- Location
- Head in the clouds
I know there's important stuff in the above post - but someone else thinks Charlotte was a recycled witch!
Well I'm happy.
Puella Magi Imperatrix Mundi, or: Wherein Half Of Japan Tries To Kill You
I know there's important stuff in the above post - but someone else thinks Charlotte was a recycled witch!
Well I'm happy.
- Location
- Here
Hmmmm. Yes. I see. So, for witches with whom communication might be possible, rehatching actually seems preferable.
[Q] Plan: Gotta Catch 'Em All
I imagine that Yui going into Maiko's apartment and accidentally turning on the wrong thing is one of the easier ways to lose the city (or more, depending on the odds of some sort of super-Walpurgisnacht). It does not surprise me Maiko put her foot down.
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Presumably, they calculated an estimate of yearly return multiplied by the expected number of years before humanity either blows itself up or gains enough magitech capability on their own to tell the bunnycats to get lost, and compared that to the immediate gains from Madoka witching adjusted by the likelihood of her doing something especially drastic and determined that the latter option had a higher expected value. All very logical if you're an Incubator, economist, or anyone else who doesn't really understand humans.
Whether the bunnycats were correct and made a good bet but lost anyway, or just didn't understand Madoka well enough to anticipate what happened, I can't say.
Yeah, while girls in desperate situations are probably easier to motivate and to manipulate if needed later on, I've always suspected that the biggest reason for targeting girls like that is that the wishes are more predictable.
For PMIM, there are basically three-and-a-half types of composite Witch:
- Cohabitation, basically the Witch version of moving in with your girlfriend or crashing on your sister's couch. Almost always nearly-literally that, in fact, usually when such girls witch out near-simultaneously. Defeating both Witches in the shared barrier produces two Grief Seeds, which may be physically conjoined by the spiky frame bits but with distinct souls, in which case they'll share grief in an attempt to rehatch each other. Maiko's old teammates Miyako and Hitomi would have ended up like this. Same for Ami and Fumi, the girls you met who have shared wish magic. This is rare, but common enough that most veterans have run into paired Witches once or twice.
- Subjugation, where a powerful Witch dominates a weaker one and essentially turns her directly into a very powerful familiar. This is much less common, because it requires sufficient deliberate intent to accomplish that it's only possible for a Witch that either has control issues as their defining trait, or Witched out rapidly enough from magic overuse to remain lucid and has wish-derived magic that makes it possible. Yui's Witch would be like this, with the extra step of turning the subjugated Witches into pseudo-human dolls inspired by Kyoufu and Muhou.
- Consumption, where a powerful Witch effectively destroys a weaker one and absorbs the fragments of her soul the same way other Witches absorb fragments of humans who die in the barrier. Far and away the most dangerous type, but easily monitored by bunnycat because they tend to start by aggressively hunting stray familiars and can be disposed of before they become too strong. Central Tokyo is occupied by Witches of this sort that the bunnycats didn't manage to deal with in time, and Lorelei (the Witch with the train familiars whose barrier Asami followed you through) was one at the familiar-hunting stage.
- Finally, the most unusual form is a Witch whose original wish and personality were focused on leadership and charisma to the extent of operating like a cross between #2 and #3, taking the best of both and skipping the early ramp-up stage entirely in favor of directly inspiring other Witches to willingly merge into the greater whole while still preserving a reflection of their original self. There's only one Witch like this. There will probably continue to be one and only one for the foreseeable future. Kyubey's trying really hard to not let it happen again.
I really don't see how it could be any other way. We see a witch-out happen on screen; the process was not subtle and by the time the special effects were done Oktavia was already settled in with a fully-formed barrier, so it doesn't make sense for Nagisa to have just witched out.
The only way to get a "hatching seed" is to start with a drained one and fill it back up, which means that someone fought Charlotte, used her seed, and then deliberately jammed it into the wall. Either it was another meguca passing through Mami's territory doing that instead of giving the seed to Kyubey--which makes no sense logically or narratively--or bunnycat put it there in an attempt to push Madoka into contracting, which obviously didn't work but it's easy to see how it could have.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Good to know they've given Yui's witch ideas.
Yui is unsure whether to blush or not.
Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
It's more that either they or their progenitor will very likely still be around as of Yui hypothetically Witching out, and she'd be lucid enough to go grab both them (whatever form they're in) and Maiko and demand they figure out how she can do it too.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Hm... It occurs to me that Alexandria would function a lot like Walpurgisnacht, then.It's more that either they or their progenitor will very likely still be around as of Yui hypothetically Witching out, and she'd be lucid enough to go grab both them (whatever form they're in) and Maiko and demand they figure out how she can do it too.
