[DVD commentary] Of Wedding Dresses
Jun. 28th, 2008 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runespoorThis DVD commentary was requested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gehayi. The fic itself is here.
I’m not into wedding!fic or even marriage!fic at all. I’m not into marriage at all in RL, actually, for most of usual reasons (I dislike what it stands for, I hate the institution, and I don’t get why the government/state needs to be notified of people’s personal lives, especially when it gives married people rights the rest of the population doesn’t have). I generally come up with various wild theories how long-standing couples/parents are not married in my fandoms. Thus, maybe, the fic.
This fic has a very long and complicated genesis. Not only because I had more rewrites than for anything else I posted – up to seven variations a line, I think, and generally to end with the first anyway – but because at one point I was wondering if I wasn’t going to couple/contrast it with the boys’ first kills; the title would’ve been Of Wedding Dresses and First Kills. I didn’t do it for reasons I’ll go into later.
The fic originated from a humming song thingy I made up as I was walking once, and which I invented with Sakura in mind. It went something like this: ”Someday I’ll have a wedding dress/ It will be red and mine/Like the colour of happiness/I wear red all the time.” (Hey, nobody said I could actually write songs, all right?) More on that later as well.
I liked the idea, and decided to do something with it. I liked writing The Kunoichi’s Guide to PMS, and I always loved fics that are a collection of snapshots.
My main, completely conscious influences on this were![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
rilina’s 2,5 years, annwyd’s Kunoichi Means, and Chevira Lowe’s “For which they dance” [the fic was on her lj, which she deleted; it’s one of the biggest losses of Naruto fandom.]. Mostly “Kunoichi Means”, because a wedding dress is the most heavily gendered thing you can come up with. In a woman’s life, traditionally the rites of passage are such: first period, wedding, maternity.
This deserves several essays, but basically I wanted to explore the irony of gender roles in the Naruto verse, which is also the reason I wrote a bunch of ‘first kill’ lines for the men.
It didn’t work out because killing isn’t a gendered trait in the Naruto-verse, and I felt I wasn’t being true to the original material by pretending it was, especially if I contrasted it with the wedding dress thing. And also, I admit, because I had a feeling I was ‘making it up’ as I went along – I wasn’t really convinced by most of the anecdotes, and I had a hard time choosing which characters to select. (I may still do something with the ‘first kill’ idea, though.)
At one point I thought I was going to do one for each of the women in Naruto, but some of them were cut, either because I had no idea what they’d think (Konan), or because I felt like I was already saying the same thing elsewhere (Kin would’ve been sort of like Tayuya, though less so).
Tsunade never gets to wear hers. Yet she has already bought it, in provision for when Dan did ask; she should have known better than to tempt fate. She gives it away when she leaves.
If there’s a key to the order, I’ve forgotten it – except of course Shizune. I was more or less writing them as they came to me, and afterwards I couldn’t think of any particularly meaningful order. Though probably I wanted to put Tsunade first because she’s one of the oldest characters.
In most of my other versions for this line, I add that Tsunade gave the dress to ‘a neighbour, a woman she never sees again in her life’. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say with that, so I cut it off.
I have to say Tsunade is the one I feel most sorry for. :( Cause that’s really sad. So I really liked writing it. :) Especially since with the ‘should have known better than to tempt fate’, I indicate that she blames herself entirely for Dan’s death.
Ino gives hers back after the mission is over. The dress is beautiful, but even if it weren’t village property, she wouldn’t want to keep it. The man is dead, and Ino is a widow.
It’s a cliché that kunoichi have angsty seduction missions (and there’s a line inarrankaara’s NaruIno 1sentence, “What do you mean, you have to marry your target?”), so there. I can’t help but think that canon!Ino is sort of a romantic, so the pill must have been rather bitter.
I also wanted something that would show that she hated it, but not something that’d imply she was going to waste her life over it – not over something so unimportant as one mission during which no-one dies. Because that’s not how she rolls.
Sakura’s regular clothes are red like happiness by the end of their fight. Sasuke stops trying to kick Naruto’s arms off from around his legs as she pulls her fist back, straddling him. The rain is pounding on them and her heart bursts into a hymn.
Like I said above, this is the idea that prompted the whole fic. Sakura is the only one to have a wholly happy sentence, because she’s the only one to reject the idea of a wedding/wedding dress as society dictates. By which I ship NaruSasuSaku.
