem super limited. Or maybe remodeling an infinite multiverse takes infinite potential and being infinitely powerful across an infinite multiverse is more of an infinity squared deal.
But yes, magic works both ways, which is why I gave up on trying to convince you that extinction events have a nonzero chance of happening in the fullness of time and am trying this tack instead.
But yes, magic works both ways, which is why I gave up on trying to convince you that extinction events have a nonzero chance of happening in the fullness of time and am trying this tack instead.
"Hey <insert some poor girls name>, I recently learned that <insert disaster name> is going to threaten your <insert planet name>, but YOU have power to save everyone if you make a Wish for it!".
Kyubey doesnt really care how girl would spend their potential, only the fact that it was spent. Easiest way to bait a girl into a contract is to frame it like she saves everyone. Two birds, one stone, sounds simple enough for me. Trick is to find a girl or two with right potential. You can literally dictate them Wish that needs to be made and contractee what happily repeat it word for word.
Says who? You'd think if Madoka could've offered better deal than eternal sleep after early death she would've done that. Her deal is bare bones one. Hence why I always support Homu on not settling on that.
As for Akumura, god I wish I could say literally anything about what she's done and HOW she's done it, my curiosity kills me. 4th movie should answer all of that but as of now, I think literally any interpretation is just blind guesses. My blind guess is that her Universe also has some sort of fatal flaw, I personally subscribe to theory that it slowly falls apart.
I grew up around capitalists, studied economics and accounting, have correspondingly thorough models. "Maximum badness level" the way you seem to mean it here is a quality of caricatures, Captain Planet villains, rather than real shareholder-value optimizers. Capriciously breaking deals is not actually a long-term winning strategy, and keeping all those plates spinning for all those centuries surely required thinking long term.
I grew up around capitalists, studied economics and accounting, have correspondingly thorough models. "Maximum badness level" the way you seem to mean it here is a quality of caricatures, Captain Planet villains, rather than real shareholder-value optimizers. Capriciously breaking deals is not actually a long-term winning strategy, and keeping all those plates spinning for all those centuries surely required thinking long term.
The problem here is that shareholder-value optimisers are humans working with other humans.
Kyubey made it very clear that he doesn't see the situation that way.
Would you go out of your way to honor a deal with a pig?
It doesnt matter how big of a number it is, if you think in infinites - which Incubators imply they do - any number less than infinity is worthless to you. Madoka's output by definition is one and done deal. Hence its less than infinite.
This is the reason why I think Incubators are blatantly bullshitting with the whole heat death thing. Because then it means they do NOT think in infinities. In this new context them choosing Madoka over sustaining species makes sense.
I think the difference in opinion here is the assumption that Earth and humanity can be maintained indefinitely with the support of wishes and grief reinvestment. Which might not actually be the case. If the Incubators have good reason to believe that no matter what they do there's a finite amount of grief they can get from Earth- perhaps wish-capable species have an average lifespan before they wish themselves into oblivion, or adjustments to maintain the sun and biosphere eventually become more costly per year than they get in return- then it makes sense to take a single payment that is larger than the projected total output remaining.
That said, I can also see a situation in which the incubators are trying to prevent Heat Death, Earth does have theoretically infinite potential, and it'd be the smart move to contract Madoka anyway: if humanity is close to achieving the technology to detect the incubators, go 'hah hah, fuck you', and declare an intergalatic war on them. If the energy gained from harvesting the Earth until that point is less than what they'd get from Madoka, then contracting her not only gets them more energy, but it prevents a war which would end their harvesting anyway, cost them resources, and could blow apart their plans.
That said, I can also see a situation in which the incubators are trying to prevent Heat Death, Earth does have theoretically infinite potential, and it'd be the smart move to contract Madoka anyway: if humanity is close to achieving the technology to detect the incubators, go 'hah hah, fuck you', and declare an intergalatic war on them. If the energy gained from harvesting the Earth until that point is less than what they'd get form Madoka, then contracting her not only gets them more energy, but it prevents a war which would end their harvesting anyway, cost them resources, and could blow apart their plans.
That actually sounds more believable. Getting rid of competition before it might get dicey is a good move. I've long since started comparing Incubators to Entities from Worm and thats exactly what they've been doing. Parallels just keep popping up huh, wonder if Wildbow is a fan...
Then again, now that I got thinking about Incubators straight up asking girls to Wish for specific things... why they dont do that usually? As long as potential spent its a good thing as far as I can tell. And non-zero number of girls can be easily tricked into Wishing something that might help Incubators either to maintain better control of species overall or further their goals somehow.
That actually sounds more believable. Getting rid of competition before it might get dicey is a good move. I've long since started comparing Incubators to Entities from Worm and thats exactly what they've been doing. Parallels just keep popping up huh, wonder if Wildbow is a fan...
Then again, now that I got thinking about Incubators straight up asking girls to Wish for specific things... why they dont do that usually? As long as potential spent its a good thing as far as I can tell. And non-zero number of girls can be easily tricked into Wishing something that might help Incubators either to maintain better control of species overall or further their goals somehow.
It's probably just a case of it being easier to get someone to wish for something they (think they) want than suggesting wishes to them, and it then being easier to manipulate them into witching out afterwards.
I grew up around capitalists, studied economics and accounting, have correspondingly thorough models. "Maximum badness level" the way you seem to mean it here is a quality of caricatures, Captain Planet villains, rather than real shareholder-value optimizers. Capriciously breaking deals is not actually a long-term winning strategy, and keeping all those plates spinning for all those centuries surely required thinking long term.
