I've been following this quest for a long time, mostly lurking because I'm not a huge fan of the freeform vote format, but I think this update might finally convince me to come out and vote more often.
So, first impressions,
I fucking love it. This chapter genuinely felt like we got outmaneuvered because we are inexperienced upstarts up against a guy with a very heavily entrenched power bloc and literal decades of experience over us. That said, it was damn close, we came within a hair's breadth of winning, and I think that if we had played our cards just the tiniest bit better, we might have pulled it off.
There is one thing in particular about the update that worried and confused me though:
The young Lord reached into his sleeve and produced a vellum scroll. "Do you think that would be easier if all of Leaf saw you marching alongside the Uchiha during the Founder's Day parade? Because Lord Uchiha gave me this invitation, and it's full of very flowery language and beautiful calligraphy, but ultimately it's just a boilerplate parade-position form with his signature. It doesn't actually have my name on it anywhere...."
This is a massive 'fuck you' to basically every single even remotely prominent and/or anti-civilian prejudiced ninja in leaf (in other words pretty much all of them), but especially so to the Uchiha. I don't get why Hazo did this, and I think it will almost certainly end badly for us. That this wasn't a decision made by the voters either just makes it rankle even more, and while I
really, really hate to be confrontational/focus on this when I loved the rest of the update so much, I have to ask for a reason or justification
@eaglejarl .
As for the results of the vote, well... I'm not gonna lie, we're in a pretty bad position here. Admittedly, not as poorly off as we could be, but at this point if we want to stay in Leaf (which I am very much in favor of), our success is going to rely heavily on the good graces of the ISC and on how well we can integrate ourselves in Leaf. The sad fact is, we're a relative upstart, our primary rival who will have few qualms in crushing us has risen to power, and we're pretty much cut off as far as making new allies goes. Realistically, I think the best move we can make here is to avoid pissing anyone off and invest heavily in civillians and clanless ninja to improve our powerbase in the future. That said, while I think Hiashi will prefer to try to starve us to death rather than just killing us via dangerous missions or running us out of town, I agree with
@Inferno Vulpix that a good bug-out plan is something we should put together just in case, so long as we aren't obvious in doing so.
