The Water Lily Ninja Diaries
Prologue: Pre Pixie Days (The Fox Girl)
The day Uzumaki Ren decided to become a Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the day her life as a kunoichi - a female ninja - truly began in earnest. She decided it quite consciously. She just woke up one day and told herself: "I am a Manic Pixie Dream Girl now." And so she began trying very hard and very conscientiously to pretend she was one - sort of like trying on a hat and then walking out of the store with it. She then became a true ninja. One thing followed the other. Ren stole a metaphorical store hat and afterward became a killer kunoichi.
But more on that in a minute. First, a matter of import - Ren's life pre Manic Pixie Dream Girl status:
… Okay. Serious time.
Bullying on the childhood playground was hard.
It didn't always have to be physical. When people laughed in your face on the playground, mocked you and called you names, told you that you were ugly and worthless and you ran away crying, everyone staring at you and your face flaming hot and the words ringing in your ears -
That was bad.
But it was worse when you thought you'd found a friend, and then you ran off to play on the swings for five minutes, and you came back behind a tree only to hear the kid saying to another, "God, that girl is such a freak. Why is she playing with us?"
You pretended it didn't hurt, that you didn't care what anybody thought. But it did. It hurt.
Bullying was a process of little comments like that on the playground, of mocking laughter that the bullies didn't think anything of. Little comments, little people saying that trait of yours was weird or that thing you thought was stupid, little things that all built up into you crying at home and trying not to cry on the playground and in general feeling so paralyzingly angry and hateful and so fucking sick of crying that you wanted to throw up.
Bullying came from adults, too. Sometimes bullying was a process of adults pulling their children away from you and yelling at you on the playground, there in front of everyone, humiliatingly. Bullying was, "Come around my children again and I'll end you!" Like you weren't even really a child yourself, but were instead an alien, an Other. Bullying was you being pushed away from another child, your privacy being invaded - or, worse, a lecture, as if you were inferior and could somehow be "fixed." Bullying was you walking down the street and people making rude, scathing comments after you, like you didn't have ears and you couldn't hear. Bullying was someone seeing you in a shop, glaring, turning, and running out the door the other way. The cold, bottom dropping out of your stomach feeling that accompanied it.
Bullying was a slow, degrading process of never being good enough for anyone.
But the isolation. The isolation was worse.
Ren should have been fairly popular among the other kids on the playground. Her name meant "water lily," a perfect counterpoint to her Uzumaki surname which meant "whirlpool," and her appearance reflected that beauty. She had a slim build, fair skin, soft almond-shaped violet-grey eyes, and long straight crimson colored hair. She had a slim, heart-shaped face and tiny, delicate features. She had natural slim red markings around her eyes that made the eyes look more fox-like, and two red dots above the insides of her eyebrows.
She'd always thought they were clan markings, from the family who had died the day she was born, the family who died the day of the fox demon Kyuubi yokai attack on Konoha village.
She looked like traditional paintings of beautiful red-haired fox demon yokai women, from old folklore and mythology, which she thought was why people called her "fox girl." It was perhaps, she thought, why she was so distrusted.
No one trusted the kid born and orphaned the day the fox demon attacked who looked like a fox demon.
But more than being a pretty girl with a pretty name, more than being a fox girl, Ren was an orphan. She seemed to love being in pain, to love defining herself by what labels other people put on her because it was all she knew how to do. She was like an empty vase, no water in it yet, no flowers. She was Nobody, the dumb girl who cried a lot. But more than being Nobody, the dumb girl who cried a lot, she was an orphan. She was an orphan who lived on her own, off of government checks, in an empty, crummy single apartment. A village was supposed to raise a child in Ren's culture, but Ren was pretty sure no one was raising her. Everyone just gave her cold, alien eyes and stayed far away.
"Fox girl," they whispered hatefully.
And so she was alone. And being alone was worse, young Ren quickly learned. Being alone was the worst part of all.
Being alone was walking into the relative safety of an empty apartment and pretending the silent stillness wasn't eating away at you. Being alone was faking imaginary conversations to the air just to have somebody to talk to. Being alone was naming your plants and caring for them so that something alive needed you. Being alone was crying and feeling like a failure when one of them died.
Being alone was not trusting anyone who was nice to you. Being alone was feeling paranoid every time someone said they couldn't spend time with you, like no one really wanted to be with you at all. Being alone was going whole days without saying anything of significance to anyone.
Being alone was doing everything for yourself, and breaking all the rules with no satisfaction, and realizing no one would care if you fucked up your entire life. If you died, no one would care. No one was ever there to do anything for you, and it was true - it was proven.
When you "fucked up," as the adults said with freeness pretending Ren wasn't there - when you fucked up, no one cared.
No one cared on the streets either. You walked alone. Everyone ignored you. You weren't there. If you'd suddenly disappeared, the world would have continued on - unchanged. You watched other people be happy together and wondered what that felt like. Little, weird moments of clarity amid the dim confusion, the dim confusion that ate away at most concrete memories of your village layout except for occasional flashes of an image:
A long paved street lined with colorful little brick buildings, lamp posts, and neatly planted trees. A grey haze of a rainy day that made the green of the trees look darker. A vast sandstone monument to the Konoha village Hokage leaders. A snatch of forestry and then a great wooden wall beyond it that was supposed to keep everybody safe. People in weird modern-kimono blend clothing. Ninja in weapons holsters and dark forest green flak vests and hitai-ate symbol marker bands. A bland, white-walled apartment with faded old thin, threadbare commercial carpet, a single front room, a single back room, and one hallway in between.
All slowly faded away.
Into nothing.
Except glaring, distant faces, across a chasm of distance away from you on every side. That was all you remembered.
The thoughts continued to spiral downward.
And together - being bullied by both children and adults, being completely alone - together eventually you got to the thought, "… What's really the point?"
Ren did not understand why she was despised so much, so firmly ignored. No one in Konoha village liked foxes, not after the Fourth Hokage had died defeating a demonic one and sealing it away while protecting his village from the attack that had killed many, including Ren's parents the day she was born. But there had to be more to it than that, more to this irrational hatred and loneliness, than some strange looking fox girl features. And as a young child this ate away at her, this not knowing.
Apologies for the deeply unpleasant topic in relation to a child. This state of mind must be firmly understood, or everything that happens afterward will not make sense.
Because now comes the one time a Manic Pixie Dream Girl was ever genuinely a savior. That fairy-like little glittery woman swooped down and saved an empty girl by giving her something to become, something brave and tremendous because it wasn't real and it never had been and the empty girl was blissfully unaware of either fact.
And that - that moment of becoming - that's where the story starts.
The day Uzumaki Ren decided to become a Weird Girl.