I’ve been working on Sannin Swap AU on and off since 2014! I spend so much time thinking about it! Finally sharing some of the sketches I’ve done in the past six years!
Part 2 (Shippuden) will be posted soon! EDIT: HERE!
(jsyk this is unabashedly an inosaku and sns AU and will be even more so going forward)
Ok, I need to talk about the fish. The fish was a whole journey. It all started with...
...me not knowing what was going to happen in the story before I started drawing. I kind of did the automatic writing thing but with sketches, just letting things out to see where they would lead. (absolute chaos is where it led)
So I sketched Kakashi's feet in the water and then added a little fish on a whim because it looked cute. That spawned the idea that the dream should be about the boys fishing for dinner, referencing the super sweet episode where Obito and Rin gets to eat dinner at Kakashi's house (also known as the episode where Obito stalks and spies on Kakashi while admiring him from the bushes like a creepy little cutie)
I wanted to transition from the dark and ominous image of the boys and their reflections in the pitch black to Kakashi looking down at his own feet in clear blue water (without a reflection because there are no scary reflections in the dream). He'd then be shaken out of the bad feeling by high energy Obito distracting him.
The distraction was supposed to be a bigger fish. I made the sketch and then many more, developing this idea. Here's a page draft:
I'm still very fond of the visual of Obito slapping Kakashi's face with a big wet fish...
I just found these doodles and I can't even remember making them or what I was thinking. It's mostly Kakashi in various stages of alarm and then being his usual unimpressed self. They're clearly older in the bottom one and Obito has no shirt on?
I was set on this idea and worked on it for a long time, making lots of sketches and script drafts until I realized that the tone was completely off in relation to the start of the comic. It was very funny to imagine a fish(dick)-measuring contest where Obito makes himself better and luckier at fishing just to annoy Kakashi, just because he can. It didn't fit the mood at all though so... I killed that idea. Days, possibly weeks of work thrown out.
I kept the sketches I couldn't bear getting rid of and decided to build a new narrative out of those and thus The Fish became a Metaphor..
My brain can do a lot of things with a visual metaphor, not all of them smart or good. It spins out of control with melodramatic creativity. The fish could suddenly symbolize so many things and I kept working without deciding on one of them. I just knew that I didn't want the fish to be a metaphor for Rin, that felt plain wrong.
For a while I played with the idea of the fish representing the chidori and Kakashi's hesitation to use it again. That Obito used the dream to help him "unlock" it. I had a layout where Obito's shoulders from one page would transition into the shape of his body on the page below but on that page it would look like a night sky with a moon. The moon being the hole Kakashi would need to punch through his heart to destroy Madara's curse tag. The final panel would show Obito's hand guiding Kakashi's hand under water to release the fish, swimming in that direction, planting the suggestion Kakashi's head for the future. It didn't work out the way I wanted though and it really didn't feel right to use a fish to represent a jutsu connected with birds. Idea scrapped!
The chidori reference is still sort of there visually though.
In the final version of the comic the fish is still a metaphor for a lot of things and it's up to the reader to read it in their own way. There is no correct answer but while I was working on this I thought of it as a representation of Kakashi himself. The fish even had a red eye at one point but it felt a bit too on the nose. It's Kakashi's guilt and the blood he finally washes off his hand with Obito's help. It's also his own childhood innocence and Obito telling him to forgive himself, literally letting him off the hook. I always feel overly dramatic and a bit pretentious writing things like these out loud but I'm an artist, I can't help getting excited about The Themes.
Oh, the hook is also a metaphor of course. Obito makes Kakashi release the fish but he does not release Kakashi.
In the end the fish also symbolizes them going fishing because it's fun and nostalgic. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that :)
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