Inherently, writing ninja vs ninja is difficult. "True", skilled, ninja are quick and effecient. If they fail to kill their target with stealth, they'll either have to abort the mission or face overwhelming numbers. Two skilled ninja going at each other is like Death Note Light vs L mental battles – exhaustive "lol I've out smarted you!" scenes occurring repetitively (for the record, I did laugh all throughout the first 20 or so chapters of Death Note, simply because L and Light kept reverse-psychologically outthinking each other "If he looks here, that means he's Kira! But if he doesn't look here, maybe he is actually Kira but knows I know he's Kira if he looks here!").

A shounen requires 3 things:

SHOUTING TECHNIQUES
Power ups
Long ass confrontations with villains

These things don't go well with ninja, so already, Kishimoto was going in the wrong direction with Naruto when he wanted it to be a manga aimed at children. Not that I'm excusing him, simply that, if he wanted to truly go about making a fantasy ninja manga, he wouldn't have picked that audience.

Not that Seinen are much better. If Naruto was seinen, Naruto would be a child assassin, slitting people's throats every chapter. Then he'd have graphic sex with a mutilated corpse to stave off the unbearable amounts of stress. Sakura would have boobs, too.

*to read a pretty good balance between Seinen and Shounen, read "Vinland Saga"

I guess there's a fine line between too realistic, and too fantastical (in Naruto's case, there isn't enough realism, or even the sense that the author is even aware that he's writing about a culture that should be super paranoid about spies, traitors, assassination, etc).

 

I think Seinen Naruto sounds fucking epic. >_> Like Gantz and Basalisk all rolled into one :awesome

 

That's why I like fanfiction. Any author can find there own line between realistic and fantastical.

 

Any recs for Sound!Naruto old or new?

 

Triad by Hellotropic. It hasn't been updated in a long time, but nevertheless it's still a good read. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3420503/1/Triad

 

Title: The Ghost and the Darkness
Author: Kirsdarkenvar
Rating: T
Genre: Drama
Pairing: No Pairing
Status: WIP
Summary:Sasuke and Naruto become friends at a young age, but will Naruto's paranoia and mental instability draw Sasuke down into madness, or will Sasuke's own demons bring them both into the dark?
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3883902/1/The_Ghost_and_the_Darkness

 

Care to elaborate a bit?

I'm skeptical about this story for a number of reasons.

Naruto and Sasuke under the character listing immediately puts me off.

This coupled with the massive angst that the summary promises and the drama genre makes me think that slash is incoming.

Then we have the slow update rate to consider. The story has been out for a year and has only just hit 40k.

Finally, depressed!insane!Naruto is about as far from his canon personality as you can possibly get.

It all translates to a plotless, awkward, and touchy-feely type story that promises to make me sick inside.

Let me know if I'm wrong.

 

The author has specifically stated that there will be no slash in this story, and I highly doubt there will be any pairings. The drama genre is for the dark themes this fic explores, rather than the omg!sob!teen! angst that we are, sadly, all too familiar with.

I understand your misgivings, as I too tend to stay far away from the depressed!naruto. However, I don't want to provide spoilers, but there is a very good reason/cause for naruto's continued paranoia/insanity that is just now begining to be revieled.

Plotless and touchy-feely are the last things this fic is, I assure you. I really don't want to say more for feel of spoilers though.

I found this story back when it had only 2 chapters, and it took forever for the third to appear. But the fourth came sooner, and the fifth even quicker. The same for the last 3 chapters. This definatly won't be updated every week now, but I feel it won't take months either.

I implore you to read it. The characterization is wonderful, and I really haven't read another fic like this before. Even if you choose not to follow it for further updates, the posted chapters themselves are a very good read.

 

Did anyone read the sixth chapter of Houses of the Holy by chance?

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4451412/6/Houses_of_the_Holy

I'm looking for a little feedback as I work to wrap up this first arc and move into the real meat of the story.

 

Did anyone?! Are you joking? If you're the chap that wrote this then I have to say I'm actually a fan of your story. Here's my review to the latest chapter on FFN:

 

What the hell, I suppose I can respond to this.

First off, I'm not going to flesh out Pain's abilities since we just don't know all of them yet.

I see no reason to start giving him made up powers when in reality he possesses more abilities than I could ever come up with.

