Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I mean I always thought Jiraiya was incompetent. So I'm not really shocked at another example
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Why do you think that?
thatwasthejoke.gif
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Who said anything about fucking lee over? We just want the scroll in the clan, which we can accomplish by adopting him.
- Location
- North Wales
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I wouldn't say *incompetent*, just not as memetically hypercompetent as the default assumption seems to be.
There was that major fuckup where he didn't bother giving established passphrases to his courier, ending in the Cold Stone Killers incident. Or the time he poo-pooed any kind of sealing security because he believes any fallout can be dealt with given a big enough Rasengan. Or his handling of the Hana incident. Or the time he left his newly-established Clan with less than two months of capital to survive on when leaving for his Last Grand Adventure...
Yeah, Jiraiya's got kind of a lot of failures going on even in the quest's limited timescale and viewpoint.
Last edited:
- Location
- Yes.
Or Yomi Numa, or Hari Jizo, or having a fuckton of backup to call upon...Honestly, I don't really count this since Jiraiya is a S-rank nightmare and any sealing failures of his level are either going to be trivially taken care of (as he described) or are so Catastrophic that no amount of Kagome-level prep is going to work, save literally not doing the seal research.
Um...the only consequences of that were on our head, and on Mist's (and on Mari's, but that was more on what Hana did and less on what Jiraiya did). Jiraiya presumably got the concessions he wanted out of the whole affair, and we more-or-less got over losing Momma.
- Location
- Australia
Jiraiya was a summoner. If he needed to refresh his knowledge he could just ask the toads.
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Largely comes down to my opinion that he was terrible at running his spy network, pretty bad at politics, incredibly bad at financial stuff, got us a terrible deal with marrying Kei to the Nara and, failed to help develop the team at all.
The fact that he explicitly left these notes in his will is not surprising to me
Last edited:
It feels like that any bad things that happened on Jiraiya's watch means you'll just blame it on him without taking into contexts on why those things happen.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Fifi is clearly the boss summon in disguise.
Tua
鸡肉面条汤
- Location
- شوربة الدجاج المعكرونة
You know, thinking about that again: why didn't our passwords come with an expiry date? Or if they did, how did Mari forget about it?
- Location
- North Wales
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
We can give equally eloquent rationalisations for the fuckups we've made along the way. Every single one of them. That doesn't stop them being fuckups. Our old set of codewords went out of date. Ok, why? Could that fuckup have been prevented with a more robust codeword system? Why didn't he tell us the expiry date of the codeword system we had set up when we discussed it in the first place - he was the spymaster and us the neophytes to the system he created, after all. The same kind of reasoning can be applied to all the other points, and the ones not brought up.
There were always reasons for what he did that seemed perfectly sane in the moment. There were also always fuckups; an ongoing shitshow of fuckups culminating in his ignoble death on a faraway isle. My point wasn't that Jiraiya was incompetent; I explicitly stated he wasn't. "Jiraiya pilots Hazou from the start" would probably have us in a very different place than we are right now, after all.
Rather, I was saying that 'while not incompetent, there sure is a lot of material for hostile successors to craft a narrative of incompetence out of', given the short time we knew him to pull them from. 4 Hazous out of 10 on the fuckup scale.
Edit: past tensed.
Last edited:
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I mean, that part's clearly just splashback from the Bear Effect.
- Location
- Yes.
Two possible interpretations for this one. When we checked Joutarou for being one of Jiraiya's agents, we actually checked he was Jiraiya, meaning that we used codes from the Liberator arc (Mari: I chatted him up at the buffet yesterday, tried one of the code words that he gave us back before the Liberator mission), which Jiraiya...probably wouldn't have given to other agents, but would have known himself (yeah, I dunno about the quote above, if we go with this interpretation). Alternatively, Mari did get passcodes, and since the only way we could get passcodes were by checking contacts in Iron and Tea (read: way too fucking far away) she just gave the old ones and hoped that they'd alert Joutarou that we were allies, or something along those lines.
Alright. Your statement was:
I refuted that statement by pointing out that we could have gotten passphrases if we'd bothered to get them from that one contact in Tea before leaving for Hot Springs. We did not, therefore that fuckup was on us. It was not Jiraiya's fault that he did not bother to give established passphrases to his courier, he clearly did and it was us who did not have the proper passphrases.
