#i didn't forget about orochimaru but he's not a healer even if we can guess that he probably knows at least a LITTLE medical ninjutsu

[evilkitten3]

#I am also sick of konan being the medical ninja of the akatsuki#guys. hold my hands. just bcs kishimoto makes all the women healers doesn't mean we have to.#if there was going to be a designated healer of the akatsuki it would be sasori. maybe kakuzu. lets think logically here#but further than that it seems like a lot of the older/more established akatsuki members have their own lackeys. like kabuto. whos a healer#and I guess hypothetically they have all of the hidden rain village at their disposal. they could be getting medical attention anywhere tbh#they are a whole ass organization yknow like they probably have doctors. they have resources they have ppl for this kind of thing#just leave my girl konan out of it ok#she does not give a rats ass about learning to heal ppl. she doesn't care if any of these assholes die

WHAT DO YOU MEAN PEOPLE ARE MAKING KONAN A MED NINJA HELLO??????

KAKUZU IS THE FUCKING MED NIN HE IS LITERALLY THE ONLY ONE WHO EVER PROVIDES ANY KIND OF MEDICAL ATTENTION TO ANY OF THE OTHER MEMBERS

sick of konan being written as the only sane one in the akatsuki. the lady thinks her bestie is an actual deity and she somehow found the time and energy to make six hundred billion bombs for the purpose of killing a single guy who helped kickstart her terrorist organization bc she thinks he's a bit sus

the only sane one is kisame

[phoenixyfriend]

For Karin's backstory, do you usually go for anime one? I prefer datebook backstory, even though it's not detailed. Because manga showed one panel of Karin being experimented on with her arms showing bite marks. So I always believed that healing bites ability is result of Oro experiments. It makes more sense to me. Also, I am uncomfortable of anime backstory. And grass village confuses me. Didn't they still exist after the fourth war? I guess in fic, we could just say it no longer exists.

I love this question.

Okay, so the short version is that I usually do a mix of the two. I’m going to do a quick rundown on the differences between the two backstories for anyone who isn’t familiar. This means we’ll be touching on some very questionable subjects, because the anime went to some very concerning lengths. It’s going to be under a cut, because... yeah. Long.

The only solid canon, as in from the manga, that we have for pre-Orochimaru Karin is the Chuunin Exams flashback, wherein she is in a Kusa (Grass) headband, and is saved from a bear by Sasuke, which kicks off her crush on him.

The first backstory we received from Karin was in the databooks; this backstory came out prior to the Exams flashback in the manga. It stated that Karin was living in an unspecified village, sensed an army coming to destroy it, and tried to warn the rest of the town. Nobody believed her, so she ran to hide (I think in some nearby foothills/forest?), and everyone else was killed. Orochimaru then came by, tried to recruit her, and then let Sasuke convince her. Sasuke didn’t really have to do much beyond saying he was Oro’s student in order to get Karin to come along.

Now, given that Kusagakure still exists post-timeskip, at least in the Blood Prison movie, the village that was destroyed wasn’t Kusa. Either Karin was in a different village, or Karin’s backstory doesn’t include the village destruction element. I tend to go with ‘a different village,’ but I’ll get to that later.

The anime gives us a different backstory, one that takes Karin’s Kusa headband from the Exams as fact.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Karin’s backstory is not presented as a backstory, but rather an alternate timeline from her Eternal Tsukuyomi dream. I don’t know what the animators were thinking, deciding to use this hell as her dream of a ‘perfect world,’ but at this point the dream is treated as her default anime background so like??? Sure. Sure. We’ll use it, but we’ll also judge Studio Pierrot for it, because there’s “I don’t like this character” and then there’s “I’m going to have this character’s dream of a perfect world include over a decade of violating her health and bodily autonomy on a level of systemic abuse that is truly horrific, edging on fucking csa” because fuck you I guess? I’m still mad. I’d have been okay with the backstory as backstory because it fits her personality, but why the hell was it presented as her Eternal Tsukuyomi dream???

Listen LISTEN Eternal Tsukuyomi is supposed to be a perfect world for each individual You DREAM WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPIEST and they gave her a decade of physical and medical abuse, bordering on extended csa, only to die at sixteen because they'd 'used her up.’ like???

When I say SP had a grudge against Karin...

Anyway. Anime backstory:

Karin’s mother (unnamed) came to Kusagakure following the destruction of Uzushiogakure, and was granted refugee status in exchange for working at the hospital, having a similar ‘bite me and you’ll heal’ power as Karin does in canon. We don’t know who Karin’s father was; he may have been a Kusa citizen, or an Uzushio man who died prior to Karin’s mother’s arrival in Kusa.

Karin’s mother dies at some point during Karin’s childhood, having been used as a chakra healing battery to the point of dying of chakra exhaustion. At this point in the anime, Kusa orders that Karin must take over her mother’s duties as a healer, because such a technique is too useful to just leave alone. The bites start out on her forearms, eventually going all over her body, including areas that, despite the intent not being sexual in nature, do qualify as child sexual abuse.