In most other versions of this, the sentences begin like this: “Sakura’s is her regular clothes; bloodied and torn, red like happiness...” I changed it because I can be rather heavy-handed with my metaphors but there are limits I refuse to cross. I liked it better as a thinly-veiled metaphor, and still do; it’s the reasons why I added the reference to a hymn at the end of the sentence.
Red’s of course the blood spilled during the fight, but it also is the colour of happiness in China. (Not Japan, so I know, I cheated, shuttup.)
Also, I’ll never stop gushing over weird Team Seven romance, but you can move along if you don’t want to spend the next moment giggling and going ^_________^ at Sasuke’s deplorable signals.
I still feel like the ‘regular’ is awkward and just too much, but I wanted to make it 100% clear she was not wearing a wedding dress at the time, that the only thing that made her clothes special was the occasion and how she felt about it.
Hinata knows there is a precious kimono pressed in a family closet. She’s never seen it; she knows what it looks like from the photograph of her parents’ wedding. It would be an honor to put it on, but she doesn’t intend to wear it.
Hinata. Hinata didn’t seem to know what she wanted to say. >_< She was very clear about the family kimono, but about what came after? I think at one point she was going to say it was going to be Hanabi’s anyway. :/ But she didn’t, because my Hinata can be – well, not selfish, but focused.
To me, the idea of Hinata only knowing how the dress looks like from a photograph shows the distance between Hinata and her family.
It also refers to the fact that arranged marriage is a plot-point in many NejiHina fics – to Neji or to an outsider of the clan. Arranged marriage is something I’ve always wanted to play with (mostly to have at least one of the two cheating on their spouse, and possibly an open marriage), and I don’t think it’s ‘romantic’ or ‘sweet’ at all, ergo this.
And of course, the eternal ‘Hinata wants to be her own person’ theme that always shows up whenever I write her.
Kurenai dresses in black until she starts showing. Her baby will not have a mother in mourning.
My pet theory that Kurenai got a post-mortem marriage with Asuma. Me pushing my ‘why do people always assume parents in fandom are married wrrry’ agenda.
And by ‘in mourning’ I don’t mean ‘grieving Asuma’. I mean that the change of outfit symbolizes going with the fact that there’s a child to be raised, who, being there and alive, is a higher priority. I’m potentially explaining very badly.
Tenten dreams, a little, when no one is looking.
This line owes so much to “Kunoichi Means”.
I feel rather bad for her – because she doesn’t feel like she’s allowed to daydream about girly things like weddings and marriage. I blame Neji for it (‘when no one is looking’ reminds the reader that she’s on the team of a Byakugan user), and also Lee for saying things like ‘you lack discipline’.
Kushina says no, no, no, and in her grave they put both headbands. In place of a dress there’s a shroud.
See the comment for Kurenai. Except that Kushina, of course, had a perfectly good reason on top of just not feeling like marriage was obligatory, and that had to do with the fact that she was a Whirlpool ninja, and Minato was the Hokage. Why force Minato through political complications when they could just carry on the way they alwasy had?
The ‘two headbands’ would be hers and Minato’s, or her headband as a Whirlpool-nin and her Konoha one (following the theory that Whirlpool had been destroyed and she was now a Konoha nin). I tend to go by the former, I think, because it implies that to everyone, she and Minato were as good as married.
The second sentence isn’t completely necessary to the meaning, but I like its rhythm, and it gets across the feeling of “too late”.
Temari, they joke, is married to her fan; she taps the weapon against the ground when she waits for Shikamaru, annoyed at his lateness, secure in the knowledge that he’ll never ask.
It’s a cliché that Temari is manly, and one I probably will never stop poking at, because while I see where it comes from (she’s competent, hard-ass, no-nonsense, and abrasive), she’s also hot. In a very “I am a woman” way. Plus the fan is a woman’s accessory, and Temari always wears skirts with no shorts underneath like, say, Sakura does, and, yeah, she’s hot. Thus the they joke.
To me, the phrase ‘is married to’ calls to mind a nun. I have no idea why.
I feel a hint of bittersweetness in this, probably because of the predictability at the end, implied by the words ‘secure’ and ‘never’. I mean, I think the sentence describes a happy life, but there’s something... Not sure what. Maybe just that I portray TemaShika as established and, I don’t know, constant? Of course it’s not really, but in this sentence, however...
TemaShika is still the least romantic couple to walk the Earth and if you think their future involves roses and passionate ‘will you marry me’, I think you’re sadly deluded, unless the situation involves Ino.
