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Oct. 24th, 2016 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmxratedGrandma drew up some kind of family tree while I worked on yesterday's blog entry. I had asked her before I got started with the entry about whom certain people were related to.
While showing me, she also said that she has a more complete tree on her computer, which dates as far back as the early 16th century, and that she'd send me a copy after returning home.
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Watched The Rebellion Story with Brian, and showed him the second half of yesterday's entry, along with something Chelle said in a recent exchange I had with her:
[E]ither [the Incubators] don't have any chance to do anything about this and are forced to adapt to the wraith system as they did in the new timeline, or they do have the technology and just start using it to isolate people to get witches, or like in Rebellion, sit on it for thousands of years until a random girl tells them that the energy goes somewhere because somehow they didn't figure that out that conversation of energy is a thing.
And yet, he still managed to chalk what supposedly shouldn't have been possible up to other things. I honestly considered conservation of energy to close all loopholes, but Brian suggested that maybe the Incubators are an evolving race and just didn't have the technology in the beginning. (Kyubey did mention a possible creation of new energy at least once early in Stars Above, but of course, that isn't canon, and if he ever mentioned that in the main series, do keep in mind that I never made a point of catching every single word in all its dialogue.)
To be fair, though, he also mentioned how convoluted the process of fiction-writing is. It is true that the movie (and by extension, the story itself) was supposed to end with Homura just reuniting with Madoka, but the different ending we got was a result of Executive Meddling. What Kyubey did to set the movie's events in motion may have been an oversight by Magica Quartet, and would be easy enough for anyone not taking conservation of energy into account to overlook, but one can only wonder what creator Gen Urobuchi himself would chalk it up to, or whether he'd own up to such an error or try to justify it somehow.
He also mentioned that, as powerful as Incubators may be, they are not actually omnipotent, or else there would be no story. This is something that was also mentioned in The Very Soil (page 32):
[T]hough enormous, [Kyubey's] power is extremely limited. He can grant wishes, act as a telepathic switchboard, control who can see him, and (as we will learn later in the series) exist in multiple places at once, but cannot actually wield magic to alter reality the way magical girls and witches do. A few of his comments even suggest that what wishes he can grant is determined by the power of the magical girl doing the wishing--given comments in later episodes that Sayaka is not a very powerful magical girl, it's possible that the reason she only wished for Kyousuke's hand to be healed and not the rest of his body is that she couldn't heal the rest.
That's actually something else I spoke to Chelle about a little while ago, following something she had written on Tumblr. What she said was that if Incubators were capable of reviving the dead, then they'd be doing that all the time in order to continually harvest energy from fallen Puellae Magi. The above paragraph, however, explains how they cannot do that on their own, and would also explain how Madoka was able to revive a cat in the first audio drama and Sayaka in The Different Story.
(She also said that Homura mentioned that limitation during the final timeline, but I would assume she meant the main one, because the closest thing she ever said to that was that the dead in general cannot be revived, in episode 5, referring only to a mortal law, and it should be obvious why she omitted contracts as the one loophole.)
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Brian pretty much declined on taking The Very Soil back with him. Originally, I thought he could use it in order to better brainstorm something once he reads Cibus Esculentus Madoka Magica next month, but he said that he's got a busy schedule and a ton of other books still waiting for him to read.
Chances are, this will have to be my gift to him for Christmas this year. Originally, I was going to get him a Wii U, on which I would have downloaded the entire Earthbound trilogy, but not only has that become irrelevant right now, but it's still up in the air whether Mother 3 actually will make its way to the North American Virtual Console, and we could afford to give Nintendo another year to put it up before I'm ready to focus on Starbound again. Also spoke to Mom about buying a print instead, like the one he got me three years ago, but she told me he'd probably be too self-conscious to hang that up somewhere.
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As of this morning, Brian and Grandma have already left.
Postponing work on Parasitic Trio yet again. Jake told me he isn't able to write in general due to job stress, and I find myself still obsessed with Kiratto Kaiketsu! Also started reading Puella Magi Homura Tamura on our way to Mill Pond, after receiving that a few days earlier, and am currently reading that one chapter at a time. Should keep me busy for a few more days.
