I'd think that by now he has a somewhat solid grasp on human reactions, if not the reasons behind them, and simply does not approach the types that would be likely to make that kind of wish.
 
I think the general theory is that he doesn't so much grant a wish, as allow the girls to grant their own. That explains the general no-bullshit nature of the wishes themselves, and implies that Kyubey has no power to stop them once the process has stated.

Considering Kyubey's reaction to Madoka's wish, I think he would have stopped it if he were able to. Ultimate Gretchen doesn't change this, because it was powerful enough to destroy the universe and therefore just gives more reason not to grant her wish.
 
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It's all about potential, IT doesn't really care what the wish is or else madoka wouldn't be able to have her's granted.
 
I think it would diminish the premise of the story if Kyuubey could mess with wishes or refuse them.

One might say that this seems unusually risky for Kyuubey to go granting wishes if he knows there's a risk of them backfiring, to which I would say "when has the bunnycat ever shown any shred of prudence?"
 
One of the conceits of Kyubeys character is that he does not lie. This does imply that if he approaches a girl and tells her "make a contract with me, i will grant you any wish", he absolutely means that. So no he could/would not refuse, even if the wish is for the incubators to die or something (not that anyone who does not have the karma of universes stacked onto them have any chance of getting anywhere with that).
 
I think the general theory is that he doesn't so much grant a wish, as allow the girls to grant their own. That explains the general no-bullshit nature of the wishes themselves, and implies that Kyubey has no power to stop them once the process has stated.

Considering Kyubey's reaction to Madoka's wish, I think he would have stopped it if he were able to. Ultimate Gretchen doesn't change this, because it was powerful enough to destroy the universe and therefore just gives more reason not to grant her wish.
But that'd still leave the possiblitity of Kyubey refusing to start the [Wish/Magical Girl] process after the girl says her wish if he doesn't like it?
 
But that'd still leave the possiblitity of Kyubey refusing to start the [Wish/Magical Girl] process after the girl says her wish if he doesn't like it?
If you watched the show you'd know this to be false, its far more likely that rules like say "a girl cannot communicate for a wish beyond their karmic weight".
If he offers and the girl expects, it will happen no matter how much he dissagree's.
 
I think that once Kyubey has agreed to the contract and the wish is made (so long as it is within his power to grant) that he must uphold his end of the bargain. PMMM has a lot of Faustian themes, and one of the recurring things with "deals with the devil" is that they (the aforementioned devils) hold to the agreement once it is made.

Thematically, that makes perfect sense. Logistically, I'm not sure. If I was aiming to keep the exact same sort of themes as PMMM for this, I'd definitely just lean on that explanation and not bother getting into why it makes sense or not, but since it may matter here... hmm.

I think the general theory is that he doesn't so much grant a wish, as allow the girls to grant their own. That explains the general no-bullshit nature of the wishes themselves, and implies that Kyubey has no power to stop them once the process has stated.

Considering Kyubey's reaction to Madoka's wish, I think he would have stopped it if he were able to. Ultimate Gretchen doesn't change this, because it was powerful enough to destroy the universe and therefore just gives more reason not to grant her wish.

I'd agree with that second bit, except according to its description, the Witch of Despair was only theoretically strong enough to destroy the galaxy, not the universe. Not that a galaxy-class witch would be great to have roaming around either, since that'll surely destroy innumerable potential contractable species, but Kyubey might have considered it an acceptable loss.

One might say that this seems unusually risky for Kyuubey to go granting wishes if he knows there's a risk of them backfiring, to which I would say "when has the bunnycat ever shown any shred of prudence?"

Now THAT I agree with. Kyubey is smart as hell in some ways and incredibly blind in others from a human perspective. Hence Rebellion.

If you watched the show you'd know this to be false, its far more likely that rules like say "a girl cannot communicate for a wish beyond their karmic weight".
If he offers and the girl expects, it will happen no matter how much he dissagree's.

Not entirely sure about this. Based on human nature, as well as our exposure to this sort of genie-type deal in popular culture, a vast number of people are likely to at least consider asking for "infinite wishes", or for something incredibly ridiculous in power/scope, just to see if it's possible. The way I've been looking at it, karmic weight is a determiner for what's possible, not of what's fated to necessarily happen. Kyubey isn't able to all but see the future based on a girl's karmic weight, he can just see how strongly they can impact the future.
 
A question I'd like to ask everyone before this continues, for potential later reasons that probably aren't related to the ones you'd think I'd have to ask this- based on evidence from canon/the spin-offs, can Kyubey, after offering someone a wish, refuse to grant it if he doesn't like it? Ashtaroth is assuming that, but I'm not sure it's necessarily true. Like, say someone wished for something that would be personally detrimental to him, his species, or his goal- would he be able to refuse? He granted Madoka's wish, even though the end of all witches meant the end of the energy collection system as he knew it, but that may have just been because he figured the energy from the "Witch of Despair" that resulted (ie. this) would be worth it, though how he could have known that would even happen given that Madoka wished to erase witches before they could even be born is questionable. Was it because he said he would grant her wish, and can't/doesn't lie? But then you have to question what he qualifies as a "lie"...

