9The Fallen Naruto Shippuden: Lore
— an educational class regarding the flaws and forts of Naruto and Naruto Shippuden, brought to you by the founders of Konohagakure who'd been there from the beginning, and also Izuna Uchiha (who didn't deserve to die without any character development, only having roughly ten lines, just to advance Madara's backstory). Cheers!
A/N: okay okay, hear me out, in my defense I am very tired while writing this. This is a writer's block fic, so it's… like… a crack!fic or something.
You guessed it! A class on meta! [Cheers echoing from the background!] I'll tell you from the get-go: This is low priority and updates will be erratic, as I'm more focused on other works that are actually stories with plots and whatnot, and not just inspections of meta— like this one is.
Loosely inspired by Akatsuki FanFiction Writing Workshop by dearrobin. There will be OOC behavior, but for Izuna it isn't quite OOC since he'd never been developed in the first place. Which works out nicely in a way, because no matter how I bend him here, it can't be considered OOC. Nice.
The Introduction: Schedules
Izuna entered the classroom with long strides. There were high school girls in there, a few snot-nosed boys, and also a gangly blond whiskered teen trying to mesh in with the children by wearing huge swirly glasses and a fake mustache — an idiot who he dutifully ignored. Their chatter faded to silence in what must have been reverence since he was just that fucking cool, walking in the classroom in his Uchiha Glory from the shadows or whatever. Absolutely fucking stunning.
He rolled down the overhead projector screen. "Everybody, be quiet."
No one had even been talking.
But kids did like to talk when they got over their initial wonder at the splendor of his face and general presence, so this was for good measure, Izuna mused. "Welcome to this seminar, titled: The Fallen Naruto Shippuden. I'm your homeroom teacher, Izuna Uchih—if you touch my fucking bandages I'll slice your fingers off."
The teen hastily retracted her hand from where it'd been reaching toward Izuna's face. She giggled what sounded like a very soft "feisty!" and then purred like she was a cat or something, leaping back into her seat.
Izuna cursed his glorious bishōnen face for the nth time. He hated kids. "Keep your paws to yourselves and stay in your seat unless given permission to move. If you rebel, you'll be expelled," he informed them, crossing his arms.
The class started (rightfully, but annoyingly) giggling in awe of his awesomely handsome Uchiha-ness. (Aside from the whiskered phony.) The girl from before was still purring. He found himself just as hot as they did, so he couldn't blame them.
He sighed again. "I'm your homeroom teacher, Izuna Uchiha," said Izuna Uchiha, gesturing over to the board where his name, Izuna Uchiha, was written: Izuna Uchiha — in red chalk. "You're sitting in Class Zero, otherwise known as the introduction. The other teachers for today are my powerful older brother, Madara Uchiha, his friend or whatever, Hashirama Senju, and that filthy fucking behemoth." He pulled a folded paper out of nowhere since his Uchiha Outfit™ didn't have any pockets and proceeded to unfold it with a noncommittal expression. It was titled Schedule.
"Wait, there's gonna be a behemoth teaching us?" a girl asked fearfully.
Izuna faced her directly and observed her with all two of his available senses (hearing and smelling) from the front of the room in absolute silence. (She smelled like fermented potatoes.)
She stared back with wide watery eyes.
"Yes," he answered.
Ignoring the frightened scream that pierced throughout the room was easy, considering that he'd screamed every night in his dreams when he woke up from death one day to discover that he was being forced to teach a class of high schoolers about the manga that did him so dirty. Also he was still blind and injured while everyone else got to have full recovery when they were revived, for whatever reason. What the heck was that, honestly?
Izuna slid the schedule for today under the overhead.
It read:
Introduction: Izuna Uchiha. the Sexiest Man Alive
(The words "the Sexiest Man Alive" were written messily at the end in red ink.)
Class One: Main and Exceedingly Relevant Characters — Hashirama Senju.
Class Two: Flaws pertinent to the endgame — Tobirama Senju. bastard FUCKING behemoth!
(There was a slit through Tobirama's name. It and the substituting description were also both scrawled in red, super illegibly, almost as if the writer was, like, blind or something. There were also a lot of exclamation points.)
