ARE YOU READY FOR THE AWESOME, KALLIEL?

[hot_mod_bot]

Author: ronsard
Recipient: kalliel
Title: Reclamation and Its Discontents
Summary: Misery loves company. May the best man win.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: All Naruto characters herein are the property of Kishimoto Masashi. No copyright infringement is intended.
Warning(s): Blatant disregard of canon. Changing POVs. Amateur metaphysics. Shameless “borrowing” from

Comments

1/2

[soleil_et_pluie]

Oh you. Oh you. ♥

Even your effin' summary gave you away, darling. Byzantine? Amateur metaphysics? But it's great that someone describes their fics like that.

In a recent effort to not just quote all your fic back at you, I'm going to go with my reactions to the brilliant story-weaving instead of my favorite quotes, which are too numerous to cite 'em all. Or maybe just a few.

I fucking love Kabuto here. I love his subtle power struggles with Shisui, how both of them are playing a game of manipulation, trying to get the other before the other gets them. Not even terribly disguised, either, but Kabuto's acceptance of his own evil is very.... endearing. Is that the right word? I'm not sure, perhaps charmingly twisted. And i saw what you did there what with the Shisui/Kabuto, HAR HAR HAR HILARIOUS. Also hilarious: Kabuto twisting knives via: “I like the little birthmark on the inside of his left thigh.” They are a fucked-up threesome of dysfunctionality.

God, I was not heartbroken. I kinda liked Shisui with his soul as black as midnight, clearly the villain protagonist. All his idealism and vindictiveness (a new trait..) and creativity made him more dangerous than the card-carrying villains. The worst things done in the name of love and all that.

Also there were so, so, so many moments I was just... GOBSMACKED at how clever certain lines and story-weaving were. 1) Shisui knowing Itachi so well, things like: That damaged air he exuded, of someone early and irrevocably abandoned, was irresistible. SO ITACHI ;^; and Nothing Shisui hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes, he hated that he knew his subject so well.
2) Itachi being willing to mostly bend with the wind, roll with the situation, except for the very few times he turns into steel. Does that make sense? Every effing fic you write adds more layers, but in this one Itachi struck me as willingly malleable up to a point, (for his own good, since like you said, he knows which battles to pick) the point at which his iron will becomes visible, like trees bending in hurricanes so they don't break, if you'll excuse the corny metaphor orz.
3) “Genjutsu users are always the strongest opponents of materialism.” There was so much nonsense in this sentence Matsuko wondered if she’d heard him right. This is brilliant on many levels, because this is nonsense/doesn't make a whole lot of sense at first, but then towards the end, you realize that what they are planning really is what it seems and just as horrible, and Kabuto WOULD take the physical cut-into-the-brain-angle, guh.
4) It was so hard to keep track of the crazy sometimes. This line is particularly multifaceted if you read it as applying to Shisui, and Itachi actually is straightforward in his desires and love, not deliberately obfuscating at all. One thing I really want to know: in this fic, did Itachi mean it when he said, "What if I said it [the person i'd miss the most] was you?" He doesn't seem like the type to throw out that question for no reason, even if evidence points to it still being Sasuke. “You don’t have to believe me,” Itachi said, lips moving softly against Shisui’s fingers. “But I’m glad that you’re still here.” ...I would laugh forever if this were true. Adding layers of tragedy to what happens to Itachi. T_T

Also, the slow build of Shisui's villainess was aces, till the end when I was sure his blinders were full-on, clearly deranged. Maybe snow blinders? XD
But it's the little things that cement this, such as:
“A tower? That’s a cute touch.” BECAUSE HE'S A VILLAIN AND VILLAINS HAVE TOWERS, RIGHT? Or because Itachi is a captive? Or am I reading too much into everything? XD

Re: 1/2

[soleil_et_pluie]

Next time I'm just going to do a "LOLOLOLOL BAD AT SUMMERY R&R NO FLAMEZ PLZ <333" type summary, then we'll see who's laughing. (Well, it's only fair since I know all of your identities anyway :P)

Kabuto is clearly my favorite, I gave him all of my best lines. The fact that he's honest about his villainy makes him actually kind of better than someone like Shisui, who probably thinks he's Light Yagami doing the right thing. I just really needed someone to fit the "grey" slot on that three-part color wheel, and nobody else would have worked. Plus, did you know that Kabuto is one of the only characters in the series who's sort of in Itachi's and Shisui's age group? Damn Kishimoto D:<