I've been trying to figure this out, but I don't seem to be coming to a solid conclusion. I'd like to have an answer before it becomes important (which it very likely will), so if you have any input, I'd appreciate it.
I'm fairly certain that Kyubey has to grant the wish if he makes the offer. Canon is the best evidence for this. Madoka wishes to remove Wishes from existence in the past, present, and future, including her own. There is literally nothing in it for Kyubey and the Incubators--on the contrary, it screws over their plans and their system quite thoroughly. But he doesn't refuse to grant the wish.

And while you might have interpreted it as him just allowing it because he thinks the energy output of Madoka's ultimate Witch is worth it, keep in mind that Kyubey is more than intelligent enough to realize that Madoka's Witch would be removed from existence by Madoka herself, because her Wish made that explicit. He also knew the paradoxical nature of that bit wouldn't matter, because it involved both magic and a Wish (which was itself founded upon potential so gargantuan that Madoka could have wished for anything she wanted, including godhood). Even if he wasn't certain that was the case, he was still more than intelligent enough to realize that it was most definitely not worth the risk of screwing over the entire system forever.

Regardless, I've always interpreted potential and "what kind of Wish can a given girl make?" dynamic as being self-answering. A girl cannot wish for something she doesn't truly want (especially on an emotional level). Not because it isn't allowed, but because having the potential requires the kind of intense emotional desire for something the individual truly wants on a personal level. The reason Madoka alone can make such a gargantuan Wish is because she'd had her potential artificially inflated to absurd levels, and because she had the genuine, personal, and intense desire to actually want what she wished for. We see that Madoka is all-loving, unfailingly kind, sympathetic, and compassionate. It makes sense that she sees that the universe itself is unbearably cruel and desires with all of her heart to fix it with her own hands, with all of the godlike potential she knows she has. This last part is important, too: Madoka was probably special because (among other reasons), she was actually told ahead of time what her potential was, and the kind of universal-scale things she could wish for. Most girls with huge potential probably aren't advised about just how big-scale their wishes could be, nor are they shoved head-first into all of the reasons why they would want to make such a big-scale wish on a personal level.
 
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But that'd still leave the possiblitity of Kyubey refusing to start the [Wish/Magical Girl] process after the girl says her wish if he doesn't like it?
No, the process has to start when they start speaking, because they're granting their own wish. Kyubey doesn't hear their wish and then go implement it, he unlocks their power and then the girl makes her wish by speaking with the correct intention.
'd agree with that second bit, except according to its description, the Witch of Despair was only theoretically strong enough to destroy the galaxy, not the universe. Not that a galaxy-class witch would be great to have roaming around either, since that'll surely destroy innumerable potential contractable species, but Kyubey might have considered it an acceptable loss.
Kyubey definitely talks about "enough despair to destroy a single universe" while Ultimate Gretchen is preparing to eat Earth.
 
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I'm fairly certain that Kyubey has to grant the wish if he makes the offer. Canon is the best evidence for this. Madoka wishes to remove Wishes from existence in the past, present, and future, including her own. There is literally nothing in it for Kyubey and the Incubators--on the contrary, it screws over their plans and their system quite thoroughly. But he doesn't refuse to grant the wish.
Also QB doesn't seem to actually agree with Madoka's wish after he made the offer "are you trying to become a god?!" is said to a human who made a truly and completely selfless wish, which includes a suicide by paradox, something incomprehensible to a logicbot.
 
It... depends. Perhaps Kyubey cannot outright refuse a direct, full-hearted and possible wish, such as the one Madoka makes. But he can turn down wishes on the basis of insufficient potential, and only he seems to be able to tell if a girl's potential is enough for a given wish. He also does not seem bound by any declaration weaker than Madoka's. He can and does ask "Are you sure? You might not have enough potential for that wish to turn out like you want it to!" like an old InstallShield Wizard bundle. He also does not seem compelled to appear on command. He chooses who he will appear to at all, as well as when and how, and clearly targets girls who are likely to make poor wishing decisions.

So, I would say that in practice Kyubey has considerable leeway to avoid granting wishes he doesn't want to, even if you consider him bound to truthfulness and etc. We rarely see him push these capabilities, because he has no reason to care about 99.9% of wishes, and his most powerful tool to avoid granting something he wouldn't like is to dodge the situation entirely.
 
