#I'm using this as an opportunity to dwell on why I like PainKona because I always wanted to talk about it so... thanks!! ;)

[gakkubi]

Pain is the corpse of a 15 year old because Yahiko died at that age. So if you decide to draw anything nsfw between him and Konan please make sure its an au where Yahiko did not die and he is an alive human being becuase that will also be considered necrophilia. Or not! If you're into that.

Hello! I was expecting this subject to come up sooner or later once I started posting art of PainKona. Truly, I understand where you're coming from with this. When I started drawing again and came back to tumblr last year, I too had some serious problems with PainKona. I was very sensitive about it, and voiced a few times an opinion about PainKona that is very different from how I feel about them nowadays.

Allow me to offer you a different perspective on things, one that perhaps might be more enjoyable since we're talking about a work of art and fiction (Naruto):

First, you say that Yahiko is 15 because of the databook entry; that is fair. But timeline is a common issue in Naruto, and the age stated for Yahiko is incorrect. I don't mean to sound arrogant by stating the official databook is incorrect, but, it was made for a shonen audience; the goal was to make Yahiko "relatable" to that shonen audience of teenage boys, even at the cost of plot logic. His age as 15 makes no sense, not only taking from the plot (Chōji assumes Pain Tendō is 25-30) but also considering how Kishimoto draws him. Using Obito's age as a time constraint and taking Nagato/Konan's age and Naruto's age during Pain's Assault, that makes 35-16=19. I can dwell on that on another ask but, if anything, Yahiko is the corpse of a 19 year old.

Second, the corpse issue. As far as I know, bluetooth controlled corpses aren't a problem in real life, so let's start from there. Naruto is a work of fiction; it's art. Pain Tendō isn't a literal dead corpse, not even in fictional sense. He's not rotting on the floor, decomposing, inanimate. He moves, talks, breathes, his skin is just slightly lighter than Yahiko's was - not grey as most corpses are drawn. Do corpses talk? Do corpses have personality? Not at all, and as you can see, I'm not drawing Konan with a dead body filled with worms. I'm drawing Konan with Pain Tendō, a character that symbolizes pain and suffering, and the inability to let go.

The Pain Arc is about, well, pain. Nagato literally has the eyes of Saṃsāra (Rinne), the endless cycle of rebirth where humans are trapped between 6 realms of existence (that's where the Six Paths of Pain come from), an eternal succession of pain and suffering that only comes to an end when the person attains Nirvana (enlightment). Pain's Arc is filled with symbolism from start to end, and the Pain Tendō is just another one of those symbolisms.

When Kishimoto created Pain Tendō, he created a metaphor to the inability of letting go and making peace with the past. Pain is literally pain embodied - Yahiko remains in the lives of Konan and Nagato as "a wound that never heals." (I'm stealing Nagato's phrase here).

Yahiko's there, constantly inflicting pain on them, a literal "live" wound that never heals because it never closes; Konan and Nagato never allow it to close. They want Yahiko to "remain alive". They don't accept his death. Pain Tendō is how they cope with his "death" - he never died. So, when I draw Pain and Konan, I'm drawing Konan loving what remains of Yahiko, because she can't (and doesn't want to) let go of him and of what he means, as neither can Nagato. It's an impossible, unreal situation because, as you know, bluetooth controlled corpses don't exist. It's a metaphor, one that I find especially sublime.

Because, well, when have you had in fiction such a physical way to show the grief, the absense, the suffering that remains from the loss of a loved one, as you have with Pain and Konan? Konan wants to love Yahiko, but all she has is... Pain. (And by saying this, I'm almost quoting Nagato word by word in a different phrase).

When I draw Konan hugging Pain, I'm actually drawing Konan wanting to hug Yahiko, but Yahiko is not there. It's the same as not drawing him at all, but how can I visually show the anguish of wanting to hug a loved one that isn't around? PainKona gives me that possibility. Pain's presence is the absense of Yahiko. That's the beauty of it; it's horrid, and yet Konan and Nagato keep him around because Yahiko's ever present absense is better than not having anything at all. And if you add on top of that the other impossible situation - a person inhabiting the skin of another, as Nagato does with Yahiko -, it's just too interesting for me not to think about it. The emotions, the human emotions of it all, because at the end art is about us.

So, this is why I ship them. This why I draw about them, why I will keep drawing about them. Honestly, from where I'm standing, the whole story looks a lot more fun than the literal interpretation you're making of a fictional work of art and literature. How about you give some time to reflect on this? Maybe you'll also find it's more enjoyable to see art as an expression for our emotions. Or not! If you're not into that. ;)

#asks #naruto meta #painkona #painkonan #pain #konan #pein #I'm using this as an opportunity to dwell on why I like PainKona because I always wanted to talk about it so... thanks!! ;)