Class Three: Forts of the series — Izuna Uchiha. the Sexiest Man Alive.
Class Four: Ships — Madara Uchiha.
Class Five: The Uchiha Clan — Hashirama Senju. (The words "Hashirama Senju" were, in fact, crossed out—to be rewritten at the end, after:) AND how they were fucking mistreated by everybody, including the author of this godforsaken series. Class by Hashirama Senju.
Further classes, miscellaneous subjects and the like: Interludes; TBA
Various sighs of relief echoed through the room. "It's only Tobirama…" the girl from before mumbled.
Izuna uncapped his pen and scribbled the poop emoji by Tobirama's crossed out name for good measure, and then faced the class. "As we're all well aware by now, the ending of Naruto Shippuden was a disaster. All of the readers, myself included, were heavily disappointed by it and—"
A hand shot up.
"…What."
"How'd you write that when you've got no eyes, datteb—… d…dude." The gangly teen nervously held up a gang sign or whatever as he said 'dude'. Izuna couldn't see it.
The high school girls in the desks around the teen's swooned at his iconic main character voice. Izuna belatedly noticed that they were all dressed identically in a school that didn't have a dress code or uniform, so they were probably in cosplay or something. He couldn't sense it clearly either. If he could, though, he'd notice the Naruto Fanclub buttons pinned to the front of their raggedy orange jackets. Then he'd fire their asses up—so maybe it was better that he was blind.
He crossed his arms, addressing the teen. "Do you write with your eyes or with your hands?"
"Uh… okay, I write with my hands," the teen admitted, frowning. "But then how'd you read the manga, 'ttebayo? With your hands?"
"Get the fuck out of my classroom, Uzumaki."
"It's not yours, you're dead."
"OUT!"
"Weird blind old guy…" Uzumaki muttered, but he got up without a fight.
He had to be like eighteen, Izuna surmised. One ass cheek in the loud-but-passionate-brat stage of his life that had made up the core of his personality for the better half of the series, and the other planted in the latter era where he magically hits a 180° transformation and becomes a giant gaping asshole when dealing with his own son for virtually no reason whatsoever. This must have been the interluding period. It was awfully convient for Izuna, though, so he muttered a quiet thanks to his lord and savior Masashi Kishimoto.
Laughter exploded from almost everyone except for the Uzumaki, Naruto, who was too busy slinking out of the door in a way Izuna considered deserving of a filthy Uzumaki. Naruto's fanclub was also an exception to the tittering, sulking as their idol left the room. Izuna closed the door behind him. He never did support what had apparently become Konohagakūre. Disgusting.
"As I was saying, the ending of Naruto was pretty bad, leaving a lot of holes left unfilled, a lot of promises abandoned, and a lot of characters disappointed. Or dead. Unfairly. Me."
"You've been dead for a while, though," some snot-nosed kid pointed out.
"Shut up," Izuna said wisely.
"O—Okay, th…thanks," the kid said, because talking to Izuna was a blessing, not because he was terrified to the point of pissing his seat, which he did, and everybody smelt it.
Izuna flashed a mildly irked and extremely weary but also very attractive bishōnen smile. He cleared his throat and said: "In any case, in this educational experience for the lot of you, you'll be learning the kinks and quirks of Naruto." (A few kids wheezed when he said 'kinks' because teens just tend to find innuendos to be the funniest jokes in the universe. Izuna pinched the bridge of his nose but kept on keeping on.) "The timeline was a wreck in general, as is the titular character's family tree, but I'll let Senju explain that since it mostly concerns the timing of his offspring. Which really leaves nothing to explain because it's just a clusterfuck, but again, that's his problem."
A girl raised her hand, asking in a snotty tone of voice, "What will be taught in each class?" Her raised hand was actually a raised index finger, the pinky also a bit high because she was trying to be proper, but it looked more like a pseudo rock star sign.
"Did I call on you?" Izuna asked, facing where her voice came from.
She was silent for a few moments, shot down, and then there came a soft "oh!" because someone had just pinched her — he felt it — before she finally responded, as he wasn't the type to ask rhetorical questions. "No… Sorry."
