Yet Another Pointless Anime Blog
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It seems like most of my posts here are about why I didn’t like something. I suppose it says something unflattering about me, but I find I have much more to say about things I didn’t like than things I enjoyed.
Ah well, enough introspection. Rant after the cut, consider yourself spoiler-warned if you haven’t been following the Naruto manga.
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One of my traits as a writer is that I find it very hard to write in a non-linear fashion. I much prefer to start at the beginning of the story and write each chapter and scene in order. This is good on the scale of the whole story, since it means I can serially release chapters. On the level of chapters, though, it’s rather annoying, because it means that when a scene isn’t coming together, it can stall all progress for days, weeks, or even months.
The only thing that’ s worse than this is when I force my way through such a scene, come back to it the next night, and realize that what I wrote was such utter crud that it’s nearly unsalvageable.
Which is what just happened with the third scene of the final chapter of One Hundred Days. Bleh. The worst part is that it’s a simple scene – essentially the good guys launching an attack on the bad guys’ base and the guards at the entrance holding them off long enough for the rest of the bad guys to join the fight – but I just can’t get it to come together in any way that’s interesting to read and flows well.
So I figured I would whine about it here. Because that’s what blogs are for, right?
Chapter 16 of One Hundred Days, imaginatively entitled “The Hundredth Day,” is now outlined and weighs in at 22 scenes.
Just in case someone cares.
Complete explanations of Naruto face exactly the same problem [as Lain]. Neither Kishimoto nor Abe thought out their respective worlds in the detail required to sustain such explanations. So when the question of overseas nations with nuclear power arises, the answer is… a magical shield (if that). Heck, nobody can even explain why radio exists while telephone does not, or why an outboard engine exists, but not a car.
The best explanation of the Naruto world’s tech level that I’ve seen comes from a thread on anachronistic settings over on the RPG.Net Forums, where Thomas T explains:
There’s computers, power lines, motors, cameras and radio headsets but no guns, cars, factories, or indeed anything that smells of industry.
And no explanation is offered or even needed because the whole point of the setting is just “Holy crap! Ninjas!” It’s a historical setting with a heapin’ helpin’ of every modern convenience that can be included without outshining the ninjas or modernising the “feel” of the world.
Which is probably about as far as Kishimoto thought out the world’s tech levels and why it’s generally not worth thinking too hard about them.
If you knew me, you wouldn’t be surprised that I have thought too hard about them.
Fairly typical filler episode this time around. Most amusing bit was probably the reused material. We literally just had a filler arc about a renegade from an evil bandit group, now we have another one. We’ve also got the return of lightning strike-induced fire (though for real this time, instead of illusory) and therefore the return of the ninja firemen.
As my choice of screencap demonstrates, the most… um… unique part of the episode was Sakura in a nurse’s outfit. Anyone care to lay a wager as to how long until the hentai artists produce works along those lines?
One thing the fillers have been fairly good at doing is adding some additional bits and pieces to the fanfiction writer’s toolbox. The most notable of those was probably the first filler arc naming the country in which the Hidden Village of Sound resides as the Rice Field Country, but there’s been other useful additions to the universe scattered about the filler arcs. This arc… not so much, thus far. I suppose it’s possible that some of the characters could evolve into something usable, but thus far they have nothing to recommend themselves.
I think this post makes me the only anime blogger on the internet to cover Naruto fillers. Hooray?
Down near the bottom of the linked page (20061127.1950), Steven Den Beste talks about a set of characters from Kamichu, “Team Good Fortune”:
I think they tried to make each one a pun. For instance, when she names Chou, she says, “Your advice was very useful.” I think the word she used in there was chouhou, which means ?? “usefulness”, or maybe ?? “handy, convenient”. But chou also means ? “butterfly”, and that’s what Chou-chan is.
For Ino, I think Yurie says, “Ki ni shi nakute ii no”, and then decides on “Ino” for his name. But ? inoshishi means “wild boar”.
I’ve listened to the section where Shika gets his name three times and I cannot pick out any reason for why she names him, except the obvious one: shika means “deer”, which is what he is. She says it’s a punishment, however. (He’d just insulted her handwriting.)
Chou-chan gets her name at 1:30:10. Ino gets his at 1:34:32. Shika is at 1:36:13. Those are all time offsets on DVD 1 of the series. Anyone who has a better ear care to help me out with this?
I don’t own the series in question, and I don’t know Japanese, but those names ring a very big bell to me. If you’ve seen much Naruto, they should to you, too:
Above we’ve got Akimichi Chouji, Nara Shikamaru, and Yamanaka Ino, along with their teacher Sarutobi Asuma. Or, in other words, Team InoShikaChou.
Checking a little bit, it appears that Kamichi is young enough that, in theory, its characters could be a reference to Naruto, though the choice of genders would be odd in that case. I find it much more likely, however, that instead both are referencing some other source, perhaps a famous Japanese story. It would certainly fit with Kishimoto’s naming practices; most names in Naruto are some form of pun, and the names (and partially the characters) of the Legendary Sannin are lifted from an old Japanese story.
So, it’s not really an answer to the original question, but it might be a fruitful avenue of investigation.
UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Steven Den Beste has the answer (20061216.2130):
Actually, as best I’ve been able to determine, those are both references to a Japanese card game called hanafuda that dates to the latter part of the Shogunate. It uses a 48 card deck divided into 12 suits of 4 cards each. The cards all have unique names, and some of them are animals. (Nintendo’s original business was making and selling hanafuda decks.)
A hand which includes the boar (ino), the deer (shika), and the butterfly (chou) is a good one. It’s referred to as inoshikachou.
Apparently there are a lot of references to this in anime. The first Sakura Wars video game, which came out in 1996, had three villains named Ino, Shika and Chou. And the Dragonball manga, from the late 1980′s, had a villain named Inoshikachyou.