#it sucks when ur favorite character kinda gets reduced to a hollow springboard for other characters to bounce off of

[mokutone]

Unpopular opinion :) about naruto in general or just yamato whatever you want

hmmm thank you for the question....i guess here's one: in "modern"/non ninja AUs, I think Yamato should still be a fairly odd guy who is not really fully socialized to the intricacies of daily life.

ough. edit update 2: tumblr deleted my first update acknowledging that it fucked up my post. dont know why this keeps happening. but it does. anyway

the thing is that around 2020 i started getting into naruto and while trying to avoid certain spoilers i decided to read some non ninja au fics, just because theyre fun and creative and i like seeing how people translate canon material into au material, and i was like. suuuuper blindsided by how often yamato was portrayed (even in some yamato centric fics) as like. the everyman.

and to be fair!! i can definitely understand how they came to this conclusion, because Yamato DOES have a little bit of a manzai routine with naruto, where naruto is the boke and yamato is the tsukkomi! yamato loves to play the straight man!

but the straight man isn't quite the everyman, there's some nuance in there. the "everyman" is somebody who is meant to be "relatable to anyone," typically their experiences in life have been """average""" in such a way that, when exposed to bizarre circumstances, they will react with an entertaining or empathy-drawing abundance of surprise and often distress.

i feel like a lot of yamato's backstory, specifically being a test tube baby created by konoha's favorite evil mad scientist and then raised and trained by a man known for having children fight to the death in an effort to remove them of their feelings, and then spending the next 10 years of his life exclusively working relatively anonymously in Konoha's black ops, however, kinda disqualifies Yamato from being an everyman? I feel like that's a pretty ah. unique. experience of life. even speaking simply in the terms of batshit ninja origin stories from naruto!

like sure! in an au, you could remove any trace of that from his character. but you could also, in an au, say that Kakashi just got that scar in a shaving accident when he was 22. i don't know why you'd say that, but like, you could if you thought that losing his eye and all that obito shit didn't matter to his character much. i mean...the world is an oyster.

the straight man in a comedic bit DOES often serve the purpose of the "voice of reason" but, unlike the everyman...there's no prescribed backstory! it's just a comedic role. The only expectation is that they generally maintain composure in the face of Antics, and that they try to correct or give deadpan commentary to the funnyman.

this is part of why i am constantly making jokes about Yamato Deliberately practicing being "normal," honestly. i think it would be a very funny and a really funny crossroads of some of his character traits if...instead of being the straight man by virtue of never having encountered any strangeness in his life, yamato (who we know to be somebody who values preparedness immensely) just...studied for it. is there anything more hilarious than the idea of somebody who studied being normal with the goal of being able to pass as Just Some Average Joe.

Imagine say, a Yamato who was brought up by danzō in some kind of homeschooler's hell blood sports situation, who is now an adult and finds doing his taxes and going grocery shopping and all sorts of very normal and unfun tasks genuinely kind of exciting because of how rewarding he finds it to practice these Normal Skills he has put an insane amount of effort into teaching himself. I find this idea to be just. utterly enrapturing. but that's a very extreme example of the dichotomy.

anyway. in fics which aren't about that kind of thing, it can be a narrow line to tread, and really all it comes down to is just. putting thought into giving yamato a backstory which draws at least somewhat on a few of his canon backstory details and characterizing his actions with his own logic (which one must then put effort into building), rather than a kind of default "common-sense" logic.

#yamswers #anon #really struggled not to say ''the worlds an oyster and we're all nonbinary'' because as funny as it is #im not sure how well that joke lands with everyone. idk how popular the oyster meme is #this is not my most unpopular opinion for yamato but my most unpopular opinion is also just #honestly a huge bummer to think and or talk about so i dont wanna #and this is something i think about a lot bc i usually loooove non source material aus #i think they can be so absolutely fun to see how authors translate the material from canon to au! theres room for lots of play #but back in 2020 when i first got into naruto + started poking around au fanfic (to avoid certain spoilers) i was soooo disappointed #it sucks when ur favorite character kinda gets reduced to a hollow springboard for other characters to bounce off of #and i wouldn't even think that yamato is particularly hard to apply a little bit of canon inspired characterization to... #even just implying that he's somewhat paranoid about security precautions #or suggesting there are periods of his life which point blank he will not talk about or will pass over with a very blank smile #or suggesting! that he has little experience or possibly not much trust engaging with most people #anything. anything. just let me know he didn't grow up raised in the suburbs by hashirama and hashirama's very not madara wife. please #im begging to be told thats not the case