Author's note
No, it's not a discontinuation A/N. Just felt I ought to clarify a few things before we continue. It's the first and last time I post an A/N as a chapter, so bear with me. Or skip this, if you wish to. If there's a next chapter up, then jump to it. If not, then merely go read something else. It has some spoilers. It's just too long a set of observations to post alongside an actual chapter. This is for those people who cannot stand the suspense of knowing how an arc or a work will pan out, and who feel the need to sling shit over this.
This fic will have the following triggers: Some tragic events, some angst, moderate levels of violence (every non training fight is more or less life or death, so there's that), sexual content, unreliable narration (Kakashi), extreme PTSD (Kakashi), slow descent into madness (also Kakashi; he is a major character next arc — The alteration point for him is that he doesn't listen to Gai and keeps pushing through ANBU till he has a breakdown, which sees him temporarily removed from service), an anti-state narrative, and the system itself as an antagonist (not Konoha, not people, not Satsuki, not the Akatsuki, but the Shinobi system itself— all five major villages, in fact; people might take this mantle up from arc to arc, but the focus is entirely on the Shinobi system and its issues).
So if any of this is a problem, then leave. You have been warned.
What this fic DOES NOT AND WILL NOT have: Other romantic pairings, bashing, Infidelity, NTR, Paedophelia, Rape (Shiho's mother was a special case; it's the only instance that could even remotely count), and pretty much anything more extreme than that. I am not interested in writing about or capturing these things.
The work is AU. Other than Wave, which has been inverted, there is not a single arc that has anything to do with canon. I have borrowed the world, and shifted about and deleted certain elements and characters. That's it. At legitimately no point have I claimed that this is supposed to be a canon take on the characters, or that the characters are even remotely similar to canon. If anything, I have twisted them a fair bit. But in most instances, there are clear deviation points. Naruto? Learns the truth about Minato. Disillusionment at a young age. Satsuki? No tsukuyomi. Ran when confronted by Itachi on that fateful night. ROOT trained from 7-8. Killed her best friend, which shifts parts of her drastically. Served Konoha for six years in various high profile missions post that. Retains aspects of Sasuke, but is at best Sasuke-lite, if that. If you are going to sit there and tell me that one big deviation, which was then followed up for six years with various other minor shifts, would result in a character being a replica of what they were in canon, I will laugh.
A few more comments:
Naruto's dislike for Minato: I like canon Minato. This is not an attempt to bash him. I will, in fact, justify his rationale right here. Minato was a military leader. He was canonically thrown into a situation where he needed to either watch his village crumble, or quickly find a new born host for the fox that was ravaging it. He chose his own son. To ask for anyone else would have been a dereliction of duty. He had a set of shit options to pick from, and he picked the best one he could. Was he justified in this, at least from his pov? Yes.
Is it also fair if his son were to hate him for it, since that one choice is basically life ruining? Yes.
This is a recurring theme in the fic. There are often no right answers, as in real life. It's simply a question of whose Pov you look at things from.
The point to that dislike, however, is for it to serve as a massive deviation point. Being disillusioned by that detail kills off Naruto's hokage dream entirely. But more importantly, when he discovers it at such a young age, the result is that he starts to re-evaluate everything about the shinobi system. He doesn't drink the will of fire koolaid. Wave just causes this fragmentation to become more extreme.
On Wave
This is a long fic. Now, if you are reading this fic, and if you've paid any attention at all, then you know there's a more than decent chance Wave will end badly. What astounds me, stuns me, breaks my heart, boggles my mind, shocks me into open mouthed submission, and so on and so forth, is the people who seem convinced Naruto's reaction to it would be to simply roll over and serve Konoha. Were you not paying attention? Did you, like, skim 50k+ words of content? Do you not see what this is building towards or what I've been setting up? What do you think the point of Wave is? I excuse people not noticing how it came about, since I deliberately swept that under the rug and fudged it up; but what do you think the narratorial point of this arc is? Why do you think I spent so much time (and will continue to spend time) linking their decay to the shinobi system itself? Why do you think this came so early in the fic? Why do you think I aligned the protagonist with an anti-state narrative and gave him a sense of identity and belonging in Wave, a civillian land undergoing severe oppression? Why give him a cause and a goal larger than himself? Why the talk of defiance and his sense of morality? Why do you think I've spent 13 whole chapters shifting Naruto from a carefully adopted passivity to a revolutionary activity? To lobotomize him at the first sign of adversity, then have him bend over and serve the very system he says he hates? Why do you think I said the pairing is of secondary importance? Why do you think I aligned Satsuki with the very same village that slaughtered her clan, a massacre she knows nothing about? What do you think Kaiza as a character represents? What function do you think he serves here? What would his death represent?
Do you think I'm just throwing shit at a wall in the hope something will stick?
