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Somebody linked to Bleed Out recently, which is a novel-length murder mystery/casefile Naruto fic that I enjoyed greatly, so now I'm on AO3 (re-)reading all the Kakashi/Iruka fic. My life is hard sometimes.
This is one of those pairings where I was never really in the fandom but it makes really good comfort reading for me, so I come back to it every once in awhile and it's still good. (I would give you some recs but I'm in "go on AO3, sort by bookmarks, filter on "-sasuke" to get rid of the ones where it's a background pairing or where canon plot is actually relevant, read everything" mode, so it would be an unhelpful recs list.)
Imagine Harry Potter fandom, okay? There's a kid, his parents were killed in the last stand against the bad guy, and he ended up with something of the bad guy sealed inside him, which means he's more-or-less a Chosen One, but also means that for his own safety he has to grow up an orphan among people who hate and fear him.
We join him age eleven or so when he's finally qualified to start his magic training in earnest, only the Golden Trio ends up being him, Hermione and Draco instead. The two most influential adults in his life are a mild-mannered schoolteacher with a tragic history and a secret past as a master-prankster, and a mentor figure who is SO COOL and also has a tragic past and knew his dad and has a dog obsession. People ship them even though they have barely any canon scenes together.
We're good, right? You get the idea.
But then imagine that instead of being coy and hypocritical about how they're taking all the kids with powers and training them as child soldiers and sending them off to fight a secret war, the authorities are absolutely open about the fact that they're taking all the kids with power and training them as child soldiers and sending them to fight a secret war, because kids with this much power would get turned into weapons by somebody if they weren't taught to fight back, and it might as well be by people who are trying to fuck them up as little as possible--
--but also openly acknowledge that they're going to fuck them up anyway, and so the whole community is designed around supporting the people with the myriad of personality disorders and trauma reactions (and physical disabilities) that result, so at least the fucked-up-ness isn't compounded by shame or lack of necessary accommodations--
and then make it a shamelessly ridiculous OTT shonen anime set in an anachronistic AU based on Edo Japan--
that's sort of what Kakashi/Iruka fanfic on AO3 is like.
(I did watch some of the anime, but like a lot of such canons, it eventually expected me to actually care about the secret war that was going on and I mostly just want to read comfort fic about the home front, so pairing fic it is.)
Oh! And speaking of ninja training, the weather has been really really springlike the last couple days, so today I went on a walk to the park for the first time this year, and sometime over the winter they replaced the kind of sad monkey-bars based playground with what appears to be a ninja training facility. There's a mini climbing wall! And a bunch of actually kind of scary spinny things that make you work on strength and balance or die! I am totally going to walk down there and become a super ninja by the end of the year.
It intrigues me though, because of the ways in which it's so different in, like, intent? From the playgrounds they were putting up through my childhood.
First that it's so clearly based on "adult" equipment - this was designed by someone who had been to rock-climbing gyms and parkour training and stuff; it amuses me that we've come full-cicrle already from adults asserting their right to play on jungle gyms to kids' playgrounds being built to call to mind the adult version.
But also - that it's being aimed at different kids. The playgrounds I grew up with, unless you were lucky enough to find one that still had swings, were pretty boring by the time you were nine or ten, because you were too tall for a lot of the stuff (like the slides and ladders) and a lot of the rest wasn't good for much except just running around like a wild thing. They were clearly designed for a peak age of about four. This one, on the other hand, has a recommended age of 5-12, and all the equipment - while I could see it was designed to also work for smaller people - was fine for an adult-sized person too.
And - everything could be played with if you were the only person there. Again, that's different from what I remember - a lot of the stuff we had was really only fun as part of imaginative play with a group, or the kinetic things needed people to push and people to ride in order to make it go. All of this stuff is carefully balanced so one person can make it spin all by themself. And I totally support building teamwork, but as someone who was sometimes the only kid on the playground, I appreciate that they are acknowledging that we are not in the middle of a baby boom in this area, and also we are a suburb that is designed to make it hard to make friends with the neighbors, so kids often are the only kid their age in the park.
Anyway. Ninjas.
This is one of those pairings where I was never really in the fandom but it makes really good comfort reading for me, so I come back to it every once in awhile and it's still good. (I would give you some recs but I'm in "go on AO3, sort by bookmarks, filter on "-sasuke" to get rid of the ones where it's a background pairing or where canon plot is actually relevant, read everything" mode, so it would be an unhelpful recs list.)
