The Patreon Letter - 3rd Nov, 2019 (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Em here today with a new letter! Sorry it's a week late, I'm hopefully going to be on time next week! Things are, as always, busy here at Abnormal Mapping. I'd say it'll get better but it absolutely will remain busy at least through the end of the year. 

I recently finished reading the entirety of Naruto, which is a very good shounen manga you can read very cheaply if you live in a region with the Shonen Jump app ($2 a month is a steal, you could read all of Naruto in that month if you wanted. Maybe don't do that, but hey I did). There's plenty to recommend Naruto: a big cast full of distinct personalities, a really well realized sense of growth as the characters go from children to young adults, some really cool magic power fights. But I don't want to talk about any of that here, 

I want to talk about some politics. SPOILERS for thematic material throughout Naruto.

Naruto takes place in a world driven by the proxy war and the war economy. Ninja villages exist to be the vague military might of nations, paid to go on missions and engage in combat with independent enemies or other ninja villages that are also at the behest of more traditional state elements we never get too much of a glimpse of. For people who grow up in the Naruto world, they were determined by birth to be part of the machine that would train most of them to be generational soldiers, living and dying at the bequest of the tasks delivered to them by a distant state whose treaties and declarations feel almost totally detached from the more down to earth reality of your life being dictated by a fatal quest board. No wonder everyone is a trauma kid who grew up to be a very messed up adult.

The situation is intolerable, and most of the early arc is characters who all have different ideas of how they would try to make the situation better if they were the person in charge of writing the quest board. But around the middle of the book, in the time skip, a villain group shows up with a new goal. They are a bunch of rogue ninjas called Akatsuki, and their leader has a dream: a dream to collect all the magical ninja supernukes and create a rogue ninja village so powerful that any side who hired them would automatically win and win so decisively that nobody would want to go to war again. And if they did, they would pay dearly for their services, and the ninja would be well taken care of and relatively safe behind their supernukes. That's right: Akatsuki wants to create Outer Heaven. 

This fails for multiple reasons: first, the Akatsuki villains are kind of bad at long term planning. Second, when all the ninja states realize this is what's happening they all band together for the first time in history to crush them. If that sounds a little like established structures of capital and power foregoing the 'free market' to expunge newcomers, then yeah you're paying attention. Naruto doesn't really have the nuance to grab a hold of that thread and ride it anywhere, but absolutely the ninja villages immediately form a monopolistic trust on war to defeat the group who wants an 'ethical' monopoly on war. 

Third, and most importantly, Akatsuki is a setup to gather the supernukes by the villain behind the villains for that most stock of anime plots: if he can gather all the supernukes, he can use them to merge all souls into a dream state beyond the very ideas of combat and strife, where everyone can simply be happy and have whatever they like as they eternally slumber in the dream. The heroes, of course, want to stop this because individualism is good or whatever, this is how it always goes. While all souls being in a dream is a little less interesting to me than all souls actually merge into a global consciousness, I still think it sounds better than living under capitalism, but hey that's why I'm not Mr Naruto.

Coming across this specific beat in so many anime and manga at this point, I'm struck not by its ubiquity but how it always ends up functioning as the release valve of intolerable real world analogues. Whether it's a gig economy hell world, the ecological apocalypse turned religious space invaders, or just fascist monarchy gone wild: all of these things are very clear metaphors for the world we live in. And when all things seem impossible to surmount, when our heroes are on the ropes in their hearts, the villain always offers this single suggestion: what if we just got rid of the struggle, and were all one. It's always seen as a horrible thing. I've yet to hear a good argument why that's true, because honestly it sounds all right, but this is always rejected.

The thing with Naruto, however, is that rejection isn't actually the end. When they decide everyone in a magic ninja matrix is not the path that they want to pursue, the question remains of who is going to pick up the pieces and create a new order because the world that exists has been pretty thoroughly revealed to be non-functioning. This forms the core of the last stretch, of Naruto who wants to kindly make the fatal quest board as safely as possible and Sasuke who wants to willingly accept the evil of making the fatal quest board to ruthlessly reduce harm with it, come to blows over whether it's even possible to lead with empathy without burying your head in the sand. You can guess how that goes, because it's a shounen manga. 

I'm not going to claim that Naruto's grasp of politics is particularly nuanced or that i like its conclusion. The existence of Boruto where over a decade later everyone is a shitty adult burdened with endless work to keep the world going as best they can kind of softens that blow for me, on some level there's an awareness (even if it's just the reality of franchise building) that to take the path of trying to fix the world will compromise the heroes and turn them at least partially into the thing they were originally rebelling against. But also I think Naruto is a little more honest just by embracing these stock ideas of the problems of the world and the rejection of the radical reordering and riding them to the end. One might (and rightly) claim there's a real political and philosophical lack of imagination to the creators of this media. Let humanity merge, let the asteroid fall, let us imagine a different world where whole new things could be possible. 

But also, we don't live in that world yet. And if a reader feels frustration by the inability of those new doors to be opened, I think that can be a good catalyst to raise one's awareness beyond the world view of a 17 year old child soldier who just really likes ramen and friendship. And the lack of fulfillment I feel as an adult reading these things is on some level the point: there are no clear actionable answers. I have ideas of what could be, and so do many others, but very little of it is happening as the world slowly falls apart. One could argue the rejection of the bold villain plan I like for a (hopefully, probably not actually) return to the status quo is just a description of the very real inertia of this historical moment. Not that it isn't extremely frustrating. Not that that isn't a very generous read, when maybe it's just the guy writing the ninja comic is politically a coward, ignorant, or both. 

But every time I see the doors open and the boys refuse to step through them, I think about the doors that exist in this world, and how we can help nudge them open a little wider and bring people closer to that threshold. Is it a little exhausting? For sure. Is it a weird thing to pull from a book like this? Probably. But we take our motivations where we can get them, and watching Naruto just become the thing he fought against works for me as a reminder that recognizing our actions in the world can be done via anything, and Naruto is as good as any other. 

It's not like Naruto Uzumaki is Amuro Ray or anything. That'd be true villainy.

Until next time,

Em