16 KiB
[RT][FF] Chapter 22 of Lighting Up the Dark, a rational Naruto fanfic
-
Author: u/Velorien *
-
URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9311012/23/Lighting-Up-the-Dark
-
Score: 42
-
Created: 2015-11-30T10:24:11
Post:
Comments:
u/Kodix [+16] (2 hours later)
I liked how subtly manipulative Kabuto was with Naruto. A compliment here, a bluff there, and he's sold on the whole concept. Seems likely he won't even double check with the proctors that Kabuto actually is a jonin - some of them could be spies, after all.
Also, Hinata's technique is pretty neat. I like how you asked yourself what secondary powers are required for canon Hyuuga capabilities, and then went on trying to abuse those in a novel way. Feels internally consistent, not asspull-ish, and interesting.
u/Jiro_T [+13] (12 hours later)
"If I wanted to deceive you about X, why would I do Y?" is self-defeating (and a version of Goodhart's Law), because as long as Y is an indicator of not-X, Y becomes useful as part of a deception about X and therefore is no longer useful as an indicator of not-X.
Also, the characters don't know they're in a rational fic (they know they are rational, but not that everyone else is), so the proper answer to "would I be stupid enough to do Y if I wanted X" could very well be "yes, lots of people are stupid that way. It's called cognitive bias, or just making mistakes." Being unprepared for irrational behavior on the part of others is a mark of a Straw Vulcan.
u/Transfuturist [+6] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
"If I wanted to deceive you about X, why would I do Y?" is self-defeating (and a version of Goodhart's Law), because as long as Y is an indicator of not-X, Y becomes useful as part of a deception about X and therefore is no longer useful as an indicator of not-X.
Not if the cost of Y given X is greater than the benefit gained from the deception. Not to mention that deception itself involves detectable patterns of behavior.
u/PeridexisErrant [+6] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (20 hours later)
Which relies on knowing the value of a deception, and actually makes you more vulnerable at high stakes.
u/Transfuturist [+8] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
Anko was great, especially when Tenten piped up. Gaara is horrifying even when not in scene. The RNG joke was beautiful.
"Why don't we forget Naruto and talk team strategy?"
Neji looked insulted.
"Do whatever you want, Haruno, as long as you stay out of my way."
Burn! Now let that burn grow into the conflagration of your downfall!
...
Is every 2v2 match going to devolve into 2x1v1?
To an outsider, the Gentle Fist Style looked incongruously like an attempt to slap your opponent
Please tell me that Juuken is actually a chakra-enhanced slapfight.
u/NotAHeroYet [+2] City of Angles Municipal Government (a day later)
I doubt it. Every match with similar-but-not-adative styles is, but a melee-ranged team might work well together, or other teams of similar skill. It really depends on if you're better off working as a pair or individual. In this case, sakura was better fighting Ino, and hinata would have been best off taking ino out herself, followed by taking out neji.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
I forgot that Neji explicitly dismissed the idea of cooperation.
u/None [+1] (21 hours later)
It's more like a poke fight.
u/Jiro_T [+7] (12 hours later)
Also, characters in fics seem to have never heard of epistemic learned helplessness, even though real human beings act that way all the time. The proper response to someone trying to talk you out of an exam fight is to say "In a battle is a poor time to evaluate a proposition, where the proposition is likely to be based on motivated reasoning, where there is little time to evaluate it in, where I can't have peers review it, and where even giving the proposition a fair hearing has costs. So I don't see any point in bothering to evaluate it." Try as hard as you can to win the fight, and if it turns out in hindsight that the argument for giving up made sense, you just got unlucky. Hinata should have just ignored Neji, not bothered to respond or think about what he said.
(Of course, it's a lot more dramatic when characters throw propositions at each other in fights, which is why fiction does it.)
u/Transfuturist [+9] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
"In a battle is a poor time to evaluate a proposition, where the proposition is likely to be based on motivated reasoning, where there is little time to evaluate it in, where I can't have peers review it, and where even giving the proposition a fair hearing has costs. So I don't see any point in bothering to evaluate it."
