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sulfurbunny — PMD: VF - 471: Power Down
#dungeon #mewtwo #mystery #pmd #pokemon #victory #victini #fire #victoryfire
Published: 2016-07-15 07:00:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 20916; Favourites: 190; Downloads: 0
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Victory Fire 471New pages will be posted on Tuesdays and Fridays, please check back
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Comments: 93
I suppose you could say that it was about time for her to, Hoopa'n board! Wahahaha!
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You,my good sir,would you please GET TO THE EXIT?!
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Hmm... guess you should have gone with X form instead.
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Some people would resort to dirty tricks to win...which they may learn the hard way that it's not the right thing to do.
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I for serious thought that was umbreon, then i looked at the comments
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What's makes this comic great is when you always pull old references from way earlier out of the bag seriously it's mind blowing
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How did Victini know Hoopa was there? Did she sense it's aura?
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The worst part is that Victini believes that you must be strong to kill someone. Mewtwo is stronger because he chose not to kill when he had the chance... now let's finish this!
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i'm assuming mister dark and mysterious is Hoopaa
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Well, looks like he WOULD have regretted not finishing the job, but we seem to have a deus-ex-Hoopina coming up. Wonder how this is going to go...
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Maybe I'm just dumb but I definitely thought that was mega Gengar for a second.
M-geng and Hoopa have remarkably similar forehead circles.
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I thought it was umbreon xD
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I thought it was Umbreon too XD
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I thought is was spiritomb until reading the comments
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We should remember, that Hoopa does nothing for free and it is still interested in something Mewtwo has...
PMD-VF-421-Outset
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Indeed his is interested, but it doesn't seem like he's looking to make a deal. Since he's interested in Mewtwo, he's probably going to try and save him.
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Or he kidnaps Mewtwo and disappear with him...
Less likely but possible
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That makes sense too.
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Guess what happened :I
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Sulfur, you just confirmed that I was right to believe that Mewtwo should have killed her. You know what's happening here? Mewtwo's getting lucky. He would have died, and it would have been all because he couldn't differentiate between murder and killing. What's going to follow will not be a victory--it will be a lucky coincidence. Instances like these always bother me in stories because they distract us from the pragmatic reality of things and let poor judgment and irrationality become the victors.
I mean, it's great that Mewtwo (hopefully) survived this encounter, but it wasn't for the right reason.
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You seem to be assuming that Mewtwo willingly ended the Mega Evolution - and that's not the impression I got.
Victini's complaint of "it's not fair" triggered a memory that jolted Mewtwo out of his trance; that much is indisputable. However, his expression in the second-to-last panel of the previous page makes me think he hasn't had chance to process much of anything before the Mega Evolution is ended without his intention. Based on the last couple of panels, I think one or both of two things happened;
1) the Mega Evolution was dependent on Mewtwo's emotional state somehow. When that changed as a result of the triggered memory, the Mega Evolution failed. This possibility is supported by the title of the last page: "Desync".
2) The bracer had some sort of power supply which was maintaining the Mega Evolution, and its "eep eep eep" was a "low energy" warning. Perhaps not a very good one because it came so late that the Mega Evolution failed before Mewtwo had a chance to react.
In short, my impression is that his Mega Evolution failed without any conscious choice on Mewtwo's part.
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No, I'm assuming nothing of the sort. In broadest terms, I'm assuming two big things: Firstly, that Mewtwo's going to survive because of Hoopa, and would have died had Hoopa not been there. Secondly, that Mewtwo was physically capable of killing Victin while he was mega-evolved.
I have to admit, all you guys are making me think about this scenario far more than I first anticipated. I didn't think about how much Mewtwo was in control of his own mentality here, nor did I think about what the ternary consequences of this choice might have been. For those reasons, I've changed my mind with how harshly I will judge and begrudge Mewtwo and his fragile character. But that doesn't change my opinion that killing Victini would have been the best option for Mewtwo and his allies. And it doesn't change my opinion that it's a damn shame that Mewtwo's life could only have been saved by an external force that he didn't anticipate.
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I think what Mewtwo was afraid of wasn't simply killing Victini, it was what he might do AFTER killing Victini.