And to answer your response, I would imagine that a robust codeword system is more prone to being broken, which is something Jiraiya would obviously not want (though, admittedly, I do not actually know what you are imagining when you say a robust codeword system, and am not a spymaster anyway so I can only guess at what a spymaster would do). Regarding the expiry date to the codewords, I believe I have answered those in response to Tua above.
Finally, I have never claimed that you've said Jiraiya was incompetent. I recognize that he is capable of failure, and is not, as you say, this hypercompetent paragon (like when he sent a couple of ninja to their deaths due to being impatient for information). I was merely pointing out things that could possibly refute your examples as being fuckups Jiraiya did. I don't see them as rationalizations.
Edit: Didn't see your edit.
To be clear, my response to you was meant to show that I don't see these events being fuckups that are Jiraiya's fault.
Last edited:
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
With the infodump giving us the location of a few clans with respect to each other, I decided to whip up a very rough map that fits what we got from them. Add in some help from the discord on previous such bits of info, and I have something that's maybe not entirely divorced from the actual layout.
Easy. Tsunade was the disguised Sage and just had more scrolls made for her team. The Jounin leader naturally gets first choice.
-actually, something to check on both the pangolin and toad scrolls: exactly how many names are on them? Also run the names against all available records, especially the two summon clans and the Nara and Mori libraries.
Y'know, compiling a report on the history of the summon path would be a good project for Pandaa. It's supposedly only a thousand years while being inhabited by creatures with typical lifespans of eight hundred and some first-hand witnesses to the Sage himself still alive.
Also ask Tsunade for more information on the seventh path.
Reminder: check Jiraiya's notes for steganography and invisible ink. Kagome is qualified.
I'm more interested in why he kept in his bequeathed files not only this one childhood homework assignment in particular, but all of its various drafts and revisions.
JulieK
Unintentionally funny
- Location
- Israel
The pink text was hard to read. Maybe a lighter shade would have more contrast with the black background.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Its a momento of Sarutobi. It absolutely feels like something that J would keep on him, obsessively reading over and over trying to remember his voice.
It just so happens to be mildly useful to us, is all.
It happened way, way before Sarutobi died, and he's bound to have had oodles of similar cruft from their decades together, most of which wouldn't have been the slightest bit classified and therefore safer to use as a memento.
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
That's what I was looking for. Thanks @Oneiros.
@eaglejarl As you said, randomly finding incomplete 7th Path notes from Jiraiya's childhood among his bequeathed stuff shouldn't really affect my judgement of him. But since he specifically mentioned leaving those notes to us in his will, I conclude that he misplaced his notes and completely forgot (incompetence), or that he somehow thought that this would be funny (I don't know how) and lighten the mood in the event of his death (I don't think it did for any Gokētsu), or that he genuinely thought that those were notes worth mentioning in his will without qualifiers (incompetence).
I understand that it is completely infeasible spoon wise to write up a professional handbook worth of world-building on a parallel universe of which we've only previously visited two little corners. But can't that be abstracted away for now like his seal notes were, with you giving us a trickle of relevant stuff on a need to know basis or something?
For now it would only be the Toads opinion and prior opinion on the Pangolins (which we pretty much got already from your update), their most up to date relationships, the summoners of Leaf, the status of the Snakes, and anything you yourself deem relevant plot hooks for right now.
...Maybe "only" is the wrong word. But we probably have 2 in-game months before we really can use any of it beyond a list of Leaf summoners.
Edit:
Don't get me wrong. The old essay itself was kind of delightful and very probably did lighten the mood for Noburi, and maybe even the other four (though each could potentially have hangups that let them appreciate it less in that situation). But I don't think any one of them laughed at the "and I leave all of my 7th Path notes to my dear clan. Yes. All of them. Read them attentively and use them wisely" joke.
Last edited:
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
On the contrary, by including powerful special abilities which vanish into thin air right when they would be most useful, we are staying completely faithful to the spirit of canon.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Related: I'm very glad that Keiko doesn't forget that she's the Pangolin Summoner for vast swathes of time in which many battles were had and opponents struggled with.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...
I didn't realize that it was explicitly called out as a bequest.
Now I'm sorry I wrote this fucking thing. It was supposed to be sweet and a little helpful but it's just been the cause of a mountain of bitching about how Jiraiya sucks.
Whatever, we'll get you something else. Hold your water, it'll take a while.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
If you cut out the part about it being the only info he left us about the 7th path, it makes an excellent interlude. I think everyone's problem was just about it being the end all be all to what we know about summon politics from Jiraiya.