Massive physical power and swarms of human shaped defenders who are fast and powerful.
Kemayo
A Certain Cheerful Tone Of Voice
- Location
- Missouri
...clever use of her wish magic there. Is Kyubey actively avoiding her now?
hugh_donnetono
No use to complain
- Location
- Caught Out In The Rain
I think Kyoufu is far more deserving of that particular title than the bunnycat is.
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
I'd say yes, but not because of a grudge or anything petty like that. I think Kyubey is just
Edit: actually, that's an amazing idea. Great job me.
once we ease Shinobu into using her powers, we turn an instance of Kyubey against the hive, and have it serve our interests (according to our dictates and it's most accurate models of human behaviour) instead of its primary goal of reducing entropy. The others would probably cut ours off of the network, but our version would know everything they know, including contingencies and backdoors and whatever.
they might try to terminate our Kyubey unit as being compromised and defective, but again we'd be able to anticipate that and potentially use the opportunity to capture additional Kyubey models and expand our rebel network
Empress of Japan? Hah! With the might and knowledge of an advanced magitech alien Empire at our disposal, we will rule all of Earth, and then all the universe! Benevolently, of course. Shinobu OP, please don't nerf.
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Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Yes, the bunnycats are avoiding Shinobu, but mostly just because she wants them to and there's nothing they want to say to her badly enough to deal with the hassle of her shouting obstructive orders at any Incubator body that contacts her. She progressed from "leave me alone" to "kill yourself" to "stop contracting magical girls" to "stop contracting magical girls and also don't kill yourself" to "do your best to prevent contracts for as long as you can". Being forced to destroy the target of that last one themselves was the final straw for the Incubator collective and they haven't interacted with Shinobu since.
(In case it wasn't clear, her compulsions only affect the individual bunnycat she's talking to, not the species as a whole, despite them being a collective intelligence to some degree.)
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
Yes, this all makes my idea sound frighteningly plausible. The fact that they couldn't just disconnect that last unit or shut it down remotely with no effort at all means subverting individual units and turning them against the others could be an effective strategy.
With active meguca protection to prevent The collective from shutting down compromised units... Yeah this could work.
- Location
- Here
[Q] Seize the means of production
[Q] Les incubateurs à la lanterne
[Q] Occupy the hivemind
[Q] Les incubateurs à la lanterne
[Q] Occupy the hivemind
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
Hunt witches now, Revolution after dinner.
"We do not know fear, but negative efficiency is a pain"
DarkLight140
Credit to Team
- Location
- Lost in my thoughts
If we're positing a Maiko alive, Yui witched, both are talking situation, then I wouldn't bet against Yui's witch arguing pretty hard that once they have pseudo-humans up and running Maiko should gift her the entire grief balancer's worth of girls, doing controlled rehatchings if necessary for proper absorption. After all, an extended bout of unconsciousness that lasts until someone breaks that machine and then is replaced by the standard future of eternal suffering seems to have an expected quality-of-life-over-infinite-time inferior to a half-life overseen by a benevolent overwitch which lasts until someone who can take out Alexandria's entire minion swarm shows up... as long as Alexandria is able to reach critical mass so that contesting her becomes unthinkably lethal.It's more that either they or their progenitor will very likely still be around as of Yui hypothetically Witching out, and she'd be lucid enough to go grab both them (whatever form they're in) and Maiko and demand they figure out how she can do it too.
And then Maiko became the head cultist of an eldritch horror, preaching its benevolence and seeking to constantly feed its hunger for girls, as expected of someone with her magical girl outfit.
- Location
- Here
Excuse me ma'am, do you have a moment to talk about our Lady and Savior?
Anyway, giving Maiko everyone's mostly-full grief seeds is clearly good idea, for either finding cooperative witches that aren't currently protagonists, immediately ascending Yui's hypothetical witch to supremacy, and/or strategic deterrent against national governments.
No but seriously.
Is entirely unnecessary. Maiko passed critical mass a long time ago. The term "witch-bomb" is figurative, the phrase "Maiko has a high-yield-thermonuclear-scale witch-explosion on a dead-man's switch in her attic" is less figurative. I have no idea what, if any, effect oversaturation would have, but there are hundreds of them, and they are all oversaturated, I doubt it would be in Walpies league, but...
Let me put this in another way. Assuming that you are a stereotypical capitalist overlord. They are overprivileged, undereducated, overpaid, there are hundreds of them, and the first thing they'll do is unionise.
There might actually be a mundane pressure-wave from all those barriers forming at once, and unlike a normal bomb they don't even have the decency to destroy themselves.
Still, I do have to wonder if she can grab some high-capacity former-familiar-witch, stuff it with as much grief as it can possibly hold, stick into a separate stasis, feed it to the collective, then see what happens when a barrier forms half-way-through being "eaten".
