[META] What do you do in the Naruto fandom?

[wafflelate]

(This has been crossposted to wafflelate here)

bushwah replied to my post in addme_fandom and at the beginning of their comment said, "Naruto canon is a fairly typical child soldier comedy from what I've seen, but the fandom somehow manages to crank out absurd amounts of quality content on all kinds of themes. What do you do in Naruto fandom?"

This question ate my brain because I parsed the question as a general "you" as in "What do you do in your part of the Naruto fandom, and why?" and I realized my full thought process was probably too long to just throw up in an unrelated community. Also, I wanted to see if I could entice some comments from other folks on the subject, since my part of the Naruto fandom is by no means representative.

What do you do in the Naruto fandom?

I think that looking at Naruto canon as a fairly typical child soldier comedy is... alright, not wrong, in the end, it turns out, but in the fannish circles I travel in, a big thing that keeps people going is actually that Naruto broke its major narrative promises, as fineillsignup put it, not only does Naruto (the series and the character) fail to change that child soldier thing at all but also:

What it all ends up to is that I thought I was reading a ninja comic about the importance of bonds and making bonds and family and family of choice, and then in the ending everybody scatters away and disconnects. It’s unsatisfying, no matter how happy we’re told they are.

I suppose people who start the series knowing where/how it ends, knowing what it becomes, maybe they just kind of settle in for a Normal Battle Anime Experience? Maybe they don't get too attached to that part in the Wave arc where Naruto makes Zabuza cry by declaring that this bullshit about ninja being only weapons is wrong and fake and actually emotional bonds are important, but some of us were really looking forward to seeing Naruto go against the grain of his society and it's frustrating that he didn't.

So, you know, I guess the statement Naruto canon is a fairly typical child soldier comedy turned out to be true? But the fact that it's true is why we make so much stuff on so many different themes!

fineillsignup said it much better than I could, yet again:

Sometimes people then say “lol salty then why do u bother reading it”. Paradoxically, I probably have more interest in Naruto fandom because the ending was shit than I would if it was great. It’s like I bought a cookbook that had a recipe that had amazing ingredients and was going perfectly, until I got to the last step and the last step was “pour into a bucket of raw sewage and allow to ferment for a week before consuming.”

If the last step of the recipe was satisfying, I’d probably be like “cool cool, that was great” and that would be that. Instead, here I am online saying “Heyyyyyy I want to make this recipe but not with that horrible last step, what are other people doing?” And then we discuss what awesome things we’re doing, and also sometimes commiserate with each other about how terrible the sewage ending was.

(Of course some people don't mind the ending! Some people are enjoying the hell out of Boruto, and good for them, although I don't get it and can't find any meta on it to my deep disappointment. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough...)

But anyway all that to say that many of us are dissatisfied with the canon material, sometimes because we're super salty about the ending but also sometimes because the series introduces so many characters but doesn't have time to actually explore them all. It's also very light on worldbuilding information, has a terrible timeline, and was written very quickly in a serial manner, so all parts of canon are a little wobbly.

What this leads to is a situation like American comics, where in my experience people who really love a character will also throw out years or even decades of canon material because they think so-and-so's run is garbage. Only, with Naruto, some things are different:

• Naruto's publishing history only goes back to like 1999 and only became commercially available in English in the mid-00's, so the canon and fandom aren't too old.
• The anime and manga are widely available and there's no question about where to start if you want to get into it.
• Lots of people (like me!) saw parts of it when we were younger and are at least passively familiar with the plot before ever getting into the fandom later in life.
• Paradoxically, it's both an open canon — because of Boruto — and a closed canon — because "Is Boruto canon?" is an entire can of delicious worms wherein even if someone answers "no" very strongly with a lot of emphasis, that doesn't mean they don't still gawk at the show from a distance, fascinated and horrified.

So like... what do we do? Generally, we do whatever we want I guess, often with lots of focus on whatever minor or underdeveloped character/concept caught our eye. I'm part of a very nice Suna-focused Discord. People are producing zines and running challenges.

Here's some interesting things people are specifically up to!

• The Dreaming of Sunshine recursive fandom takes a 700k fanfic as its canon, which is my main contact with Naruto.
• There's folks over on the SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity forums running quests (a sort of interactive fiction run on forums) like this one that focuses on Sasuke.
• I've heard good, interesting things about ANBU Legacy, a long-running fic-style roleplay.

So, what do you do in the Naruto fandom? What do you think we, the fandom, do in general, and how has it changed?

I would especially love to hear from the pro-Kishimoto/pro-Naruto ending/pro-Boruto side of things, as I know basically nothing about that. Why do you feel the way you do?