Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[faflec]

...you know, I had a thought: what if chakra pushes your mental state into higher extremes? Like someone who thinks they're supposed to be really bombastic becomes Lee, and someone who believes themselves to be lazy ends up like Shikamaru.

Like, suicidal people have the chakra autoimmune disease, right? What if the same applies to other things, with Jonin aura being the ultimate manifestation of being able to alter other peoples mental states to mirror your own?

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Mari is a self-described sadist. She enjoyed much of her work.

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Do you have a reference for that? I'm curious what the context was. The times I can think of Mari enjoying doing awful things to people, it was because those people thoroughly deserved them. That doesn't make her a sadist, just somebody with a sense of justice. Sadists enjoy hurting people for the sake of hurting them, even helpless innocents. Often especially helpless innocents. I don't think Mari has a thing for that.

 

[Cariyaga]

...you know, I had a thought: what if chakra pushes your mental state into higher extremes? Like someone who thinks they're supposed to be really bombastic becomes Lee, and someone who believes themselves to be lazy ends up like Shikamaru.

Like, suicidal people have the chakra autoimmune disease, right? What if the same applies to other things, with Jonin aura being the ultimate manifestation of being able to alter other peoples mental states to mirror your own?

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This... does seem worth consideration, actually.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

...you know, I had a thought: what if chakra pushes your mental state into higher extremes? Like someone who thinks they're supposed to be really bombastic becomes Lee, and someone who believes themselves to be lazy ends up like Shikamaru.

Like, suicidal people have the chakra autoimmune disease, right? What if the same applies to other things, with Jonin aura being the ultimate manifestation of being able to alter other peoples mental states to mirror your own?

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Are we looking for in universe explanations for lazy, exaggerated characterization?

 

[Emstar]

Are we looking for in universe explanations for lazy, exaggerated characterization?

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Just an FYI, the use of "lazy" here really rubbed me the wrong way. Lets be more considerate and tactful with word choices please? I don't think theres that much-- as far as the thread goes-- that could be qualified as "lazy" in actuality.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Just an FYI, the use of "lazy" here really rubbed me the wrong way. Lets be more considerate and tactful with word choices please?

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Fair enough, it's probably unfair of me to call it laziness. Writers can use exaggerated characterization as a deliberate technique in stories, particularly those with lots of characters or for characters that have little screen time. Using unrealistically extreme character quirks lets the author explain the character very quickly, which is important when there's no time to paint a more nuanced portrait of who they are. It can also be used by a writer in a time crunch to get lots of material out the door quickly.

The downside of the technique is that it produces characters that are extremely two dimensional, to the point of being caricatures. That can be alright if they're not on screen for long, but for recurring characters in a story I think it's less than ideal. I'd prefer people that are on screen more than once to have some depth to them.

Edit: To clarify, I'm absolutely not criticizing the QMs (who are awesome), I'm criticizing the canon material. In so far as any character is exaggerated in the quest, the QMs are just being faithful to the original canon. I think they've actually done a marvelous job of filling out two dimensional canon characters into whole people in the quest.

 

[Emstar]

Fair enough, it's probably unfair of me to call it laziness. Writers can use exaggerated characterization as a deliberate technique in stories, particularly those with lots of characters or for characters that have little screen time. Using unrealistically extreme character quirks lets the author to explain the character very quickly, which is important when there's no time to paint a more nuanced portrait of who they are. It can also be used by a writer in a time crunch to get lots of material out the door quickly.

The downside of the technique is that it produces characters that are extremely two dimensional, to the point of being caricatures. That can be alright if they're not on screen for long, but for recurring characters in a story I think it's less than ideal. I'd prefer people that are on screen more than once to have some depth to them.

Edit: To clarify, I'm absolutely not criticizing the QMs (who are awesome), I'm criticizing the canon material. In so far as any character is exaggerated in the quest, the QMs are just being faithful to the original canon. I think they've actually done a marvelous job of filling out two dimensional canon characters into whole people in the quest.

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Totally fair, and I appreciate the clarification. I was just pointing out that it could be read as "So much lazy characterization in this story" or somesuch.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Totally fair, and I appreciate the clarification. I was just pointing out that it could be read as "So much lazy characterization in this story" or somesuch.

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Thank you for that, and I'm sorry that my original message was so ambiguous. That's on me.

 

[Powerofmind]

She seems to be stuck in a loop that her skill set, which do to her training and ninja specialty are based entirely around manipulation, are inherently evil in and of themselves as opposed to what she does with it or her intentions.

