wherein Liz steals time from real life and NaNo in order to be thinky about Naruto

[edenfalling]

Today I got a review for chapter 8 of "The Way of the Apartment Manager," which is the one where they fight the 'bandits' and meet Uchiha Akaro, Hyuuga Shiro, and Aburame Kuroko.

(Those three, by the way, should have a team name, since at least one of them will cameo in "Guardian," hopefully within the next few chapters. Somehow 'Team Bleeding Penguin' or 'Team Newspaper' aren't quite cutting it in my head, and 'Team Asuma' just sounds wrong... though Asuma is, indeed, their jounin-sensei.)

Anyway, the reviewer raised a question about my interpretation of the Byakugan:

I would point out that the Byakugan has great insight into Genjutsu, even greater than that of the Sharingan, according to Kakashi.

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This is what I said:

A good point.

However, because I didn't want any bloodline limit to become too powerful, I decided that it takes a lot of time and hard work to make sense out of the ambient chakra the Byakugan perceives. You have to learn to interpret the input before you can see through the illusions.

The Sharingan, on the other hand, is something of a shortcut -- instead of seeing everything, it perceives select aspects the surroundings (movement, illusions, and the active chakra flow composing them), and therefore the Uchiha need much less effort to interpret what they see than the Hyuuga do.

So while the Hyuuga can, theoretically, see through genjutsu, in practice most of them find that technique unreliable, because they haven't learned to filter their sight in that particular way.

This may well not be what Kishimoto originally meant to show, but it makes sense to me and was much easier to work with in a story. :-)

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Does that make sense, or am I just being unforgivably lazy for not looking up the exact mechanics of the Byakugan and then working them into the story? I mean, it is canon that not all Hyuuga are as good at using jyuken and their bloodline limit as, say, Neji, but... I dunno. Maybe I just like differentiating the Byakugan and the Sharingan, for my own narrative convenience.

Comments

[lynati-1.livejournal.com]

That answer actually makes sense - and unless you want to strip out that whole section about the Byakugan not being able to see through Genjutsu, you should stick with it. Because my understanding of the canon is that Byakugan *is* the one easy way to see through illusionary techniques. But yeah, if one assumes that a large amount of training is required for it to be reliable rather than an automatic usage- like the sharingan seemed to be for Sasuke- then it fits well as a reason.

(When I first read that section in the story, it struck me as off, incorrect, but I was enjoying the story far too much to pick that particular nit. I figured it was either outright author error, or a deliberate change- and either away, it didn't feel right to bring it up without having a relative amount of praise for all of the *good* work that you did. And I don't have eight free hours to devote towards writing you a proper review. ; )

By the way, if I haven't already dropped a line in the last couple weeks in a review to say I think your work is awesome- it is. And if I said it already, it bears repeating. (I've got a bad tendency to write up reviews in my head and then forget to type them out and send them, and then misremember whether or not I actually did. : P )

[(Anonymous)]

Seems absolutely reasonable, even almost inevitable, to me. It might even be simpler than that - the Sharingan has about the same field of view as a normal eye, right? But the Byakugan is like looking at a fisheye lens in a way - it's processing data from all directions, and a lot of that's just going to be lost in the clutter.

[rusco-ducam.livejournal.com]

No, I'd say that sounds perfectly reasonable.

[jessara40k.livejournal.com]

Agreed, it makes sense. After all Hyuuga have to be taught to use the Byakugan, whereas Uchiha just activate it automatically when in a life or death situation.