Drawing more designs for the AU fanfic that I barely work on... Spoiler: People in headbands and stuff
In other news, the Hokage robe is a poorly designed piece of garbage and I did some edits to it to make it look a bit more traditional and more interesting.
@Raire i love your art style! I especially love the way you can keep clothing designs similar to canon but still bring out individuality. May i ask about the green hoop necklaces? Or is it too plot relevant to anounce yet
@Deresto Thank you so much! I do try to make sure personalities are readable in the clothing they wear, but also to keep it consistent with canon. The green hoop necklaces are jade pendant necklaces that all members of the Miyamoto clan who have the kekkei genkai receive! It's just a small tradition and detail I thought would be fun to add. It's kind of recognition of the person in question, a status symbol.
AAAND posted the first installment in my Naruto fanfic [Edit: Warning for descriptions of violence and fighting]
DAMN, those fight scenes are well written. Easy to follow, descriptive, and realistic. I will say maybe you could give a content warning in your post, I went in completely blind and it was a bit of a shock
I am back on my wanting to do take 2 of my horribly self indulgent egg mode trans person fic I did as a child that I never published. But now as like an adult who has mostly sorted out his gender shit. And who can write poetry I guess. Some may ask why is Hinata and a transguy and the answer is just 'Because I was like 12 and this helped me through some shit and I want to give this The Treatment It Deserves even if people think it's dumb or weird'. Which is a good enough answer I think. Also there is comedy potential to be had in naruhina fic wherein Naruto attempts to, with good intentions, teach Hinata how to boy properly. Because That Would Be A Beautiful Trainwreck Depending On Where He Is At Maturity Wise Doing a readthrough of the manga now. I may or may not actually fucking finish it this time. But it is time to at least attempt again and also we must for research purposes. I do really like the early bits of Naruto and it does remind me why, out of the Big Three, it's the series that I gravitated to the most. Because out of the pick of the three big protags Naruto is honestly just the most charming and relatable for me. Shit childhood, acts out for attention, has self confidence issues and feels a need to talk himself up to try and deal with that, has an understanding for why other people might be fucking assholes because he is intimately acquainted with being a jackass due to being treated like shit. Really neither Ichigo or Luffy had any chance of contesting Naruto's supreme reign over my tiny teenage Aon heart. AND THEN HINATA CAME AROUND AND TINY TEENAGE AON REALIZED THAT HE WASN'T JUST RELATABLE BUT ALSO HOT. look at him. all. charming and loud and sincere and shit. naruto will beat up your bully and tell you you did a good job and that's all i wanted as a little girl ok.
tiny gripe: i am frustrated by how many sakura-centric fic write her as a nice and kind person. like, sakura is not a nice girl, especially when she was younger. sakura's insecurities-- and also, i think, her baseline personality-- made her a really self-absorbed, unsympathetic, shallow girl who was dismissive and cruel to her peers in pretty much the same way as she herself had been bullied. she was awful to naruto and rock lee and pretty ungrateful and disloyal to ino. she cared almost exclusively about appearances-- her own and everyone else's. she was literally two faced, that was the whole thing with Inner Sakura, she cared so much about appearances and coolness and social norms that she never behaved genuinely, and was infuriated by people who didn't follow social conventions, or who failed at them. sakura LEARNED to be kinder and more sympathetic to oddballs and outcasts as she matured. but as a kid, she was really goddamn cruel. she wasn't a nice girl at all. i'm really really tired by everyone who writes her as someone who was. EDIT: i don't mean to say she's a bad character or even (as ninjas go) a bad person. just that it's bad writing and kind of sexist to assume that a girl character has, or even should have, a sweet and generous nature when very little in canon actually supports that reading.