Capriciously breaking deals with peers isn't a winning strategy. Capriciously breaking deals with people who can't impose meaningful consequences for your dealbreaking has a long and storied history. This goes doubly so for people who can't speak your legalese, so what looks like capriciously breaking deals to them is really just them failing to understand the nature of the deal they made as far as your peers are concerned. This goes triply so for people who don't speak your language period, and have to rely on you to translate the deal.
Not a wish that'll make their soul shine, most likely. Kyubey is specifically looking for the phase change between hope and despair, and you get more of that from a deeply heartfelt wish.
Doesn't mean it doesn't do more subtle stuff like, I dunno, get Toei to make an infinite number of magical girl cartoons.
Not a wish that'll make their soul shine, most likely. Kyubey is specifically looking for the phase change between hope and despair, and you get more of that from a deeply heartfelt wish.
Also there's the issue that the spirit of the wish is honored, not the letter. Great for the wisher, to be sure, but less so if you're trying to get a useful wish out of someone who is several orders of magnitude below you in terms of understanding the universe.
I wouldn't be surprised if they tried that and only got superficial benefits because the girls they managed to convince to make wishes lacked an understanding of the fundamental concepts required to affect a meaningful change.
I grew up around capitalists, studied economics and accounting, have correspondingly thorough models. "Maximum badness level" the way you seem to mean it here is a quality of caricatures, Captain Planet villains, rather than real shareholder-value optimizers. Capriciously breaking deals is not actually a long-term winning strategy, and keeping all those plates spinning for all those centuries surely required thinking long term.
The defining quality of Kyubey is limitless greed. It's literally what fucks him over in the show (telling Madoka so much she had the information as well as the potential to truly upend the system when he had a working system already for turning suffering into power) and in the movie (Trying to capture a goddess so he could make the world a worse place to make line go up, even though he again had a working system of power generation)
It's best to think of him like a space oil baron. He just turns suffering into power more directly than they do. To make a deal with him would be to assume he sees us as equals. He explicitly sees us as cattle, he tells Madoka as much outright. You cannot make a deal with someone who sees you as a resource to be extracted. Working with the incubators was a bad idea when people insisted on it years ago in this thread, and it's a bad idea now. Kyubey's friendliness is calculated and cold, he is not your friend. He wants to turn you into space gasoline. Do not work with Kyubey.
The problem here is that shareholder-value optimisers are humans working with other humans.
Kyubey made it very clear that he doesn't see the situation that way.
Would you go out of your way to honor a deal with a pig?
If I was running a slaughterhouse when a pig came up to me, shat out a huge gold nugget in defiance of all previous understanding of porcine biology, and said "there's more where that came from if you take friday off," - assuming for the sake of argument that the gold actually was worth more than the lost revenue, etc. associated with that proposed downtime - hell yes I'd honor the deal. How else am I supposed to extract the rest of the mystery gold?
And if the nugget wasn't worth the downtime, well, given that the slaughterhouse in question has a longstanding policy to avoid saying anything provably false where a pig might overhear, I would certainly not explicitly claim to have accepted the deal, and then continue business as usual on friday regardless. That would violate company policy.
If I was running a slaughterhouse when a pig came up to me, shat out a huge gold nugget in defiance of all previous understanding of porcine biology, and said "there's more where that came from if you take friday off," - assuming for the sake of argument that the gold actually was worth more than the lost revenue, etc. associated with that proposed downtime - hell yes I'd honor the deal. How else am I supposed to extract the rest of the mystery gold?
And if the nugget wasn't worth the downtime, well, given that the slaughterhouse in question has a longstanding policy to avoid saying anything provably false where a pig might overhear, I would certainly not explicitly claim to have accepted the deal, and then continue business as usual on friday regardless. That would violate company policy.
You're presupposing that what you're offering is valuable, when it is, in fact, the opposite to the Incubator.
Going around creating a fuckload of Clear Seeds is just giving the Incubators energy they were already going to received when the used Grief Seeds were handed over to them, and in exchange you're preventing more witch-outs by having plentiful cleansing around.
And you're also completely ignoring that what you're demanding isn't a pause in usual operations, but to ignore the actual pile of gold that Madoka's contract represents, which is a windfall worth more than the entire income from the rest of the slaughterhouse's foreseeable profits all at once.
EDIT: Oh, also, you're doing that thing of claiming Incubators are "honest", rather than deliberately engineering their explanations to prime later victim-blaming for the sake of pushing a faster witch-out for anyone who finds out what their con is.
@strange_person look dude, if there's one thing the original show is extremely clear on, it's that you can't trust Kyubey. You can't wheel and deal with Kyubey. There is no benefit to doing some bootstrap timestop bullshit in order to try and satiate his bottomless greed, and the QM already said the timestop bullshit simply wasn't allowed, which means you can't possibly offer him shit anyway. Drop it, you're getting nowhere.
It doesnt matter how big of a number it is, if you think in infinites - which Incubators imply they do - any number less than infinity is worthless to you. Madoka's output by definition is one and done deal. Hence its less than infinite.
This is the reason why I think Incubators are blatantly bullshitting with the whole heat death thing. Because then it means they do NOT think in infinities. In this new context them choosing Madoka over sustaining species makes sense.
They're thinking in infinite for the universe, not for earth.
They have other planets and don't need to sustain any single one indefinitely, because they can simply find new ones when one runs out.
That's why they are more than happy sacrificing earth, it's already on the schedule anyway.
They also don't need to seed humans anywhere, aliens already exists and allowing humanity to expand actually risks them not being as good for farming, so they don't want us to become an interplanetary empire.
