21 KiB
[FF][RST] The Waves Arisen [Ch.6]
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Author: u/Wertifloke *
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URL: https://wertifloke.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/the-waves-arisen-chapter-6/
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Score: 23
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Created: 2015-01-31T00:50:33
Post:
Comments:
u/ToaKraka [+8] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (an hour later)
I don't think I've ever seen spoiler before--I was grinning widely for the entire second half of the chapter! Ah, so much nostalgia for my first read-through of Time Braid...
I appreciate the effort that you put into making Hinata's shy mannerisms more discernible. I don't mean to nitpick, but I do find it rather interesting that you chose to portray her shyness through repetition of whole words ("You always—you always say how useful it is, don’t you?"), when I've always seen it in other stories as repetition of single consonants or vowels ("Y-you always say how useful i-it is, don’t you?"). I think your approach is just as valid as the usual one, though, and quite novel to see.
u/logrusmage [+9] (7 hours later)
I don't mean to nitpick, but I do find it rather interesting that you chose to portray her shyness through repetition of whole words ("You always—you always say how useful it is, don’t you?"), when I've always seen it in other stories as repetition of single consonants or vowels ("Y-you always say how useful i-it is, don’t you?"). I think your approach is just as valid as the usual one, though, and quite novel to see.
I just want to say that I find his version far more palatable. I honestly skip a lot of dialog by Hinata in fics because I can't stand the way people write in the stutter.
u/Wertifloke [+5] (2 hours later)
All feedback counts positively toward our sacred timeless bargain. When His cardboard army comes, you will be spared.
What is the relation to Time Braid?
u/ToaKraka [+4] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (2 hours later)
I was grinning widely a lot when I first read Time Braid, I mean. (Note my flair.)
u/JanusTheDoorman [+8] (4 hours later)
I don't know if enjoying is the right word, but I really appreciate your handling of the dissonance between a typical civilian's attitude toward death and mortality and the ninja's approach.
In a mixing of criticism and praise I do think you're occasionally veering into a bit of ham fisted-ness when conveying those dissonances, however. Hiashi's extremely terse delivery of the decision to select Hanabi over Hinata as the Hyuga successor, delivered in front of Naruto seemed like the character had been replaced by a robot programmed only to care about the prestige of the clan, which effectively communicated that intra-clan politics should be expected to be a very real storyline factor, but seemed shoehorned in for that purpose. It felt somewhat artificial. I have to think that the "real" Hiashi would have felt a measure of compassion for Hinata, and tried to justify it to himself and possibly her that he was doing her a favor by shielding her from the demands that would be placed on a clan head, rather than the way it was delivered which seemed meant to shame her for failing the clan.
By comparison, at the beginning, when Sarutobi discusses Naruto's decision to play along with Mizuki's plot, I was expecting the typical "Naruto, that was very risky, and your life and human life is very precious and you shouldn't needlessly risk yourself, especially as a child, you should have come to an adult for help" narrative that's so common in fiction.
When Sarutobi instead commends Naruto for good ninja thinking in making sure that the village knew what he was up to and would have been able to follow up on what he was doing if he died, that was a great moment of "show, don't tell" even though it was accomplished through dialog. It alone was enough to make me come to grips with the inevitably expendable view the world has of genin and ninja in general.
I know it's a fine line of playing with a reader's expectation to get great moments of exposition by subverting expectations and an event which comes off as contrived, but if it's helpful, I think that what put the Hiashi example over the line was that we got the explanation of the pressure of clan politics first, and the example second, a sort of "tell-then-show", whereas with the expendable theme we're getting lots of examples of how it affects their lives without anyone having sat down and sort of explained it outright.
u/Wertifloke [+6] (5 hours later)
Ch 2 has been edited, but I'm wary of making Hiashi too compassionate; in canon his first words were that Hinata was useless to the Hyuuga and he didn't care if she died.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (8 hours later)
Are other chapters edited too? Do I have to reread? :)
u/Wertifloke [+1] (22 hours later)
Yes, but no. Just little tweaks.
u/JanusTheDoorman [+2] (15 hours later)
Saw the edit, and I think it does a lot to contextualize Hiashi's decision since it clarifies the timing, making it a case of him bringing it up at the first meeting since her tests rather than simply at a meeting with her new teammate, previously it seemed like he was doing it to communicate disapproval of her having been placed on that particular team for some reason.
u/AugSphere [+5] Dark Lord of Corruption (7 hours later)
Byakugan gives the full benefits even with one eye, doesn't it? This is one of the most brilliant ideas I've seen in naruto fanfiction.