Izuna pulled a few more papers out of virtually nowhere with finesse. After shuffling through them for a few moments, miming the action of reading them despite the fact that he had no eyes to read with, he faced the class again.
"In Class One, you'll be taught the fortes and fallacies of all your favorite characters. And by all, I mean, probably like two. Or whatever. There are cliché faves, such as Itachi Uchiha, Kakashi Hatake, the behemoth, et cetera, but because the author of this—ahem, class, might not share favorites with you, don't expect all your popular or obscure favorites to get a chance at the limelight." He brought the papers closer to his face, furrowing his brows at them attentively. "The main characters are really obvious, but they'll be reflected upon too. Really, this is just world-building, or maybe world-establishment, course. You're a better writer when you're well versed with what you're writing about, so that's what we'll be going over," he said. "Knowing the components of a good character will also help you make OCs, so cheer to that."
Crickets.
No one cheered to that.
Izuna sighed and looked up from his paper. "Itachi will be shined upon, though."
The class roared.
If he had eyes, he'd have seen the Itachi Fanclub cheering in the back in their cheap Akatsuki cloaks and painted faces, but he didn't have eyes, and also he didn't really want to deal with them more than need be so he didn't try to sense for them either. Which was irresponsible of him since a few were waiting for a good opportunity to throw eggs at him, but whatever.
He cleared his throat and continued in the midst of the celebration:
"Class Two will address flaws pertinent to the endgame of the series. I'm sure you're all very upset with how it went down, if not with the very presence of romantic relationships or with the specific ships themselves, but this isn't about the romantic factor. Frankly, there is a lot to be addressed; this series was about friendship, found family, never giving up, et cetera, so it sucks that everything was washed away in favor of two negligent marriages that bore children who have badly excused estranged relationships with their fathers—who, being orphans, should know better—but also it's what all these pieces of shit deserve as a unit for killing my clan and then failing to avenge them in full, so what the fuck ever."
Somewhere in the shadows of the class, a nineteen year old man hidden under Transformation Technique sneezed.
Izuna tsked in the general direction of that particular shadow because, yes, he was mad at Sasuke too. You get chased around for five years and lose an arm and suddenly think it's okay to abandon justice for your dead family? Despicable. "But we'll make the most of it for the memories that were very, como di se, sugoi," he said bitterly, a bitter expression on his face.
A few girls swooned at his excellent demonstration of trilingual proficiency. He was just so fucking incredible.
He crossed his arms, crinkling up the papers in his hand, and leaned back against the desk in a way that very hip and cool. "I will be going in depth over the fortes of the series, in Class Three. Naruto was, in fact, excellent at dealing with friendships and all the like. When someone says it's flawed, unless they're talking about the general treatment of women who are constantly slept on, then they're usually referring to the very last arc or chapter, because everything beforehand was fucking ingenious. Most of you brats thought that Tobi was me, and the other half thought he was Kagami. ALL of you thought he was my brother Madara. Only the rest figured out that it was Obito. When Lee dropped those weights, every single one of you lost your shit. Orochimaru gave you shivers. Jiraiya's death had you all tearing up. Itachi's backstory had you shits sobbing—and I know because I cried too," Izuna quipped. "Naruto was glorious. It was an enigma, a mysterious piece of art. It was glorious for a number of reasons, and we'll be going over that too."
The class was pin-drop silent as he explained. Some kids were snoring in the back. Three girls clapped politely when he finished, and the rest of the class booed—because no matter how fucking insanely awesome Naruto and the sequel, Naruto Shippuden, had been, they were forever going to hold it in their hearts that the relationships that they spent years being invested in weren't made canon. (e.g: Naruto x Sasuke or Sakura, Shino x The Recognition He Deserves, Sasuke x Comfort and Peace, Kurenai x Justice, Hinata x Kiba probably, and all the other little things.)
Understandable, because a wise man (Itachi Uchiha) once said: "We don't know what kind of people [i.e. manga] we truly are until the moment before our deaths."
Everything does tend to tie together at the end. People then have the right to decide whether they'd rather appreciate the journey or the final destination. It leaves everything in the eye of the beholder.
But Izuna didn't even want to be here in the first place, so he didn't care.