While showing me, she also said that she has a more complete tree on her computer, which dates as far back as the early 16th century, and that she'd send me a copy after returning home.
-----
Watched The Rebellion Story with Brian, and showed him the second half of yesterday's entry, along with something Chelle said in a recent exchange I had with her:
[E]ither [the Incubators] don't have any chance to do anything about this and are forced to adapt to the wraith system as they did in the new timeline, or they do have the technology and just start using it to isolate people to get witches, or like in Rebellion, sit on it for thousands of years until a random girl tells them that the energy goes somewhere because somehow they didn't figure that out that conversation of energy is a thing.
And yet, he still managed to chalk what supposedly shouldn't have been possible up to other things. I honestly considered conservation of energy to close all loopholes, but Brian suggested that maybe the Incubators are an evolving race and just didn't have the technology in the beginning. (Kyubey did mention a possible creation of new energy at least once early in Stars Above, but of course, that isn't canon, and if he ever mentioned that in the main series, do keep in mind that I never made a point of catching every single word in all its dialogue.)
To be fair, though, he also mentioned how convoluted the process of fiction-writing is. It is true that the movie (and by extension, the story itself) was supposed to end with Homura just reuniting with Madoka, but the different ending we got was a result of Executive Meddling. What Kyubey did to set the movie's events in motion may have been an oversight by Magica Quartet, and would be easy enough for anyone not taking conservation of energy into account to overlook, but one can only wonder what creator Gen Urobuchi himself would chalk it up to, or whether he'd own up to such an error or try to justify it somehow.
He also mentioned that, as powerful as Incubators may be, they are not actually omnipotent, or else there would be no story. This is something that was also mentioned in The Very Soil (page 32):
[T]hough enormous, [Kyubey's] power is extremely limited. He can grant wishes, act as a telepathic switchboard, control who can see him, and (as we will learn later in the series) exist in multiple places at once, but cannot actually wield magic to alter reality the way magical girls and witches do. A few of his comments even suggest that what wishes he can grant is determined by the power of the magical girl doing the wishing--given comments in later episodes that Sayaka is not a very powerful magical girl, it's possible that the reason she only wished for Kyousuke's hand to be healed and not the rest of his body is that she couldn't heal the rest.
That's actually something else I spoke to Chelle about a little while ago, following something she had written on Tumblr. What she said was that if Incubators were capable of reviving the dead, then they'd be doing that all the time in order to continually harvest energy from fallen Puellae Magi. The above paragraph, however, explains how they cannot do that on their own, and would also explain how Madoka was able to revive a cat in the first audio drama and Sayaka in The Different Story.
(She also said that Homura mentioned that limitation during the final timeline, but I would assume she meant the main one, because the closest thing she ever said to that was that the dead in general cannot be revived, in episode 5, referring only to a mortal law, and it should be obvious why she omitted contracts as the one loophole.)
-----
Brian pretty much declined on taking The Very Soil back with him. Originally, I thought he could use it in order to better brainstorm something once he reads Cibus Esculentus Madoka Magica next month, but he said that he's got a busy schedule and a ton of other books still waiting for him to read.
Chances are, this will have to be my gift to him for Christmas this year. Originally, I was going to get him a Wii U, on which I would have downloaded the entire Earthbound trilogy, but not only has that become irrelevant right now, but it's still up in the air whether Mother 3 actually will make its way to the North American Virtual Console, and we could afford to give Nintendo another year to put it up before I'm ready to focus on Starbound again. Also spoke to Mom about buying a print instead, like the one he got me three years ago, but she told me he'd probably be too self-conscious to hang that up somewhere.
-----
As of this morning, Brian and Grandma have already left.
Postponing work on Parasitic Trio yet again. Jake told me he isn't able to write in general due to job stress, and I find myself still obsessed with Kiratto Kaiketsu! Also started reading Puella Magi Homura Tamura on our way to Mill Pond, after receiving that a few days earlier, and am currently reading that one chapter at a time. Should keep me busy for a few more days.