on villains -- Itachi vs. Tom Riddle

[edenfalling]

Am attempting to come up with plausible motivations for Itachi.

Oh, my head.

Tom is so much easier, you know? I know what he wants -- to get out of the diary, and to figure out how the fucking hell Harry survived Voldemort -- and I know that he has no moral qualms, and from there his actions are quite straightforward. He's probably the easiest character in "Secrets" to write... to the point where I occasionally get freaked out and cannot write him for a while because I'm having a quiet panic attack over my ability to think like a sociopath.

I don't have a clue what Itachi is really after, particularly before he joined Akatsuki. Gaining Mangekyou Sharingan, okay. But he'd already done that. Keeping others from being able to do that themselves? Maybe. But then what about Sasuke?

I think people go slightly wrong by considering Itachi emotionless, despite his portrayal in his occasional manga appearances. I think his emotional responses are limited, yes, but he strikes me as having a fair sense of melodrama and a taste for theatrics -- witness his nice shaming of his father while Sasuke was listening. Witness the way he (whether he admits it or not) shows off to Sasuke while practicing his knife-throwing skills. Witness his use of ravens in that strange genjutsu he threw Naruto into. Witness the way he declaims about the workings of Mangekyou whenever he gets someone into that strange half-world.

He may have started killing relatives for one reason -- I think he might have genuinely hated his father, for various reasons -- and kept going because it made good theater. He may have left Sasuke alive because there has to be a single heir to avenge the slaughtered clan; narrative tradition demands it. Itachi is a thwarted artist as much as he is an assassin. His primary weapon is genjutsu, and he creates whole worlds. He's playing storyteller-as-god, except instead of doing it with words, he does it with real people.

...I think I need to go do something else for a little while.

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In other news, Ranna and Shae are currently doing a little verbal dance prior to cutting a tentative deal. I like Shae. She's visually based on a girl I used to run into in the library computer lab, with an expression of fierce concentration and perpetually wide eyes (not innocent-wide, but painfully wide, as though she'd nailed her eyelids to her brows to keep herself from falling asleep) who always gave me the impression that her eyeballs might pop out of her face without warning. Shae's personality, though, is entirely my own creation.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

Just curious, but was the war and subsequent peace within Itachi's lifetime? (And, rather interesting point of view, particularly since I think Erasure's "Drama!" is the Sasuke's angst about Itachi theme song.)

[edenfalling]

Let's see...

Theoretically Itachi is 13 when he knocks off the Uchiha, which makes Naruto not quite 8. Assuming Yondaime was Hokage for 2-4 years before the Kyuubi attacked Konoha, and that he became Hokage around the end of the great wars, then Itachi would have been 1-3 years old at the start of peacetime. So I doubt the wars made a huge impression on him, though I'm sure he noticed that his family was preoccupied with something and tended to stop being around at unexpected intervals.

My own timeline makes Itachi 14 during the massacre (and Naruto still not quite 8) and sets Yondaime's ascension to Hokage firmly at 4 years pre-Kyuubi, so that Itachi would have been 4 years old at the war's end. Still not old enough for it to affect him on too personal a level, and the war was definitely over before he entered the academy.

(I refuse to believe that even a 'genius' would be admitted to the ninja academy before reaching the age of 5 -- most kids can't even tie their freaking shoes when they're 5. Kakashi is seriously pushing it, and even there I take Kishimoto with a grain of salt and say he graduated the academy at 6 instead of passing the chuunin exam at 6.)

However, according to Yukiko the chuunin exams were still on a wartime footing -- that is, they emphasized open battle skills instead of stealth and trickery -- during Yondaime's rule. So Itachi's education might very well have been geared toward war and therefore harsher and more brutal than what Naruto experienced later.

Excellent, excellent point!

[rianax.livejournal.com]

The entire genius bit gets on my nerves in Naruto-- I can understand an advanced child understanding and comprending complex shinobi lore, but physically there is no way a six year old can be what a warrior is. The body can't deal with the stress and more so with the mind.

I personally think that all that stress and expectation warped Kakashi and Itachi around the bend and upriver to the funny farm.

[edenfalling]

I suspect very young shinobi are probably used more on assassination missions than as guards or straight-out fighters. Nobody suspects a little kid, after all, and they can make great distractions even if they're not the actual killers. (And yes, that would give them psychological issues up the wazoo.) They probably do some infiltration/spying as well, working as support, since a family unit looks much less suspicious than a single adult.

[edenfalling]

Itachi would have been 2 years old, not 4, according to my personal timeline. (Or 1 year old if I capitulate to canon and say he's 13 when he slaughters his clan.)

Cannot do math -- am as bad as JKR! Argh.