![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timepiececlockI was reading a random standard series review of Naruto, and it got me thinking. It got me thinking about Naruto as a series and Harry Potter as a series. What both series manages to do, one of the strongest aspects of both series, is the fascinating and in-depth world created for the characters to play in.
The worlds of both Naruto and HP draw liberally from previous conventions in their respective genres:
HP is about a supernatural underworld the normal humans are unware of. I think I've read that about 40 times in different books.
Naruto is about ninjas. Half the anime out there is about ninjas. Even the new Batman movie was about ninjas.
But both series manage to take those conventions and create something entirely fresh-feeling. In the case of HP, it's the simple depth of detail and munitiae (sp?) that makes the wizarding world seem fresh and new. JKR's capacity for coming up with new and fascinating little quirks for everything creates a vibrant world that you feel you could walk into. This has always been one of the strongest things drawing me into the HP series.
The world of Naruto, on the other hand, is much less detailed on the day to day stuff. We know some things about the average ninja lifestyle, but not as much as we know about the average lifestyle of the HP wizards. Nevertheless, what Narutoverse lacks in the small things it makes up for in the big things. We have a very clear idea of the politics and social environment of the societies of Narutoverse. We don't know much at all about international politics in HP, but half of Narutoverse is about war, i.e. about international politics. Or intervillage politics, to be more specific. It also feels a lot more realistic and more sensibly structured to me than the political world of HP.
The world HP feels realistic and vibrant on and individual level, but I've always felt it was better when JKR just glossed over details of international stuff because when she tries to go into detail about it, my mind starts picking it apart, and fast. Speculating about population ratios of wizards to muggles and economics is the LEAST of it. The plot of Naruto, however, is very strongly grounded in the politics of the hidden villages, and the whole concept of ninjas as a society was wonderfully created. If you're going to have ninjas but they're going to be common and well-known, make them like a real military. Not to say that the hidden village system is anything remotely resembling a real military, but the point is that actual ninjas weren't military-like at all; there weren't armies of them and they didn't all wear flak jackets and they didn't function like a working military body supported by a company town. But the ninjas of Narutoverse do all that. Naruto demystified the ninjas and militarized them at the same time. Brilliant. The idea of individual and self-sustaining mercenary armies being used interchangeably by various countries DOES make a kind of weird sense. And the way the mangaka developed the world around the hidden villages supported this societal structer very well. It falls firmly and pleasantly into my suspension of disbelief.
The Naruto world also manages to feel really, REALLY different from the original worlds or societies created in other anime series. It's familiar and filled with familiar things, yet feels very unlike any kind of ninja or action anime we've seen before.
I've said the vibrancy of HPverse is one of the reasons I like the series. That and the plot are why I keep reading. I like the same things about Naruto. However, I've never bonded with the characters of HP the way I've bonded with the characters of Naruto. I like the HP characters and I quite adore Luna Lovegood, but I don't love them. I LOVE the characters of Naruto, almost all of them. And while I'll make a few HP posts every once in a while, I tend to post Narutoish things a lot.
While writing this I remembered FMA. I thought about adding that to the comparison since it *does* create a vibrant and original world... but then I stopped because I remembered that the world of FMA may be vibrant, but it's not original and it's not meant to be. It's meant to be Europe. It's a history class through a mirror darkly (it's got psuedo-Nazis, terrorism, trench warfare, civil wars, train travel, and fighting with insurgents in the Middle East. Like I said, it's Europe thoroughout the 20th century.) And besides, FMA for me is about the plot and characters, not about the setting anyway. Although the setting fucks with your head just as much as everything else in this series. You can't trust anything in FMA because it all fucks with your head sooner or later.
The worlds of both Naruto and HP draw liberally from previous conventions in their respective genres:
HP is about a supernatural underworld the normal humans are unware of. I think I've read that about 40 times in different books.
Naruto is about ninjas. Half the anime out there is about ninjas. Even the new Batman movie was about ninjas.
But both series manage to take those conventions and create something entirely fresh-feeling. In the case of HP, it's the simple depth of detail and munitiae (sp?) that makes the wizarding world seem fresh and new. JKR's capacity for coming up with new and fascinating little quirks for everything creates a vibrant world that you feel you could walk into. This has always been one of the strongest things drawing me into the HP series.
The world of Naruto, on the other hand, is much less detailed on the day to day stuff. We know some things about the average ninja lifestyle, but not as much as we know about the average lifestyle of the HP wizards. Nevertheless, what Narutoverse lacks in the small things it makes up for in the big things. We have a very clear idea of the politics and social environment of the societies of Narutoverse. We don't know much at all about international politics in HP, but half of Narutoverse is about war, i.e. about international politics. Or intervillage politics, to be more specific. It also feels a lot more realistic and more sensibly structured to me than the political world of HP.