The past three pages have made it clear that Mega Mewtwo was not entirely in control of himself as he was attacking Victini in Mega form. He was aware that his thought patterns were abnormal for him and that he wasn't in full control of them, and also that there were lives at stake.
In addition, it's shown in Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon that a Pokemon that Mega Evolves in the PMD world (i.e. without a human as the usual bond) will, if they do enough damage before the power wears off, eventually go berserk and start destroying things willy-nilly until the power fades. I doubt Mewtwo was aware of that mechanic, but from his own admittance, he wasn't acting like himself when he had that energy, so he might well have realized the possibility could occur.
What would be a worse possibility in Mewtwo's mind: being killed by Victini and failing to protect his friends (assuming his friends hadn't already escaped), or being himself responsible for killing his friends along with Victini with an unstoppable power he didn't try to reign in until it was too late? I'm not sure there's a right answer to that question, but I'm fairly certain Mewtwo thinks he made the right answer.
Of course, it's hard to choose the right answer when you're not thinking clearly, so we shouldn't judge Mewtwo too harshly here. The very reason he shut down the Mega Evolution was because it was messing with his mind. He'd become a living weapon, but his thoughts and emotions weren't his own anymore, and he knew it. He didn't want to let poor judgment and irrationality be the victors.
I also doubt that Mewtwo could have possibly predicted that turning off the Mega Evolution would have weakened him so severely. But, under whatever knowledge we can safely assume Mewtwo might have had or not had, I personally think that shutting off the Mega Evolution was a choice Mewtwo made as much for his friends' safety as for his own.
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That's a very good point that I didn't consider. If the possibility of ending Victini's life while still maintaining control over his own subsequent actions wasn't a perceived option, then there would need to be some more careful calculations that need to be made. I still don't believe that this is a victory (except on Hoopa's end. Good for him.), but you've certainly changed my mind with whether or not Mewtwo was being fully rational with his decision.
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In fairness, I don't think it was possible for Mewtwo to be fully rational with his decision, because the entire reason he needed to make the decision was because he wasn't thinking rationally. (As someone who suffers from mental illness that sometimes affects my decision-making, I can fully empathize with this.)
If he'd been able to think more clearly, he probably would have been able to plan better to avoid being put in danger from Victini, but that's assuming that he'd be able to realize that de-megavolving would exhaust him, which, from what we've seen, clearly didn't happen in this case.
The current situation is pretty tough on Mewtwo however you slice it, though. Weak, de-powered, beaten up, and between a murder-happy Victini and an ambiguously motivated Hoopa. (Well, technically it's the Hoopa that's between them both, but I digress.)
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I'm not going to provide a lot of explanation about what happened to Mewtwo here because it'll spoil important stuff later on regarding mega-evolution and the Plasma device but I will say that EurekaTrollcat's theories are closest to what's actually going on (albeit not exactly right).
As a personal note, I fully expected going into this that these events would prove controversial and possibly stir up some anger, and felt a bit tense posting this page given that we had that kerfuffle a few pages ago over V! Beta-reader and I had even made some alterations from the original script to at least potentially reduce the Mewtwo fans' feelings of being cheated of a victory, but yeah, it doesn't look too good when you don't have the background knowledge we've got.
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I have to disagree, personally.
Hoopa's interest in Mewtwo was foreshadowed. If Mewtwo was in danger and Hoopa wanted something of his, of course Hoopa isn't going to let him die before it can get whatever that is. It's an established ability of Hoopa's, both to teleport and to locate Legendary Pokémon (after all, it summons them wherever they are and has even captured a Kyogre mid-leap in the anime canon, which VF follows).
It's not so much that Hoopa is resolving everything using a power we didn't know it had, but that it's accomplishing a goal we already knew it had with powers we already knew it had, and that, at this immediate moment, that just happens to align with a protagonist's motives. For all we know, Hoopa could make everything worse in a minute (we do know it wants something from Mewtwo!) - nothing about what's going to happen is "confirmed" just yet! C:
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Hoopa's interest in Mewtwo was foreshadowed. Not to Mewtwo himself. If he knew that Hoopa was there and that he might be able to save him should it come to this, then I would have no problem with what's happeing. (And, for all we know, this may be the case, but I'm doubtful.) But Mewtwo made a bad decision here, and that bad decision is now going to be shrugged off because his life is going to be saved through means that he had no knowledge of. I'm not saying that this is a Deus Ex Machina; I'm saying that this is an "unfair" resolution that forgives a grave mistake that Mewtwo made.