As a side note, I very much appreciate how subtly you made the characters more rational. I think this approach is strictly superior to making one of the characters into HJPEV expy.
u/Jello_Raptor [+3] The Last Tool User (15 hours later)
hmm, I sorta expect it wouldn't give depth perception. My assumption (by way of my tendency to shoehorn things into reasonably "scientific" narratives) was that the entire interior of the eye is coated by "chakra photon" (maybe they're neutrinos? they need to pass through most matter anyway.) detecting cells.
Assuming they're directional then they'd get a full image in all directions but you'd need two to get depth perception. Issue with that is they'd lack depth perception on the line that goes through the center of both eyes, and in canon the "hole" in the byakugan is behind their head.
I should probably just give in and realize that the original authors of naruto have no clue about science, and pretty much just use "rule of cool" to decide everything.
u/AugSphere [+2] Dark Lord of Corruption (16 hours later)
It's mostly a matter of taste, since you can interpret canon a bunch of different ways. You can have the eyes which require user to focus on something. Just like normal human eyes, but with a huge peripheral vision. Then you can have eyes which give you the full 3d picture of everything all the time or eyes which must be consciously controlled to give tomographic view. There is plenty of possible combinations.
I think that the best interpretation is that the eyes give a full 3d scene of everything in the field of view all the time without any need to consciously focus on anything. This would require some impossible information processing in the brain (or somewhere else), but considering the powers of other doujutsu in naruto, I think it's only fair to give byakugan a useful interpretation. If we go with this interpretation, then one eye would ether work alright by itself with full depth perception, or be completely useless.
Personally, I would prefer the most useful interpretation possible.
u/Jello_Raptor [+3] The Last Tool User (a day later)
I'd argue that a well chosen explanation leads to more drama in the story. Not to mention it can be a useful lesson in testing. Why not have Hinata try to activate the byakugan in only one eye and estimate what the effects are beforehand?
This is one of the lessons that rational!Harry has trouble learning and an important one. Namely that some decisions are very hard to take back, and those need to be well thought out. 5 minutes, even a a day or two aren't enough.
Personally, really clever solutions or important objections to an action come to me randomly within about two weeks (the median is probably around a week) of first musing on the problem. It takes time for my unconscious mind to churn on things, and present something useful but non-obvious.
Not to mention a Byakugan without depth perception is far from useless. It'll take getting used to, but even people with one eye can learn to interpret distance from context and secondary factors like level of focus and change in size of objects.
It also helps reconcile the fact that an eye is still an eye, and space is still space, and you can't triangulate given only one ray in an inner product space. You need at least two to see how they intersect. This fic seems to be going the Clarke's Law route for the explanations of chakra and other phenomena so a touch of realism would be nice.
u/AugSphere [+2] Dark Lord of Corruption (a day later)
It also helps reconcile the fact that an eye is still an eye, and space is still space, and you can't triangulate given only one ray in an inner product space. You need at least two to see how they intersect. This fic seems to be going the Clarke's Law route for the explanations of chakra and other phenomena so a touch of realism would be nice.
The eye is not a point, you know. It has a pretty significant radius, so you can get convergence from several points on just one eyeball (though this requires parts of the eye to be able to perceive several directions individually). Or you could say that the eye is receptive to chakra and not photons (which it would pretty much have to be anyway to perceive chakra) and chakra has some property that depends on the distance travelled (otherwise the space of vision would not be limited to some sphere around the users head, though it may be not limited in this fic), then you could extract absolute distance information with just one eye. My point is that there is enough wiggle room to make any interpretation sound superficially plausible, so one might as well go with the one that's most convenient from the storytelling perspective.
