Over To Us.

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7

The people chose to call Thunderclash to get a sense of his mental state.

 [CONTENT WARNING:  This installment deals with a character experiencing voices other people can’t hear, and an open question about whether the voices are real.]

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“Ultra Magnus is right,” you say, trying to ignore Skids shooting you a startled - and hurt - look.  “Before we decide anything else, let’s hail the Vis Vitalis.  We should at least find out where we stand.”

You silently hope Skids will understand.  You want to help Gleeerboo, and hopefully you can - but you’re not going to be of any help if you charge in without gathering all the information first.  You still don’t know what’s happening with the planet, or with Thunderclash, or how (or even whether) they’re connected.  And if you insist on just going to the planet without even checking on Thunderclash, odds are that Ultra Magnus or Perceptor will have a lot of questions for you.

Besides, Thunderclash is your patient, and that has to take priority.

Ultra Magnus hails the ship, and you wait.  And wait.

After a much longer pause than you’d normally expect, an image finally flickers to life on the main screen… but it isn’t Thunderclash.  Instead, you recognise the softly rounded features of one of Thunderclash’s subordinates.  You seem to remember that this was the Vis Vitalis’s second lieutenant - he came aboard the Lost Light when you last encountered Thunderclash.  You recall that he was a bit quiet, but then, it was probably easy for him to get lost in the flood of adoration directed at his commander, and then the high drama of then-first officer Paddox’s betrayal.

You wince slightly, still remembering the full-body ache after Swerve swung your alt mode into Paddox so hard that he shattered into his component beings.

“This is Ultra Magnus of the Lost Light to speak to Captain -”  Magnus is cut off.

“Oh, thank you, Primus!”  The young officer peers anxiously at you all.  “Please - we need your help.”

Magnus looks less than impressed.  “State your designation.”

The officer straightens up, although his expression still betrays his worry.  “Second Lieutenant Sparker, sir.  Please, I - I formally request assistance.  Captain Thunderclash is behaving extremely strangely, and I’m afraid he may be in danger, sir.”

“We are aware of the situation.  I am accompanied by Rung, one of the Autobots’ leading psychiatrists.”  You give a solemn nod when Magnus gestures in your direction, and you school yourself not to smile in greeting; in situations like this, many people prefer a serious expert to a friendly one.  “Captain Thunderclash himself contacted us, so if you could simply connect -”

“I can’t, sir!”  Sparker bursts out.  “The captain locked himself in the shuttle bay ten minutes ago, and he won’t answer his comm!”

Turning away from the screen, Skids murmurs, “Do we think he’s planning to -”

At that moment, a siren sounds on the Vis Vitalis.  You can hear a muffled voice in the background shouting, “Unauthorised launch!”  Sparker mouths a curse, and then disappears from view.

“We do,” Perceptor answers Skids coolly, and puts the view of the Vis Vitalis in space up on a split screen with the still-open comm link to the ship’s chaotic bridge.  He zeroes in on an even tinier dot that’s moving away from the Vis Vitalis at speed.  “I surmise that this shuttle contains Captain Thunderclash, and, further, that his trajectory is towards the planet.”

“Hail the shuttle.”  Magnus turns to you.  “Rung, you may be best suited to talk to him.”

You’re prepared for the hail to go ignored, but to your surprise, Thunderclash responds.  He looks haggard, hunched over the controls of a small shuttle.  There’s a grey tint to his facial metal, and his colours seem muted - a sign of stressed systems.  His optics, though, are blindingly, worryingly bright.

“Thunderclash here,” he says.  He isn’t looking at the screen, and he sounds distracted as his fingers fly over the controls.  As you watch, Thunderclash suddenly winces and clutches his head.  A second later, he seems to shake it off.

The time has come.

This episode starts with a giant magical talking cat shrinking down, going to see Granny Cat, and requesting four hundred "cat kunai". Absolutely exquisite, I have no notes. I have QUESTIONS but no notes. :D

There's something genuinely sweet about the idea of tiny!Itachi inventing a game to keep tiny!Sasuke occupied on their weapons shopping excursions, by getting him to chase the ninja cats around - and then, because it's the two of them, it escalated exponentially into tiny!Itachi half-jokingly telling Sasuke to catch lions and tigers, and tiny!Sasuke succeeding. Those two. <3

... wait, did Granny Cat commission Sasuke's team to complete the collection of pawprints from Sasuke's old childhood game, just because she was... feeling nostalgic? Because she wanted to see Sasuke again? Because she thought it would be good for him? I can't imagine she actually needs the pawprints.

