fun fact: it takes about five months for babies to develop depth perception.
related fun fact: babies as young as five months old show consciousness–that is, they actively process their surroundings rather than simply reacting to stimuli.
conclusion: all the reincarnation si/oc fics where people are conscious in the womb or while being birthed and where they are able to see clearly within like a week of being born are fake and you actually just kinda come to yourself slowly as a baby. you realize one day that you’re a baby and by that point you’re already integrated into another family and going through developmental milestones
I think starting with birth is a genre convention that Silver Queen popularized with Dreaming of Sunshine, although DoS did actually address what you’re talking about in your post somewhat:
But like I said before, I was born to Shikaku and Yoshino Nara in the Konoha General Hospital on the 22nd of September as the younger of twins. It sounds so amazing when said like that. A spiritual miracle. The truth was, at the time I had no idea what was happening. I was twisted and squeezed and the comforting darkness in which I had rested was torn away. There was pain and cold and terror. There was immediacy. Things that hadn’t seemed important were suddenly at the forefront of my mind; what had happened; where was I; was I alive or dead, hurt or injured; what was going on?
I couldn’t tell.
When babies are born, their eyes are incredibly undeveloped. The entire world was a blur to me. It wasn’t quite colour blindness, but the easiest thing to see was the stark contrast between light and dark. I could see shapes and edges but the world looked incredibly confusing.
SQ also spends all of the prologue/first chapter summarizing, moving thing along at a nice clip, and talks about all of it in the past tense. From the writing in the first chapter, it’s apparent that Shikako is literally remembering this and telling the reader about it, rather than experiencing it as we read, so it’s always made sense to me as like… the way Shikako makes sense of what she remembers, leading up to her fulling realizing what’s happened at the end of the chapter when first her eyes fully develop so she can see details and then finally she goes outside and sees the Hokage faces on the mountain.
That being said, I would love to see the SI/OC genre move away from starting with birth because babies and young kids have no agency, both literally in real life and also as characters. I guess in Naruto a kid as young as four or five might be training to kill people, might actually be sent to kill people, but that’s not going to be the case for most characters. I really liked @sage-thrasher‘s cold open in Sanitize, which starts with the insert being about 10 years old.
good point about DoS popularizing certain SI/OC conventions. i don’t necessarily mind this particular convention in most cases–i’ve come to expect it from the naruto fandom, at least–but i wrote this post after reading a fic from another fandom (which… probably had DoS’ genre influence, yeah) wherein the main character was outed as not being a normal baby within a week of being born.
a week.
because of a myriad of things that boiled down to “clearly, having the memories of an adult means that the body of a baby is nearly entirely overwritten. the necessary developmental milestones are met with alarming alacrity through a combination of an adult mind and determination. language and cultural barriers expected from a native english speaker finding themselves in a country whose predominant language is not english are ignored with great prejudice, allowing a one-year-old to have a vocabulary that is more vast than her eight-year-old brother’s.”
i’m like Please. Please. Remember You’re Writing A Literal Baby?
like… if you’re going to start from birth, you can’t just… Speed Through Development? you are purposely starting with the most vulnerable point of a life, where your character is physically and cognitively unable to take care of themselves. being an adult in mind is not going to help you walk and talk at five months old. if you want your character to be able to do things, Don’t Start At Birth, Where They Cannot Do Things?
like–summing this part up as “they have no agency” is so true. it’s a convention, yes, but the characters have no agency. they literally cannot do anything. they’re a baby! they’re a small child! you don’t look at a baby and think, “yes, this baby is going to catalyze great change and avert this world from imminent disaster.” they’re a BABY. they’re learning how to crawl and roll over. they’re not the savior of any world right now.
like, fanfic writers, it’s okay to skip over narrating your character’s birth. it’s okay to skip over the first few years of their life. having to write someone’s entire life is never going to be a requirement.
(Sidenote — man sometimes it’s crazy how so much of this genre can be tracked back to DoS??? possibly even the term SI/OC itself like. damn. although peggy sue time travel stories do sometimes go all the way back to birth as well, I think.)
I have a looong post halfway written up about how I think fanfiction writers just like…. forget that they don’t have to tell stories 100% linearly and also forget that they can just… mention past events…. because they learn to stop doing the italicized flashback and then are like “clearly all kinds of flashback are bad” and then struggle with like. how to cover events before the start of their plot. Thus: start with being a baby, because otherwise how could the reader possibly learn about the baby years?
But yeah I totally agree most stories really, REALLY don’t need to start from birth, even SI/OC stories. Dreaming of Sunshine was about exploring the worldbuilding of Naruto from the very start and lots of the childhood things serve to set up later character development and things, and I think covering childhood very briefly can be good for SI/OC stories, but so often it just seems like they’re just checking it off the list. Or like they want to make sure that their MC is really really justified in the skills they have when it comes time to (in the case of Naruto fic) be a genin, possibly because of fear of the Dreaded Mary Sue Label… even though as long as they’re at an appropriate level most readers will just accept that they have those skills and move on if they open with them.
Anyway, I’m right there with you. It drives me crazy like 90% of the time to have the MC be a baby or a toddler, even with an adult mind. It’s fine if authors wanna write that! They should live their dreams! But they should also consider whether that’s… really… the best place to start….
I think it’s important not to equate age with experience – even an adult is going to have problems with ‘I made a mistake and now my brother is injured’. Even experience probably wouldn’t change that, but an experienced mission leader would probably have been able to react to the situation and handle the aftermath better. And experience, unfortunately, only comes with doing the thing.
In the General Forces a specialty is assigned based on the skills a person has – Shikako gets made Special Jounin based on her ability to sense things specifically. There are Sp Jounin in kenjutsu or code breaking or interrogation.
In ANBU the designation is much more output focused – so the individual is as faceless as possible. That means you have specialties like ‘sabotage’ or ‘acquisition’ or ‘infiltration’ instead. They’re all broad categories that require multiple skills, while giving mission assigners a brief idea of what ANBU are capable of.
For Shikako, she’s got a very broad range of skills and Tsunade knows that Team 7 is good at adapting and reacting to new situations on the fly. and that their missions are liable to go sideways And of course, as Shikako herself says: It’s the official terminology for ‘ruins everything I touch’.
Cheloneuniverse 