I'm not sure how well I've shown this, but Pain isn't the type to go around detailing all of his abilities - even to someone as close to him as Naruto. What Naruto knows about Pain's powers was gleaned from observing the few instances that Pain used them. In other words, Naruto is about as in the dark as everyone else concerning the mystery that is Pain.

As far as Naruto's ablities are concerned, I prefer to introduce them as the story progresses especially this early on when I'm still fast-forwarding through his childhood.

As many people have stated, this story gets off to a - in my mind - necessarily slow start. Despite that, I'm keen to move on with the plot as much as anyone else and detailing Naruto's training as well as what abilities he's working on obtaining just bogs down the progression.

When Naruto uses a new jutsu you can assume that he trained in tireless Naruto fashion to master it.

As far as the prowess that Naruto shows, I don't see it as entirely unreasonable.

He's been training hard as a ninja for four and a half years - that's more than canon Naruto has trained if you discount his academy years where it's fairly obvious he learned very little in the way of ninjutsu.

Elemental manipulation is supposed to be impressive in the manga, sure, but if you consider that Naruto has spent a great deal of his time focusing on mastering his wind affinity as I have tried to show it isn't too unreasonable.

Remember that Sasuke could use fire ninjutsu at age 7-8 despite the fact that it seems to be secondary to his lightning affinity.

Lastly, let me just emphasize that as far as ninja geniuses go, canon shows us that the only character who rivals Naruto for the title of ninjutsu super genius is Pain himself thanks to his Bloodline Limit.

The ease with which Naruto learns and masters ninjutsu is commented on time and time again throughout the canon story.

If anything can be said about my Naruto when compared to the canon counterpart then I'd propose that mine is even more determined and inspired to be successful because he understands the measure of his abilities in the ninja world at large.

Canon Naruto is big talk and big talent, but up until recent chapters hasn't been shown to really apply himself towards achieving the power needed to defeat his real enemies - mostly due to the fact that he doesn't have an accurate measure of their power. Jiraiya's death finally changes that by waking him up to the reality of the power scaling of the antagonists.

HotH Naruto has the same innate talent but is motivated very early on to work to become not only stronger, but the strongest ninja that he can be. He has a unique insight into the highest tier of power in the Naruto universe and therefore knows how high he needs to climb in order to achieve his goal.

In canon Kakashi invents the Chidori at age 12. Naruto learns the Rasengan - having no experience in spacial manipulation whatsoever - over the period of a month at age 13.

If Naruto had learned of and worked to familiarize himself with his wind affinity from an early age then I believe he'd be capable of what I've portrayed him to be capable of.

After all everything he's used so far is simply a jutsu that he's learned out of a scroll or from Pain and Konan. I don't know off the top of my head, but the Blade of Wind is most likely a B-ranked jutsu (possibly A at the highest). That level of difficulty shouldn't be outside of Naruto's ability to learn even this early on.

I'm going to stick to revealing Naruto's abilities as they're introduced for the foreseeable future, I think. I just don't have it in me to write another "school is in session" chapter.

Sorry if this disappoints you, but if I start getting bored when I read what I've written then I know something is terribly wrong. I can tell you that literally thousands of words of unnecessary explanation have been cut out of the story already because I just don't want to reread it.

That's enough rambling I think. Thanks for the review and I hope this answers some questions for you.

 

Lol. Another author. Which is always a good thing ^^.

Welcome to DLP.

We actually had a small bit of discussion over a false alarm update for your fic--or at least, a misunderstood one. (Basically, long story short, I read a post that said you'd updated, and had assumed it meant for chapter seven. Lol.) It was disappointing that it wasn't actually a new update.

Well, in any case, I thought that the arc with Hanzo was wrapped up very neatly, and with all characters shown the right amount of strength and power. It was definitely a good read and an excellent way to finally end the war in Rain.

I do hope for an update soon . I'm dying here because of a recent drying up of updating fics.

 

I actually had thoughts on this one, and while I agree with you in HP world I'm starting to think that it doesn't really fit Naruto.

In short, the more I think about it the more I think the Narutoverse is AU in more ways than just ninja and monsters. I don't care if you're mature beyond your years, five year olds simply don't have the musculature to be active combatants. We're not talking Itachi/Kakashi level here either, a five year old physically couldn't be a genin IRL.

There's a lot of other things besides that main argument as well, and they all point to ninja maturing far faster physically as well as mentally than should be possible.

