What do you do in the Naruto fandom?

[wafflelate]

(This has been crossposted to naruto)

bushwah replied to my post in addme_fandom and at the beginning of their comment said, "Naruto canon is a fairly typical child soldier comedy from what I've seen, but the fandom somehow manages to crank out absurd amounts of quality content on all kinds of themes. What do you do in Naruto fandom?"

This question ate my brain because I parsed the question as a general "you" as in "What do you do in your part of the Naruto fandom, and why?" and I realized my full thought process was probably too long to just throw up in an unrelated community. Also, I wanted to see if I could entice some comments from other folks on the subject, since my part of the Naruto fandom is by no means representative.

What do you do in the Naruto fandom?


I think that looking at Naruto canon as a fairly typical child soldier comedy is... alright, not wrong, in the end, it turns out, but in the fannish circles I travel in, a big thing that keeps people going is actually that Naruto broke its major narrative promises, as fineillsignup put it, not only does Naruto (the series and the character) fail to change that child soldier thing at all but also:

What it all ends up to is that I thought I was reading a ninja comic about the importance of bonds and making bonds and family and family of choice, and then in the ending everybody scatters away and disconnects. It’s unsatisfying, no matter how happy we’re told they are.

I suppose people who start the series knowing where/how it ends, knowing what it becomes, maybe they just kind of settle in for a Normal Battle Anime Experience? Maybe they don't get too attached to that part in the Wave arc where Naruto makes Zabuza cry by declaring that this bullshit about ninja being only weapons is wrong and fake and actually emotional bonds are important, but some of us were really looking forward to seeing Naruto go against the grain of his society and it's frustrating that he didn't.

So, you know, I guess the statement Naruto canon is a fairly typical child soldier comedy turned out to be true? But the fact that it's true is why we make so much stuff on so many different themes!

fineillsignup said it much better than I could, yet again:

Sometimes people then say “lol salty then why do u bother reading it”. Paradoxically, I probably have more interest in Naruto fandom because the ending was shit than I would if it was great. It’s like I bought a cookbook that had a recipe that had amazing ingredients and was going perfectly, until I got to the last step and the last step was “pour into a bucket of raw sewage and allow to ferment for a week before consuming.”

If the last step of the recipe was satisfying, I’d probably be like “cool cool, that was great” and that would be that. Instead, here I am online saying “Heyyyyyy I want to make this recipe but not with that horrible last step, what are other people doing?” And then we discuss what awesome things we’re doing, and also sometimes commiserate with each other about how terrible the sewage ending was.

(Of course some people don't mind the ending! Some people are enjoying the hell out of Boruto, and good for them, although I don't get it and can't find any meta on it to my deep disappointment. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough...)

But anyway all that to say that many of us are dissatisfied with the canon material, sometimes because we're super salty about the ending but also sometimes because the series introduces so many characters but doesn't have time to actually explore them all. It's also very light on worldbuilding information, has a terrible timeline, and was written very quickly in a serial manner, so all parts of canon are a little wobbly.

What this leads to is a situation like American comics, where in my experience people who really love a character will also throw out years or even decades of canon material because they think so-and-so's run is garbage. Only, with Naruto, some things are different:

• Naruto's publishing history only goes back to like 1999 and only became commercially available in English in the mid-00's, so the canon and fandom aren't too old.
• The anime and manga are widely available and there's no question about where to start if you want to get into it.
• Lots of people (like me!) saw parts of it when we were younger and are at least passively familiar with the plot before ever getting into the fandom later in life.
• Paradoxically, it's both an open canon — because of Boruto — and a closed canon — because "Is Boruto canon?" is an entire can of delicious worms wherein even if someone answers "no" very strongly with a lot of emphasis, that doesn't mean they don't still gawk at the show from a distance, fascinated and horrified.

So like... what do we do? Generally, we do whatever we want I guess, often with lots of focus on whatever minor or underdeveloped character/concept caught our eye. I'm part of a very nice Suna-focused Discord. People are producing zines and running challenges.

Here's some interesting things people are specifically up to!

• The Dreaming of Sunshine recursive fandom takes a 700k fanfic as its canon, which is my main contact with Naruto.
• There's folks over on the SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity forums running quests (a sort of interactive fiction run on forums) like this one that focuses on Sasuke.
• I've heard good, interesting things about ANBU Legacy, a long-running fic-style roleplay.

So, what do you do in the Naruto fandom? What do you think we, the fandom, do in general, and how has it changed?

I would especially love to hear from the pro-Kishimoto/pro-Naruto ending/pro-Boruto side of things, as I know basically nothing about that. Why do you feel the way you do?

Comments

[wafflelate]

I intended it as "which part of Naruto fandom are you, as a single person, involved with?" but this answer is also great. Among other things, it describes several parts of the Naruto fandom that I did not actually know about at all.

