[FFML] [Naruto][AU] People Lie

[Nugar]

On 9/5/07, Pale Rider <redtabard at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is a pretty interesting take, and largely believable, but there are some aspects I'm not sure of.

$Thanks!  I'm glad you liked it enough to feel it was worth the effort
to say something.

 Leaving aside grammar and such,

$Actually, I would like to ask something about that.  Did you feel it
was clean and easy to read?

 I'm annoyed by the failure to explain the initial incident in the
story, that is, Naruto showing up looking dishevelled and beaten. I
can't really reconcile that incident with  anything else you've
described in the story, and except for Naruto's accidental display of
talent it doesn't seem to be particularly important or add anything we
don't already know. Moreover, although whatever happened apparently
caused a significant psychological disruption, Naruto never seems to
think about it again. I think you should either fit this incident into
the world in some way or excise it entirely.

$ ...Sorry.  I sort of thought I had alluded to it.  The idea was,
Ibiki had given Naruto a complete dressing down on his failure to
socialize with his peers and develop his interpersonal relationship
skills.  He was dishevelled because it had really upset him and he
hadn't been taking care of himself, Ibiki having been his 'father' for
years now and never really having had cause to be mad at him, pranks
notwithstanding.  That was what I referred to when he was thinking
about going and seeing Ibiki, and why it was so long into the story
before he actually did.

I like to keep things pretty subtle, though, and it's caused problems
before.  I'll see about going back and clearing it up a bit in the
final draft.

>
> Also, I can't really believe Naruto's mindset. I won't say it's inconsistent with the world (hardly, considering Sasuke), but it doesn't seem really consistent with *reality*, and the idea of Naruto-as-Sasuke-clone isn't really very compelling, especially since there's almost nothing left, psychologically, of the Naruto we know in this character.

$Well, Naruto isn't a Sasuke clone.  At least, I didn't intend for him
to be.  Naruto is emotionally screwed up, but he still keeps somewhat
of a happy go lucky external persona, even if inside, he's just as
cold, if not colder, than Sasuke.  Of course, inside, just like
Sasuke, he's a lost, scared little boy.


 To be fair, I've never found Sasuke to be a particularly compelling
character, but at least his reasoning and goals are clearly linked.



$Yeah, not a Sasuke fan, either.  But I'm not gonna bash him.  In
fact, he gets a major role in this fic.  Whereas in canon Naruto, it's
Naruto who might be his redemption, in this fic, it's Naruto who needs
the redemption.

I tell you, he's HARD to write.  Gotta make him recognisably an
asshole, or he's not Sasuke, but also make him human enough you don't
hate him on sight despite character prejudice, and maybe, you'll even
come to like him.  If I can pull it off.

 Although this Naruto clearly has a goal, you haven't elaborated what
it *is*, specifically.


$Nope.  Naruto is secretive.  He keeps his reasons to himself.  Part
of his character.


 Without knowing what's driving him it's difficult to understand *why*
he is the way he is, and so it's also hard to believe *that* he is the
way he is. In short, Naruto's attitudes are just too extreme for me to
buy, even in the context of his world and his experiences.
>

$Well, I can't do a whole lot about his personality at this point,
it's kinda set.  He's deceitful, cold, and manipulative.  The thing
is, a lot of people have found him to be more the badguy than the
hero.  I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but the point is he isn't
like the original Naruto.  I'd love to be able to write an original
style Naruto fic, but I've given it several efforts which I have
burned and buried, since such crap should never see the light of day.
I can't do the original Naruto's personality right.  I'm actually up
against the limits of my own writing skill.  So I gave him something I
could write.  Sorry if you find him unbelievable, quite frankly, I
agree.  He's too damned good, too _practiced_ at lying and
manipulating for someone who hasn't really spoken to anyone but Ibiki
and maybe Anko and a few other ANBU members since he was young.

Other than giving him plenty of opportunities to screw up, I don't
know what to do about it.

> I thought that your explanation of his past worked wonderfully. However, it's simply too difficult to get from the end of that story to the beginning of this one. And from the end of this one going forward, it's difficult for me to imagine that anything could actually undo his attitudes. There's not even an inkling here that he's changing, and that's a mistake, especially given that the revelation about the Kyuubi can only make him *less* trusting and socialized.

$YES!  That's, actually, sort of the point.  No, his attitudes haven't
really changed.  They may by the end of the longer work, but certainly
not now.  Naruto isn't really the hero of this story.  More a...
tragically flawed main character we hope finds redemption.  Cause
that's the kind of thing that'll keep ME interested in the story.

>
> The last major problem I had here was with the final act. It broke the story for Naruto to trust Mizuki that way. If it had been *Iruka* then I would have been able to accept that Naruto went along with it, but this Naruto should have been suspicious, and he wasn't, and so the story sort of fell apart.
>
> I like this idea, that Naruto is (somewhat) more skilled than he lets on, that his friendly behavior is a front, etc. However, I think that the track you've taken is psychologically too extreme for Naruto. The other characters are pretty believable, and I very much liked how Hinata developed. But Naruto is too depraved to be believed, and in the final act, too trusting to be consistent. Before you go forward with this, I think you need to maybe rework Naruto's character slightly, and fiddle with the last section to make the scroll theft work.
>

$Aww, I was kinda proud of how I handled the scroll theft.  I didn't
even want to include it, except that Kage Bushin is so integral to how
we see Naruto that writing him without it would make it even more
unbelievable than what I've done.  I racked my brain trying to figure
out how to make him interact with Mizuki, and finally decided that it
would be the core concept for the fic.

It's sort of the idea, though.  Mizuki never really treats Naruto
badly.  And Naruto has screwed his mind around to the point he thinks
contempt is actually praise.  Since he knows he's only acting as a
fool, any treatment of him that way is actually a complement to his
acting skills.  He expects everyone to suddenly treat him with respect
after he 'reveals' himself, the way Iruka does, and Mizuki didn't do
anything to disabuse that notion.

And yeah, Naruto is quite a bit depraved.  And he has trust issues,
for all that he'll cheerfully lie and say anything you want to hear to
your face.  Only Ibiki, and Iruka, just a little, and maybe, _maybe_
Hinata, get any trust out of him.  But the thing about the scroll
stealing incident was that he really was starting to trust other
people.  He's only twelve, after all.  And quite possibly the greatest
tragedy in his life, in some ways even more than the incident when he
was very young, was that just as he was breaking out of his shell,
Mizuki betrayed him.

People lie.  You can't trust anyone.

And now, it'll be twice as hard for people like Iruka, Hinata, and
especially in the continuation, Sasuke, to really emotionally connect
to him.  It'd be a really short fic if I let him recover from years of
self imposed isolation and emotional scarring just because two people
saved his life.  In fact, it'd end here.


-Nugar