Her tapping her weapon is definitely a threat, btw.
I have slight twinges of guilt about this sentence, however, because I’m afraid I pushed the TemaShika into it. When I write snapshot/fragments fic, I want them to be as close to canon as possible, and for all that I’m convinced TemaShika is the Ron/Hermione of Naruto, I was... slightly uneasy about pushing the ship anyway.
(the NaruSasuSaku in Sakura’s sentence was different, because 1) it’s Team Seven, and 2) the wedding/marriage is metaphorical.)
Mikoto sewn hers, long and quiet, and she secretly embroidered her love for him on the fabric, each stitch a wish for the future.
I don’t see why Mikoto and Fugaku couldn’t have been in love.
Mikoto is like Kishimoto’s ultimate housewife. For being a jounin, she certainly doesn’t seem concerned about it, thus why I don’t mention it at all. The sewing... to me, the most important are the adjectives ‘long and quiet’, the adverb ‘secretly’. Not so much the fact that she’s Kishimoto’s ultimate housewife and likely to kow how to sew very well.
I am horribly ironic because the future went to hell in a handbasket. ^______^
I’m very fond of this sentence. I guess I wanted something romantic.
On the other hand, I made very sure I was nowhere implying that the love was returned, or even that she knew him – “her love for him” rather than “their love”, and “a wish for the future” could mean that there’s nothing in the present between them upon which to build that future.
Anko really wanted to help Kurenai choose hers. When Asuma dies, she throws all the catalogs in the Interrogation garbage bin and only goes home when Ibiki drops her at her apartment, roaringly drunk, before she goes to see Kurenai in the morning.
I feel very bad for Anko too. No-one thinks she’s the marrying kind, and she doesn’t think she is the marrying kind either, one more thing Orochimaru made impossible, and the best she could hope for was a vicarious wedding, and then ninja life went and fucked that up as well.
My Anko and Kurenai are generally BFFs who occasionally turn to more. My Anko wouldn’t often turn down a threesome with Asuma and Kurenai, and she’s often in platonic love with Kurenai. All of which I have no excuse for except that I like Anko and I like contrasting ships – thus AnkoKure and IruAnko.
One change I made to the sentence is that I added the “really wanted” between the first saved draft and the rest, because my beta-listener told me it sounded like Anko was in love with Asuma if I left the first part unsaid.
I like the idea of a friendly relationship between Anko and Ibiki (who sounds much more mentally stable than she does) and Ibiki keeping an eye on her, but I don’t ship them. I see theirs as more of an older sibling/younger sibling relation, I think. (That, and I fail at imagining Ibiki’s sex life.)
Karin makes sketches she tears into shreds before she’s done; she’s never happy with how they turn out.
Unlike Tenten, I don’t think it’s because she thinks she shouldn’t be thinking about it, or if it it’s only a minor part of it. I didn’t have the impression that Karin was the type who’d lie to herself, thus the somewhat simpler reason for being unhappy. Karin is very rarely happy about anything.
Karin’s reason is, I think, the least metaphorical of the lot, though her way of settling the problem is anything but. I’m as good as saying she never will get married. (I don’t deal with it in the sentence, but I think she perfectly well can, and in fact most likely will, just not by society’s standards – I sort of ship SuiKa, but even if I didn’t, she’s hardly a conventional girl.)
Tayuya is seriously offended when Jiroubou mentions the word, and she doesn’t speak to him for a week. That’s how long he spends in recovery.
I hesitated mostly between two versions for this sentence; the one up there and this: ” Tayuya is seriously offended when Jiroubou mentions the word, and she doesn’t speak to him for a week. Not because she’s giving him a silence treatment – a girl’s vengeance – but because she doesn’t come to see him while he’s in recovery.”
I liked it because it made clear that Tayuya wants to be one of the boys, but my beta-listener told me it was unnecessary anyway and was very insistent about it, so I listened. For once. I still wonder whether the more explicit version wouldn’t have been better, though we know from canon that Tayuya’s a tomboy.
Jiroubou was the one who spoke, not because I lopsided-smile at Tayuya-Jiroubou interactions, of course not, but because in canon he was the one concerned with what was proper and how Tayuya, as a girl, should act. Notice I never said he asked Tayuya about what she’d do when she got married. He dislikes her use of language, but he’s neither stupid nor conscending enough to imply she only matters as a female.
Rin had wanted one, though she thought about it less than about the man for whom she’d wear it.
