#also i was gonna skip manga chapters and just yknow read what i missed of silver soul

[vanridgeway]

another sloppy lil thing i did while reading the manga! this quote is from chapter 13 and tbh, if i have to stop to draw every serious, cool, or poignant thing gintoki says then ill never actually finish lmfao

sorry for the handwriting!

[dosbysilverqueen]

i've been watching anime-manga commentary lately, and one of them was about naruto as a whole series (the flaws and the good) and now i'm wondering, what was your initial thoughts about the canon naruto? like, what did you like about it and what were the flaws that you wanted to fix upon in dreaming of sunshine (unless it's gonna be a spoiler, then you don't have to tell everything haha) - and also, what has changed in your impression of naruto since you started making dos and now? thanks!!

 Oh gosh. So, this is a massive topic. And I don’t want to really get all ranty about it or anything but that’s probably going to happen. >.>

I started watching Naruto… years and years ago. I mean, DOS was started in 2011, so that might give you a hint, but I’m pretty sure it was before Shippuden. A quick google tells me the Shippuden anime started airing 2007 (japanese) or 2009 (english). The manga dates are a bit earlier, but I didn’t actually start reading that until I wanted to ‘catch up’ later on, and even then I gave up reading during the war arc and only really picked up the last few chapters when the series ended.

So almost immediately I think we can tell my attraction to the series is rooted in the early installment stuff and not the later DBZ powergaming. I liked the Wave Arc. I thought Haku and Zabuza were interesting antagonists, with provoking backstories that were great mirrors to the protagonists and provided an interesting mirror image. I liked Gaara, who (again) was an interesting mirror to Naruto. I liked the world that we started to see around all these characters - flawed and complicated, with a lot of players moving in the shadows. I liked that Naruto wanted to change it all.

I thought we would get more character arcs with the side characters. I thought we would get Sakura development. I thought things were building to a Sound-Konoha war and we’d get to see a lot of Tsunade-Orochimaru-Jiraiya stuff - interactions and backstory and development. And I’m a little disappointed that most of that never really happened.

(And then timeskip. Personally I just don’t like time skips. You lose connection to the characters. Either nothing happens (and therefore things are weirdly the same) or you miss out on great content. Still, that’s a personal opinion.)

Overall I think the series has serious problems with its female characters and giving them, yknow, actual character. I think the epilogue is so full of holes that it deserves to be struck off completely. I think the ‘man-behind-the-man-behind-the-man’ of the war arc was so extremely tiresome. (99% of Uchiha characters make me have a kneejerk ‘no’ reaction now and the only reason Sasuke escapes is because I write him in DOS, not because his canon self is any better.)  I think that including the Sage and Kaguya did the series no favours and things got ‘too big’ in a way that made it difficult to care about the characters involved - how many thousands of people died in that final battle? And yet the only meaningful ones were Neji and the Ino-Shika parents.

But there are people who have presented those opinions in better and more thoughtful ways than I can. These are all discussions that have been around.

And okay, all these rants make it sound like I don’t actually like the series. I do! I wouldn’t still be in this fandom if I didn’t. I’m perfectly capable of putting books down, turning off movies and walking away. I actually really like Naruto. I like core of the series and the themes and ideas it sets out in the first part. And there was a lot of cool fanfiction that kept me invested.

DoS was mostly (okay it was a little bit a ‘fix it’ fic) about ‘well why did these things happen’. Not about changing them, not about being some ‘rationalist’ take on it all. I can’t understand why people read DoS and complain about how silly things like sending a team of genin after Sasuke are. That’s canon. It happened.

But I mean, things have changed. Some of them I planned, some of them I didn’t but they seemed logical when it happened, and some of them are just because I got sick of people asking and kinda regret now. Thems the breaks. I think if I ever actually finish writing DoS I’ll do a massive rewrite and cull everything down like this is a sprawling first draft. But who knows. I may not ever actually finish writing.

-Silver Queen