And she can't help but constantly reinforce that belief because it's literally how she has been trained to see the world, as nothing but avenues of manipulation.

Tough spiral to crack. She won't trust anyone's assessment of her because she can't trust that she isn't manipulating them. She had her trust in herself utterly destroyed. All that leaves is her actions, which she can't trust the intent of. Leaving her with literally just whatever work she physically does as the only way to show positive progress, which is a insanely unhealthy mentality.

She is a utter liability right now and I have no idea what could be done to snap her out of it.

Toiling away each day for a tiny sliver of self worth ain't it though.

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Words are an expression of power.
Chakra is an equally valid expression of power.
Holding a knife to someone, even if they physically outmatch you, is an expression of power.

The only difference between words and other types of power is that words are the least immediately destructive expression of power and self. A person is no more likely to be impervious to pain than to words, and frankly we've seen plenty of people that aren't Mari make liberal and lethal use of other kinds of power with much less restraint and a much greater willingness to seek out personal satisfaction through it. Hell, even Keiko's mean streak is used more effectively than Mari used words to control people's actions, because there's real willingness to follow through at times that Mari has never even hinted at.

 

[Fresh C]

Words are an expression of power.
Chakra is an equally valid expression of power.
Holding a knife to someone, even if they physically outmatch you, is an expression of power.

The only difference between words and other types of power is that words are the least immediately destructive expression of power and self. A person is no more likely to be impervious to pain than to words, and frankly we've seen plenty of people that aren't Mari make liberal and lethal use of other kinds of power with much less restraint and a much greater willingness to seek out personal satisfaction through it. Hell, even Keiko's mean streak is used more effectively than Mari used words to control people's actions, because there's real willingness to follow through at times that Mari has never even hinted at.

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I think you're right to a degree, but you're somewhat underselling how good Mari is at manipulation (or at least how good she thinks she is).

Her words have been used in capacities that have hurt people, just rarely directly. She isn't interested in hurting people for the sake of hurting people, but she's been more than willing to lead people down paths that are likely to hurt them in the long run as long as it helps her.

The whole Swamp of Death incident happened in part because she crafted the words that would best appeal to those on the mission to get them to follow Shikigami. That's the biggest one we've seen, and it really can't be trivialized. Because she indirectly (and probably directly in the scuffle that happened right before that) lead to many people dying.

Other than that, Mari hasn't really needed to hurt people with her words. Mostly she used manipulation to help the team and only occasionally mess with enemies in a non-lethal fashion (Hidden mountain, Arikada... or whatever the sealmistress's name was). But she's also used her abilities for petty things like getting out of cooking duty.

That's not to say she's only done manipulative things. Afterall she was willing to die for the team. And she also let us convince her to go to Snow, even though she hated every minute of it. She's obviously not motivated completely by selfishness and I think she had no real desire to hurt people, even when she was at her worse.

All in all, I'd say Mari is both effective and dangerous with manipulation when she wants to be. But she's wanted to be dangerous less and less as time went on.

 

[Lailoken]

She enjoyed not having a chance of acting like a monster she believes herself to be.
If physical pain is the price for peace of mind from internal hell she's in, then by gods she'll enjoy it.

That's honestly pretty relatable. Social, moral, and generally mental pain is agonizing. Physical pain is nothing compared to it.
Edit: At least for low-intensity burn of chores and work. Torture and training-from-hell would probably be comparable.

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She's in hell now, because all of her coping and deflecting mechanisms have been stripped away to leave raw guilt. A large part of what she feels guilty about is the that she is a person who enjoys manipulating and hurting people.

...you know, I had a thought: what if chakra pushes your mental state into higher extremes? Like someone who thinks they're supposed to be really bombastic becomes Lee, and someone who believes themselves to be lazy ends up like Shikamaru.

Like, suicidal people have the chakra autoimmune disease, right? What if the same applies to other things, with Jonin aura being the ultimate manifestation of being able to alter other peoples mental states to mirror your own?

Click to shrink...

I doubt it's a coincidence that the Nara are yin-talents and Naruto has the yang half of a god pumping him chakra 24 hours a day. Shikaku told Keiko that one of the greatest benefits of joining the Nara would be having other people who understand what it's like to have her very blood demanding that the universe be understood, structured, ordered, static. That is pretty much the foundational role of yin.