Oh, sorry, my mad science is playing up again. To blowing up living stuffed animals with tortured fragments of tortured souls of tortured manifestations of tortured girls: just say no.
Olivebirdy
mook.
Kyoufu and Muhou aren't identical, right?
missing period
[insert obligatory text here]
Olivebirdy
mook.
Not great, it would be easier if they were the same age, let alone identical. For the best shot at finding the original girl, we'd want to check the school pictures of the nearby schools and the missing persons records, looking for someone who could be their sister. Probably get a bunch of false positives.
Hopefully Kyoufu and Muhou stayed in their creator's general area and hopefully they look like them.
If Despair and Memoir are staying in their own stealthy human guise, how well could Minami scan everyone for particular features? Her spy sat doesn't have programming, it's just a viewpoint, right?
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Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Also, Kyoufu and Muhou have their hair cut and styled differently--Kyoufu's is uniformly shoulder-length, parted and tucked behind her ears; Muhou has short hair and perpetual bedhead, like Minami--and Kyoufu is significantly thinner, not that you can tell with how baggy her clothing is.
Assuming the girl in question is a newbie of typical contracting age she probably looks like a slightly older (and hopefully less malnourished) Kyoufu with a different hairstyle, but she could easily be anywhere from around Muhou's apparent age (9-10) to 16-ish like Koharu and Sayuki.
Sort of? Like, you know how you can be passively looking for something and abruptly notice it out of the corner of your eye? Minami can let the spysat wander in a fixed pattern without conscious attention and "notice" things that way. It's more effective than it logically should be because ✨🌟✨magic✨🌟✨ but that's the basic idea. She can find people she's gotten a clear look at that way, though any change in appearance that would be enough to make Minami not immediately recognize someone in person would also be sufficient to hide from her spysat's passive search.
Anyway, given that she could find Kyoufu or Muhou that way she could find the original girl if and only if her actual age and hairstyle is close enough to one of the two. It's far from guaranteed, but on the other hand it's probably no less helpful than whatever else Minami might be using her spysat for all day, which is totally not a mildly worrisome topic that Yui tries not to dwell on too much.
Olivebirdy
mook.
increasing
loath
powerful-looking
I really wonder what's up with Kyubey's mental block.
your
confrontational."
What would Maiko think of the theory that the victims who got better were the ones who had their unfamiliars destroyed?
I'm pretty amused at how spooked Yui was in the chapter where she met Kyoufu, promising not to go after her until emotional shielding was ready- then immediately in the next chapter, she's running after Kyoufu, sans emotional shielding.
Okay, excellent. Does the wide variety in hair-and-eye color in the PMMM-verse make identification of people easier? ...Are people who dye their hair in colors other than of their eyes considered weird?
It's too bad we don't have access to police and school records. At least we have a general area. We should have asked Muhou when and where she spawned, or where her first memories were. Might give us a clue.
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Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
- Location
- "echolocation" dur hur hur
Yeah, that was kinda jarring. Partly that was me trying to nudge things toward meeting the newbies because of this:
...but mostly it was just me anticipating where I thought the next update would go and underestimating the threads ability to take a joke-y comment and turn it into an actual bandwagon:
Which you were, in fact, the first person to bandwagon onto. As it happens.
At any rate, there are a few update transitions that I would definitely smooth out if I were editing this into a single narrative, and that one's near the top of the list. Even when Yui's being flighty, she tends to go from one thing to the next a bit less bizarrely than that.
She's like 90+% sure that's what happened. The only reason she's not pushing for wiping the unfamiliars out immediately is that she's not 100% sure there isn't an additional factor involved (time, proximity, &c.) and that doing so would clearly sabotage any friendly-ish interactions with at least Kyoufu and possibly Muhou as well.
Maybe a bit easier? Goofy anime hair colors are not exclusive to plot-relevant people, so it's not that big of a factor.
Also, I'm not doing the "hair and eyes match exactly" thing for everyone. Most characters have nearly the same colors for both, yes, but not all, and a lot only have very similar colors. Yui's brother's hair is a sorta dusty lavender while his eyes are more of a purpleish-red, like Yui's but a few shades darker. Koharu's hair is a fairly light blonde but her eyes are purple. I think there's a few others, too?
(EDIT: Oh, and thanks for the corrections--I'll fix them after I'm done with the in-progress update.)
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- Location
- United States
In retrospect, that is kinda bizarre. I guess we were all motivated to haste by Kyuuby being concerned over the mess, and the fact that civilians were being actively and permanently mind-raped. Then the point was raised we could just talk with her over the brain-mail, and so things escalated.