[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

[askerian]

@____@ whoaaa. I don't know where to start to say I love it. The logic is... very shinobi, yeah, and you put it down very succintly and clearly. Shiny. (in a kinda evil way.)

[edenfalling]

I am inclined to blame my dilettante studies in early childhood education and my years of teaching Sunday school -- the idea of seven-year-old kids (the age I usually teach) being trained as killers freaks me the hell out whenever I think about it beyond the level of 'whee, action/adventure cool stuff explosions!' that Kishimoto seems to want to stay at (at least with regard to childhood violence and conditioning).

[000-hester-000.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU. I do wonder if Kishi stopped to consider how fucked-up his world was when he first started writing, or if he's only just realizing that (and even then, only just a little, it seems...) now.

[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.)

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

And the scary thing about it is, how easy it all is in theory. Reading about how small children will believe anything you tell them, and it suddenly becomes clear just how much terrible power adults have over children. Looking to Africa we can see boys barely able to hold a rifle conscripted into rebel armies and taken away from their entire lives to lead careers of destruction. They are disposable, because you haven't trained them, they are replaceable, because you can always get more, and you can do it for the good of the group, which is the one thing that has kept me from being a total utilitarian in my ethics.

On the other hand, one would expect the ninja clans to have more kids if they honestly expected there to be significant attrition. Demographically, I know we don't have much to go on, but it seems like there are quite a few single and two child families. That seems to point to both keeping women in the workforce outside their homes and to low child mortality. Then again, it might just be Kishimoto failing to consider the proper implications and just dropping in families that his readers can relate to.

[edenfalling]

Have you ever read AK, by Peter Dickinson? It's about a child soldier in a fictional African country, and it will break your heart, whichever of its two endings you choose to believe.

I can actually handwave the low family size in ninja clans! Shinobi figure that since their children have clan bloodline limits or secret jutsu, they are not expendable, and therefore give them lots of personal time and attention (which means they can't have too many kids). Meanwhile, the academy also recruits heavily from the much larger civilian population. Since civilian kids don't have the extra training, they tend to fail out of the chuunin-track that the manga focuses on and are consigned instead to a general genin pool as escorts, guards in non-shinobi towns, and disposable frontline troops in any wars. So it's mostly former civilian children who are dying, whereas born ninjas have a much higher chance of surviving... at least in body. :-)

But yeah, handwaving aside, I think it's mostly Kishimoto not thinking through the implications of his world-building. *sigh*

[cherokee1.livejournal.com]

I think the mangaka was quite young when he began to build this world.
I don't know, because I haven't researched it.
And now perhaps, he is locked into a very successful cycle and might not be able to break out.
Or want to.
Money is a powerful force and so is success.
C

[edenfalling]

Yeah, Kishimoto was pretty young when the series got picked up, and I am quite sure he was thinking something along the lines of "adventure, whee!" instead of considering the psychological fallout of training children as killers.