This is the sentence I’m the least sure about. I don’t get Rin’s character very well, though I like her, and I added her mostly because I needed the PoV of the only girl who hadn’t grown to be a woman, who was from a different generation and dead.
I knew almost at once I wanted to play on the dichotomy dress =/= husband, because from what I did get from Rin was that she was both romantic and sensible, and at the age I imagine her as having thought this, she was in love with Kakashi and much less interested in a frilly dress than in love. Yes, I wrote this with Rin->Kakashi in mind, even though I don’t ship the pairing – but Rin->Kakashi is canon, so it doesn’t bother me to include it.
Chiyo leaves for a mission on her wedding day, after the ceremony; war doesn’t wait. She runs a hand on the silk before she leaves, knowing that when she comes back she’ll find the fabric as a skirt for her sister, a scarf for a richer woman passing in the street.
I wanted to do this one because I wanted a counterpoint to Tsunade’s, and also as a counterpoint to the girls’ PoV. Chiyo lived through the wars, and I chose to imagine she got married because then I could speak about how a ninja wedding during a war would go. I gave her a sister because of the concept of reusing old clothes in order to make new ones in wartime like was the case during WWII in Europe.
Her sister gets a skirt, which is a necessary article of clothing, whereas a richer woman would buy a scarf, which is not; privations affect everyone during a war, but not to the same extent.
Chiyo acts here the way she professes when we see her as an old woman; she’s a little wistful that she will never see the dress again and that she has to leave on her wedding day, but at the same time her village needs her and she doesn’t even imagine being sad about it.
Hanabi sometimes wishes she could play dress-up like other little girls her age, and sometimes she pretends kunai are hair ornaments, even if she can never put them in her hair.
Same as Chiyo, I wanted to have another generation. Younger than the Rookies, it’s either Moegi or Hanabi, and I know who gets more page-time and which of the two I’m more invested in. (I forever regret having killed her in Celebrationverse. I’ve thought about her character a lot since I started writing Oversights and Celebrations, and it makes me sad to know I’ve killed her. :( )
Oddly (or not?), the past doesn’t weigh on Hanabi’s mind as much as it does on Hinata’s. I could probably write something about it. Instead, her issue is with the future, their expectations, mostly the fact that she is to be a warrior. I know my Hanabi unconsciously feels like she has to be her father’s son; my Hanabi is always a tomboy. But like Hinata, her picture of a wedding dress is a kimono – the “hair ornaments” – proof of how the Hyuuga weigh on her.
“other little girls her age”: behold my mad subtlety skills, or how I manage to emphasise both that she’s a Hyuuga (and can’t and isn’t expected to act like Sakura or Ino did when they were young) and how young she is.
I chose my time markers so I could have the “sometimes-sometimes” repetition, and then “never”.
This reminds me that one reason why the thing as a whole was difficult to write was to avoid the repetitions between sentences – and not just the themes either, but the vocabulary. I lost count of how many times I switched verbs such as ‘dream’, ‘wish’ etc.
Shizune, during her travels with Tsunade-sama, sometimes stops in front of a shop window and wonders why these shops don’t exist in Konoha.
At first I’d written this sentence before Chiyo’s and Hanabi’s, but it was clear that it needed to be the last.
Shizune got the dubious honor of being associated most clearly with the theme because I see her as ‘the witness’ and I have no grasp of her character beside the fact that she’s Tsunade’s right-hand. She seems to have even less of a life than the other ninja, and that made her perfect for this reflection.
When I wanted to define Shizune by something that made her unique among the people in that list, I found her travels with Tsunade, so I wanted to write something about that. Especially since I think Tsunade would have been too busy running from her past and her creditors toward the next jug of sake and town of excitement to do much introspection, particularly of the wedding-related kind. (this needs to be a fic, btw.)
This DVD commentary probably lacks unity, except for the theme, but that’s how I wrote the fic; I worried about repeating myself and I wanted ecah character to say something different, reflecting both their character and a different aspect of the issue. I’m happy with how it turned out. It was a fic I liked writing, though I think I did more or less well on each character (I don’t feel all that sure about Tayuya, Karin, Tenten, and a little about Temari). I don’t think I’ll ever be able to just ‘read it’ without overthinking it, because a lot of thinking went into writing it – that was what made it so fun.
