#is danzou enough of a bastard to use nawaki's death to get orochimaru to do shit? yes absolutely

[evilkitten3]

#I've always had the hc that one of the main reasons danzou got orochimaru into root when he did#and subsequently had him experimenting on children w/o going straight to sarutobi abt it was cause of nawaki's death#keep in mind i haven't read or seen naruto and dont give a fuck abt canon#this is my playground and im gonna do what i want#cause like orochimaru is alone when danzou approaches him abt root#both jiraya and tsunade have left konoha and nawaki has died but it's recent enough that it's likely still a p fresh wound#also afaik danzou approached orochimaru in front of his parents grave!#what better time to manipulate someone into attempting to give orphans mokuton than after the death of one of the last senju#who if he had had mokuton might not have died and therefore if mokuton can be brought back those children might have a chance of survival#or at least a bigger chance than those who dont#idk this is just my thought of why orochimaru didnt go through the thought process that would lead to “sensei wouldn't approve”#cause orochimaru is absolutely devious enough to get danzou in trouble by bringing it up w sarutobi all innocent like#and having the whole thing and possibly root while he's at it gutted before it can even truly hurt anyone#but because of his mindspace at the time and having no one to pull him out of the guilt and grief of both recent and old loss#he doesn't really want to think too hard on what he's doing and what the consequences later down the line will be

i'm not sure we know when danzou approached orochimaru - a lot orochimaru's past is pretty vague, which i think is on purpose. usually when we see him in flashbacks it's through someone else's point of view (hiruzen, jiraiya, tsunade, kabuto, sasuke, etc). he's a somewhat mysterious character, which is probably bc he doesn't actually know himself all that well either. sasuke theorizes that even orochimaru isn't one hundred percent sure why he does the things he does, which i think is likely at least semi-accurate (and also part of why he can't relate as well to sasuke as he thinks he can, bc sasuke is a character who always has a set goal and an idea of how to get there and orochimaru is just kinda. doing shit and justifying it to himself afterwards. "why did i do that? well here's a reason that has enough words to sound correct-ish even tho i'm definitely just saying shit that sounds like it might be kinda true idk kid i just live here")

orochimaru having been nawaki's jounin sensei is afaik just fanon but it's an idea that i really like, in part bc it adds an extra tragic element to that poor kid's death (although. if we're being honest nawaki isn't really a character himself as he is a prop for tsunade's tragic backstory. but i have no problem with that tbh you can't develop everybody and it's nice that tsunade's backstory is something of a reversal of manpain tropes).

anyway, we don't to my knowledge know when orochimaru got entangled with root - all we know for sure is that he was working with danzou before kabuto left the orphanage, which doesn't actually tell us much bc kabuto is only like 19 when we meet him during the chuunin exams arc and orochimaru is about 50 or so. so if we say that kabuto was 7 when he was brought to the orphanage, then orochimaru would have been 38-ish at around the same time, and tho it's not clear how long kabuto was at the orphanage before meeting orochimaru, i'd say at minimum half a year, since he had a pretty good grasp on medical ninjutsu by then, but likely longer since he'd clearly aged a bit.

so if kabuto meets orochimaru at 9, joins root at age 10, and then defects 4 years later to orochimaru at 14 (i'm going loosely off of @keepyourpantsongohan's timeline here), orochimaru would have been respectively 40, 41, and 45 at those same times. as a spy, kabuto infiltrated kumo, kiri, suna, and iwa, so if we allow a year for each of those that'd have him at.... 11, 12, 13, and 14, which fits. orochimaru also states that danzou ordered nonou to assassinate "a certain man" (kabuto) "several years ago", so assuming that she joined root immediately after he did, danzou always intended kabuto to die when he was sent to iwa, and either to take have him take out nonou as she took him out or to tell her the truth afterwards and have her kill herself (orochimaru uses the phrase 共倒れ (tomodaore) when he talks about this, which means "mutual destruction" or "falling together". can also mean "joint bankruptcy" but that's probably not what danzou was thinking about)

anyway, the point is, this shows us that danzou's a brutally efficient ruthless sob, which we knew, but anyway.

yamato was stolen as a baby (the anime ages him up a bit but. he was a baby in the manga) but he's in his mid-20s in shippuden which orochimaru is 54. nawaki died at age 12, so tsunade and therefore orochimaru would've been 16 or so, which means there's a difference of about a decade between nawaki's death and orochimaru's experiments with the mokuton, so i doubt those two were quite so directly tied. the thing is, since tsunade took shizune with her when she left, she would have left after shizune became a chuunin, which was several years after yamato's birth and therefore the start of orochimaru's mokuton experiments.

however, we know that tsunade's boyfriend dan died at 27. assuming he was the same age as the sannin, that means that he died a year or so before yamato's birth. since this caused tsunade to effectively retire, i think it's much more likely that any non--scientific personal investment orochimaru had in the mokuton experiments had to do with dan's death (or, rather, tsunade's reaction to it) rather than nawaki's. hard to be absolutely sure about anything bc the timeline of naruto is,,,,,, iffy. at best.

thinking many thoughts about this particular screencap