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rozaceous · 10 months

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mariko, violence, and the meta of violence in fanfiction

ok so it’s apparently not enough that i write the most indulgent kind of fic, but now i’m writing an essay about my fic. this got so long, abt 2k total. if i said sorry, it’d be insincere, but at least no one is making you read it?

i want to piggy-back off the post i made earlier this week where i was talking about how mariko was not well-adjusted, and was, in fact, doing extremely poorly. what this post turns into, however, is an analysis not only of mariko’s relationship to violence and her subsequent trauma, but a meta-analysis of how violence is treated in canon more broadly, and how that ends up translating into fic. because, and i mean this in a way that is distinctly not about tooting my own horn, i’m approaching violence with a different lens than what i've found in a majority of fic, but also in a way that is unique to SI fic.

‘to continue being alive is also an art’ starts in medias res ch 1 with mariko haring off to the confrontation at the bridge in wave. we find out later, she’s fresh from just having killed people for the first time. kakashi and mariko have their little chat abt it in ch 2, but it’s treated as done and resolved afterwards. it was self-defense, she was protecting others, she was justified and shouldn’t lose sleep over it.

mariko also kills during the chuunin exams itself (members of the sound team) and during the finals (she on-screen beheads a foreign ninja). there’s a sort-of killing w the itachi puppet in ch 15, and a mention of sasori, but otherwise we don’t get any particular details of her killing people until the events of ch 17, where she kills danzo and the rest of the elder council, as well as whoever was caught in the bombings. (i’m going to word-of-god this for everyone right now and tell you that there were people caught in the bombings, just like i will confirm that she’s killed other people in the interim of the time skip.)

from a writing-level, i approached violence in a very specific way. most of the violence is off-screen and mentioned as a retrospective; what occurs on-screen i tried to keep brief and matter-of-fact. graphic, maybe, but not gory. i also try not to play violence as something that’s done for laughs, like how sakura will beat naruto up in canon when he annoys her. (we’ll come back to this.) and a lot of this has to do with how mariko herself deals with violence.

i mentioned in that previous post, that mariko grows up in a militaristic culture where violence is a norm and acceptable, as someone who is not actually a kid who can be acculturated into that thinking in the same way. mariko comes from a culture and personal history where interpersonal violence is abhorrent. she tries to duck out of canon events and any requirement of violence on her own part by being a medic, but the team assignments (the narrative/me, if we’re wanting to get meta abt it lol) prevent her from achieving this relatively more peaceful role.

when mariko gets assigned to team seven, she has to get real comfortable with violence real fast. she’s already befriended naruto (and hahahaha you may remember that she does so by punching a guy 🙂) and she cares about kakashi and sasuke. she’s come to the realization that this is her lot, these are her people, they are her responsibility. as she notes in ch 2, she’s not good enough to solve her problems without killing. this is also to say, she’s not good enough to problem-solve without violence. it’s beyond her capacity and skill when the stakes are as high as they are. let’s also consider that caring about everyone is a luxury that mariko cannot afford, widespread mercy is potentially a death sentence, and so she narrows that care down to a handful of people. and so if she’s taking the well-being of her teammates as her ultimate good, she will absolutely let the ends justify the means.

added onto any personal sentiment is that, as far as mariko knows, if anyone on team seven dies, the entire world is fucked.

mariko one hundred percent and sincerely believes that violence is wrong. even when it’s justified, self-defense, etc., mariko views it as ugly. there may be situations where she assigns herself less blame, but she is always blaming herself for being too weak to find another way, because her (somewhat unrealistic) view is that violence is the sign that you’ve run out of other options to get your way.

however, with the stakes being as they are, and with the world she’s in treating violence as a form of currency, mariko sees violence as a necessity.

so we can see the dissonance, right? she has to use violence to protect not only herself, but the people she loves, and the entire world. and mariko’s fundamental optimism is that people are worth helping and that the world is worth saving, because if she doesn’t believe in that with her whole heart, she’d literally just curl up and die. she wants to be kind and to help and nurture and build, but her most effective tools—once again, she views using violence as a failure—are the ones she hates the most. but she has to use them. more, she has to be very, very good with them.

this isn’t a small-level dissonance, it’s a diametric opposition. so in terms of narration, mariko can’t think too much about the violence she’s enacted because it would destroy her. she knows this about herself. she hates it. but it’s necessary. and so she doesn’t think about it. and if she does think about it, she’s very clinical and writes it off as unfortunate and necessary and—well, it’s done, no use crying over it now. she’s disassociated herself from it. and i wanted that perspective reflected in the way i wrote about violence.

the other aspect of how i wanted to handle violence is from how i approach the canon. we’ve all read the fics where konoha is a grimdark dictatorship, with death and torture around every corner. and, uh, it is? it’s a fascist war machine, plainly. it’s child soldiers and state-sanctioned assassination baked into the world economy? there’re multiple instances of genocide? it’s a fucking nightmare.

