Hackman

Hiruzen cracked me up so much, pure gold

Danzo put one foot in the grave despite not moving

Guy already has his team, his students are only a year older than Naruto. Naruto should graduate in less than a year.

Interesting, such a roller coaster of a chapter, Ken’s behavior makes me think Saburo didn’t betray them, but I can’t think of a different explanation for the clones then. Very good chapter.

Even cooler that he didn’t change it even though we guessed it. There are so many fics where the author introduces something outlandishly unreasonable, just to have a twist that the reader couldn’t foresee. It’s a pretty small detail but exactly for that reason he could a have just introduced a one-off oc or given the research to someone else. Very endearing.

I kind of understand why readers want him to train Naruto, but I think that wouldn’t be good. Apart from loving Naruto and wanting him to be cool, there is really no reason for this. I want Fujin to become the strongest, not watch him train Naruto to be the strongest. That would be so boring, we know how Naruto becomes the strongest completely without Fujin, we all read the manga. It’s so much more exciting to read how Fujin overcomes those massive odds.

One thing you don’t get enough credit for is how alive this world feels. I know your care for details is often disrespected, I honestly feel so bad for you for having to suffer people who want to impose their ideas onto your story and try to disguise it as criticism. It’s so blatant and disingenuous sometimes. I sincerely appreciate how fleshed out and authentic everything feels, the training chapters we had previously especially. But even in this chapter, of course Zetsu can’t be completely undetectable, especially when someone knows what their looking for, but naturally it can’t be that easy. An Akatsuki member would probably chuckle to themselves that Kakazu would have liked to be the one to catch such a large bounty, but unless you let us see in their head we miss that. Since even them just chuckling or laughing, especially some battle crazed lunatic like Juzo, would otherwise be seen as just another sign of their bloodlust, and in addition to the killing intent a simple laugh would just be corny. And if you leave it out, they just seem so robotic, which could work for other more stoic and reserved Akatsuki members, but not for this guy. Your well executed focus on the characters sets this story really far apart from most other Naruto stories, e.g. Fujin‘s relationship with Hiruzen is expansive and dynamic, but only because Hiruzen feels like a genuine character and not just a contrived caricature of an author‘s view on government figures. I could give more examples but I really just want to say, I appreciate your writing and care for the characters immensely.

I think it’s incredibly disingenuous to compare his vacuum bullets to the Chidori! The Chidori moves so fast that the user can no longer react to things around them, that’s why you need a Sharingan to use it effectively. You literally move so fast that the world around you becomes a complete blur. That’s not the case with Fujin’s bullets, or at least it absolutely isn’t in my mind. The reason they’re so deadly is that, if Fujin fires them at point blank range, in the moment the enemy needs to comprehend what Fujin did his bullet hits them. It’s not that the bullets themselves are too fast to react to. And obviously they need that moment of comprehension because Fujin doesn’t use hand signs that indicate what he is about to do. At range, once the enemy sees the bullet, they can all avoid it. Otherwise it wouldn’t even make sense for Fujin to use them at close range. If his bullets were too fast to react to then he could just snipe down all his opponents from all distances, and that’s simply not the case. So if they all know what he is about to do, why shouldn’t they be able to dodge? It would make less sense if they anticipated what was coming the whole time and still couldn’t dodge.