Do you have a reference for that? I'm curious what the context was. The times I can think of Mari enjoying doing awful things to people, it was because those people thoroughly deserved them. That doesn't make her a sadist, just somebody with a sense of justice. Sadists enjoy hurting people for the sake of hurting them, even helpless innocents. Often especially helpless innocents. I don't think Mari has a thing for that.

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Mari proudly wore her nickname earned by repeatedly mentally and emotionally torturing people until their hearts gave out. It wasn't just her father. There were at least five others. There aren't a whole lot of situations where that is tactically optimal. Then there's all the damage she did to Mist citizens.

First Keiko, who was already so broken when they met that Mari could do anything to her and it would still be an improvement. Then Hazō. Noburi. Akane. Kagome, who in many ways was still as much a child as the rest of them. They had not only survived their exposure to Inoue Mari, but had somehow taken the best of what she had to teach without absorbing her nihilism, her sadism or her narcissism. And now, inexplicably, impossibly, they were her family. Was there enough trust and affection between them for a parent-child relationship? Could she live up to it if there was?

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"Kai," Hazou whispered, making the hand seal for the Dispelling technique. Sadly, the world completely failed to shatter around him, so this was either Inoue-sensei being sadistic with her un-Dispellable supergenjutsu, or it was actually real. He sincerely hoped that it was just Sadist-Sensei getting up to her tricks and that at any moment he was going to snap out of it and find his hair being ruffled.

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Before his brain was fully awake, Hazō was on his feet, wearing the clawed gauntlets gifted to him by the pangolin, and sprinting from his bedroom into the common room. Long training by a sadistic teacher who enjoyed late-night ambushes had taught him to sleep in a shirt and shorts, so at least he wasn't flapping around.

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Mari-sensei had once been a bad person, and still had a sadistic, manipulative streak that showed up every once in a while.

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It had worked for Mari. She remembered that moment, leaning over Yuri's body with a kunai in her hand, seeing the trust still in her lightless eyes, and reflected in them the trail of perfect self-destruction that had led Mari there. There was no way back, of course, there was never a way back. But when she saw the chain of cause and effect, from the happy child to the broken doll to the libertine to the puppeteer, she also saw the patterns. No matter who she was or what was happening to her, Inoue Mari always found a way to be playful, manipulative, curious, trusting, sadistic…

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"I know all of the facts," Kurosawa said, "and not just the ones in the Mist dossiers. You think I don't remember you, Inoue? Caring about nothing but your own pleasure, sleeping around and living in drug dens and doing other things I won't dirty my mouth with, leaving a trail of broken hearts and corrupted innocents in your wake? Kanna was weak-willed. Shikigami was a fallen idealist. But you… you didn't have anywhere further left to fall."

That condemnation was a heavier blow than Kurosawa knew, and not just because every single word of it was true. Jōnin were the village's heroes, beloved and feared all at once. Even Captain Zabuza, who'd cared about nothing but his work, couldn't escape his own legend. Kurosawa Hana was no exception. How could Mari not have known about her, the woman who'd mastered combat and diplomacy both, turning enemies into loyal allies or destroying them as the mission demanded—all without ever sacrificing her dignity or her integrity?

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[Lord Marshal]

I doubt she was tricked, she probably agreed to work with Shikigami and then selected some/most of the people. That's useful wouldn't you say?

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I've always read this as meaning that Shikigami convinced Mari to go ahead with the Swamp plan, and she agreed in part due to fear of Yagura but also because she honestly thought he could do better, and after that point Shikigami delegated the task of selecting the appropriate individuals and writing speeches, etc. so that the plan would succeed.

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Mari is one of the people that when fall, they fall even harder because know what they are doing it's bad.
When she took revenge on her uncle, and broke all the taboos a ninja on her field have to maintain some boundary...
That was bad and it was even worse because she enjoyed it.
So we have a person without boundaries that feel horrible because she did some very horrible stuff, and feel even worse because she enjoyed doing that horrible stuff.
So how do you forget you're a monster? By going even deeper, because there isn't really much for you from your point of view.
So you have
Mari feel bad, but feel good too about it, so that means she bad inside, so she keep going bad things to ignore the problem(Because she's clearly rotten inside and can't do good,right?), so she feel bad.....ect.

Mari always wanted to do good, or, ironically, she would have never fallen so low, so when Shikigami told his plan, she went with it, even if other variables helped her.
It appealed to the part of her that wanted to do good, and felt bad and was just sick of it.