It's pretty silly to cavil this much about physics of Byakugan vision anyway, when there is stuff like shadow clones going around.
u/Jello_Raptor [+2] The Last Tool User (a day later)
It's pretty silly to cavil this much about physics of Byakugan vision anyway, when there is stuff like shadow clones going around.
Sure, but it is fun. ;)
My point is that there is enough wiggle room to make any interpretation sound superficially plausible, so one might as well go with the one that's most convenient from the storytelling perspective.
I tend to like it when there's more than superficial plausibility. But that's obviously a personal preference. Likewise, I'm a fan of sanderson's laws, and in this case, such a straightforward munchkin is only interesting because others haven't written it before, rather than it being an interesting decision to make in its own right.
Further Needless Pedantry Follows
The eye is not a point, you know. It has a pretty significant radius, so you can get convergence from several points on just one eyeball (though this requires parts of the eye to be able to perceive several directions individually).
Yes, but assuming that there's some reasonable biological pathway from normal eyes, to the magical versions (which is itself kinda silly given the sharingan and rinnegan) then a chakra sensitive version of rods and cones has a much higher probability than omnidirectional cameras evolving at a scale orders of magnitude smaller than the eye itself.
Not to mention that "significant radius" is directly proportional to the directional errors in the relevant sensor and the distance to the object you're triangulating against. As you scale down the sensor, noise tends to become significantly higher. (Both in biological and non-biological sensors)
u/gregx1000 [+3] (6 hours later)
This is shaping up into a very interesting story. I really enjoyed the interplay between the clones. It's almost exactly how I'd imagine I'd end up getting along with more of me. The munchkining is pretty good, but I just wonder how much low hanging fruit is really left for ninja when it comes to seals and stuff. I suppose it could be explained through the whole 'villages don't share well' though.
u/kaukamieli [+4] (8 hours later)
Hinata has now branded Naruto as her own. :D I wonder when Naruto realizes she likes him this time.
On the other hand, I don't think Kakashi should buy the Uchiha secret technique thing. There is someone on the village with the cursed seal already... I think higher-ups should notice what happened immediately.
edit: I also loved the notion of byakugan being for long range and it being stupid to have to hit enemy so many times. It feels a bit weird when Hinata thinks she is not strong enough and that leading to making Naruto stronger.
edit2: And it feels weird when Naruto can't agree on things with himself. Instead of every clone having different opinion, I think it should really be about them understanding there is no single strongest technique, but there could be multiple for different purposes. Strongest for close combat, strongest for ranged combat, strongest for capturing, strongest for disabling, strongest for spying, strongest defence...
edit3: Not sure if I like Naruto practically reinventing rasengan on himself immediately. ESPECIALLY WHEN HE TOLD HINATA BYAKUGAN IS FOR RANGED COMBAT! :D His clones could be a damn artillery that never misses! Shit, now I might have to try some fanfiction myself...
edit4: Feels a bit bad though, that Hinata feels a bit useless to the team now. Best use for her might be tanking with her clan's ultimate defence jutsu thing while Naruto snipes everyone. Or actually maybe not, when clones can just tank for him with barrier too.
u/rumblestiltsken [+3] (10 hours later)
There is someone on the village with the cursed seal already...
Not confirmed in story. Orochimaru is thought dead, which is a divergence from canon that shouldn't exist if his failed experiments (like Anko) are still trickling in to the village.
This could literally be the first cursed seal that Konoha has seen.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (10 hours later)
Could be. Though Anko was apparently with him since she was a child, so Orochimaru could just have died later, if he died at all. I think the seal, the village of sound and Kabuto hints too much to Orochimaru to think he's really dead.
u/rumblestiltsken [+2] (19 hours later)
Oh, I don't think he is dead. He is clearly alive in the body with two chakra networks.
I just think it is more likely Anko never escaped or is dead. We will find out soon.
u/FeepingCreature [+2] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (13 hours later)
edit2: And it feels weird when Naruto can't agree on things with himself.
He just likes to argue. See somebody holding one opinion, start holding a different opinion. It's a chaotic system. :)
edit4: Feels a bit bad though, that Hinata feels a bit useless to the team now.
