#naruto hell never ends

[weppy]

Me, buys origami paper: I’m going to make so many cool animals

Me, makes my 15th paper shuriken:

[faustocosgrove]

naruto blogger reads another book about ninjas, more at 11

it should come as no surprize to y’all that I, someone who still reblogs naruto posts in the year 2023, picked up John Man’s Ninja: 1000 years of the shadow warrior.

and of course, as a naruto fan i was also comparing the actual history of ninjas in Japan to the naruto series. for example, the real Sarutobi Sasuke versus the characters Sasuke and Sarutobi Hiruzen, the historical Hanzo Hitori and the Hanzo and Danzo in the series. the political formation of the naruto ninja villages versus the historical pressures that made ninjas. and the more i read the more i lost what little respect i had left for the naruto series.

In the book, the author has one hilarious paragraph mentioning the naruto series. here it is:

“No account of modern ninja literature can omit Naruto, the multivolume manga series by Masashi Kishimoto. This is pure fantasy, with no pretense of any historical roots, and phenomenally successful, easily the best-selling manga of all time, with almost 60 volumes -113 million copies- sold in Japan. The anime versions (220 episodes in Japan, 209 in English) and video games and novels and card games and on and on and on have all had equivalent success.”

that’s it. it’s got nothing to do with historical ninjas and is very popular.

and on one hand i kinda wonder how much of naruto the author read, but on the other it’s pretty funny that a manga that spends 700 chapters butchering the interesting parts of the history of ninjas while trying to make random characters look cool by giving them names and other references to the historical ninjas got called “no pretense of any historical roots” to actual ninja history.

what’s even funnier is that Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles got 3 paragraphs with a plot summary pointing out where the plot was drawing from actual ninja history. Naruto didn’t get a plot summary because there’s nothing in the plot that reflects actual ninja history. The discrepancy that sticks out the most to me is the very brief history we got in Naruto of the change from there being no ninjas to there being ninjas. in naruto, the change is a magic alien man god who bestowed upon the human race his DNA (don’t argue with me about kaguya, she had two kids and one populated earth and the other the moon.)

But the real actual historical ninjas formed from when feudal lords were waging war against each other and the peasants whose land they were fucking up with their war and the samurai employed by the two lords all got together and said this nonsense has to stop. and then they worked together to stop it, usually by assasinating one of the feudal lords. let that sink in. marinade in your brain. soldiers from both sides of a war put their differences aside and worked together to kill one of their commanders because that would stop the war the fastest.

that is just so fucking cool. and kishi replaced it with an alien and his magic sperm. i hate that so much that i want to vomit. he didn’t have to do that. he could have written that chakra was a thing already that samurai used and animals! because animals use chakra in the naruto universe. so alien god daddy must also have used his sperm to bless cats and dogs and snakes and toads and slugs and fuck if i can remember all the species of animals that can also do ninjutsu off the top of my head. like he could of just had the same actual history of ninjas but do it with chakra. like let normal people be able to use chakra too but only ninjas are able to do cool shit with it because they’ve been trained by their super secret ninja village. like boom there you go. problem solved. like you don’t even have to get rid of the magic space aliens so long as the thing that gives ninjas value isn’t how much sperm they got from the magic alien god daddy.

mild tangent warning.

like years ago i remember reading an article about Harry Potter and how a parents group criticized the books for the whole magic is a thing you’re either born with or not instead of magic is a thing anyone can use so long as you study it and work hard. because one narrative encourages children to apply themselves and the other teaches that some people are naturally superior to others because of their DNA and how that sounds a lot like something hitler would have given two big ole thumbs up to.

but i digress. anyway the whole DNA superiority thing is almost interesting in one regard in naruto because literally everyone is obsessed with sasuke or the uchiha clan in general. because of the sharingan which requires magic uchiha DNA to exist. and it’s been noted by smarter naruto fans than me that naruto and sasuke are stand ins for kishi and his twin brother. so he wrote a character based on his twin brother and made him genetically superior to his own stand in. when they’re literally twins. light googling, identical twins. they have the same DNA. like what can possibly be going on in ones mind when they feel inferior to their identical twin sibling and express this inferiority complex through art that results in genetic superiority. this is the whole reason i’m still into naruto. i enjoy studying kishi. he’s a weird guy.

…this is turning into more of a naruto critique than a book review. oopsies.

anyway, this book took a really interesting turn by arguing that the Nanako Spy School that was operating in Japan during the second world war was a ninja school. and then i learned a whole bunch of things about Japanese world war two history that’s actually cool as fuck. it talks about Onoda Hiroo, the guy who lived in the jungle in the Philippines for 30 years, who was a student of the Nanako Spy School. like everything about the Nanako Spy School is just so fucking cool. the central japanese government fucked up everything they achieved, but considering japan was allied with germany we can all thank god that they did fuck up as bad as they did.

warning: whiplash inducing tone shift ahead

it’s also worth noting that i checked this book out in *checks notes* May????? and i literally finished it today. i was having such a good time reading this book that when i felt the action ramping down i put it down and just never picked it back up because i didn’t want the fun to end. turns out i had exactly 2 pages and 5 lines left to read. what i thought was more to read was the bibliography. i am such an idiot.