Also logical modeling would give you some predicted wish routes since while you can't factor in emotional impulse, you CAN figure out what kind of wishes would from the girl's perspective be preferred, and the impulsive emotionally driven wishes almost always have very short term consequences due to not being thought out(resulting in the magic executing in the shortest path method that the wisher could think of).

Madoka's wish is an aberration because she logically arrived at a completely selfless wish, which falls outside their modeling. It makes no sense at all.
 
Emergence 23: Hands Tied
> Aim for her body, attacking from where you are now, utilizing a strategy of circling around her and looking for openings.

Deciding on a plan of action, you fly over the other witch's head. The same grinding noise as when she first revealed herself starts echoing in the air as she begins to turn... but just like before, it's an extraordinarily sluggish process, leaving you plenty of time to take advantage of her poor relative positioning.

You release your first salvo, which flies forward completely unimpeded to strike the windmill witch's unguarded upper back. As your words burst into ink-black shards that tear into the stone which composes her, she cries out with a noise like shrieking metal, before the sound abruptly cuts off, as though forcibly silenced. Fanning her two lower arms out over her flowers for some reason, the witch crosses her other two arms behind her, in what you imagine is a bid to block your next assault.

In response, you redirect your aim towards her still unprotected right side, and loose a second volley. All but two of your symbol chains score direct hits before the other witch can adjust her guard — turns out, not being able to see an attack coming makes it a lot harder to defend against.

More screeching and arm flailing subsequently ensues, causing a small fountain of stone to crack and cascade out of her side. Ooh, that's promising... with the witch's now larger, longer arms making her body overly top-heavy, if you attack her just beneath them and weaken the brickwork enough, you should eventually be able to make her body crumble under its own weight. You're glad physics appears to still be a constant here; that's not always a guarantee in witch barriers.

As your opponent finally manages to turn herself enough to face you, you simply float over and behind her for a second time, leaving her just as helpless to fight back as before while you prep another salvo. Once more, you rain down hell from on high, and once more the windmill witch is left desperately trying and failing to defend herself, before her lacking rotational speed eventually gets her facing the right direction again... at which point the whole sequence just repeats itself.

By the third iteration of this, you're almost starting to feel sorry for the other witch. It seems as though she truly has no way to retaliate against you where you are, and at this point you honestly feel like you're just prolonging her misery. This isn't shooting fish in a barrel, this is shooting a single fish in a barrel, repeatedly, over and over and over again. Unfortunately, she's apparently quite reslient — your shatterwords don't do much individually, but you've hit her with enough by now that the majority of her upper body looks like it's been used as cover in an active warzone, yet she still refuses to fall.

You move around to the other witch's back again, readying your next set of shatterwords. Whatever the case, she can't possibly last much longer. Even if her body is held together by magic, at this rate you'll eventually win by sheer attrition, so-

Your train of thought is forcibly diverted as you're suddenly swarmed by a mass of small, flying green hands. The disembodied appendages come at you from all sides, vines extending from their fingertips to wrap around you like rope. Hey-!

Completely surrounded by the hands, there's not much you can do to evade, and thus you end up quite entangled despite your best efforts to avoid it. You pull backwards, straining at the bindings, but while the vines are small, thin, and don't seem to actually be hurting you in any way, their sheer numbers are still proving enough to effectively prevent you from moving. Stupid familiars; get off!

You thrash in place, now turned too far out of position to effectively see or target the other witch. You toss a few more shatterwords off to your right in what you think is her rough direction anyways, only for vines to lash out from multiple angles and interpose themselves, causing your attack to impact on and tear through the ropey vegetation instead.

...what a nuisance.



[-] Deal with the familiars. You can't possibly fight effectively while you're tied up with/by these things.
[-] Keep focused on the witch. Most of the familiars are busy keeping you restrained — if you can just get your attacks past the ones that are blocking you, you can probably end this.
[-] Multitask. Splitting your efforts to attack multiple targets generally isn't easy, but it should keep you from losing track of what any of them is doing.
[-] Write in.
 
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Update delayed on account of I want to make it better before posting it but got sidetracked by a cooking project.

(Also with trying to finish Chapter 6 of Stand-in, which is inexplicably taking forever and a day to complete.)
 
Emergence 24: Quixote's Vindication
> Deal with the familiars.

You've always preferred to work around familiars rather than deal with them directly, but ignoring these things just isn't feasible when they're being this much of an impediment. The witch isn't doing anything anyways, so her minions should take priority.

You start writing out more shatterwords to bolster your dwindling supply, even as you alter the orbits of your remaining ones, speeding them up and aiming them at your restraints. The resulting shrapnel shreds right through the vines that hold you, catching more than a few familiars in the crossfire. Unfortunately, due to your unavoidable proximity, you also end up caught in the crossfire, tiny shards of your own attack peppering your straps like hail. Ow, ow, okay, not the best idea, ow!

