Chapitre 20: Naruto : Monsters: Chapter 20
Naruto just pouted at me, "So you already knew." She crossed her arms and looked away. "It isn't fair. How come you always seem to know everything, Hikaru?"
"It's called reading Naruto." I told the girl, "You should try it sometime. If you'd only read all the books I keep giving you to study instead of the bare minimum I allow you to get away with, you'd know just as much as I do."
...
She stuck her tongue out at me. "Blah, books." She spat out, acting as if the just speaking the word had left a bad taste on her mouth, before turning to glare at the medical book on my desk, the one I had been using as an improvised pillow just minutes ago.
"I can't understand how you can even like those things, they're boring. And evil. Evil I tell you!"
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the girl's melodramatics. Really, no matter how hard I tried I never was able to get Naruto into reading. It was like Kakashi had once said, Naruto was a Kinesthetic Learner.
While she was nowhere near as stupid as she behaved in the show, and thank every deity out there for that mercy, theory was never going to be her strong point. Practical lessons was where she excelled in.
Once I figured that out, it made things a lot easier to get her to understand her classwork. Naruto's grades began to shoot up nearly overnight and while it wouldn't be accurate to say it had been easy, I could proudly say Naruto was steadily becoming an excellent student.
And after two hard years of training her and playing on her strengths, she wasn't the dead last she was supposed to be. Technically she was the top female student of the class, though that had more to do with the bad turnout of talented kunoichi in this year's crop of students than her own ability.
As Naruto kept on prattling on the evils of books, I took the chance to look her over.
At eight year old, her appearance hasn't changed that much since we first met. Her love for orange clothing hasn't changed, a crime against fashion that I wasn't able to prevent.
Though I had thankfully managed to convince her to tone it down to a more reasonable level and mixed it up with other colours, everything she wears was still predominantly orange.
She managed to gain a couple of inches in height though nothing major, and she grew her hair out so that they now just barely brushed her shoulders, but other than that very little about her appearance had changed over the years.
The last change may have been my fault. Apparently being mistaken for a boy all those years ago was traumatizing enough of an experience that she never wanted to have a repeat of again.
But really, that wasn't my fault. How was I supposed to know she was a girl? If there was anyone that should be blamed, then it was Kishimoto.
Now I know that sounds like I'm just dodging the blame but just hear me out on this. I've lived in this world for eight years now and after thinking long and hard on the matter, I've come to the conclusion that this universe was, in fact, the one and the same universe as the Naruto series. Other than my existence and the direct changes that resulted from it, it was a perfect replica of the Manga.
But if that were the case then why wasn't Naruto a boy? Or why wasn't I kidnapped? The solution was simple; the reason why some things were different was because Kishimoto had altered the plot of the Manga so that it would sell better.
Think about it. Naruto was a Shounen manga. How many successful Shounen mangas were there with female leads?
Naruto had always been a girl but Kishimoto, knowing that most of his audience would be young adolescent boys, naturally concluded that they would have trouble relating to a female lead. So in order to better suit his target demographic, he had flipped the main character's gender from female to male.
And when you start thinking about it that way, it made you wonder what else had Kishimoto changed? What other details was he willing to twist to make a better story? That's when it hit me, the Hyuuga Affair. Everything relating to the event was something he made up to make the story more entertaining.
Neji's entire character arc, his tragic past, all of it was something Kishimoto made up to spice up the plot. And let's admit it, Neji's past and character development was awesome to watch even if it was littered with plot holes in hindsight.
Take a moment to consider how little Neji's past made sense.
The entire source of Neji's psychological trauma was based on a misunderstanding. He thought that Hiashi, his uncle, had murdered his father on a cruel whim. Which wasn't even true. What made it worse was that Hiashi could have easily nipped the entire issue in the bud.
All he had to do was sit Neji down and explain that he had not murdered his father, rather Hizashi willingly sacrificed himself to save his life.
But for some stupid reason, Hiashi allowed Neji to continue living under the false assumption that he murdered his own brother for years.
Hell, why had Hizashi even allowed himself to be killed in front of his son? Couldn't he have just chosen another time to pull the stunt off? At the very least he could have waited for the boy to leave or explained to him what he planned to do. To avoid traumatizing his preteen son, if nothing else.
See what I meant? Plot holes everywhere.
Then there were other facts that supported my theory, especially the one that Naruto had always been a girl. Think back on Naruto's behaviour during the entire show, only this time imagine she was a girl instead of a boy, and things started making a frightening amount of sense.
Naruto's obsession with getting Sasuke back had nothing to do with their friendship or her promise to Sakura, she wanted to get Sasuke back because she was in love with him.
And while the thought of anyone falling for that prick made me sick, it all fits. Even that accidental kiss between the two at the start of the show takes on a completely different light if you realized that Naruto was a girl.
Hell, even Sai's infamous nickname for her made a lot more sense.
She really was 'Dickless'.
That's right, it turns out that the Naruto series was nothing more than one big fat love story between Sasuke and Naruto.
Shuddering at the thought of me ever enjoying a show about a romance between the two, I quickly looked for something to take my mind off it and was fortunate enough to find just the thing.
Snatching one of the strips of chakra papers out of her hand, I interrupted her speech about evils books, which she had still been rattling on about. "Hey Naruto, are you ever going to use that thing or not."
Naruto quickly brightened, "That's right! I almost forgot." She held the paper in front of her face, gazing at it in excitement before freezing. Naruto slowly turned back to look at me with a sheepish smile on her face, "How are these things supposed to work again?"
I rubbed my temples before sighing at the girl, "And this is why you should crack open a book from time to time, or at least try to pay a bit more attention in class." While Naruto was far from stupid, she had the attention span of an alcoholic gnat.
"Sorry, sorry." She rubbed the back of her head in embarrassment before turning her excited blue eyes on me. "So, how do they work?"
Raising my hand up between us with the strip of paper held between my index and middle fingers, I said, "Simple, just draw out your chakra and direct it into the paper. That's pretty much it, the rest is automatic.
The paper will undergo a different chemical reaction depending on your chakra affinity. If your chakra leans towards fire it will burn, if its water it will get wet, wind will cut in two, lightning will crinkle it, while earth will turn it to dust."
I explained before demonstrating by pouring my own chakra into the paper.
To me, calling on my chakra had always felt like drawing water from a deep but full well. It wasn't enough to simply open up my reserves, I had to coax it out, just like pulling a bucket from a well.
The hard part was making sure to only draw out the precise amount needed and nothing more. Too little and nothing will happen, too much and I'll end up wasting chakra.
Most people didn't really care if they wasted a little bit of chakra but to me the very thought was sacrilegious. It may have been to my experiences as a toddler but I couldn't imagine letting a single drop go to waste.
...
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