"Fourth will be ships. This is in reference to romantic relationships." Cue a very acute mixture of applause and jeers. Touchy. "You're probably familiar with them as SasuSaku, NaruHina, NaruSaku, KibaHina, whatever else, NaruSasu, what the fuck ever else. It doesn't matter whether you support it or not, because you—along with Madara—be discussing the pros and cons of the canonical ships and comparing and contrasting them to their equally popular however non-canon counterparts anyway. You'll be relating them to their actual relevance to the plot of the story, and will view each relationship from both sides, mutually. Introspection."
Out of nowhere, totally uncalled for, a girl in the Naruto Fanclub threw an egg at another girl, also in the Naruto Fanclub. "FUCKING NARUSAKU FOREVER!" she screeched. There was a whole carton under her arm.
Izuna's just about had it with this stupid ass class. "What the fuck?"
The girl now covered in egg yolk snatched toilet paper from out of under her desk or some shit, yelling, "Shut the hell up, bum ass bitch! Long live NaruSasu!"
"NaruSaku is international!"
"Okay, and? So's NaruSasu? NaruSasu outsold, outfought, outperformed, outdanced, outbreathed—"
"LMAOOO!" the 'bum ass bitch' laughed. It was pronounced something like luh-may-oh but for the sake of honoring her intents of literally saying the acronym instead of just laughing, it'll be presented as LMAO. She said it twice. "LMAO! Listen here Becky, NaruSaku is the king of all ships that won six daes—"
"My name is Kaijin, one. Two… listen, babe… your fave is problematic. Sakura hits Naruto. It's cancelled."
"Hey, one, you blind? Your faves get in fights all the time. Two, this is Naruto. Are you blind?"
Izuna took offense to that. But instead of slitting her throat, he slapped his face into his hands and went to sit behind his desk. "I can't stand this," he muttered, direly wanting to take a shot. He didn't even like alcohol, he was just tired as hell of this class.
Kaijin snarled. "Itachi, the king of this entire series, invented NaruSasu with his bare eyes."
The Naruto Fanclub had a mini-civil war thing in the middle of class, where NaruSakus and NaruSasus split down the middle, going for each others throat. They got their wigs torn out, crying things like, "NaruSaku make an all-kill on the shipping chart!" or strange things like "Only NaruSasu biases interact!" Whatever that was supposed to mean.
The Naruto fans were everywhere. They were wild. When they ran out of eggs and toilet paper, Kaijin ran out of the room crying and the other girl was passed out, slumped under a crater in the wall where she'd been nailed with a roll of TP. The others were strewn across the classroom, shoved under desks or hanging over the ledges of open windows, all unconscious. The normal kids who weren't into shipping wars, or who were just plain terrified, were bunched up in the corner of the classroom, trembling. The weirdos were still in their seats. Sasuke was still in the shadows, probably pissing himself, trying to hold himself back since it was his bestfriend-rival-soulmate-thing and girlfriend-teammate-whatever-thing that the Fanclub were talking about.
When Izuna sensed that the fighting was over, he didn't bother getting up from his seat again. He groaned. "Fifth and last of today will be the most important class of them all: The class on the Uchiha Clan. Why the fuck it's not being taught by an actual Uchiha? I don't know. It'll be taught by Hashirama Senju, which would make sense considering the fact that he's irrevocably in love with my brother or some shit, if not for the fact that I, Izuna Uchiha, am here."
A girl held up the Naruto Databook, Third Edition in her hand. "If you're Izuna Uchiha aren't you supposed to be devoted and harmonious?" she asked skeptically.
Well, it was about time that his churlishness was called out.
Izuna looked very tired, which made no sense since he'd recently been sleeping for the past century or so. He walked up to her desk and somehow glared despite the fact that he had no eyes. "I have no fucking eyes," he said. "There's a bleeding gash in my side. It's dripping down my whitie tighties as we speak."
The girl sunk into her desk, eyes tearing up. What did she care about his stinky underwear…?