Aha I'll get way more into what I'm into in particular in the next part of this response for sure, but it was super fun to answer this in a more general sense! You might also be interested in the more robust discussion here on naruto.

Dreaming of Sunshine is an entire enormous compendium of worldbuilding? That sounds fucking amazing and like exactly what Naruto canon is missing. I did notice that different fics did wildly different things with the setting; I guess the canon setting must be pretty badly done. Do you call it DoS, DOS, DS, Sunshine, DSun, or what?

We call it DoS! It's actually a proper fic, don't get me wrong, it's just long and well-thought-out. You can find it here. The fic spends lots of time exploring how the canon setting works in a way Naruto definitely doesn't. Off the top of my head, Dreaming of Sunshine has shown us these parts of how the world functions:

• the village intelligence department
• torture & interrogation
• logistics and wartime prep
• village and clan research departments
• what happens to genin who graduate the academy but don't pass their jounin tests
• "sensory squad" aka the village tracking specialists
• ANBU recruitment and training
• various kinds of international politics, including two non-Konoha chuunin exams
• the hospital, medic training, and some of the judiciary rules around it

It's told in first person POV of the SI/OC so we get to see her perspective of the world very closely through an excellent combination of inside/outside observer — she's been raised by the Nara clan from birth, so the setting is familiar to her in the way it would be to anyone else, but she also lived an entire life (the details of which are irrelevant and therefore never elaborated on) before becoming Shikako Nara, so the worldbuilding explanations often come from that side of things. There's also a lot of detail around the more magical side of the worldbuilding (the big example: definitely sealing, which gets explored lots) but actually I think the biggest draw for me is the characterization and character development. Shikako herself is a wonderful character who I love, but Silver Queen does a great job treating every character like a real person with their own lives.

Anko, for example, proctors their chuunin exam like in canon... and then also gets a whole off-screen subplot focused on her dreams and ambitions over the next, like, hundred chapters that Shikako just gets glimpses of and happens to help with. It would have been easy for the story to just ignore her after the chuunin exams, or to make her into a joke like so much Naruto fic does, but instead she's just another part of the village that Shikako lives in and comes up at logical times.

At this point I'm definitely trying to talk you into reading it instead of just telling you what I do with the story, oops, but listen: you should definitely read it. We have multiple people who read it and write fic with it who haven't seen or read any of Naruto canon. The only things that might end up confusing are Shikako's casual mention of various villains, which is a problem that can be solved with about ten minutes on narutopedia.

The recursive fic process for it is pretty simple: one just accepts that everything in Dreaming of Sunshine is the new canon and does their fanfiction stuff from there... but because DoS has such solid worldbuilding, we're all working from wayyy more of the same assumptions than we would be otherwise in Naruto fanfiction. Also, imo, a much better cast of characters.

Most of the recursive fic is in third person and the fandom leans heavily towards gen fic and away from NSFW content — not that there isn't shipping or that we make value judgements towards folks who want NSFW stuff! But future fic is pretty uncommon and at the moment most of the characters are like 14 and also, most importantly, Silver Queen does read all the recursive fic and although at this point Shikako's more OC than SI it's still, like, weird to think about writing anything like that where she could see it, esp considering she (+Shikako) are aro/ace. So fics tend towards plotty stuff and friend/family things.

Anyway, on dreamwidth we can be found at dreamingofsunshine!

And -- I can actually see a thematic justification for most of what you're laying out. The theme is *we become our parents.* The younger generation always sees problems, always demands huge, sweeping changes. But they have to hide their dreams to be accepted into positions of power, and the dreams sort of wither away, and we get another generation of people who collect their paychecks and keep their heads down and watch their own asses and don't make waves. And they insist that this is their happy ending.

This is a thing that actually happens, and it's tremendously sad. And of course it doesn't affect everyone the same way! But it's still a trend that teens are more reformist than adults, and less powerful people are more reformist than more powerful people, and so as disenfranchised teens become enfranchised adults, their activism frequently (not always) gets sidetracked or abandoned... perhaps even the same way their parents' did.

It doesn't feel like this is the story Kishimoto *meant* to tell. But it is a story, and it looks like it might be the one Kishimoto DID tell.

I say this having gotten to, like, episode 8, and like volume 15, on separate occasions years ago -- I'm mostly basing it on what you just said and what I've seen in fanworks.