Apparently the team's target is "a big player in the ninja cat underworld". Why the fuck is this entire show not about the ninja cat underworld. This is AMAZING.

Said target, btw, is named Nekomata, which is a term referring to multi-tailed, malicious cat yokai in Japanese folklore. At one point, he even turns himself into a human woman, but then starts lapping up the oil out of an oil lamp - a reference to a particular myth in which a nekomata gave itself away like that.

He also sits behind a screen like an Edo-period shogun, while swirling a champagne flute of milk. Truly the Naruto villain of all time.

A big part of the joy of this whole adventure is the contrast between Sasuke's inner monologue going, Such humiliation! But I will endure it, because I must surpass every limit Itachi laid upon me, until the day I finally take his life! and Naruto's inner monologue going, hahahaha cat toy go brrrrrr. Which is also a lot of the joy of the show as a whole to be fair. :D

Sakura immediately heads to one of the catnip bars in the ninja cat stronghold (what a sentence), reasoning, "The best place to get information is always a bar." Kakashi, what have you been teaching these children.

I'm oddly charmed by cat dressed like a dapper Edwardian gentleman, who buys Sakura a drink and a tin of wet food - but when she goes running out of the bar as soon as she knows where her target is, and tells her conversation partner that he can have her wet food, instead of being upset that she's gone he's over the moon at the prospect of two tins. :D My guy, you realise you could have just bought two for yourself, right? You're paying for both of those anyway!

I love the little details of this episode so much. Like the way the cat guards' pupils dilate when they sense a threat, and then go back to slits when they relax; or the fact that the fortress walls are ringed with plastic bottles, like if you're trying to keep a cat out of your garden. Someone who was very fond of cats created this episode, is what I'm saying.

Another little sidelong reference (I think!): Granny Cat tells the gangster Nekomata that he must have drawn an "unlucky hand of cards" the day Sasuke got his pawprint. The worst hand you can get in one particular Japanese card game (a bit akin to blackjack) is 8-9-3 - which is pronounced ya-ku-za, and is where the yakuza derive their name from.

And I, chronic what-if-we-treated-the-joke-seriously-er that I am, am now thinking about how this would work as a full AU where the ninja world has three distinct genders. Each one comes with its own archetypes, its own societal expectations, the works. And for whatever reason (maybe just ancient tradition?), it's believed that the best ninja teams must include a mix of all three.

Some thoughts about this:

Kind of like with omegaverse, you could still have real-world genders in the mix, with most people having both. Maybe "Girl" actually has nothing to do with being female - there's a lot of overlap for some reason, but they're actually unrelated. (Maybe it doesn't even overlap all that much! The teams we've seen tend to have female Girls and male Goofs and Geniuses, but that doesn't mean that's the norm everywhere.) So, in the original Ino-Shika-Cho trio, Inoichi is the Girl even though he's not a woman.

Likewise, teams with more than one woman (like the Cloud Ninja trio) have a female Genius and/or Goof. This can potentially be combined with a male Girl.

Which characters would exemplify the expectations for their gender? Which characters would push against them? Does someone like Lee get the side-eye for being too focused and intense for a Goof? Does Shikamaru get shit for not being dark and edgy enough for a Genius (up until he takes out Hidan)?

Cultural differences between villages!

Maybe this is an exclusively ninja thing? Ninja making casual conversation with a civilian and saying, "Oh, yeah, my brother's got a kid on the way; he really wants a Genius but I'm kind of hoping they're a Goof," and the civilian is just like what. Are you talking about.

... which would suggest civilian-born ninjas like Sakura only find out their Ninja Gender later in life.

Lee turns up at Tsunade's bedside with medicine Guy has made for her - which Sakura seems happy to accept. Apparently, in the Leaf Village, you can just show up like, "My sensei brewed this weird medicinal moonshine and I do not know what's in it. It's for the president," and they'll just give her whatever's in the mystery bottle.