So there, I hope you enjoyed the read. ^^; I didn’t post the ‘variations on each sentence’ because I honestly don’t think it’d be of interest to anyone – they’re only repetitions with minor details changing. If you ask I will, but I don’t think it’d be that interesting.
gehayi. The fic itself is here. I’m not into wedding!fic or even marriage!fic at all. I’m not into marriage at all in RL, actually, for most of usual reasons (I dislike what it stands for, I hate the institution, and I don’t get why the government/state needs to be notified of people’s personal lives, especially when it gives married people rights the rest of the population doesn’t have). I generally come up with various wild theories how long-standing couples/parents are not married in my fandoms. Thus, maybe, the fic.
This fic has a very long and complicated genesis. Not only because I had more rewrites than for anything else I posted – up to seven variations a line, I think, and generally to end with the first anyway – but because at one point I was wondering if I wasn’t going to couple/contrast it with the boys’ first kills; the title would’ve been Of Wedding Dresses and First Kills. I didn’t do it for reasons I’ll go into later.
The fic originated from a humming song thingy I made up as I was walking once, and which I invented with Sakura in mind. It went something like this: ”Someday I’ll have a wedding dress/ It will be red and mine/Like the colour of happiness/I wear red all the time.” (Hey, nobody said I could actually write songs, all right?) More on that later as well.
I liked the idea, and decided to do something with it. I liked writing The Kunoichi’s Guide to PMS, and I always loved fics that are a collection of snapshots.
My main, completely conscious influences on this were
rilina’s 2,5 years, annwyd’s Kunoichi Means, and Chevira Lowe’s “For which they dance” [the fic was on her lj, which she deleted; it’s one of the biggest losses of Naruto fandom.]. Mostly “Kunoichi Means”, because a wedding dress is the most heavily gendered thing you can come up with. In a woman’s life, traditionally the rites of passage are such: first period, wedding, maternity. This deserves several essays, but basically I wanted to explore the irony of gender roles in the Naruto verse, which is also the reason I wrote a bunch of ‘first kill’ lines for the men.
It didn’t work out because killing isn’t a gendered trait in the Naruto-verse, and I felt I wasn’t being true to the original material by pretending it was, especially if I contrasted it with the wedding dress thing. And also, I admit, because I had a feeling I was ‘making it up’ as I went along – I wasn’t really convinced by most of the anecdotes, and I had a hard time choosing which characters to select. (I may still do something with the ‘first kill’ idea, though.)
At one point I thought I was going to do one for each of the women in Naruto, but some of them were cut, either because I had no idea what they’d think (Konan), or because I felt like I was already saying the same thing elsewhere (Kin would’ve been sort of like Tayuya, though less so).
Tsunade never gets to wear hers. Yet she has already bought it, in provision for when Dan did ask; she should have known better than to tempt fate. She gives it away when she leaves.
If there’s a key to the order, I’ve forgotten it – except of course Shizune. I was more or less writing them as they came to me, and afterwards I couldn’t think of any particularly meaningful order. Though probably I wanted to put Tsunade first because she’s one of the oldest characters.
In most of my other versions for this line, I add that Tsunade gave the dress to ‘a neighbour, a woman she never sees again in her life’. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say with that, so I cut it off.
I have to say Tsunade is the one I feel most sorry for. :( Cause that’s really sad. So I really liked writing it. :) Especially since with the ‘should have known better than to tempt fate’, I indicate that she blames herself entirely for Dan’s death.
Ino gives hers back after the mission is over. The dress is beautiful, but even if it weren’t village property, she wouldn’t want to keep it. The man is dead, and Ino is a widow.
It’s a cliché that kunoichi have angsty seduction missions (and there’s a line in
arrankaara’s NaruIno 1sentence, “What do you mean, you have to marry your target?”), so there. I can’t help but think that canon!Ino is sort of a romantic, so the pill must have been rather bitter.I also wanted something that would show that she hated it, but not something that’d imply she was going to waste her life over it – not over something so unimportant as one mission during which no-one dies. Because that’s not how she rolls.
Sakura’s regular clothes are red like happiness by the end of their fight. Sasuke stops trying to kick Naruto’s arms off from around his legs as she pulls her fist back, straddling him. The rain is pounding on them and her heart bursts into a hymn.
Like I said above, this is the idea that prompted the whole fic. Sakura is the only one to have a wholly happy sentence, because she’s the only one to reject the idea of a wedding/wedding dress as society dictates. By which I ship NaruSasuSaku.