Points for missing the fact that this is completely different from how someone who's being psyched out in a fight actually thinks and feels. You have to train this nonreaction. You have to precommit to it.
u/Jiro_T [+5] (15 hours later)
I wouldn't point this out if this wasn't a rational fic. But since it is a rational fic, characters should ideally act in ways that characters in other sorts of fic might not usually act.
Besides, they're ninjas. They train lots of things that people don't normally do.
(And there are also plenty of characters who should naturally act that way anyway. "stubbornness" and such are just terms describing how humans precommit.)
u/Transfuturist [+5] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
There are plenty of irrational characters in HPMOR. Rationalist fiction shows the most effective players as having the most effective practices.
As for stubbornness, Sasuke is stubborn. Hinata is not.
u/None [+5] (5 hours later)
Oh, the marvels of random events!
Perfectly executed, in my opinion. I wonder how you will go around the caged bird seal thing, it's a pretty stupid device however you look at it. And I can't imagine main branch members not abusing it.
u/Transfuturist [+5] Carthago delenda est. (14 hours later)
It would be pretty cool if the Caged Bird was given to all Hyuuga, and all Hyuuga were able to activate it (It also makes more sense because the main branch in canon is unsealed, even though the goddamn point of the seal is to protect the bloodline). They'd indoctrinate their children into their sacrifice for the clan, to protect the bloodline as it protects their own. The kind of indoctrination that Free demonstrates.
This commitment of their lives to the clan would naturally affect their values, kind of like how the Hyuuga behave in canon but even more alien, and the main/branch distinction wouldn't even come up. Just a sociopathic system producing a unified front. The ingroup is the clan, the outgroup is everyone else.
"You judged me for a lesser being, rather than a Hyuuga. Your mistake."
u/None [+2] (21 hours later)
Exactly! Canon CBS is an unsustainable proposition, it even baffles me /u/Valorien chose to adopt it. A smart enemy would just go for the main branch, just like Lightning did in canon, only they wouldn't stop the first time, and try again until they got the byakugan.
Like you said, to be useful the CBS should work like a cyanide pill, if they get you kill yourself for the good of the clan. Strange enough Uchiha didn't adopt a similar method. Stranger too there is no concocted Uchiha family in any other ninja country (unless you take into account Naruto Gaiden, which I don't).
u/None [+5] (a day later)
[removed]
u/None [+3] (a day later)
The problem with this is if someone found a way to hack it, it would doom the entire clan, rather than, at worst, the branch family.
I've come up with a workaround to a problem like this that took me literally two seconds. It follows, you have thought of something too, haven't you?
You don't get infinite retries when attacking someone. Get caught once and it's a diplomatic incident. Get caught repeatedly and it's a full-on war.
Also, by the time you kidnap enough Uchiha to make that practical and worthwhile, they will find out who you are and Leaf will annihilate you
Well yes, unless you do so during one of the three full-on wars that have already happened.
On the other hand, the main family is stronger and better-guarded. The CBS at least helps a little by allowing the Hyūga to keep the branch family weaker than the main one without turning them into a liability.
-Say brother, how would you like for you and all your descendants to be bound to permanent service/probable abuse to me and my descendants, on pain of death?
-Why yes brother, it seems like a wonderful and perfectly reasonable idea! Here, paint my forehead first.
Legit.
u/None [+5] (a day later)
[removed]
u/None [+2] (a day later)
We could come up with a long series of workarounds and counter-workarounds if we wanted to. In the end, any ninja with an iota of caution will not strap a bomb to someone's forehead, no matter how confident they are in their control of that bomb, unless that person is on some level expendable.
Precisely. The point here is, everyone is expendable as long as the clan power stays home.
Those wars ended, though. I can't see any peace treaty which would involve Leaf (or any of the other sides in the conflict) permitting another village to continue an Uchiha breeding programme.
I can. Peace requires compromises.
For your attempt to usurp the clan leadership, you and your followers must die - but we will permit you to live on and serve us as a branch family if you take this seal which guarantees you and your descendants can never rebel against us again.
I have mixed feeling about that. Deserved death sentence or endless slavery and abuse?
u/NotAHeroYet [+3] City of Angles Municipal Government (a day later)
endless slavery that still contains the choice of death at any point. the abuse probably wasn't there, originally- that was probably a gradual addition.