We get a flashback to Lee before Tsunade heals him, and there's an interesting parallel I'd never really thought of before. Lee is crying, asking, "Why am I the only one being punished like this?", which has some unexpected resonance with Gaara's reaction to his uncle's assassination attempt: "Why me? Why is it always me?" (And, indeed, with Naruto's similar lament - "Why is it always Gaara?" - during the Kazekage Rescue Mission.) It's intriguing, because we've got two kids looking for some cosmic answer to why they're uniquely targeted, uniquely doomed - when, actually, the answer is human cruelty and human choices. And what's more, you can draw a line back through those choices. Yashamaru's attempt on his nephew's life triggered Gaara's serial killer period, and then Gaara maimed Lee in turn. And maybe that's a less satisfying answer than Destiny. But it's very much in line with the themes of the show: that people tell themselves things are fated to happen (like ninja warring with each other forever), when really, they're the consequences of our choices, and we can make a different choice.

When Sakura and Naruto come to visit Lee in the hospital, he blushes and gasps, "Oh, Sakura!" To which Naruto grouses, "What, no, 'Oh, Naruto!' I'm here, too, ya know." Why, Naruto, I didn't realise you were so invested in Lee swooning over you. :D

I'm amazed by how the thing that got on my nerves about Naruto when I first started watching has become one of his most endearing qualities to me: he's so much. And thing is, the show does a great job at setting up why he's so much. Naruto is - insulting and loud and gross and impertinent and always up in everyone else's business because it's his way of trying to force the world to pay him attention. And that, from a child who's spent so much of his early life being deliberately ignored, is heartbreaking. But Naruto pairs that with being really, unaffectedly kind. Like here: he drinks half of Lee's last dose of medicine without asking (and spits it out and calls it disgusting), but when he sees Lee tear up, he immediately commits to travelling to a distant mountain for more ingredients. I just - I love him, and as the friendly moral paragon hero he's not the kind of character I tend to love.

Guy spends this period where Lee is injured running around in manic optimism - he's going to visit every shrine while walking on his hands! he's going to make a special Youth Drink for Lee using this flower that can cure anything! - and it's really nice to see that contrasted with Guy's quiet, dark moments, when he's stuck contemplating Lee's pain and his own guilt.

Guy is also just. So soft with Lee. It's really lovely.

Yayyyyyy, Naruto finally breaks out the green jumpsuit! :D Now all we need is a reaction from Kakashi...

I was going to say that this episode - with Sakura and Naruto so wracked with worry over Lee - makes it hard to buy them both getting along with Gaara during this arc. (Post-Lee's recovery, sure - but right now?) But then I thought about how interesting it is that there's a near-complete lack of vengefulness, from either Lee or anyone around him, over what happened in the chuunin exams. Guy blames himself; Lee blames the universe; but no one blames Gaara. And that - kind of makes sense for ninja culture? From an outside perspective, sure, it's Gaara's fault - he went way harder than he should have, with the clear intent of killing Lee, and fully crushed two of his limbs. But from a ninja perspective: they willingly put their children through these exams, where everyone goes in knowing the risk of fatalities isn't that high (in non-Gaara years), but is never zero. Even the proctors say their role is "to save as many lives as possible", implying that's not going to be all of them. If Gaara had pressed ahead to kill an unconscious opponent (something Neji also attempted, btw), or if he'd killed Lee in the hospital, yes, that would be considered murder. But it's possible that the Leaf ninja see this as just... the chuunin exams. Shit happens.

On being told their destination is haunted, Naruto confidently says there's no such thing as ghosts, which is going to get very funny when he ends up dealing with actual ghosts in two separate filler arcs of the original show. :D

After the team has to fight a flower-pollen-created version of Gaara - formed when the flowers searched Naruto's mind for his "nemesis" - Naruto laughs that it's too bad he wasn't thinking of Choji at the time instead, because then they could have won the fight easily! Hahahaha oh I want to see Choji beat him up so much.

I love that Guy's love language (which he's passed on to Lee) is Vigorous Exercising Near You. :D

Next up is a two-parter Jiraiya & Naruto training flashback. Instead of being framed with a segment set in the present-day Leaf Village after Pain's attack, this one begins by re-showing the scene where Jiraiya gives Naruto an ultimatum - give up on hunting down Sasuke, or no training for you! - and Naruto refuses to budge. And it reminded me of how difficult it often is with Jiraiya's Trickster Mentor schtick to figure out when something is a test, versus when Naruto is actually getting Jiraiya to change his mind in real time. Does Jiraiya go into this conversation fully expecting that he'll end up training Naruto to face Sasuke? Or is he being honest when he tells Naruto he needs to give up that dream, and only then realises it's never going to happen?