In most other versions of this, the sentences begin like this: “Sakura’s is her regular clothes; bloodied and torn, red like happiness...” I changed it because I can be rather heavy-handed with my metaphors but there are limits I refuse to cross. I liked it better as a thinly-veiled metaphor, and still do; it’s the reasons why I added the reference to a hymn at the end of the sentence.
Red’s of course the blood spilled during the fight, but it also is the colour of happiness in China. (Not Japan, so I know, I cheated, shuttup.)
Also, I’ll never stop gushing over weird Team Seven romance, but you can move along if you don’t want to spend the next moment giggling and going ^_________^ at Sasuke’s deplorable signals.
I still feel like the ‘regular’ is awkward and just too much, but I wanted to make it 100% clear she was not wearing a wedding dress at the time, that the only thing that made her clothes special was the occasion and how she felt about it.
Hinata knows there is a precious kimono pressed in a family closet. She’s never seen it; she knows what it looks like from the photograph of her parents’ wedding. It would be an honor to put it on, but she doesn’t intend to wear it.
Hinata. Hinata didn’t seem to know what she wanted to say. >_< She was very clear about the family kimono, but about what came after? I think at one point she was going to say it was going to be Hanabi’s anyway. :/ But she didn’t, because my Hinata can be – well, not selfish, but focused.
To me, the idea of Hinata only knowing how the dress looks like from a photograph shows the distance between Hinata and her family.
It also refers to the fact that arranged marriage is a plot-point in many NejiHina fics – to Neji or to an outsider of the clan. Arranged marriage is something I’ve always wanted to play with (mostly to have at least one of the two cheating on their spouse, and possibly an open marriage), and I don’t think it’s ‘romantic’ or ‘sweet’ at all, ergo this.
And of course, the eternal ‘Hinata wants to be her own person’ theme that always shows up whenever I write her.
Kurenai dresses in black until she starts showing. Her baby will not have a mother in mourning.
My pet theory that Kurenai got a post-mortem marriage with Asuma. Me pushing my ‘why do people always assume parents in fandom are married wrrry’ agenda.
And by ‘in mourning’ I don’t mean ‘grieving Asuma’. I mean that the change of outfit symbolizes going with the fact that there’s a child to be raised, who, being there and alive, is a higher priority. I’m potentially explaining very badly.
Tenten dreams, a little, when no one is looking.
This line owes so much to “Kunoichi Means”.
I feel rather bad for her – because she doesn’t feel like she’s allowed to daydream about girly things like weddings and marriage. I blame Neji for it (‘when no one is looking’ reminds the reader that she’s on the team of a Byakugan user), and also Lee for saying things like ‘you lack discipline’.
Kushina says no, no, no, and in her grave they put both headbands. In place of a dress there’s a shroud.
See the comment for Kurenai. Except that Kushina, of course, had a perfectly good reason on top of just not feeling like marriage was obligatory, and that had to do with the fact that she was a Whirlpool ninja, and Minato was the Hokage. Why force Minato through political complications when they could just carry on the way they alwasy had?
The ‘two headbands’ would be hers and Minato’s, or her headband as a Whirlpool-nin and her Konoha one (following the theory that Whirlpool had been destroyed and she was now a Konoha nin). I tend to go by the former, I think, because it implies that to everyone, she and Minato were as good as married.
The second sentence isn’t completely necessary to the meaning, but I like its rhythm, and it gets across the feeling of “too late”.
Temari, they joke, is married to her fan; she taps the weapon against the ground when she waits for Shikamaru, annoyed at his lateness, secure in the knowledge that he’ll never ask.
It’s a cliché that Temari is manly, and one I probably will never stop poking at, because while I see where it comes from (she’s competent, hard-ass, no-nonsense, and abrasive), she’s also hot. In a very “I am a woman” way. Plus the fan is a woman’s accessory, and Temari always wears skirts with no shorts underneath like, say, Sakura does, and, yeah, she’s hot. Thus the they joke.
To me, the phrase ‘is married to’ calls to mind a nun. I have no idea why.
I feel a hint of bittersweetness in this, probably because of the predictability at the end, implied by the words ‘secure’ and ‘never’. I mean, I think the sentence describes a happy life, but there’s something... Not sure what. Maybe just that I portray TemaShika as established and, I don’t know, constant? Of course it’s not really, but in this sentence, however...
TemaShika is still the least romantic couple to walk the Earth and if you think their future involves roses and passionate ‘will you marry me’, I think you’re sadly deluded, unless the situation involves Ino.
Her tapping her weapon is definitely a threat, btw.