okay caught up and im over here blushing after finding out one of my fic rec posts got linked here like i'm usually under the impression that my tastes in fic are Questionable to most people, so finding out one person shares those tastes is a surprise, finding out more than one person does is breaking my brain, but like in a good way
BLESS YOU FOR EXISTING HOLY SHIT i get SO MAD when people forget that naruto's personality was a whole hell of a lot different before all this "child of prophecy/ninja jesus" bullshit. like first part naruto MADE SENSE for his upbringing (and hella likely neruodivergency). post-timeskip felt like the kind of "uwu precious special angel" shit you get from "autism mommies" intersecting with "only good abuse survivors are perpetually kind and patient and forgiving and if you aren't then you retroactively deserved the hell you were put through" bullshit i also get so mad when people pull that "i don't hate autistics/people with adhd, i just hate everyone that has any traits asssociated with autsims/adhd because i realize blatant bigotry is looked down on but cringe culture continues to thrive!" in their fics with naruto. like not even a "this is what its like growing up treated this way" kind of thing, or a "this is a look at the fallout of ninja society being this way" thing, but a full on Spoiler: cw: slurs "lets laugh at the idiot-savant/retard, nevermind that this is the omnicient narrative voice suggesting this" way i hate it. i hate it very much and knowing that IM NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESN'T FUCKING BUY INTO IT is such a breath of fresh air. its like getting a breath after drowning for ages
Yeah, I don't want to say the timeskip is the cause of all the big issues with Naruto (the story, not the character, hence the italics to mark it as a title), because some of them were present beforehand, but all the big issues that get brought up mostly started to metastasize post-timeskip.
...that...is, i think, the best description of what happened it was already cancerous before the skip. it just spread everywhere afterwards and thats the exacct reason why i call the show itself "shitty ninjas" XD honestly at this point what i'd like the most for the show itself would be for the original anime to be declared the worlds longest terribly-thought-out OVA, hire a known good writer-editor team/mangaka/creative lead/etc. to rewrite the whole damn thing to make some kind of sense, and then shunt all the funding for the frankly better animation quality of boruto into remaking the original, but not as terrible like, what kishi really needed the most (aside from better working conditions, wtf japan?) was a goddamn editor. someone to sit him down and tell him "no" to the terrible ideas he tried to add. like its the same issue we've seen in some directors and authors who get big enough no one wants to tell them no regardless of how bad an idea might be, or who divorce their spouse who was essentially working as lead editor of their shit. i mean, hell, after watching the behind the scenes extra bits for the whole lord of the rings movies the only thing keeping Peter Jackson from falling into the same kind of shit with those movies was all the people around him telling him when enough was enough. its just sad (and frustrating!) that there was not only no one there to do that for shitty ninjas but also like...no time or spare funding to do any band-aid measures for it either when it was first being made
I've heard tell that Kishi actually had a LOT of editor meddling that changed his story completely. So what he needed were good editors.
i am frankly horrified at the thought that shitty ninjas could have been shittier ...how??? did kishi open a portal to the plane of suck or something? like i knew the publishing people made him make changes but i had no idea there were actual editors too
Like I read they pushed the Chuunin exam arc in the first place and the appearance of Orochimaru, for example
The way Shonen Jump titles work is that we tend to need to keep these motherfuckers going for AS LONG as possible. So we're not really editing necessarily for graceful endings. Especially with popular series like Naruto. The Chuunin Exam thing is the example I know of with Naruto, but it is a factor in, say, why Dragon Ball kept going on as it did. Toriyama did not want it to go as far as it did and a lot of his plot was altered by his editor. The most famous example being that the entirety of the Cell Saga is the result of his editor repeatedly rejecting his proposed big bads. Editors have a lot of sway over the titles. So a mix of needing to get a complete chapter out every week, needing that title to remain popular, and needing that popular title to keep going for as long as we can results in the way a lot of SJ titles go. I'm not sure what Kishimoto-sensei's relationship with his editor was, but I do know that some have very contentious relationships with them. I remember someone describing SJ as an industry that eats mangaka and shits out manga. Which. Honestly. Yeah. So I can't really fault a lot of the titles for how they are quality wise.
