Fiction doesn't equate reality? No fucking way!

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Let's be real, fr: It's a pathetic cop-out, and it doesn't mean a damn thing. For one, we analyze fiction through projection; yes, everyone does it; you, me, everyone! No one's the odd one out in this regard. Where projection varies is that how much and how little of it is utilized; and for what purpose.

Remember, characters aren't real. They don't exist. They assume the emotions we ascribe to them; hence, if they can take on your emotions—or what you make of them—then they take on your world-view, as well. To make it simpler, you interpret the characters; the characters don't interpret you; and without projection, you can't even begin the former process.

Whilst magic and Jutsus aren't real, politics in the manga very much are. There's no "massacre" that the manga created; no slavery the manga invented; and no military industrial complex that the manga fashioned out of nothing. You can recognize these things because they're a part of the real world. Without the real world to reflect them back, how would you even recognize them? And the argument falls apart there and then, because victims and aggressors are a matter of framework—real or otherwise. In past, many things were justified (they still are) through the idea of righteous aggression; but empires fall, and in the end, they no longer hold the power to remain righteous. Once that power slips away, you're back to a state of seeming equilibrium; and then the scrutiny begins, and you've got many victims on your hand. How do you get around that? Either you create an Empire that's eternal—or you don't create any opposition—you crush it before it ever becomes one (why else did UCM take place?); because the moment you create one, you've, in your world or narrative, introduced a schism; and that itself is a cause for comparison.

So you interpret any piece of media with the moral and socio-political framework you have at your disposal. If you didn't, you wouldn't say that so and so is unethical and so and so is ethical. Ethics themselves are a part of the real world; otherwise, they don't have any value. The manga—any narrative, in fact—would have to invent every sociopolitical and moral dimension from scratch … to the point where it'd be unrecognizable to you; or it'd have to be justified within the framework. (You can take your narrative to … let's say, hell; and you'd be absolved of all errs as hell isn't a place for moral dilemmas; it's a place to punish because of the moral dilemmas you didn't or couldn't conquer; so the place allows for as much misery you can afford; it's just the luxury of hell.)

Take slavery, for instance. You can create a narrative in which the world is oblivious to equality. Slavery is not only the norm but also an imperative. It isn't an anomaly. It just is. Same for massacre. Same for military aggression. Same for any social ill you can think of. You can even illustrate it as being the good thing. Whatever goes. However, then you'd have to eliminate the idea of victim from your narrative. If there's no wrong, there's no victim; if everything's righteous, everything's right.

What you create as right would be … right! That's true for our world, too, and all the euphemisms that were invented in the past to justify atrocities. The right in the narrative, naturally, would require some apparatus. You'd turn to what you know and would make peace with the notion that, albeit all of this is vile, it's a narrative "quirk" of sorts to accomplish … something—whatever that may be.

And you're back to the same argument all over again: your apparatus. You can't decode, deconstruct, and deemphasize anything till you don't know what that is; and as Naruto's narrative itself creates ideas of victims and aggressors, it makes no sense for you to not interpret it as a reflection of your own world—as Naruto, word for word, defines victims and aggressors as we do in our world.

Aristotle knew that way back in poetics that Action (an all-encompassing phenomenon) is beholden to social values (I've paraphrased it, but that's the gist of it); a catharsis can't be attained if the spectators don't experience a pathos on behalf of the man who's fallen. (Aristotle didn't consider slaves, women, and men of lesser birth to be worthy of these tragedies that result from "fall", but that's a different topic.) I.R. Richards talks about it in Practical Criticism.

When Death of a Salesman (by Arthur Miller) was acted for the first time in theaters, men (from middle-class backgrounds) began to weep uncontrollably. (It took a while for them to stop crying; and some even claim that doctors had to be called to the theater to attend to them as they were wrecked with grief.) Why? They projected onto the life of a man whose American Dream was without worth, value, and reason. In him, they saw their own lives and as to how they, too, were without a value. Everything was a sham—even them. Was that an insult to real life suburban values?

I'm sorry … maybe I've digressed, but I find most people in this fandom—fandoms in general—to be pitifully stupid. Their problem is that they make a point and then they work backwards from it. There's just no reason for these remarks save to escape criticisms that why are you projecting your political views on the characters in so and so manner? Once called out, it's their go-to escape plan, "it's just fiction, bro!"

I'd just end it on this: Paradise Lost reflected Milton's fear, anxiety, and anger in regard to the political upheaval in England; he cosmically magnified all that in Satan. He considered the English leadership and Church to be a cesspit of corruption, which were in need of reform—even a brutal one. So he wrote Paradise Lost in hiding, fearing execution. (To this day, no critic can decide as to why Milton wrote Satan the way he did; there are many theories, but none of them is concrete; Satan's character is always a subject of serious debate.) Is that an insult to … the British? What does that even mean? I wouldn't take these people seriously if I were you; they're as senseless as the comments they create; after all, they can't create the comments without projecting first, now, can they?

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