On Pretension
I will address one thing (for the first and the last time) before going forward: accusations of stylistic pretension. I, without fail, receive a couple of these every chapter. What I dislike about this sort of critique, is the readiness with which it resorts to words such as 'obnoxious, pretentious, purple, try hard, affectative', and so on and so forth. You know what all those words have in common? They aren't critiques. They are lazy shortcuts, and the totality of what they mean is: "I do not like this style of writing; and since I cannot stand it, I will ascribe to it this trite terminology which signifies nothing but makes me sound astute." That's the extent of it. I do not like this, and I wish to let the writer know that I do not like it.
There's no effort at interacting with the work. No breakdown of the style itself, or where and why it fails. This isn't some technical virtuoso dismantling the piece with a bunch of rhetorical body blows and masterstrokes; it isn't a balanced discussion of the technique and its various deficiencies (of which, trust me, there are hundreds, given my general level of inexperience and the like). It doesn't discuss the tonal or thematic failings of certain images, or the crudeness in structure and technique at various points. No. It's the reader throwing his toys out of the pram. You don't like it— you have an urge to let me know you don't like it.
I guess the equivalent would be if I were to call minimalism turgid shit on a stick: the last resort of a hack; the final refuge of the untalented; the unrefined, unerudite, prosaic successor of watching paint dry, except that's more fun. This, however, is an equally one eyed take, and it states a preference. Nothing more, nothing less. It isn't criticism. Hell, it isn't even constructive. It's a bunch of childish insults levelled against a literary tradition that has withstood the test of time and become mainstream.
So yeah, if the style, the characters, the story and some of my narrative choices aren't to your tastes, then spare me the tragic tale of just how my writing offends your sensibilities, and how this would be a good story, if only I had curbed and checked what I write and how I write it. If I had, in other words, written what you want me to write.
I write how I feel like writing. I take this story in the direction I wish to take it. Stop guest reviewing me with filth and abuse over this. Stop insulting my family. If you dislike this work, then feel free to go read something else— I'm not holding a revolver to your temple and keeping you here. Stop giving me shit over what for me is my monthly quota of writing practice. I'm not charging a dime for this, and I don't intend to start anytime soon. It's a free work— if you hate it, then that's fine by me. I respect that. Not everything is for everyone, and not everything has to be for everyone. But if you are going to stoop to abuse, then I'd rather you take your toxicity and your entitlement elsewhere. I don't owe you shit, bar basic courtesy; and I expect the same in return.
On why FF writers give up and fuck off to do something better with their time
If you've ever wondered why writers quit this site, by the way, then it's exactly due to this. A 10k word chapter written at a decent level is anywhere between 30-50 hours' of writing and editing. So you sink a fortnight's worth of free time into writing fan-fiction, then return the next day to see some anonymous cretin chat shit about your mother. At some point, updating becomes a joyless endeavour, fraught with a sense of: I wonder what shit I'll have hurled at me this time?
You either learn to deal with it, or it chips away at you till you fall to pieces and never return. Considering that this site is a mass grave for so many unfinished works, I'd guess the latter is more prevalent than the former. People say work, other priorities, life— it's mostly bullshit. You find ten minutes here and there if you love what you write. You find ten minutes a day if you're passionate. If you love your work, then you return to it. A toxic environment, however, slowly saps away at that love, till one day you open your fiction in a tab and feel nothing for it. It's as if a stranger wrote it.
And that day, it's done. You're done, too. You find something else— you start anew.
The vast majority of readers and reviewers don't fall into the categories I mentioned above, mind. But the few that do, ruin it for everyone.
On what FF ought to be, for readers and writers
Lastly, FF writing is about discovery. It's about exploration and experimentation. It's about failure, mistakes, bad decisions, lapses in judgment, dead ends, and an eventual growth as a writer through all this. It is, more often than not, a writer either tentatively trying to find their own feet, or else indulging in wish fulfillment. It encapsulates all the imperfections of the hobbyist plodding away without a monetary reward or a professional editor. Believe it or not, most fiction you read here, this one included, would qualify as bad fiction. You implicitly accept that poverty in quality the second you step into a fandom as a reader— you agree to give a work a chance, flaws and warts and all. And when you don't like it, you leave and find something else. You don't piss all over what has taken someone weeks or months or even years to put together. That's basic decency, ye connoisseur of fandoms, with your Joycean talent, and your Johnsonian gift for analysis, and your cutting edge critical repertoire that instantly furnishes the world with thought provoking takedowns about cliches and pretensions.
So yeah, decency. And an appreciation of every writer's technical, grammatical, and narratorial inadequacy. You are dealing with rough, rough writers, often at the beginning of their journey (and that's if they're even interested in being a decent writer someday). As long as they don't spring twisted shit on you out of nowhere (and I haven't— I am outright telling you now that this work will have tragic events; but the tone alone at several points and in some of the imagery should have been enough to cover this), a live and let live attitude ought to be par for course.
That's what it's about.
Or that's what it should be about, anyway.
Anyway, see you next update. Done for the moment. Don't think I missed anything.