i, personally, am not able to brush aside those things. i like the meta and the reading-into-things and the what-if’s that happen when you don’t take things at face value. so for me, the writer, i can’t glorify violence. there’s a reason i wrote mariko walking through the uchiha compound in the way that i did. so i’m not going to write like killing a thousand people in one go is anything but horrifying (staring at you, minato), even if i’m not interested in directly interrogating every particular instance of violence within the narrative.

but canon doesn’t approach it from this angle. for canon, this is all the quirky backdrop, and violence and killing are bad, but very few people tend to die in a meaningful sense. violence doesn’t often have lasting consequences. (this is, also, the evolution that Naruto goes through as a series, where it starts off as a critique of the state and then turns into bootlicking, but that’s another meta that plenty of others have written better than i can.) in canon, the ability to do high-damage moves is considered a cool power-up. in fact, your power level is directly correlated with your physical danger level—ie, your ability to do violence.

moreover, casual violence is funny in canon. (we’re back to sakura beating up naruto and it being treated as a joke.) these things are entirely the conceit of reading/watching canon, and it’s what we do with every piece of media. this isn’t a judgment! we are suspending our disbelief and buying into the premise of the story that gets told. and i would hardly have written over 50k of naruto fanfic if i didn’t find it innately compelling and, yes, fun.

so this is where the presentation of violence in fanfiction can get dicey, because not every author is approaching canon with the same spirit that canon itself has. i also want to make the blanket statement that i don’t think any one interpretation is right or wrong, it’s that they’re all interpretations. i’ve read and liked fics of all varieties; i’m not morality policing, i’m trying to place myself and my own fic within a broader phenomenon of how fics present the morality of violence. i don’t personally care what one fic thinks is morally good, nor do i think that a particular presentation necessarily corresponds with what the author thinks in real life, or even that a presentation has to be consistent from fic to fic. these are all lenses/perspectives, and fanfic is inherently about playing with the little details of canon and going, “And?”

so on one end, you’ll have some fics that 100% correspond with the attitude towards violence that canon has and aren’t too interested into getting into the grittier moral quandaries of the canon past what canon presents as good or bad. on the other, you’ll have other fics that will rip the morals of canon to shreds. again, i like both! it always depends what the focus of your story is!

i feel like i’m somewhere in the middle. i feel like a lot of naruto fics commit hard to either of the above scenarios from the start and i...don't (as one commenter pointed out). there's a level of progression I'm trying to portray. and, i have to say, part of the comment that @vermillioncrown left on ch 17 really resonated: “She's sunk as low as them, she's just as fucked up in this second life despite knowing another moral framework and society. And she's mud-wrestling them down at ground level lol.”

mariko ‘knows better’ but isn’t better. she doesn’t feel like she’s a good person. arguably, she isn’t a good person. she has enough of an outsider perspective to see the system for what it is, but she is still inherently within the system. she is absolutely playing the game, and doesn’t have any moral high ground. she kills, she lies, she deceives, she betrays. she harms people. her intentions might be noble, but as tumblr loves to say abt causing others harm: intention isn’t magic. mariko wants better and is trying to achieve it, but she’s in the system and can’t get out of it because we all inherently live in a society, and removing yourself from society isn’t exactly as feasible as our ideals might like.

and because tcba is, mostly, from mariko’s perspective, her understanding of violence colors the narrative. because mariko is an SI/OC, her perspective is one that is ALWAYS going to be a negotiation of ‘canon at face value’ and ‘me personally doing an analysis.’ and i think that’s really cool and interesting, which is why i’m doing it!

but—and this is not me throwing shade or getting mad or singling anyone out—this is also a take that is a little counter to broader fandom habit that aligns with ‘omg she was so badass when she killed that guy!’ or ‘yes! fuck it up!’

reiterating that i’m not trying to scold or slight anyone, bc this is the ‘canon at face value’ take, where we are supposed to see these things as badass and praise-worthy, and often these are climactic scenes where mariko is ostensibly cast as the righteous victor! and if people don’t see what i’m trying to do as different to that take, that’s also on me as the writer, especially bc, as i already said, this is a story that is trying to negotiate those different perspectives on violence. but i also want to point out that there’s more than just ‘violence as badassery’ happening. this is also ‘violence as tragedy.’

and since the meaning and role of violence isn’t a theme that’s going to go anywhere any time soon, i thought it was worth discussing.

#this is not to say that i think the narrative doesn't reward mariko for mercy or generosity. zabuza and haku as the prime examples ofc #and i hope i made this clear? it got so long.#kudos also must go to verm bc it's our discussions that always filter through to everything and some of this was probably their words #but i so would love to talk more abt this if anyone is so inclined #tcba #tcba meta #rozisms

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