#gatou

imagine some old man lying to you and endangering (understandably tho) you and your fellow twelve-year-olds and then guilting you about how if he dies his poor daughter will be left all alone and then you go to his how and meet her and her disillusioned rage-filled son who watched his father's brutal murder and became trapped in an obsessive hateful spiral bc he couldn't even imagine a world in which the monster who ruined his life would ever cease to be present in every waking misery-filled moment of his pitiful life and then your dumbest friend yells at him for not trying to punch his way out of crushing systemic oppression and you aren't really paying attention to any of that bc his mom is uncannily similar to your mom in just enough ways that you're totally fine spending as much time Not Dealing With That and climbing trees instead

and then you do go to the bridge and you get fucked up so bad your magic eyes activate (actually they already activated but you don't know that bc your dickweed brother was too busy traumatizing you to say "oh hey nice sharingan good job sasuke") and then your stupid idiot orange-wearing jerkwad teammate who won't leave you alone and also kissed you once barges in like a stupid orange-wearing idiot and you fling yourself in front of him as a meatshield and hope someone else deals with your dickweed brother bc you probably just got yourself killed for this idiot

and then you wake up and everybody except your team is dead and your other teammate is crying bc she thought you were dead but it turns out the guy who killed you (who also looks a little bit like your mom but maybe you're just losing it and anyway he's got a hole in his chest now so who cares) was too nice to kill you and the last time someone could've killed you but didn't for some reason it went Super Great so you kinda just wanna go home and sleep for like a week but before you can do that the townspeople name the bridge after your dumb teammate even tho as far as you're aware you're the one who nearly died for it and the rest of your team looks basically ok while you are literally covered in holes but sure fine whatever

Title: DAQUIRI

Arrangement: negi, Gatou, & Bos

Album: TOMATO AND BITTERS

Circle: トマト組

[A picture of a drawing on the screen of a Nintendo 3DS. The drawing pictures Madara, in armour with Edo Tensei cracks, from the side smiling and holding Gatō, who is a lot shorter, up. Gatō is wearing a black suit and tie, smiling and waving his hands. End ID]

SARUTOBI HIRUZEN vs GATOU

Reasons for submission under the cut

[ID: A cut manga panel of Gatō from Naruto. He's smirking and wearing a suit and tie, with black round sunglasses. End ID]

Madara x Gatō fic | 671 words | Summary ⤵

Gatō has been yearning for Madara for so long, he needs to get to him now.

also, do you think the chuunin exams were especially traumatic during the sannin era, especially bc they were 6 (or a few years older but defo younger than naruto's gen) ??? and even if it wasn't the chuunin exams goal to create a traumabond, it certainly did for the sannin?

honestly, no. it's possible that i'm just the sort of person who tends to assume the best of people, especially fictional ones, but it's also true that i just tend to find fucked up shit more interesting when it was done with good intentions. i'm only into cartoonishly heinous motivations when they're applied to individuals rather than systems, i guess.

the thing you need to keep in mind concerning my view of the naruto universe is that literally every single character is deeply traumatized, whether they're aware of that or not. for starters, the vast majority of characters were raised to be child soldiers in a world where that's considered normal. our modern view of the 18-21 age group as the youngest adults doesn't apply there - legally, these people are becoming adults at ages as young as twelve (and that's the improved version - a lot of the older cast members have been shinobi since as young as five or six).

even the characters who never became ninja have all been through some pretty serious trauma. ayame and teuchi lived through the kyuubi attack, tazuna and his family had to deal with the whole gatou situation, and so on. no one in this world is remotely okay by our standards. but what that means is that being a neurotic mess is the norm. for the whole. entire. world.

a world based on structures so fucked up is going to be full of thoughts that to us seem entirely contradictory - how can konoha say it cares for its citizens when of the five most famous genin-by-six, the most functional is jiraiya (kakashi is a mess, tsunade is drinking and gambling away her problems, orochimaru is out there inventing to moral event horizons to cross, and itachi murdered his whole family and tortured his little brother about it)? but - and this is something that is understandably hard for people to wrap their heads around - we're shown things from people like the sandaime's point of view. we know - for a fact - that hiruzen cares deeply about his village and its citizens, and that most of the people he was personally involved in fucking up are the ones he - genuinely - cared for the most.