The world HP feels realistic and vibrant on and individual level, but I've always felt it was better when JKR just glossed over details of international stuff because when she tries to go into detail about it, my mind starts picking it apart, and fast. Speculating about population ratios of wizards to muggles and economics is the LEAST of it. The plot of Naruto, however, is very strongly grounded in the politics of the hidden villages, and the whole concept of ninjas as a society was wonderfully created. If you're going to have ninjas but they're going to be common and well-known, make them like a real military. Not to say that the hidden village system is anything remotely resembling a real military, but the point is that actual ninjas weren't military-like at all; there weren't armies of them and they didn't all wear flak jackets and they didn't function like a working military body supported by a company town. But the ninjas of Narutoverse do all that. Naruto demystified the ninjas and militarized them at the same time. Brilliant. The idea of individual and self-sustaining mercenary armies being used interchangeably by various countries DOES make a kind of weird sense. And the way the mangaka developed the world around the hidden villages supported this societal structer very well. It falls firmly and pleasantly into my suspension of disbelief.
The Naruto world also manages to feel really, REALLY different from the original worlds or societies created in other anime series. It's familiar and filled with familiar things, yet feels very unlike any kind of ninja or action anime we've seen before.
I've said the vibrancy of HPverse is one of the reasons I like the series. That and the plot are why I keep reading. I like the same things about Naruto. However, I've never bonded with the characters of HP the way I've bonded with the characters of Naruto. I like the HP characters and I quite adore Luna Lovegood, but I don't love them. I LOVE the characters of Naruto, almost all of them. And while I'll make a few HP posts every once in a while, I tend to post Narutoish things a lot.
While writing this I remembered FMA. I thought about adding that to the comparison since it *does* create a vibrant and original world... but then I stopped because I remembered that the world of FMA may be vibrant, but it's not original and it's not meant to be. It's meant to be Europe. It's a history class through a mirror darkly (it's got psuedo-Nazis, terrorism, trench warfare, civil wars, train travel, and fighting with insurgents in the Middle East. Like I said, it's Europe thoroughout the 20th century.) And besides, FMA for me is about the plot and characters, not about the setting anyway. Although the setting fucks with your head just as much as everything else in this series. You can't trust anything in FMA because it all fucks with your head sooner or later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 01:12 pm (UTC)One of the things I love about the Naruto setting is figuring out the minutae of daily life based on the little hints we get -- HP has a main character who was, to start, unfamiliar with it all, so he shares our surprise at new things and we all get the magic life explained to us, but Naruto is all about characters who have never known anything but the ninja company town, so they take its workings for granted, and we're left to extrapolate the mundane details and internal details on our own.
I love thinking about things like what it's like for the non-ninjas in Konoha. Because we know that all the kids go to the ninja academy till they're 12 or so, whether they come from ninja families or not, and most of them graduate but aren't selected for small-team training by jounin, I figure that all the shopkeepers and carpenters and what have you can still kick the crap out of the tough guys in any ordinary town. The ones that stay in practice can still do a jutsu or three, can navigate that complex network of roof-and-treetop paths. And they know their kids will go through the academy too -- do they hope they'll make the genin 3-man teams and go on to become real ninjas like they never could, or do they hope they'll be let go after that, to stay home and build and support the actual ninjas and not be in so much danger all the time?
Are there a bunch more ninja bloodline families we don't know about, or did they all get busy reproducing the year the kyuubi was on the rampage? What are the teams like in years when the graduating class isn't full of kids from the ninja families? Most of them are the ninjas that never get past genin or chuunin, I guess, the guys that are the guards, the foot soldiers, sent out on missions only in emergencies -- because the A and B-rank missions are for the elite ninjas, and the lower-rank missions are given to the trainees, especially the ones with high potential.
I also like to think that Kakashi failed all the genin they tried to saddle him with before because he was waiting for the Fourth's kid and/or the last Uchiha to graduate. Or at least that he wasn't interested in training any of the kiddies, preferred to work alone, until the Third went and gave him that group, and he knew he couldn't abandon them. Because no way in hell were those three-man teams actually organized to be even -- all the bloodline kids are on teams together. The grown-ups stacked the deck. Which makes perfect sense, of course. The ninja families would all flip a shit if their kids didn't get to go on with their training because they were grouped with weaklings.
Or maybe I just like fanwanking. ;)