Ridtom vs Crim judgement

I think Ridtom makes much better arguments here, but that ****Crim wins the round****.

In terms of rhetorical critique, I don't think Rid makes too many mistakes here. I think the focus on Crim's rule-breaking takes up a *bit* too much space, and that John's bullets "stumbling" the Wolf is kinda vague (the same passage explicitly describes this as a non-physics based narrative interaction, the stumbling is pretty obviously a result of a headshot, and we see earlier that high-caliber rounds break the Wolf's bones), but largely everything they say is correct, well-cited, and well-presented. For future reference, *I would recommend Crim take notes* from this, and focus more on characterization and strategy in future rounds, as I don't think Yuta's stats are much in question.

Speaking of, I feel like the thing here is just that Yuta is like, really really strong lol. I agree that Yuta's Cursed Speech probably shouldn't work on Rid's team (I think Crim misses an opportunity to argue that Yuta knows some English here, I can think of several arguments to this effect), and I agree that John is clearly the stealthier of the two (again I think Crim misses an opportunity to argue Yuta's senses here - as a manifestation of negative emotions, I figure "Dog of War" John Stiles would have a lot of quote unquote "Cursed Energy"). The problem is just that John has few ways to press his win condition against Yuta and Rika.

To start, Rid consistently presents the dog tag-enhanced shot as being "the way" to handle Crim's team. I can buy that John's war senses would allow him to intuit that Yuta is powerful enough to warrant this kind of response, but even setting aside questions of how powerful that shot is (and I don't think it's stronger than what's shown in the scaling from Sukuna), it's still an ability that takes a substantial amount of time to charge, and it's further something that he charges verbally. Yuta is likely to hear this, and he can almost certainly counter in the time it takes the shot to come out. And again, even if he doesn't it still seems likely he would either tank the round *or* regenerate afterwards, as Crim argues in his first response that Yuta can recover from limb and organ loss.

> As a quick side-note to address "does Yuta have defenses up", I think the answer to this is yes. As Crim posts in their first response, Yuta is "constantly surging" with Cursed Energy, and I don't think there's any reason for Yuta to be off guard during a match where he knows he's in combat. I don't think space is "wasted" on this, per se, but I do think this is the closest thing to a "miss" in Rid's argumentative basket.

Essentially, I feel like John's only win condition here would be to locate Yuma, line up a shot that hits Yuma but *not* Rika, charge that shot, and then kill Yuma without Yuta healing him (reminder, Crim also argues Yuta can heal others as well). I'm not going to say this is impossible - in fact, the vibe of the scans I read suggests John comes from a world where magic works on narrative rules and thus this sort of underdog story might be paradoxically *more* likely -, but I'm not sure how well this was argued outside of "stealth" (and even in that case, the scans seemed mostly concerned with erasing tracks and getting past sensors rather than like, "being invisible").

Conversely, Yuta has a frankly ridiculous physical advantage that's basically never pressed, and I think if he spots John he could pretty much just run straight to him from any arbitrary distance and turn him into spaghetti. And maybe John would regenerate! But it would still have to be fast enough to defend the VIP, and I think this is an uphill battle.