Like if that's the story that Naruto was trying to tell, if it was consciously a tragedy in the sense of inevitably-we-all-betray-the-ideals-of-our-younger-selves, I'd probably be all over that. But even though the bare facts of the situation definitely lean towards that kind of theme/story — and I'd read the hell out of a fic that grappled with that! — the tone of the narrative is sooooo not self aware of that omg. Aside from somewhat frequent out-right statements by characters that each generation is supposed to surpass the last and aside from Naruto being Straight Up Literally Actually Prophesied To Save The World (Despite Early Series Indications That Fate Is Bullshit)... the narrative definitely frames the end of the series like everyone got what they wanted and everything is perfect.

There's no narrative acknowledgement that Naruto has failed to change the Hyuuga (they've got this whole enslavement thing he said he'd fix in Part 1) or that Orochimaru like... was a real actual villain........... like if Kishimoto wants a story that ends "...and then everyone becomes just as complicit in the exploitation, torture, and abuse of children as their forefathers were because they decide that horrific medical experimentation is fine as long as it's sufficiently valuable" then fine I guess? But because Kishimoto/his successor (Boruto is being done by someone else) have just chosen to ignore the problems instead of either dealing with them as the narrative promised OR showing them not being dealt with, it just makes the end of the series very, very jarring.

[bushwah]

Is it hosted somewhere other than FFN or is that the only copy? The most relevant issue with FFN is that they clumsily try to keep people from copy-pasting and thereby make it harder for me to stim by selecting and deselecting pieces of the text, but they're also just bad in a bunch of other ways.

Ahh, like the diary of a sassy clerk? That sounds fantastic. (I've done temp clerical work and the regulars are universally total badasses.)

I absolutely intended you to sell me on your part of fandom! I'm sorry if I made you feel like you had to be neutral; if there's active controversy I'd appreciate a passing mention of the other side so I don't embarrass myself later, but I'm not here for a dispassionate analysis of who's posting what. I want to know where the fans are so I can participate in fandom and have fun being excited about things; excitement is actively in service of that goal.

I'll still probably eventually read it if the only copy is on FFN, but it might take me a bit longer and I'll grumble more. :p However, I've got no problem with the lack of NSFW. Honestly, I'm glad to have some nice friendly gen with feels. With the ongoing disaster that is tumblr, it's hard to look at M or E fic without seeing yet another political mess that I have to try to clean up -- and "our fandom centers around an aroace creator" is a really good sign in other dimensions, tbh.

I absolutely understand the difference between an ending that is meant to read as sad and/or horrifying and an ending that just has those implications very clearly but is presented as positive. And yeah, although the theme is there imo, it's... botched in multiple ways, not least that it wasn't put there on purpose.

The caged bird seal? That... nothing happened to that?! What the fuck? And, I read the entire fic of that meta you linked me to, that included the thing where Orochimaru memory-manipulated their child while Orochimaru wasn't supposed to be being villainous, and -- for a work for children, Naruto sure has a bizarre and horrifying moral system! Not just simplified in unfortunate ways (like the message "the police want to help you" being broadcast to children whom the police do not actually want to help), but actively terrible.

Engaging and showing the problems being fixed or not fixed -- even just through the distortions at the edge of the perspective of someone desperately trying to pretend that everything is fine -- is kinda necessary. Ignoring problems in the setting instead of engaging with them honestly is really fucking bad writing.

I think you're right that fans being able to sincerely love canon but also be angry with it is a major reason why Naruto fandom has generated so much diverse and passionate content. I wrote all that! I, fuck, I haven't had the energy to fan much in a while, but this is definitely good. Fandom is good. Fandom is fun. And Naruto I at least have some context for; the yelling about Voltron, Overwatch, and Star Wars 8 was stressful not only because it was yelling but because I had no solid understanding of what was going on and was being yelled at anyway.

I get the feeling fandom is going to be processing what happened on tumblr for a long time.

[wildtabbykat]

if the inability to select text is specifically what causes you trouble with the site, then you could try the chrome extension called Selectable in the web store that will allow you do it again. Alternatively, if you dont want to download that for whatever reason, you could try just manually switching to mobile format by changing the www. into m. which you should still be able to highlight in.

[bushwah]

I don't use Chrome, but the mobile site thing is clever.

I've read the entire posted work DoS at this point though. I wasn't ever likely to not read it over that; I just like griping.

It's easily the best SI I've read, plus or minus HPMoR. Not as canon-compatible as I expected but very good. It's one I'm planning to keep an eye on, along with Lighting Up the Dark and People Lie.

[wafflelate]

I'm glad you read and liked it! Sorry my reply is coming so late, the holidays really kicked my ass.

I use Selectable as well and there are probably versions for other, non-chrome browsers. Plus you could always, like, download it or something. There are third party sites for that that I know a lot of people prefer for reading ff.n fic.

Some of the non-canon-compatible-ness comes from it starting in 2011, lmao, since Naruto wasn't even done then. I'd love to hear more about what you liked about it! And, have you checked out any of the recursive stuff?