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Hmm, my impression of your argument here is that there were only two outcomes to this battle: victory, or Mewtwo dies. I don't think it's that simple. It's true that Mewtwo most likely isn't going to die here, but I also don't think that the narrative is going to end up forgiving/forgetting about the choice he made. I highly doubt Victini's going to be permanently defeated here--Hoopa's most likely going to "hoop" Mewtwo to safety, or possibly distract Victini/hoop her somewhere to keep her occupied long enough for Mewtwo to escape.
The point is that Victini's going to be a continued problem precisely because Mewtwo chose not to finish her off here. And that exactly is the punishment for his choice. What about the pokemon that are now going to be injured/killed/shadowfied by Victini, all of whom would have been fine if he'd taken her out? I mean, obviously the consequences to Mewtwo himself are going to be primarily psychological rather than "death," but that doesn't mean that they aren't real or don't matter.
Setting aside completely the question of whether Mewtwo's decision here was bad or not, I think it's much too early to say that it's going to be shrugged off by the narrative. If, yes, Hoopa just obliterated Victini himself, I think that would be cheap--in that case Mewtwo's choice would have meant nothing, yeah, it would have let him have his cake and eat it too (he would get to avoid having blood on his hands AND the Victini problem would be solved). But given that I don't see that happening, I think there's plenty of negative consequences to come as a result of Mewtwo's choice here. Mewtwo lived this round, but that doesn't mean that he "won" or that he's going to get off scot-free.
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First of all, if Hoopa weren't there, then there would certainly only be two outcomes: Mewtwo dies or Victini dies. Or, one of them runs away scared, but things escalated too much in the past couple of pages for that to happen. So yes: as far as Mewtwo is concerned, this is a two-sided battle and Mewtwo was too lighthearted or too afraid to make the right judgment call.
Now, I don't doubt that Victini's going to remain a threat. Story-wise, it actually makes a lot of sense for that to be the case, and it's a dominant contributing factor towards why this was a bad choice. I'm not exactly making a criticism of the story with this comment (although it may have been a bit on the obvious side that I'm irked by these scenarios where poor decisions are forgiven by lucky unknowns), but rather I'm making a criticism with the dynamics of the theme at hand here. I'm making the argument that 1: Mewtwo made a horrible choice to not end Victini's life here, and 2: the fact that he's going to get saved does not forgive the first point. From what I'm seeing in the comments, people are praising Mewtwo for retracting his fist. But in this case, it was most certainly not something worthy of praise. The only reason we're not seeing negative repercussions right now, after all, is because of sheer, external luck.
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Hmm, I guess I don't really understand where you're coming from. Okay, so Mewtwo made a horrible choice, and the fact that he's going to get saved doesn't change that. I think you could reasonably make that argument. What I'm not as clear on is how you go from there to "therefore, Mewtwo being saved by an external actor he didn't know about is a thematically poor decision." Is the idea that, because he decided "I would rather die than do this thing," he therefore deserved to die, and having his death averted undermines that? Like, you're thinking the repercussions of his decision aren't severe enough in this version?
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I'm not saying that at all. I suppose the next point I'd be making afterwards is that instances like these prevent the audience from getting a grasp of the severity of Mewtwo's choice. If it so happens that Sulfur wanted us to feel that Mewtwo acted in poor judgment, then it's going to be more challenging to elucidate that point now. If, instead, Sulfur wanted us to feel that Mewtwo made the right choice, then Sulfur's dumb. If, finally, Sulfur wanted us to believe the former when secretly the latter is the case, then that's perfectly fine (although I won't be fooled that easily), but I'll still feel a bit begrudged because I have a sense of animosity towards lucky encounters like this. I like to believe that Mewtwo's good enough that good luck isn't something that he needs for his own survival, but I was wrong in this case. I'm a bit disappointed is all.
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Well, none of your options there are correct so I guess I have Schrodinger's IQ right now
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Okay, that's fair. It was probably a bit silly of me to pretend that I might know what's going on in that mysterious and mischievous little mind of yours.
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