I have slight twinges of guilt about this sentence, however, because I’m afraid I pushed the TemaShika into it. When I write snapshot/fragments fic, I want them to be as close to canon as possible, and for all that I’m convinced TemaShika is the Ron/Hermione of Naruto, I was... slightly uneasy about pushing the ship anyway.
(the NaruSasuSaku in Sakura’s sentence was different, because 1) it’s Team Seven, and 2) the wedding/marriage is metaphorical.)
Mikoto sewn hers, long and quiet, and she secretly embroidered her love for him on the fabric, each stitch a wish for the future.
I don’t see why Mikoto and Fugaku couldn’t have been in love.
Mikoto is like Kishimoto’s ultimate housewife. For being a jounin, she certainly doesn’t seem concerned about it, thus why I don’t mention it at all. The sewing... to me, the most important are the adjectives ‘long and quiet’, the adverb ‘secretly’. Not so much the fact that she’s Kishimoto’s ultimate housewife and likely to kow how to sew very well.
I am horribly ironic because the future went to hell in a handbasket. ^______^
I’m very fond of this sentence. I guess I wanted something romantic.
On the other hand, I made very sure I was nowhere implying that the love was returned, or even that she knew him – “her love for him” rather than “their love”, and “a wish for the future” could mean that there’s nothing in the present between them upon which to build that future.
Anko really wanted to help Kurenai choose hers. When Asuma dies, she throws all the catalogs in the Interrogation garbage bin and only goes home when Ibiki drops her at her apartment, roaringly drunk, before she goes to see Kurenai in the morning.
I feel very bad for Anko too. No-one thinks she’s the marrying kind, and she doesn’t think she is the marrying kind either, one more thing Orochimaru made impossible, and the best she could hope for was a vicarious wedding, and then ninja life went and fucked that up as well.
My Anko and Kurenai are generally BFFs who occasionally turn to more. My Anko wouldn’t often turn down a threesome with Asuma and Kurenai, and she’s often in platonic love with Kurenai. All of which I have no excuse for except that I like Anko and I like contrasting ships – thus AnkoKure and IruAnko.
One change I made to the sentence is that I added the “really wanted” between the first saved draft and the rest, because my beta-listener told me it sounded like Anko was in love with Asuma if I left the first part unsaid.
I like the idea of a friendly relationship between Anko and Ibiki (who sounds much more mentally stable than she does) and Ibiki keeping an eye on her, but I don’t ship them. I see theirs as more of an older sibling/younger sibling relation, I think. (That, and I fail at imagining Ibiki’s sex life.)
Karin makes sketches she tears into shreds before she’s done; she’s never happy with how they turn out.
Unlike Tenten, I don’t think it’s because she thinks she shouldn’t be thinking about it, or if it it’s only a minor part of it. I didn’t have the impression that Karin was the type who’d lie to herself, thus the somewhat simpler reason for being unhappy. Karin is very rarely happy about anything.
Karin’s reason is, I think, the least metaphorical of the lot, though her way of settling the problem is anything but. I’m as good as saying she never will get married. (I don’t deal with it in the sentence, but I think she perfectly well can, and in fact most likely will, just not by society’s standards – I sort of ship SuiKa, but even if I didn’t, she’s hardly a conventional girl.)
Tayuya is seriously offended when Jiroubou mentions the word, and she doesn’t speak to him for a week. That’s how long he spends in recovery.
I hesitated mostly between two versions for this sentence; the one up there and this: ” Tayuya is seriously offended when Jiroubou mentions the word, and she doesn’t speak to him for a week. Not because she’s giving him a silence treatment – a girl’s vengeance – but because she doesn’t come to see him while he’s in recovery.”
I liked it because it made clear that Tayuya wants to be one of the boys, but my beta-listener told me it was unnecessary anyway and was very insistent about it, so I listened. For once. I still wonder whether the more explicit version wouldn’t have been better, though we know from canon that Tayuya’s a tomboy.
Jiroubou was the one who spoke, not because I lopsided-smile at Tayuya-Jiroubou interactions, of course not, but because in canon he was the one concerned with what was proper and how Tayuya, as a girl, should act. Notice I never said he asked Tayuya about what she’d do when she got married. He dislikes her use of language, but he’s neither stupid nor conscending enough to imply she only matters as a female.
Rin had wanted one, though she thought about it less than about the man for whom she’d wear it.