Mari is a self-described sadist. She enjoyed much of her work.

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Meh.
To be fair, things like that have a certain, appeal to most primal parts of the brain, so it's not like Mari is intrinsically abnormal as she says.
But i think in Mari case what she really craved was
1) Control, because she felt her own powerless when she was young and she never wants to feel that again.
2)A sort of punishment for herself: If she does bad things and she enjoy those, it shows to her she's rotten inside, so there isn't much she can go about it,right? So she uses those thing to drown the pain, because it's only thing she can do being a bad person, but that only make her even worse.
It helps with the pain, because it make her ignore the problem in the moment, on the other hand, it just make her feel worse, and so she then do even worse to forget it and reaffirm she's a monster.


At least in my humble opinion.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

She's in hell now, because all of her coping and deflecting mechanisms have been stripped away to leave raw guilt. A large part of what she feels guilty about is the that she is a person who enjoys manipulating and hurting people.





I doubt it's a coincidence that the Nara are yin-talents and Naruto has the yang half of a god pumping him chakra 24 hours a day. Shikaku told Keiko that one of the greatest benefits of joining the Nara would be having other people who understand what it's like to have her very blood demanding that the universe be understood, structured, ordered, static. That is pretty much the foundational role of yin.





Mari proudly wore her nickname earned by repeatedly mentally and emotionally torturing people until their hearts gave out. It wasn't just her father. There were at least five others. There aren't a whole lot of situations where that is tactically optimal. Then there's all the damage she did to Mist citizens.

​

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I'm not seeing any sadism in those examples. Hazou is calling her a sadist in the sense of the gym coach who makes his students run laps for their own good, not a sadist in the sense of torturing innocent people for kicks.

The awful stuff she did on missions wasn't really voluntary, she was effectively coerced. What do you think would have happened to her if she refused to do what she was ordered to do by the village?

Using drugs, sleeping around, and breaking hearts doesn't make someone a monster either.

 

[faflec]

That was bad and it was even worse because she enjoyed it.

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There was a part of her that had been screaming in horror at what she was doing, crossing so many lines that could not be uncrossed, all at once. She killed those feelings too. She took pleasure in what she was doing, because that was what the mission demanded. If she'd let herself give in to compassion or regret, at the end of the night there would have been two corpses instead of one.

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Sounds to me like she makes herself like it because the alternative in her mind was to go suicidally mad. Not because she actually enjoyed it.

 

[Lailoken]

I'm not seeing any sadism in those examples. Hazou is calling her a sadist in the sense of the gym coach who makes his students run laps for their own good, not a sadist in the sense of torturing innocent people for kicks.

The awful stuff she did on missions wasn't really voluntary, she was effectively coerced. What do you think would have happened to her if she refused to do what she was ordered to do by the village?

Using drugs, sleeping around, and breaking hearts doesn't make someone a monster either.

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She described herself as a sadist. Her 'training' methods went well beyond mere utility. Her missions were to complete her missions and there are very few missions where spending hours mentally torturing somebody to death is tactically superior to getting whatever information you need out of them and quickly finishing them with a garotte or knife to the heart. If your mission doesn't in any way require and indeed suffers a delay due to you indulging yourself by burning down an orphanage the crispy tots are all on you. She didn't just sleep around in the village; she destroyed people, corrupted souls, and ruined lives.

 

[Walter]

I'm surprised to be so far out of the mainstream here. Like, by her own admission, Inoue lied about the mission being a suicide mission, pitted everyone against Zabuza, then used their deaths to cover our escape.

Isn't that way beyond anyone else's capacity to forgive? Like, a dozen dead kids, prosecution rests? Yagura, Zabuza, Shikigami, Inoue found guilty, sentence... our undying contempt.

Like, she can brokenbird as hard as she likes, but I'm not gonna forget what she did.

 

[dukezinnia]

I haven't read the comments so this question probably has been answered before, but can we look at a character/redemption arc for Mari or something? It's really no good to have her moping around and not doing stuff.

 

[18scsc]

As long as you keep it in a stoppered vial away from air, basically forever. There's venom collected in 1935 that's still as potent as ever.

It would probably go bad eventually after we took it out to coat a weapon with it or whatever, but that seems like a viable offensive option. It might go especially well with Keiko's fighting style, her knives are sharp but not terribly lethal all by themselves so her ability to put a tough target down without Pangolin help is limited. Stupidly lethal fast acting venom might be just the thing.

