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….
shoutout to this nameless, generic Snow ninja for being focused + bored at all the carnage
this is just another day on the job for him, and it sucks:
no jumps
no flips
no cool jutsu
he doesn’t even get to show off how good he is at throwing kunai, even though he’s probably been training his whole life to throw kunai real good, since he’s a ninja and all.
no, this guy’s job is to just… turn that crank.. and probably try not to get frostbite, because I see that despite this task taking absolutely no manual dexterity, no one’s provided full gloves for this poor man. that crank is totally metal! it’s below freezing on top of a mountain!!! he should complain to his union reps.
RIP nameless, faceless, characterizationless Snow ninja, who only got a few seconds of screentime but who i nonetheless loved deeply. you were cut down exploded in the prime of your life by uchiha sasuke and will absolutely be forgotten sorry 😥
okay i KNOW that Naruto is the protagonist of the Land of Snow movie because Naruto Is The Protagonist but frankly???? what a mistake. if i were going to rewrite this movie (which… don’t tempt me) and if this movie were allowed to have real character growth and important character moments….
Naruto should learn a lesson from the princess
it’s a Naruto movie and the plot kind of demands that she still go through with it, but as much as this is a story about the princess realizing that she can’t give up, this should also be a story where Naruto makes a real, emotional connection with the princess.
at the beginning of the movie the princess doesn’t want to sign autographs.
she’s like what’s so special about my autograph? you’ll shove it in a drawer and it’ll collect dust. it’s “useless” and a “waste of time”.
meanwhile Naruto gets caught up in fannish excitement and chases down her horse! he also calls her by her character name for like the first half of the movie.
Naruto should have gotten to learn why the princess felt her fame as an actress was “a joke”!
in the end of course the only person we really get to see change is the princess, who (because this is a nart movie) discovers that actually she just had to believe in herself and Naruto all along and she was, idk, wrong for being scared of being literally murdered by the powerful dude who literally murdered her father.
Naruto could have had a real conversation with her about how empty her life has been since she left Land of Snow and how isolated she’s been by her trauma and fear. Naruto could hear, in her explanation of how meaningless her fame is, an echo of his own loneliness. Naruto could have looked past her film persona and actually really connected with her in a way the rest of the team couldn’t!
furthermore, he could realize that his quest to be recognized and loved by the village, although a perfectly fine goal, could become an empty dream if he doesn’t really focus on being recognized and loved for the right reasons.
at the end of the movie when the princess is gladly signing autographs, Naruto would get to see that this fame and adoration brings her joy because it’s based around her doing something really good for these people, not around who they think she is, and the autograph that he has from her would be super meaningful.
(ok, it’s already a little meaningful because Sasuke got it for him, but you know what I mean.)
I think calling the Uchiha oppressed prior to the massacre (important!) would be an overreach. They were a clan that was involved in a simmering power struggle with some other clans in their shinobi coalition village experiment. They were given special authority (police status) that had pros and cons. The limitation of their movements had pros and cons. The whole business of the Uchiha clan district doesn’t appear to be different than many other clan compounds.
Now, the way that they were surprise attacked and wiped out down to the youngest and oldest member? That’s oppression, yeah.
As I’ve mentioned before but am too lazy to look up, this kind of “wiping out an entire clan” thing is a historical thing that really happened for logical, if brutal and merciless, reasons.
The thought pattern goes like this: revenge cycles cause massive destruction over generations, potentially forever. How to prevent revenge?
Ok, if when you kill someone, you also kill everyone that would be honour-bound to take revenge on their behalf, you’ve stopped the revenge cycle.
So that’s the historical justification for killing babies. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It makes a certain amount of sense, in a lawful evil way. It’s totally in character for Danzo to do it.
Anyway. The clan massacre was a sudden massive and overwhelming oppression. Before that, I wouldn’t say that the Uchiha were really oppressed. They were playing the political game, they just weren’t playing it very well.
Hm, I normally totally agree with you but in this case I only partially agree with you. Especially about the “They were playing a political game, and weren’t playing it very well,” bit. Are you only including the information we were given early series, and not the Itachi Gaiden stuff?
Because I think it was made quite clear in the gaiden stuff that Danzou was actively working against the Uchiha. He had rumors spread about them after the Kyuubi attack. He was working with Orochimaru to steal their bloodline (among others, but his required stealing eyes, so he was actively targeting Uchiha and killing them for it, poor Shisui), he had their clan moved off their original land to the outskirts of the village, where Fugaku claimed it was more difficult for the police to do their jobs, and where it was presumably harder to attract customers.
The Aburame’s preferences were taken into consideration:
The Uchiha’s concerns were dismissed:
So Danzou here is not only sequestering the clan away from the main village, he’s basically dismissing the police’s purpose. Hiruzen then jumps in to try and ‘make up for it’ by letting them have some space for private training grounds…. which only further isolates them from the village. As if training grounds – which are all over the village! – make up for not being as emergency-ready.
And on that note, I don’t believe we see other clans with shops in their compounds – in fact, we explicitly see an Akimichi restaurant that’s not in the clan compound – so that seems like it’s a special Uchiha thing that leaves them very cut off from the village. Perhaps worst of all, he had their clan under constant, active surveillance, which they knew about, which means the other ninja certainly did too. (Hell, if you include the light novel stuff, which I usually don’t, Danzou actively had some Uchiha killed and replaced.)
So, the Uchiha were physically sequestered in their own area, the department they were given that was meant to honor them was declared useless (”We’ll just use ANBU patrols!”) and its ability to function was reduced and isolated from the village at large, and finally, they were actively treated as a threat to the village, and not even secretly, so that had to have affected their ability to have relationships with anyone outside the clan. Their homes, jobs, and social prospects were all distanced from the village, with active enforcement of that sequestration from the government. That sounds like active, structural oppression to me.
(Of course, all this is not even getting started on Danzou just taking and Killing Uchiha clan shinobi, how easily he flexed his power to get the Uchiha massacred even without Hiruzen’s support, and how no justice was sought for them after the fact, but several of those points fall into line with your specification of before the massacre so I suppose they’re not quite as helpful.)
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Also, The Snippet:
As Kakashi predicted, when they wander into the Uchiha district and land at Obito’s house, Rin steps up on her tiptoes and presses a kiss to Obito’s lips. His eyes are wide open, which makes for an amusing picture, but Kakashi only smiles and shoves a hand in his pocket.
“Goodnight, Obito,” says Rin as she pulls away.
“Um,” says Obito, looking like he’s been hit by a particularly strong genjutsu.
Unable to resist the opportunity, Kakashi steps forward in front of his friend. He pulls down his mask, but Obito doesn’t even seem to notice, dazed as he is. “Goodnight, Obito,” says Kakashi, and presses his lips to Obito’s cheek
“Um,” Obito repeats, choked.
Kakashi doesn’t wait for him to gather his bearings, and turns swiftly with his mask back up to head for compound’s exit. When Rin catches up to him, she looks at him with an expression that has far too much humour in it to be truly reproachful. “You only did that to tease him,” she says, elbowing him in his side.
“Maybe,” agrees Kakashi, grinning. “But it was funny.”
Cheloneuniverse 