[Fic] "Children's Crusade" -- Naruto

[edenfalling]

This week's 15_minute_fic word is not actually up; one from a few weeks ago seems to have been copy-pasted in by mistake. So I went back a few months and found a word I'd skipped.

I ended up with a characterless bit of world-building for Naruto, along the lines of Traps -- in other words, morbid thoughts about the social and legal construction of childhood in a culture where children are often raised to be assassins and front-line soldiers. It's also a strict form double drabble, for the hell of it.

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Children's Crusade
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Legally, shinobi are not children.

Once people pass the academy exit tests and are accepted by a jounin-sensei, they are adults, no matter how young. They pay taxes. They enter binding contracts. They gain a voice in clan councils and village politics.

They fight. They kill. They bleed. They die. If they fall or if they fail, they are tried and sentenced with no cushion for youthful idiocy and inexperience.

Shinobi hold the power of life and death over themselves and civilians. No child should hold such responsibility. No child should make such choices.

Therefore, no child does.

But little fingers are deft. Youthful optimism and gullibility send disposable troops into the thick of battle. Inexperience drives innovation. High voices, large eyes, and round faces disarm and distract opponents for crucial seconds. Children are too valuable not to use.

So girls become women and boys men at twelve, at eleven, at seven, at six. They live on the edge between life and death. By the time they are adults in physical truth as well as legal fiction, more than half of them are dead: in body, in mind, in soul.

Shinobi are not children. But far too few grow up.

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Inspired by the 5/11/09 15_minute_fic word #110: children

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...Clearly the whole 'training children to be killers' aspect of Naruto bothers me on a deep level, since I keep turning back to it directly or indirectly. I wish Kishimoto would address that more in canon.

Comments

[edenfalling]

I do wonder if Kishi stopped to consider how fucked-up his world was when he first started writing

I am inclined to say no, though at least now he's making some effort to deal with politics?

[000-hester-000.livejournal.com]

And, see, I'm glad that he's dealing with the political aspect of it, but it really bothers me that he apparently still hasn't noticed the whole village-devoted-to-raising-child-soldiers aspect of it, when to my mind at least, that's the most glaringly wtf thing about his world.

I think it's weird that he's started to notice that shinobi wars are always going to end up with some country getting thrown under the bus and that the people living there are obviously going to suffer, but he apparently doesn't get the point that under the shinobi system, children raised in the countries that prosper are also being unfairly used. (And in a way, maybe it's even worse to grow up in a strong village, because it must raise your chances of being born into an important family in which everyone will simply be expected to become a ninja.)