In fact, she could coat a bunch of kunai with venom and keep them in a storage seal to take out in a moment when she needed them, I think.

The venom might need some sort of thickening agent to make it stick to weapons properly, like grease or lard, but I presume ninja know all about what works for that.

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Even better, rather than using just granite as the base for our macerators, we carve a pocket in the body of the granite and fill it with poison. Now we shoot a mix of hyper-deadly poison and tiny rocks traveling at high speed with every punch.

 

[faflec]

Mari proudly wore her nickname earned by repeatedly mentally and emotionally torturing people until their hearts gave out. It wasn't just her father. There were at least five others. There aren't a whole lot of situations where that is tactically optimal. Then there's all the damage she did to Mist citizens.

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Her missions were to complete her missions and there are very few missions where spending hours mentally torturing somebody to death is tactically superior to getting whatever information you need out of them and quickly finishing them with a garotte or knife to the heart.

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OK, so just to be clear, I don't think that's how her Heartbreaker schtick works:

"Back on track," Inoue-sensei said more seriously, "the reason they call me Heartbreaker is that I have stopped five people's hearts with genjutsu alone."

Mori looked horrified. "I thought that was impossible."

"I'm not saying I can make my illusions directly affect the physical world. That's crazy talk. But some people have weak hearts, and a sharp enough spike of genjutsu terror…"

She didn't have to finish it.

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I'm under the impression that she killed her enemies with the sharp enough spike of genjutsu terror, which implies that she made them go from "baseline" to "OMGWTFBBQ" in a second or so, which killed them. Not drawn out at all.

 

[Kiba]

I haven't read the comments so this question probably has been answered before, but can we look at a character/redemption arc for Mari or something? It's really no good to have her moping around and not doing stuff.

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Can we wait for redemption until after the results of the Battle of Nagi Island?

 

[TaliesinSkye]

I'm surprised to be so far out of the mainstream here. Like, by her own admission, Inoue lied about the mission being a suicide mission, pitted everyone against Zabuza, then used their deaths to cover our escape.

Isn't that way beyond anyone else's capacity to forgive? Like, a dozen dead kids, prosecution rests? Yagura, Zabuza, Shikigami, Inoue found guilty, sentence... our undying contempt.

Like, she can brokenbird as hard as she likes, but I'm not gonna forget what she did.

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What? She didn't want the kids to die, and wasn't the one who killed them. That was done by the brutal regime that she was attempting to escape with everyone else from. The persons responsible for killing those kids are Zabuza and whoever gave Zabuza his orders. She did not embark on the mission intending to get everyone killed. It happened despite her best efforts, and she only survived because she left when it became clear there was no alternative.

 

[dukezinnia]

Can we wait for redemption until after the results of the Battle of Nagi Island?

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I guess we could. It's just that it seems like it has been an awfully long time since Mari has been a real player in the quest. And I'm more curious if the authors have any plans of us getting a reasonable shot at getting her back.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Even better, rather than using just granite as the base for our macerators, we carve a pocket in the body of the granite and fill it with poison. Now we shoot a mix of hyper-deadly poison and tiny rocks traveling at high speed with every punch.

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Holy crap, that's brutal and brilliant. Parrying would be impossible without covering the whole body, and dodging would be pretty difficult if it spat out a wide cone. All it would take is one scratch from one venom coated shard and it'd be over.

Assuming the venom could stick to the shards in flight and not just aerosolize? I'd be worried about breathing the stuff in.

 

[faflec]

Pretty sure we have to up the strength of our Macerators to get granite shards. Or seal them as pre-ground granite, either/or.

 

[Cariyaga]

I'm surprised to be so far out of the mainstream here. Like, by her own admission, Inoue lied about the mission being a suicide mission, pitted everyone against Zabuza, then used their deaths to cover our escape.

Isn't that way beyond anyone else's capacity to forgive? Like, a dozen dead kids, prosecution rests? Yagura, Zabuza, Shikigami, Inoue found guilty, sentence... our undying contempt.

Like, she can brokenbird as hard as she likes, but I'm not gonna forget what she did.

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Eh. She's a person. She made mistakes. She wants to be better. That's enough for me. My standards for forgiveness are low because I've found that unconditional faith in people often turns them around. Obviously not always the case -- and I'm good at judging people as to when it's not the case -- but I'm not inclined to hold against people what they did in the past if it doesn't actually help them or me to do so.