You are actively disagreeing with me, and yet I find myself fond of you. This is a novel sensation.
The short answer is that the Condor resistance is described as a desperate, wrecked force. If they could ally with another close clan beyond a neutral buffer state it's hard to imagine them refusing.
Plus, burgeoning pan-clan alliance. This is about fostering multilateralism on both planes instead of focusing on specific individuals.
I appreciate it! Big fan of having civil disagreements and not taking things personally.
When you phrase it like that I can definitely see the benefits. If I had to pare it down, I'd say I'm still worried that the Condors take the whole 'enable the destruction of our culture' things fairly seriously, and would try to attack Keiko or us (which is another thing - make sure the Pangolins and Condors don't have any issues given that both their summoners are going to be Leaf ninja).
I think it would be better going for the Otters, setting up the trade network, forming some sort of 7P UN, and then fitting the Condors in so that they don't have a choice but to accept. It's not that they're going to hate us more for forcing them in. I just want to ensure we aren't in any danger from them.
I'd say it's a mixture between cultural conditioning and incentivization. The Will of Fire says to protect Leaf and pass along knowledge so that the next generation can do the same. That, combined with some Tower pressure for newly minted jonin to pass along knowledge/skills before they die, would be enough to have Asuma and Gai take on a team. Especially if we assume that Hiruzen had his own son teach the next generation of ISC heirs to further bind their closely knit clans to the Leaf, and that Gai --a taijutsu monster --saw Lee's blind persistence and was inspired by it.
I like this reasoning, and it makes sense for Leaf. Other villages don't have a Will of Water or Will of Rock though, so it's probably more administratively ordered there?
The whole demographics things, where you want to have meaningful casualties and meaningful stakes, but don't want to worry about the details so it feels like there's infinite ninja is my least favorite things about Naruto fanfiction, and there's been a fair number of battles or losses (vs Mist, vs Akatsuki, sealing failure, sinkholes) that I can't contextualize because there's not a population model I can point to.
You're growing on me, but you really did pick literally the two worst examples of pedagogical selfishness in the entire history of the entire setting.
Fair, but I don't think any other Leaf S-ranks take a team other than the Hokage (honestly very coincidental that Hokage keep teaching other Hokage. Maybe teaching correlates with being good at politics?), so it's very peculiar that 2 did at the same time.
Pending them actually being S-rank, see below
They were, but note that skywalkers were a brand new thing and they make an enormous difference. That was the last major battle that we rolled by hand and the jōnin v ANBU part of it was a curbstomp. Hiruzen got a stupidly unlucky roll which is why he died.
That's a very good point, and it explains why they folded to Akatsuki, since Sarutobi, Jiraiya, and Naruto took the equivalent S-rank Mist ninja.
Keep in mind that Elite Jounin like Gai, Kakashi, and Asuma are not S-rankers (though after inheriting the Monkey Scroll, Asuma likely is on the cusp of S-rankery). They're in the same demographic category as S-rankers, the 'unlikely to die to anything less than history-defining battles' group, but they aren't S-Rank yet.
In terms of proper S-rankers, it looks like major villages tend to have about 2-3 proper S-rank ninja. Sand had Gaara and Chiyo, and now only has Chiyo, and the consequence of only having one S-ranker is that Sand looks really weak right now compared to other major villages.
Meanwhile, Rock had Han, Roshi, and Onoki, two Jinchuuriki and one Kage, and Cloud had A, B, and F. It's also possible that there's one or two more that I'm not aware of from those villages, and it'd be more apt to say 2-4. Leaf is highly anomalous, generating multiple times as many S-rankers as other villages but losing something like half of them, ending up merely one or two S-rankers higher than average.
As for minor villages, I would buy that their power often peaks at Elite Jounin as often as not. We have the example of Waterfall's Fu as an S-ranker in a minor village, but I would similarly buy that the strongest ninja in River is closer to Hiashi than Jiraiya in terms of power.
I'm assuming elite jounin are S-rank mainly because otherwise Akatsuki, a group of 10, could solo major villages. That feels setting breaking to me - the whole reason the village system works is that, as we've experienced, its horrifying and near suicidal to go missing nin. But having an entire missing nin group be more powerful than a village is just-- if you go based off of that, Akatsuki had like half the S-rankers that exist. The ratio of S-rank to jonin works because S-rankers, as you pointed out tend not to die.
Also I might be remembering wrong, but I thought Kakashi was referenced specifically as S-rank, meaning his rival Gai would be as well, and I know Zabuza was referred to as both S-rank and Elite Jonin.
Another thing - I feel there gets to be a pretty big difference between senior chunin and new chunin, and I think the same thing starts to happen with jonin after they survive 3-5 years. I'm not sure it works to have all ninja but injured or S-rank ones die at 30, essentially. There's enough heredity of ninja being children of ninja that I'd expect them surviving longer in exchange for having a slower power curve due to less experience. See: Choza, Inoichi, Shikaku, Hiashi, Shibi, and Tsume, all these clan ninja that survived until their kids were 15 and approaching chunin. Assuming they had children earlier as 20/21, that still puts them at 35 until they died.
You could also make an argument that they died to a coincidence and normally would've survived longer, but ninja. Eventually some act of war comes and they're going to die at some point. A little curious how clan elders work now - maybe they aren't ninja and gain their power due to longevity and experience vs ninja power?