Thankfully, self-inflicted damage or not, the basic idea still worked. Tearing your way free of the remainder of your leafy chains, you spin around and propel yourself to the side through a now relatively clear patch of air, removing yourself from the center of the familiar swarm. The disembodied hands turn to follow, the closest ones sending out yet more vines to ensnare you, but you're already tossing shatterwords their way.
...unfortunately, most those shatterwords by and large miss, the hands' small size making them relatively difficult targets to hit. Hmm...

Quickly revising your approach, you turn your words sideways and start sending them out in loosely spaced "walls", making them much more difficult to evade than your lengthways shots. Their speed suffers from the altered orientation, but as the hands aren't particularly agile, each one being wholly reliant on a single small propeller, your new tactic proves remarkably effective, striking a large swathe of them from the sky before they can even attempt to get out of the way. Several of them simply fall out of the air, their fans no longer spinning properly, while others are torn apart by the shards of blackness outright, though less than you'd have expected. Your words don't seem to fragment quite as dramatically when thrown like this either.

The familiars rapidly shift from trying to restrain you to trying to defend themselves, but as you begin whittling down their numbers even further, they become ever less and less effective at doing so. Eventually, the death of so many of their comrades seems to be enough to bring the remaining familiars pause, and they turn and flee as one back towards the muddied fields from whence they came.

Looks like they've decided you're too much trouble for them to deal with. Excellent, now you just need to make a bit more ammo and finish up with the-

Your thoughts screech to a halt as, halfway through the process of turning around, you bear witness to a gargantuan windmill blade scything up through the sky in your direction. The titanic sail of steel-hard cloth is barely able to reach your height, but even what little grazes you still hacks into the side of Tome with ease, scoring an enormous vertical gash into the side of its pages that leaves you mouthlessly screaming in agony. The lowest part of the blade hits the edge of Tome's cover and fails to cut through, sending you spinning away from the force of the blow.

Several seconds later, you manage to recover and right yourself enough to actually look down at your opponent again, and-

What... the...


At some point between her familiars restraining you and fleeing from you, the windmill witch seems to have gone from "relatively large" to "absolutely, ridiculously HUGE". Before, her height was roughly comparable to yours, but now she's almost twice that, making her tall enough to physically reach up and hit you despite your current elevation, if not your current distance, since the strength behind her last attack just sent you a good 10 meters further out. She towers over the hill she's planted in like a looming giant, her eye rotating much faster than before as it glowers up at you.

Before you can truly come to grips with her sudden shift in size, a massive geyser shoots up at you from the ground below. You barely realize what's happening in time to throw yourself backwards, and the edge of the water blast still manages to hit the underside of Tome with enough force to send you spinning into a literal backflip. Hurriedly righting yourself, you float away as another geyser explodes upwards to your left, reaching greater heights than any of the ones you previously witnessed. Ack, you're supposed to be safe up here!

You make to move around behind her again, but the windmill witch seems quite determined NOT to let that happen again, as multiple jets of purplish liquid begin bursting upwards on every side of you, forcing you into the center of a watery, multi-pronged onslaught. You do your best to dodge while attempting to extricate yourself, but by the time one geyser falls away, another has taken its place, leaving you no virtually no opportunity with which to escape the prison of continually renewing streams without being hit by one. You just had to be paper going up against water, didn't you?!

You fall into a desperate series of barely adequate evasive maneuvers. Drop down to avoid the spout coming up at you at a diagonal, leaving it to arc overhead. Move forward to avoid it inevitably splashing down on top of you, causing the geyser which was forming directly below you to also miss. Swerve left to avoid the jet coming from your front, right to take advantage of the gap it leaves- no, two more coming from that direction now, down again! Okay, up to recover the lost height- scratch that, too slow, way too slow, definitely not up!

You grit your nonexistent teeth. While you definitely know how to evade all this, your size and method of movement are just too cumbersome to let you do so with nearly as much speed or agility as you'd like. It is likely solely by dint of the fact that your opponent still isn't a very good shot that you haven't been hit yet, but eventually she's going to get lucky-!

Two geysers shoot forward from behind you in an x-shaped cross. You lean your body forward to avoid them, only for another one to blast forth from directly in front of you, forcing you to drop down once again in order to get away from it. Damn it, there's no way out of this! Every attack you get away from just seems to lead you right into the next one! It's almost as if you're being-

Herded...

Your balk in realization, and turn a fraction of your attention from dodging back to the witch, just in time to realize her attacks have already maneuvered you back into striking distance. Her lower right arm swings towards you, a glaive the size of a house, while water spouts shoot up from below to prevent you from simply dropping out of range.

Shit-!



[-] ??? [Write in.]
[-] Press x to not die.
 
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