the second thing you need to be aware of is that the rankings in the naruto world are based on real life ninja ranks - jounin, chuunin, and genin are all real world terms that were modified to fit the world of naruto. whether irl ninja could move up in the ranks or not is something i don't know, but given that naruto is a shounen, it makes sense for the protagonist to have a clearcut explanation of the steps he needs to take to achieve his goal (ninja president) laid out early on, and that he and his friends be given the opportunity to move through the ranks throughout the course of the story (although, as many people have pointed out, naruto stayed a genin pretty much the whole time)

from an irl perspective, the chuunin exams are a way to introduce other characters, give the main trio a chance to level up, and also have a tournament arc for funsies. in-universe, the purpose is for genin to get a chance (or six chances kabuto) to become chuunin, and to strengthen ties with other villages via a show of trust - we're showing you our next generation. this is incentive to maybe not go to war again pretty please heart emoji poop emoji.

the thing is, life and innocence are valued in konoha, and likely the other villages as well, though we don't see it as much. but it's such a twisted, foreign concept to us real world non child soldiers that it doesn't seem like it (more accurately, it's valued by the people but not the system, and the people in charge of the system ignore that bc unfortunately for the entire naruto universe sakura didn't get around to inventing mental health until after the fourth war ended)

danzou and hiruzen exemplify this perfectly imo. hiruzen is full of ideals and beliefs and trust, and bc of that isn't able to see the system for what it is and can never fully understand why all of his good intentions keep churning out shitshows. on the other end of the spectrum, danzou is very aware of the world he lives in, possibly more than almost any other character. but bc of that he views the nature of humans as a flaw for shinobi to overcome - ninja are tools for the good of the village, and can and will be discarded just as easily. from a brutally practical viewpoint, danzou and hiruzen were probably genuinely extremely effective at keeping konoha together. it's just that how that worked out and how they did it is morally abhorrent to the majority of people (including hiruzen himself)

lastly, the concept of trauma as we view it not only doesn't but honestly can't exist in the world of naruto. say someone has a jutsu that allows them to create a brain scan similar to something we can do irl. the effects of mental illness on an adult brain wouldn't register as anything abnormal bc that's what everyone's looks like. you aren't having a "panic attack" or a "trauma response" or a "flashback", you're just going through the same shit everyone else is. that's all par for the course, it's just what life is like. that's how the world of naruto sees it, at least.

so where we see "children going through horrific events together and bonding bc they have no choice", the residents of narutolandia see "tuesday". so no, i don't think the chuunin exams were formed with the intent of gluing people to each other via trauma - they don't need to be. that's what life is for.

concerning the sannin, i'm not sure they ever took the chuunin exams. i honestly don't even know if the chuunin exams would've been a thing yet - the earliest one we know of is the one kakashi and his team were at, which was konoha-only and thus already fairly different from the one naruto went through. the sannin lived through all of the first three ninja wars, and though they probably didn't fight in the first one, they likely became genin just as it ended (otherwise i'm not sure how sarutobi would've had time to teach them...?). orochimaru's parents were already dead by the time he became a genin, so it's not hard to imagine they died in the first war. the sannin are actually relatively lucky - the second world war didn't happen until they were in their 20s, so they got a good two decades of not being at war (this is the longest space of time between the wars, followed by the time between the third and fourth wars (~15 years) and then the time between the second and third wars (less than 1 year)).

actually, thinking about it now, i think it's possible that spend early pre-ninja childhood with their village at war, then spending the rest of their youths in (relative) peace, and then finally getting tossed right back into shitshow two electric boogaloo might've been why they ended up more fucked up than most. so i guess the solution really was the moon coma after all

Title: NO.160

Arrangement: negi & Gatou

Album: TOMATO FIZZ

Circle: トマト組