Originally, it was nothing more than a personal kill-switch. the passing onto descendants was from the fact that grudges came from binding parents, no matter how justified you were- or at least, the main family thought so. if you're going to have a grudge, have a kill-switch ready.
u/Valorien [+2] (5 days later)
A tiny spelling error led me to your post. ;)
u/None [+1] (7 days later)
Cool! (further elaboration needed)
Also, last chapter had me laugh in real life. That's something.
EDIT: Oh, now I see. Thanks pal.
u/None [+1] (23 hours later)
There is a literal countdown for the next generation
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Didn't understand what you're talking about.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
I was referring to naruto gaiden. After saying he needs rest, Kishimoto is apparently making a new installment of the saga
u/None [+2] (a day later)
I was happy this morning.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
I would laugh, but I'm too busy crying.
So, adventures of Bolt and Salad, anyone?
u/Zephyr1011 [+4] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (2 hours later)
I'm extremely unclear in what happened in Sakura and Ino's fight. What did Sakura do that anyone else couldn't do against Ino? Is this the result of a great deal of preparation to fight Ino specifically?
u/Kodix [+17] (2 hours later)
No, that's a canon thing - something like that happened there, too. Sakura has a multiple personality disorder of a kind, where she has an Inner Sakura personality and an outer (normal) Sakura. This apparently lets her somewhat-resist the Yamanaka mind-body jutsu.
More info here.
u/Cariyaga [+2] Kyubey did nothing wrong (an hour later)
Hahaha, that was brilliant. I loved the Persona reference in Sakura's fight. I really do need to get around to finishing Persona 4...
u/None [+2] (a day later)
You seem to have greatly improved in effectively describing ninja combat! It seemed clunky in the forest of death, but it's smoothed out noticeably. Congratulations! That can't have been easy.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
[removed]
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
Yeah, sure.
So I've just re-read chapter 20, which was where the Sound ninja made their major appearance. After a bit of thought, I think that the largest difference is that in this chapter you spend a lot of time describing the exact effects of the sound Ninja's Technique. For example:
For a second, the air was eerily still, and all sound disappeared from the area.
Then something hit Naruto hard in the chest.
The blow wasn't that strong, not even enough to knock someone over if they were in a defensive stance, but it did have enough force to pop a shadow clone, and it covered the entire clearing in a full 360-degree radius.
But the instant annihilation of Naruto's shadow clone army wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that the wave also popped Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura. Then it hit the bushes at the far end of the clearing, breaking the originals' disguises.That's four paragraphs in total, purely describing the effects of one jutsu. In contrast...
To an outsider, the Gentle Fist Style looked incongruously like an attempt to slap your opponent, but in reality a Gentle Fist strike could be deadlier than any punch. Precise needles of chakra emitted from the palms could pierce any of the more than three hundred chakra points a Hyūga could see on the target's body, blocking the meridians along which chakra naturally flowed. A sufficient number of hits could do anything – disable a limb, shut down the lungs, stop the heart… a terrifying amount of power for an art that ignored armour and was dangerous even to block.
A battle between two Gentle Fist users did not remotely resemble taking turns. Rather, it was a constant dance around each other, limbs almost intertwining as each attack turned into a block, and each block was reversed into another attack. Hinata and Neji's limbs didn't stay still for even half a second, constantly shifting stance, the fighters leaning back and sideways and occasionally forwards as their hands moved in endless elaborate patterns that seemed completely independent of the motion of the rest of their bodies.
That's two paragraphs, one describing how the jutsu works in a way the reader can quickly grasp, and the second describing the visual implications effectively.
Chapter 20 to me read like every time an individual jutsu was used there was a subscene devoted wholly to it. In the latest chapter things seemed smoother because some unneeded flavour text was removed, and the scene was blended together into a cohesive whole.I love this story more than I love the convenience of Microwavable food.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
I love this story more than I love the convenience of Microwavable food.
Woah there! Let's not fall prey to the availability bias!
...Actually, you're right. This story is better than microwave ovens!
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+1] Nudist Beach (4 days later)
Interesting. The chakra which surrounds Gaara, I imagine that's his sand? If it counts as a living thing for the purposes of consent, I wonder who would actually have to give consent - Gaara or Shukaku?