GAMARIKI! <3

One downside of the dub is that you don't get the relationship cues provided by the forms of address used in Japanese. Occasionally, the dub will attempt to translate these - that's how we end up with the toad sages calling Jiraiya and Naruto "Jiraiya-boy" and "Naruto-boy", respectively (presumably -kun in the original Japanese?), and, here, how we get Gamariki addressing Jiraiya as "Jiraiya-honey" (which... is maybe also -kun? I need to dip into the subbed version more often to compare :)).

We discover that magnetic fields mess with chakra, and can even produce an effect like being under a genjutsu. I feel like there's wasted potential in that: I would love to see a bunch of civilians figure out that they can mess with ninjas if they just get big enough magnets. (For that matter, it would be fascinating in general to see what anti-ninja measures civilians in this world might invent - kind of like the measures created to contain benders in Avatar the Last Airbender.)

Jiraiya recognises the kid guarding the entrance to the village he and Naruto are travelling to, and cheerfully tells the boy, "Your parents put me up when I passed through here doing research for a novel!" Research, huh? *headdesk* Jiraiya, did you fuck this kid's mom.

It's actually really cool to think about a community living in harmony with, and protected by, the natural genjutsu caused by the spooky forest around them. Like it's a natural resource.

I do get a kick out of Jiraiya pretending to be captured by the boy from the village (actually Naruto in disguise). Jiraiya's entirely wrapped in ropes from shoulder to knee, and lamenting loudly, "I am the GREAT JIRAIYA, and yet I was so CARELESS as to allow this MERE CHILD to capture me!" and somehow no one finds this remotely suspicious. :D

The bad guy in this arc has a conch summons (with... Viking horns?), which has both what seem to be barbed (possibly poison) tentacles and darts it can fire at its enemies. Fun fact! Both of these are based on real features of different conch species! Nature is horrifying!

Naruto has a persistent problem I'm going to call And Mom's Here Too I Guess. It's not that we never get mothers whose personalities matter. But 9 times out of 10, if someone's parents are important to the story (loved, hated, lost, whatever), Dad is important, And Mom's Here Too I Guess. Kakashi's father was the White Fang of Konoha, whose story came to define his son's; his mother was... um. We don't actually know, apart from the fact that she died and her husband misses her. Sasuke's dad royally fucks up both him and Itachi, and his mother... is there? Is sweet to them sometimes but apparently doesn't play a meaningful role in their psyches? Hinata's got a father, who is a strong and ruthless clan leader with a complicated history with his brother and sky-high expectations of his daughters... and a mother, who's, like. Nice or whatever. In this current arc, just as in the Land of Waves, we meet a young boy whose village was taken over by a gang, and whose father was murdered in front of him for daring to defy the gang leader, and whose mother is... also here. Except that it's even worse in this arc, because the kid's mother doesn't even get a hint of interiority, and because all the women in the village are the same. They're here to be held hostage and eventually rescued, and to apparently not have much of an opinion on either development. (Hell, even when Jiraiya cuts the cages they're in free, the women all just sit there quietly until the doors are actually opened for them. No one's trying to help by working on opening the cage; no one's freaking out; no one's even standing up.)

The bad guy traps Jiraiya and Naruto in a genjutsu that convinces them they're frozen in ice, and then cackles that this will break them psychologically! Which is... almost cute, in a show with genjutsu users like Uchiha "All Your Friends Are Disappointed And Hate You" Itachi and Hatake "Your Wayward Best Friend Has Returned Covered In Stab Wounds And Begging For Your Help" Kakashi.

The implications - almost certainly unintentional, but still! - of the fact that Naruto used to be the huggy type and now reacts to most physical affection from men as if they're "being creepy" is so fucking uncomfortable. I THINK we're just supposed to see this as him becoming a teenager, but it comes across like the effect of his time spent travelling with Jiraiya - which at minimum suggests that training involved a hefty dose of Ninja Toxic Masculinity. :/