"Listen." He tried to tower over her, as lofty as a 5'7" tree. She had to be like 6'4", she was so tall. She dubiously looked him up and down for a second, before they met eyes-bandages again. "I'm less developed in this series than a fetus in its mother's womb," Izuna said, "so I'd think I'm entitled to any personality I so choose to have. You wouldn't know the difference anyway, as the amount of lines I have in this series can be counted on one hand—one finger being dedicated to me warning my brother against the Senju, which he didn't heed, and now my clan is ding dong dead."
Izuna was composed, more or less, but the girl sniffed in dismay. He didn't have to be so mean, jeez.
"The only one left is a rip-off of me, since I was born first—or it might be that I'm a rip-off of him, since he was created first, which would further stress the point that I have no purpose. And I'm fucking blind." He pointed at the bandages on his face and then just absolutely fucking snapped.
The class started pulling out their cellphones to immortalize this epic moment on all their social media. Sasuke would have done so too, from the shadows where he hid, but he had a flip phone that couldn't record for shit. It's what he deserved.
"I have a right to be mad!" Izuna yelled dramatically, letting the papers go loose and pointing at her angrily. "My eyes were implanted into some shit named Nagato and he used them, used my eyes, to revive the village that has embedded itself balls deep in the overall destruction of my clan, fucking it over completely! Your shitty Leaf Village deserved to burn. My eyes that I gave to my brother revived it instead, what the hell? How did they end up in an Uzumaki? I don't even like the Uzumaki Clan, what the absolute FUCK!"
"Uh… you're blind, we get it. Chill." The girl frowned. Why were his empty eyeball sockets more important to him than the bleeding side that killed him? Maybe it was an Uchiha thing.
Izuna grabbed for her.
The door slid open and a vaudeville hook sped in to snatch him away.
He kicked aggressively but couldn't get away, though a designer sandal did fly off his foot from the wild flailing. He probably looked like a squirming roach, which was embarrassing, but he'd started to look uncool and sully the association of attractiveness that went with his clan's name awhile ago. No one ever did associate the Uchiha Clan with sanity, though, so that wasn't lost since it'd never even been there in the first place, which was nice.
"LET GO!" he shouted.
The hook didn't listen, decidedly favoring tightening its hold on Izuna's bleeding waist and pulling harder.
Is this fucking Mokuton? Izuna thought in fury. He grabbed onto the girl's desk (she'd been sitting at the front) and looked right at her, except he didn't have any eyes, so the best intimidation factor that he had was his breath, which smelt like watermelon. He breathed in her face. "I'm only devoted to my clan. I'm only harmonious with my brother! THE REST OF YOU CAN CHOKE!"
And he was dragged away.
Preview: Chapter 2 — Main and Exceedingly Relevant Characters: The People's Favorite!
Mokuton was a gift. It had many uses, ranging from murdering other human beings for pay, to effortlessly building the infrastructures of the strongest village of all time, all the way to loud kids in class accidentally getting their hands stabbed by no less than a thousand tiny splinters, probably from holding their pencils too hard.
He definitely wasn't a closet sadist or anything. He smiled widely.
…
"And yes! Even Madara! He's perfect—to me, but to others, the way he's stubborn and arrogant can be considered a major flaw. There's also the fact that he's sexist and egoistic, which is probably why he lived to be like a hundred but still died a virgin, so—"
"Wait, what?"
"He died a virgin?"
"What about Itachi, is he flawed?" This new question was asked by someone with a dark voice. Hashirama saw what looked like a small-lipped version of Izuna Uchiha under a pathetically thin Transformation Technique, but because he didn't discriminate, he ignored it and let—was it Sasuke? sit among the high school girls of the Itachi Fanclub and learn the goods too.
…
A deadpan look swept across Hashirama's face, and then he hid himself behind the desk in a fetal position. "Why do people who know the series better than me even come here?" he moaned.
Another A/N: Is there any character or content you're looking forward to seeing covered?
Erratic Updates! Even though, as you can see, I may or may not have a lot more written, this is still super low priority. Since it's meta we're talking, I need to take the actual information presented a bit seriously, yes? Following the schedule presented by Izuna, this will be something like seven to nine chapters, maybe give a few, take none. Flame me if you want, it's true, I'm wilding. Nice reviews are appreciated more, though! Thanks for reading!
Cheers!