While it still reeks of underage bullshit, its not as unbelievable as it would be in a 'verse that was closer to real life. Not that I'd endorse an adult fic with children, but I can see them pairing up pretty easily. (On the same, though lesser, note; fics that have ninja bars serving alcohol to genins make me laugh. Especially when taking the path that Case13 mentions, about them trying to act tough and getting shit-faced.)

Afterall, old enough to fight and die...

EDIT@Howdy: Welcome! I enjoyed your fic a good deal, you've got some great ideas in there. (The part about the seal stumping Pain, I felt, was particularly good)

My only complaint was that it didn't seem to be going anywhere, but that seems to be changing. =3 I look forward to future chapters.

 

Thanks for the response.

About the seal and Pain:

Not only did it play well into my story by giving Pain a convenient reason to refrain from killing Naruto, I also feel that it has some basis in the canon story.

Jiraiya made a big deal about discussing the complexity and uniqueness of Minato's seal and the significance of the key is also telling about the nature of the seal.

On top of that, if Minato truly did seal the Kyuubi away so that Madara couldn't retrieve it then it wouldn't make much sense to have Akatsuki be able to simply remove it using a blanket bijuu unsealing ninjutsu.

As far as the story not going anywhere:

I understand what you mean. The first three chapters didn't have much at all in the way of plot development aside from the basic elements that set this story up. I wanted to spend some time characterizing Pain, Konan, and Naruto and focused quite a bit on that.

In chapter 4 I started adding a few plot points that set the stage for future chapters. Believe me when I say that the little glimpses you see will play a major part in the story down the line, mostly in part 2 (part 3 of this story).

Pain and Madara's somewhat strained relations, jinchuuriki interactions, and the characterizations of my principle players will matter a great deal to the story as it develops.

I'm excited to be finishing this intro Naruto-centric-but-not arc and get on to the real story very soon.

I have to say though that I'm having trouble deciding what I want to do with chapter 7. So many people want some sort of epic and detailed fight between Pain and Hanzou while I was originally planning to skim over the majority of it.

I mean we all know who wins, right?

One of the biggest issues I have with action stories is that some authors get way into their battle writing and end up writing 4k word epics that lose my interest halfway through. How many water clones and replacement jutsus do you really want to see, anyways?

I think I'll end up compromising by showing some but not all of the fight.

Now I just need to sit down and write it.

 

=P I dunno, do we? This is your story after all.

Fuck Wave

 

Congratulations, you just ruined the story for everyone.

Guess I'll have to rewrite it so that Pain doesn't get bumped off so soon.

Damn.

 

^_^ Always happy to help!

 

It's been a few weeks since I read HotH, Howdy, so I don't know if I can comment accurately, but, if you're having trouble deciding where you should be heading, let me offer a few suggestions:

First of all, how important is the fight Pain vs Hanzo? Will it reveal something about Pain, Hanzo, Naruto, or Paper-face? If it doesn't, then don't give it too much detail. Move on.

If you want another time skip after Hanzo though, this would be a good way to move forward a few years. Make the fight long, and then in the next scene show "aftermath: 1/2 years later". It will reengage your readers since they'll be trying to understand what just happened (don't tell them you've time skipped, let them figure that out).

Where are you heading with this story? Who's the main antagonist? Will Naruto fight and kill Pain? Will he rejoin Konoha (if only for a short time)? Try to work towards your goal, don't worry about your readers. If you're doing something wrong, you'll hear your readers telling you, but trust your own instincts. Go where the story needs to go, how can Naruto grow and become a more interesting character? That's what you should be focusing on now. I agree, making a battle that has no significance long is just a waste of your time.

 

Title: Lost soul
Author: LD 1449
Rating: T
Paring: Naruto/Temari
Category: General/Adventure
Summary: The eve after Kyuubi's attack, Konoha is low on strength. The council agrees to turn Naruto into a living weapon. But years later, after Sarutobi's death, will Konoha's weapon continue to defend it or will he poise his blade to slit it's throat.

Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3430516/1/Lost_soul

A while back I was desperately searching for some decent Naruto fanfiction and stumpled upon this gem. Features Naruto who really can kick ass, only a couple well done OCs and clear plot. Nearly 300,000 words, over 6000 reviews and while this story may not be pure gold it still rather epic.