- Location
- United States
Since Walpy runs on narrative logic and there's a bigger but less well-known threat that will show up after we're done with her, I actually wouldn't be very surprised if she fell victim to the Worf Effect.
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
- Thread starter Firnagzen
- Start date
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- Tags
- 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?
- Location
- Florida
I don't really see the utility in bothering with the Iowa. We have no pressing pertinent uses for naval might. The Tokyo districts have a ton of manpower if we somehow needed it, and obviously there's the other national organizations we can parlay with. Meguca are our ticket to the firepower to defeat Walpurgisnacht, but i don't think they seem to be relevant in the convo of defeating Feathers or the QB. For those, we probably need science, esoteric meguca powers, or maybe Toshimichi. Barring plot contrivance or a relationship breakdown, any sufficiently existential threat below the tier of feathers or QB is currently solvable with timestop, as we demonstrated by disassembling the Iowa group in a literally unreactable manner like 2 days ago. If we were able to avengers assemble and defeat what iirc nadia stated was basically the most notorious group in the world, i wouldn't expect us to be under threat from any similar direct assault reliant threats. The threats we're not well prepared to handle are mostly diplomatic or existential. 🤔
- Location
- Georgia
Yuki can claim buildings, and thinks she can claim ships of sufficient size. Claiming the Iowa would let her send it to other places without needing to be stuck on it all the time, or needing a full crew. I don't see it being useful for military purposes, but it would be fun to have it as a claimed space. It's not important, but I would find it funny, especially if she swaps some things around to turn it into the Love Boat when we take Mami on a date.
- Location
- Washington, USA
They're good at thinking long-term. The heat death of the universe is their priority because it would endanger them personally - when it arrives, which is still quite some way off, but there's no sense waiting until the last minute. If the eggs they need to crack turn out to be planet-sized, and the resulting omelette will feed their tribe but nobody else's, signs point to them saying, more or less, "don't care, do it anyway." Not such a noble goal at that point, is it?
I've been... frustrated with that myself.
- Location
- United States
Their ethos is very much "some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
- Location
- Florida
Im not really sure the malice and tribalism you're attributing to the incubators is supported by the text. They're unethical utilitarians and nakedly callous, but they've not really been shown to have a moral motivation which I could comfortably frame as evil or malicious. For them, based on everything available to us, their every interaction with humans appears to be a calculus of energetic value.
We can certainly attempt to read into their motivations—it seems logical to assume that overcoming entropy is just self-preservation for them—but I don't think we can state that we know this information for certain. We're kinda left grasping at straws because both canon and PMAS have focused very little on discussing or revealing the nature and motivations of the Incubators.
Basically, I'm currently of the opinion that seeking out information on QB's race/civilization/collective conscious/whatever should be a priority rivaling doing the same for Feathers. I'm not convinced there's such a thing as a happy ending where the Incubators aren't dead, defanged, subdued, or at least made to see the error of their ways, but we currently have no information on how to go any of those routes.
We can certainly attempt to read into their motivations—it seems logical to assume that overcoming entropy is just self-preservation for them—but I don't think we can state that we know this information for certain. We're kinda left grasping at straws because both canon and PMAS have focused very little on discussing or revealing the nature and motivations of the Incubators.
Basically, I'm currently of the opinion that seeking out information on QB's race/civilization/collective conscious/whatever should be a priority rivaling doing the same for Feathers. I'm not convinced there's such a thing as a happy ending where the Incubators aren't dead, defanged, subdued, or at least made to see the error of their ways, but we currently have no information on how to go any of those routes.
- Location
- Georgia
Feathers is likely the more immediate problem, but the Incubators are a longer term issue we likely won't get to resolve within the confines of this quest, unless a Wish changes things, even if we do manage to remove them as a problem on Earth.
Part of why I like to think about them as an artificial intelligence is that, despite the cold calculous involved, they don't seem to differentiate between two courses of action that both give them a positive result, regardless of which gives them the better result. Their cold logic doesn't work if they are natural, thinking beings, as evolution does not favor things that cannot learn and adapt to things they aren't already programmed to deal with. A number of sci-fi stories have had as an important setting detail that an alien intelligence was so mutually incomprehensible that they had to create something that could interface with both and try to translate concepts that are extraordinarily difficult to convey thanks to how different the minds of those races.
In the book for Total Recall(1990 movie), for instance, there is a device in the ruins on Mars that shoved an explanation directly into Quaid's mind of what the alien facilities really were-a test. Turn the terraforming engines on, and they'd send a message to the greater galactic community that there was a new space faring race that might be worth dealing with. Ignore the engines, and nothing happens. Destroy them? The sun gets triggered to nova as any race that aggressive isn't worth letting grow too strong. This is a relevant example because the aliens who built the machines were chosen as being sufficiently similar to humanity to devise a proper test and set up something humans might understand. Quaid wonders at this, since the aliens in question were very dissimilar to humanity, at which point the machine also implanted the knowledge of exactly how alien the average species is.
Part of why I like to think about them as an artificial intelligence is that, despite the cold calculous involved, they don't seem to differentiate between two courses of action that both give them a positive result, regardless of which gives them the better result. Their cold logic doesn't work if they are natural, thinking beings, as evolution does not favor things that cannot learn and adapt to things they aren't already programmed to deal with. A number of sci-fi stories have had as an important setting detail that an alien intelligence was so mutually incomprehensible that they had to create something that could interface with both and try to translate concepts that are extraordinarily difficult to convey thanks to how different the minds of those races.
In the book for Total Recall(1990 movie), for instance, there is a device in the ruins on Mars that shoved an explanation directly into Quaid's mind of what the alien facilities really were-a test. Turn the terraforming engines on, and they'd send a message to the greater galactic community that there was a new space faring race that might be worth dealing with. Ignore the engines, and nothing happens. Destroy them? The sun gets triggered to nova as any race that aggressive isn't worth letting grow too strong. This is a relevant example because the aliens who built the machines were chosen as being sufficiently similar to humanity to devise a proper test and set up something humans might understand. Quaid wonders at this, since the aliens in question were very dissimilar to humanity, at which point the machine also implanted the knowledge of exactly how alien the average species is.