Yeah, poor Hinata. I wonder if this is an effect of her insecurity, that she's effectively trying to make herself redundant.
Hey, there's this series where the protagonist is an expert in dating games, and his catchphrase when he realizes how to get the girlfriend of the current route is "I can already see the ending!" I sort of felt like that with Naruto in this chapter. Three sentences.
"Hinata, your eyes are amazing. I really like them. :grab hands, pause: But I like them a lot better on your face."
u/Anderkent [+6] (15 hours later)
"Hinata, your eyes are amazing. I really like them. :grab hands, pause: But I like them a lot better on your face."
"Oh.. Oh. I guess I could give you my face as well." :P
u/kaukamieli [+1] (23 hours later)
Yeah, poor Hinata. I wonder if this is an effect of her insecurity, that she's effectively trying to make herself redundant.
She is definitely doing the smart thing too. It's just story-wise not fun.
TheWorldGodOnlyKnows
Yeaaaaa... I've read it a bit.
u/lehyde [+2] Nudist Beach (15 hours later)
If you're taking suggestions, I felt the sentence "Probably for the first time since their struggle against Kakashi in the bell test, Naruto felt like he was actually part of a team." in the previous chapter shouldn't have been there. The preceding dialogue stood well on its own and didn't need this explanation.
A scene from the D-rank missions would also be nice. To establish characters and see some interaction between the four team members.
u/fortycakes [+2] (21 hours later)
I like the story - thanks for including a follow-by-email option, because otherwise I probably wouldn't have remembered to check back.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (20 hours later)
A lot of people seem to thing that This was a strict power down for Hinata.
I don't think it was. It was indicated that one Byakugan works as well as two, and then there is this:
“Did it work?” he asked. “Can you see through my eye?”
“I’m still letting it rest,” she said, “I can see it making chakra already, though. A—a stream of it, swirling into mine… it’ll be like that forever…”
Even though she doesn't get all of Naruto's insane chakra regen, it'll still be a power boost.
That should strictly make both of them stronger.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (23 hours later)
How will it be a power boost? Isn't it just like any other eye? I think it making chakra just means it's not getting rejected or something, that it's part of her body now.
u/rumblestiltsken [+1] (10 hours later)
Can I vote for no more 4th wall breaking snark about canon? It really breaks my immersion when people go "wouldn't it be silly if (insert part of story that doesn't exist in universe)".
It has happened a few times now, and it is out of place even in crackfics. Outside of crackfics? Bleh.
Good chappie though. Looking forward to poop in rasenshuriken.
u/Jello_Raptor [+3] The Last Tool User (15 hours later)
As a counterbalance: I tend to enjoy it. Doesn't hurt that I really dislike the core naruto series. (All the chars are idiots, the world-building is mostly ad-hoc and badly thought out, and it wastes a lot of time when I try to go back to it after reading enjoyable fanfic only to find that it hasn't gotten better.)
u/kaukamieli [+3] (23 hours later)
As another point of view, I'm not sure what you are talking about and I did read this chapter twice.
u/Jello_Raptor [+3] The Last Tool User (a day later)
From the previous chapter:
Yeah, but come on, a single skill which is supposed to grant perfect chakra control, and the ability to read minds, and to resurrect the dead and to summon giant fighting centipedes? That doesn’t even sound like a real technique. It sounds like a list of cool powers written down by a nine year old with no idea of, like, balance, or consistency.
From this chapter:
“A-ha! I’ve got it!” said a clone. “The shape with the highest ratio of volume to surface area is: …the humble sphere.”
“…You expect us to just… punch a ball into someone?”
u/kaukamieli [+1] (a day later)
The first one might not really be one. Rinnegan just might be very famous. It could still have all those powers in this fic.
I guess the second one is, but I didn't myself like the idea of Naruto figuring out his rasengan alone and this fast. Also, ball... Why not a flat, wide surface like a sawblade? I'd bet it would make more damage, any hit would cause bleeding and a good hit cuts enemies in half. Enemies still live with a good hit in the anime...