#justenzhe

Tagged by @fineillsignup!

1. An Even More Different World — My current main fic, A Different World, is so sprawling and ambitious, and has been revised so much while writing, that I have a bunch of little scenes that’re fine, but just don’t work with the direction I ended up going. I’d like to clean them up and post them. Maybe.

Sample:

Nagato who commanded Yahiko's body as the Deva Path. Itachi with Shisui's eyes. And himself, with the eye he had once given to Kakashi.

Obito was starting to feel uncomfortable, which meant one thing: it was time to say something stupid.

"Is there anyone here who hasn't harvested their best friend's corpse?" he asked.

(Another example: In earlier revisions, Kakashi ended up working in admin—specifically, as a strategic advisor to the Hokage—after giving his sharingan back to Obito. This idea developed into Kakashi’s mother working in admin in the published fic, but I still have an entire scene written for this storyline.)

2. The Philosophes — What if Naruto isn’t weird, and all ninjas fought with Talking no Jutsu? All “battles” would be depicted entirely via dialogue and metaphor. Laying out their motivations and justifications for what they do and believe becomes the entire point of fighting. (Despite the fancy title, it’s less like formal debate and more like a particularly intense and loud personal argument.)

The concept alone is the most pretentious Naruto fic ever.

Featuring: Messiah!Naruto preaching universal love in world of hatred and suffering; Objectivist!Orochimaru; failed messiah Obito who’s tried the power of love, and knows it can’t change the world.

Sample:

“We must love one another or die,” Naruto said.

“True,” said Obito. “But we don’t love one another. And we’re dying.”

3. As We Lay Dying — A series of depressing one-shots exploring various characters’ reasoning behind all the shit they did. I have one-and-a-half chapters written for this one so far.

Sample:

Itachi knows the value of every life. War was the arbitrage of the priceless, and he would attenuate the cost.

4. Samsara Wheel — The world is set. Rin always dies, Kakashi always lives, Obito always breaks. Until Rin lives, just once. It's all she needs. Rin will tear down the wheel of fate itself to save her team.

Like A Different World, this is way too ambitious. Featuring: massively OP tailed-beast-sage-mode Rin in pursuit of whoever keeps destroying every AU she discovers; multiple versions of Kakashi (the traumatized canon!Kakashi, a traumatized TeenagedHokage!Kakashi who still somehow fails to ever save anyone he loves); and multiple versions of Obito (Hokage!Obito, and of course, Evil!Obito who’s destroying universes in his search for the “perfect” version of his team).

I have only a couple hundred words of this written. (The original inspiration for this fic was “Time Braid, minus all the gross parts, and for Team Minato”.)

5. Dark Naruto — A deconstruction of all the ~Dark Naruto~ fics floating around. Unfortunately, I can’t decide if it’ll be completely straightforward (letting Naruto’s cruel, counterproductive, foolish actions speak for themselves) or if it’ll mostly be a comedy. I’ve written some for both!

Featuring:  AU Sasuke, seeing how awful Naruto is, decides he doesn’t want to be anything like that—even if it means not avenging his clan. I hope you like the idea of awkward good-guy Sasuke!

Sample:

“Congratulations Naruto!” announced Kakashi. “You’ve failed.”

“What?!” yelled Naruto indignantly. (He was always indignant because other people were always idiots.) “You said 'be ready to kill'! And I totally was! You’re a stupid teacher, just like all the others! I’m better than either of those two losers,” he said, jabbing a finger at Sakura and Sasuke.

Sasuke was hunched over bleeding while Sakura frantically applied the first aid she’d learned in academy.

“Double failed,” said Kakashi.

Naruto screamed and charged at him. Naruto wasn’t sure what happened, but he somehow ended up hanging by his leg, paralyzed by a slight current running from Kakashi’s fingers.

“Triple failed,” said Kakashi.

Naruto blinked and he was still standing, as if he’d never charged at Kakashi. Illusion. “Take me seriously!” Naruto demanded, throwing a kunai at his shitty-ass teacher.

The kunai was caught and thrown back at his feet. Kakashi was so fast that Naruto didn’t even realize this until he tripped over the kunai now in front of his foot.

“No,” said Kakashi. “You’re an asshole.”

“I’m a realist!” yelled Naruto. “I make the hard choices others don’t!”

“Quadruple failed,” said Kakashi. “Violence is a tool—one of many in a ninja’s arsenal. And it’s certainly not a tool you turn on your own comrades.”

Feel free to let me know if any of these strike your fancy. I still don’t know which one I’ll focus on once I’m done with A Different World.

Tagged by @justenzhe to post the last sentence I wrote from a story I’m working on. Thank you!

The world needed to change. But how? With himself, obviously, and his sword.

(I’m cheating by including the full paragraph.)

I tag @lightwolf, @arch-nemesis, and @shrrrr1mp (nothing in the meme said it had to be fanfiction :-P )

Not part of the meme, but I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about my writing process.

This sentence may or may not make it into the final draft. But it’s still really important to me. I’m approaching the chapter in my fic where I try to address “What the hell has been going on in Hidden Mist this whole time?”, and that means attempting to write some characters I’m not used to writing yet. My grasp of Zabuza in particular was shaky.

So I’m pretty pleased with this paragraph; I feel like his characterization has solidified into something I can work with. Zabuza is very, very smart—he asks sharp questions about the world and himself—, but he reaches for terrible answers (“Just kill anyone in the way. Personally.”).