Imagine Harry Potter fandom, okay? There's a kid, his parents were killed in the last stand against the bad guy, and he ended up with something of the bad guy sealed inside him, which means he's more-or-less a Chosen One, but also means that for his own safety he has to grow up an orphan among people who hate and fear him.
We join him age eleven or so when he's finally qualified to start his magic training in earnest, only the Golden Trio ends up being him, Hermione and Draco instead. The two most influential adults in his life are a mild-mannered schoolteacher with a tragic history and a secret past as a master-prankster, and a mentor figure who is SO COOL and also has a tragic past and knew his dad and has a dog obsession. People ship them even though they have barely any canon scenes together.
We're good, right? You get the idea.
But then imagine that instead of being coy and hypocritical about how they're taking all the kids with powers and training them as child soldiers and sending them off to fight a secret war, the authorities are absolutely open about the fact that they're taking all the kids with power and training them as child soldiers and sending them to fight a secret war, because kids with this much power would get turned into weapons by somebody if they weren't taught to fight back, and it might as well be by people who are trying to fuck them up as little as possible--
--but also openly acknowledge that they're going to fuck them up anyway, and so the whole community is designed around supporting the people with the myriad of personality disorders and trauma reactions (and physical disabilities) that result, so at least the fucked-up-ness isn't compounded by shame or lack of necessary accommodations--
and then make it a shamelessly ridiculous OTT shonen anime set in an anachronistic AU based on Edo Japan--
that's sort of what Kakashi/Iruka fanfic on AO3 is like.
(I did watch some of the anime, but like a lot of such canons, it eventually expected me to actually care about the secret war that was going on and I mostly just want to read comfort fic about the home front, so pairing fic it is.)
Oh! And speaking of ninja training, the weather has been really really springlike the last couple days, so today I went on a walk to the park for the first time this year, and sometime over the winter they replaced the kind of sad monkey-bars based playground with what appears to be a ninja training facility. There's a mini climbing wall! And a bunch of actually kind of scary spinny things that make you work on strength and balance or die! I am totally going to walk down there and become a super ninja by the end of the year.
It intrigues me though, because of the ways in which it's so different in, like, intent? From the playgrounds they were putting up through my childhood.
First that it's so clearly based on "adult" equipment - this was designed by someone who had been to rock-climbing gyms and parkour training and stuff; it amuses me that we've come full-cicrle already from adults asserting their right to play on jungle gyms to kids' playgrounds being built to call to mind the adult version.
But also - that it's being aimed at different kids. The playgrounds I grew up with, unless you were lucky enough to find one that still had swings, were pretty boring by the time you were nine or ten, because you were too tall for a lot of the stuff (like the slides and ladders) and a lot of the rest wasn't good for much except just running around like a wild thing. They were clearly designed for a peak age of about four. This one, on the other hand, has a recommended age of 5-12, and all the equipment - while I could see it was designed to also work for smaller people - was fine for an adult-sized person too.
And - everything could be played with if you were the only person there. Again, that's different from what I remember - a lot of the stuff we had was really only fun as part of imaginative play with a group, or the kinetic things needed people to push and people to ride in order to make it go. All of this stuff is carefully balanced so one person can make it spin all by themself. And I totally support building teamwork, but as someone who was sometimes the only kid on the playground, I appreciate that they are acknowledging that we are not in the middle of a baby boom in this area, and also we are a suburb that is designed to make it hard to make friends with the neighbors, so kids often are the only kid their age in the park.
Anyway. Ninjas.
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Is there a supercut or something?
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If you got through the first six episodes or so of the anime you probably know about all you need to know for Kakashi/Iruka fanfic? And I guess episode 20, which is like the one episode where they actually have substantial interaction. (Oh, except that Kakashi's kohai eventually shows up, he's kinda fun in the fic but I have no idea what his canon arc even is or when it happens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
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This is great for the kids who sometimes get socially excluded by other kids because
- they're a girl wearing "boy clothes" or with "boy hair"
- they're a boy wearing "girl clothes" or with "girl hair"
- they have a port wine stain
- they're Deaf, have a hearing aid
etc etc
I mean, zero social exclusion would be MUCH better, but small wins are still wins.
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