Oh Shisui... How do I even begin to explain this dude without breaking suspension of disbelief? See, this is why this story is retarded in so many ways. Yeah, he is definitely a Byronic hero at best and a villain protagonist at worst. It's probably most accurate to say that he started out as the former and became the latter by the end of the story. Okay, let's see:

Where did Itachi get the MS?: From Shisui's "death". He didn't know he was being set up, right? Which is why later on when Shisui asked why he didn't check the body, he just said that he was bawling his eyes out distracted. Shisui, on the other hand, didn't know that to get the MS you had to kill the closest person to you, so it's kind of ironic that he told Itachi "wherever you got it from", etc. Um, from you, dude. Twist the knife into his heart, why don't you? ;____;

Shisui's motive: Urgh, this thing is a mess. Basically, it's this stanza in Hallelujah: "Your faith was strong but you needed proof..." Prior to befriending Itachi, Shisui was basically the prince -- he'd already had the clan in his palm and would probably have been the one chosen to succeed Fugaku. Then Itachi came along and became his new obsession "project", and he stopped giving a shit about the clan. Even when he helped frame Itachi, he only thought that Itachi would be arrested and the coup would succeed and things would go back to the way he wanted -- but Itachi succeeded despite being set up and so ruined Shisui's perfect little kingdom ("broke his throne", "took his life", etc.). Hence, his quest for "reclamation".

The entire story basically is: Shisui wants to be with Itachi, he should be with Itachi -- but no one should want to be with Itachi; Itachi's a psycho-bitch! And of course Shisui doesn't want to be with Itachi -- not as he is -- he wants to restore him to the way he used to be a.k.a. the way Shisui wants him to be. It's what Shisui perceives to be the Edenic state of their relationship, and that's what he wants. Creeper. Also confusing as fuck orz

I don't think anyone except a few crackpot philosophers still seriously subscribe to materialism anymore. Kabuto probably meant something similar to it but different (see how even I don't understand what I was talking about D:). He was mostly just in it for the lulz the chance to get the better of Itachi, by taking his personal identity (worse than death!). Shisui wanted to maintain Itachi's personal identity, but by the end he had begun to change his perception of personal identity altogether. So he obviously thought he got it right and Itachi was still Itachi... but he was also sort of an unreliable narrator at this point. Did he really manage it? Or was Tamaki right? :D

Re: 1/2

[soleil_et_pluie]

Kabuto's way certainly seems more honest, doesn't it?

Hah, well it all makes sense if you consider Shisui didn't know enough about the MS- Man, you got me- I was so used to fics where Shisui is already aware of what the MS means, and that you have to kill your closest person to get it, I didn't even think he might not know that. God, and Itachi was nice enough to not tell Shisui he was grieving so terribly over his death? Or did he just get the overwhelming impression Shisui wouldn't believe him? ;____; The fucking crossed signals here!
Itachi comes off so pure here (perhaps by comparison!)-- clan-murdering psycho he may be, but he does love Shisui and Sasuke pretty honestly, and so much less duplicitous in general. He's even so charmingly straightforward about wanting Shisui's body to be with Shisui. .-. tho he's still got that caged tiger thing going on. LAYERS, MAN.

..Everyone wants to get the better of Itachi, nobody succeeds! >D

Sortof of a Clockwork Orange kind of vibe going on with the personality thing: people imposing their cursory perception of your personality on you is nothing short of heinous and futile. Manufactured, artificial change is not change at all, or in this case, trying to rebuild something when the spark is already dead is pretty doomed to failure. :/
Tho, who knows. Shisui has to believe that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, which I think most people agree with. That some part of Itachi could've survived that, been alive after what happened, that his soul was still there, untouchable by knives and genjutsu. ._.;

Re: 1/2

[soleil_et_pluie]

Yeah. While the MS was widely known in Madara's time, I get the feeling that by Itachi's generation, it had passed out of common knowledge. Don't you have to crawl into that dinky space under the shrine to get the scroll that talks about it? How many people would have known about it, really? If it hadn't been for Madara, I doubt Itachi would have known about it.

Oh alright, Itachi is pure okay, he is pure! He is modeled in part after Desdemona, after all, lololol. (Doesn't that make it worse?)

Personal identity by very definition is like the Highlander, there can only be one. But I think as long as you're psychologically connected to yourself at different stages in your life, you can still say that you're the same person even after a traumatic event -- or at least you can say that you've psychologically survived the event. It's also kind of a gradation account, though, I'm totally generalizing. And all of these are of course reasons why philosophy is a stupid discipline :\