She is bitten on the chest and thighs, by people she barely knows, with minimal consent on her part. She is a minor. This is csa and I hate that people forget this, or choose to exclude it to more easily vilify her.*

(Manga canon also has her with bites on her chest, at sixteen, most of which we can assume are not Sasuke since he seems to not know that biting her chest is provides better healing when she tells him to do it. Again: underage, coercion, chest bites, violation of bodily autonomy. It’s long-term csa in every canon. It may not be explicitly stated, but this is the most explicitly shown example canon has of this particular kind of trauma.)

Now, again, this is her Eternal Tsukuyomi (for some fucking reason), and not her technical backstory, and in that context she just... never gets out. She keeps getting used and abused, the bites eventually even covering her face, and then she dies before hitting twenty.

...so how do we reconcile this?

Elements we have:

Kusagakure headband during the Chuunin Exams (manga canon)

Saved by Sasuke, causing her crush; implies she was very poorly treated by the people around her prior to their meeting (manga canon)

No visible bite marks on her arms during the Chuunin Exams, but with the caveat that the marks are also not visible during Boruto, so it’s possible that Kishi, and in turn SP, just didn’t feel like drawing the scars. (manga canon)

Karin’s healing abilities were present at some point prior to Sasuke recruiting her to hunt down Itachi, but it’s unclear if it is a Kekkei Genkai or something nurtured by Otogakure. (manga canon)

Kabuto’s abilities during the Fourth War include Karin’s ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘life force,’ which implies that it may be a Kekkei Genkai but leaves it frustratingly ambiguous.

Experienced a village destruction, followed by Orochimaru taking her on, due to a Cassandra Truth incident, using Sasuke to convince her to join Oto (databook)

Her mother came to Kusa at some point post-Uzushio destruction; iirc Uzushio fell when Kushina was a teenager, so Karin’s mother either spent a decade or so wandering around prior to deciding Kusa was better than nothing (possibly when she got pregnant), or lived in Kusa for a period of time prior to becoming pregnant. (anime)

Karin was forced, via coercion, to use her healing abilities while in Kusagakure following her mother’s death (anime)

Kusa still exists post-timeskip (anime)

Here’s what I usually go with:

I do think Karin was a Kusa genin. The databook and anime both state that she joined Orochimaru after Sasuke, so she’d have no reason to wear the headband during the Exams other than actually being a genin of Kusagakure.

I err towards the biting being a Kekkei Genkai, which means that it fits with the anime’s suggestion of Kusagakure having used her as a chakra healing battery prior to her arrival in Oto. THIS IS OPTIONAL in other people’s readings, because it’s not manga canon and it’s obviously an incredibly hard subject to work with.

So, Kusa kid, dead mom, chakra healing battery, genin at the Chuunin Exams, then... Otogakure. In order to work in the databook’s element of the destroyed village, we either have to wipe Kusa off the map, or it’s another village.

I’ve generally gone with stating that Karin was on a long-term mission as a healer in a larger civilian village, or possibly the country’s capitol (though that’s less likely). Kusa was obviously willing to send her away temporarily, as with the Exams, so if the price was right, they’d probably send her out on out-of-village missions as well. Would she have a team? Maybe.

Given her poor treatment in this scenario, and the implied distrust/abuse of refugees in the anime, it’s possible that any teammates she had either didn’t trust her as a person, or didn’t think her skills were as good as she claimed. Possibly they assumed that they’d be able to fight off a smaller attacking force, and that Karin was exaggerating or mistaken when insisting that they evacuate. In any case, whoever was with her, if anyone was, also died in this attack.

The army was very likely sent by Orochimaru, and it’s plausible that Karin was actually the main target. I imagine that a spy would have gotten word to Oro about a redhead with extreme healing abilities, and Orochimaru going “Gotta catch ‘em all, Ooh! An Uzumaki!” and deciding that the healing abilities played well enough into the immortality plan to be worth sending an army (and then going in person, with Sasuke) for.

Given how canon played out, she was worth it.

------------------

* Okay the reason I harp on the CSA thing in particular: there was a significant period of time where two headcanons were prevalent: that Sasuke was sexually abused by Orochimaru in his time as Oro’s student, and that Karin was a wannabe rapist.

The Sasuke thing was based on a manga cover and one of the anime openings, but had no actual textual basis beyond Orochimaru being a queercoded villain, which is a whole different problem. The Karin thing was based on a fan’s mistranslation of a single panel, along with later arguments failing to take slang into account and often had by people who don’t actually speak Japanese.

Ultimately, I’m furious that a large portion of the fandom painted a canon CSA victim as a wannabe rapist while pushing that same backstory element onto a different character which they often put as her hypothetical victim, oftentimes just to get her out of the way for shipping purposes. This is a long-standing grudge.