This is the sentence I’m the least sure about. I don’t get Rin’s character very well, though I like her, and I added her mostly because I needed the PoV of the only girl who hadn’t grown to be a woman, who was from a different generation and dead.
I knew almost at once I wanted to play on the dichotomy dress =/= husband, because from what I did get from Rin was that she was both romantic and sensible, and at the age I imagine her as having thought this, she was in love with Kakashi and much less interested in a frilly dress than in love. Yes, I wrote this with Rin->Kakashi in mind, even though I don’t ship the pairing – but Rin->Kakashi is canon, so it doesn’t bother me to include it.
Chiyo leaves for a mission on her wedding day, after the ceremony; war doesn’t wait. She runs a hand on the silk before she leaves, knowing that when she comes back she’ll find the fabric as a skirt for her sister, a scarf for a richer woman passing in the street.
I wanted to do this one because I wanted a counterpoint to Tsunade’s, and also as a counterpoint to the girls’ PoV. Chiyo lived through the wars, and I chose to imagine she got married because then I could speak about how a ninja wedding during a war would go. I gave her a sister because of the concept of reusing old clothes in order to make new ones in wartime like was the case during WWII in Europe.
Her sister gets a skirt, which is a necessary article of clothing, whereas a richer woman would buy a scarf, which is not; privations affect everyone during a war, but not to the same extent.
Chiyo acts here the way she professes when we see her as an old woman; she’s a little wistful that she will never see the dress again and that she has to leave on her wedding day, but at the same time her village needs her and she doesn’t even imagine being sad about it.
Hanabi sometimes wishes she could play dress-up like other little girls her age, and sometimes she pretends kunai are hair ornaments, even if she can never put them in her hair.
Same as Chiyo, I wanted to have another generation. Younger than the Rookies, it’s either Moegi or Hanabi, and I know who gets more page-time and which of the two I’m more invested in. (I forever regret having killed her in Celebrationverse. I’ve thought about her character a lot since I started writing Oversights and Celebrations, and it makes me sad to know I’ve killed her. :( )
Oddly (or not?), the past doesn’t weigh on Hanabi’s mind as much as it does on Hinata’s. I could probably write something about it. Instead, her issue is with the future, their expectations, mostly the fact that she is to be a warrior. I know my Hanabi unconsciously feels like she has to be her father’s son; my Hanabi is always a tomboy. But like Hinata, her picture of a wedding dress is a kimono – the “hair ornaments” – proof of how the Hyuuga weigh on her.
“other little girls her age”: behold my mad subtlety skills, or how I manage to emphasise both that she’s a Hyuuga (and can’t and isn’t expected to act like Sakura or Ino did when they were young) and how young she is.
I chose my time markers so I could have the “sometimes-sometimes” repetition, and then “never”.
This reminds me that one reason why the thing as a whole was difficult to write was to avoid the repetitions between sentences – and not just the themes either, but the vocabulary. I lost count of how many times I switched verbs such as ‘dream’, ‘wish’ etc.
Shizune, during her travels with Tsunade-sama, sometimes stops in front of a shop window and wonders why these shops don’t exist in Konoha.
At first I’d written this sentence before Chiyo’s and Hanabi’s, but it was clear that it needed to be the last.
Shizune got the dubious honor of being associated most clearly with the theme because I see her as ‘the witness’ and I have no grasp of her character beside the fact that she’s Tsunade’s right-hand. She seems to have even less of a life than the other ninja, and that made her perfect for this reflection.
When I wanted to define Shizune by something that made her unique among the people in that list, I found her travels with Tsunade, so I wanted to write something about that. Especially since I think Tsunade would have been too busy running from her past and her creditors toward the next jug of sake and town of excitement to do much introspection, particularly of the wedding-related kind. (this needs to be a fic, btw.)
This DVD commentary probably lacks unity, except for the theme, but that’s how I wrote the fic; I worried about repeating myself and I wanted ecah character to say something different, reflecting both their character and a different aspect of the issue. I’m happy with how it turned out. It was a fic I liked writing, though I think I did more or less well on each character (I don’t feel all that sure about Tayuya, Karin, Tenten, and a little about Temari). I don’t think I’ll ever be able to just ‘read it’ without overthinking it, because a lot of thinking went into writing it – that was what made it so fun.
So there, I hope you enjoyed the read. ^^; I didn’t post the ‘variations on each sentence’ because I honestly don’t think it’d be of interest to anyone – they’re only repetitions with minor details changing. If you ask I will, but I don’t think it’d be that interesting.
