Well... How Did I Get Here?

hello! have you been watching me n dez's output rapidly explode with gai and kakashi fic? have you been wondering who the hell this man with the bowlcut is and why we have suddenly succumbed to the allure of white-haired anime man? did you somehow escape from the teen-years vortex of naruto because you had good taste or just weren't the right age? i'm here for you. @deadtrilobitesociety asked about a gai primer and i kinda went off the deep end by crowd-sourcing (asking dez) an amazing list of naruto to watch and then putting it under neat little headers for your enjoyment.

how do i watch this naruto stuff?

there's 500 million episodes of the anime so i'm gonna give you specific recs. confusingly, there's original naruto, naruto shippuden (picks up after a timeskip), and boruto, which we don't talk about. you can find a lot of it on netflix, tubi, and crunchyroll, depending on your country. it's an older anime, so you'll also have a lot of success on the pirating sites. for one of the below suggestions, i specify that you should go to naruto kai, a fan project which basically edits out all of the extra nonsense stuff that sometimes makes the show boring to watch. kai is soooo much snappier and really makes the old show i remember more enjoyable, so if you're interested in just actually watching naruto i would start there. google it and you'll find a reddit post with links (or message me and i'll link you)

i was a manga person as a kid but i'm more into watching cartoons now and also a lot of the gai backstory is mostly in the anime filler. read the manga if you care more about this naruto kid haha.

also - blanket warning for naruto being full of people dying, usually in battle but also by suicide and often in very bloody ways. this isn't an adult horror anime - it's for kids and teens - but gai and kakashi's backstories are essentially about being a child soldier in the middle of a war that decimated multiple generations. it's bleak! if you need specific warnings or want to know about a specific arc or episode, please reach out.

okay, noted. i want to know about gai!

gai....

maito gai/might guy is an elite-level ninja who specializes in physical combat. he's modeled on bruce lee! he's got a sick bowlcut and a formfitting green jumpsuit! he mentors a group of young ninja including a kid who looks exactly like him. and his greatest rival and man of destiny is hatake kakashi :)

i want to know about kakashi!

oh yeah he's also cool

hatake kakashi is probably the greatest ninja of his generation. he's also a depressed burnout who's perpetually late and reads erotica all the time in public. all of his friends are dead except for gai and also a bunch of other people that he sometimes reluctantly acknowledges are also his friends. technically he's the mentor of the main characters in naruto, but really you get the sense that he's mostly focused on stopping them from dying or killing each other and any actual learning is incidental. he has a lot of dogs!

i want to know about this fucked up world they live in!

gai and kakashi live in konoha, which is a secret ninja village in the land of fire. during the wars between the different lands, it's essentially the home base of the army, but for most of the series they're technically in peace time so instead they're doing protection missions, assassinations, and other ninja stuff. you definitely shouldn't be worried about how kids start on this career when they're six or seven!

this doesn't have any gai in it, but you should watch the Zabuza/bridge builder arc if you want more of the general naruto experience. this is definitely the one i remember best from reading as a kid, and it comes early on in the series so there's a lot of scene setting. might also make you cry if you're a wuss like me but it's worth it.

i just want. shenanigans. please give me the gai and kakashi shenanigans.

yes please they're SO silly with each other ;-;

okay but actually i want the sick fight animations

nev you and dez have written almost two HUNDRED and fifty THOUSAND words of naruto fanfiction in the last twelve months. where on earth should i start

look, i know. i know. here's like… four fics. fourish. all of these are on ao3, under neveralarch or desdemonakaylose, sorry that tumblr hates links

okay!! that's the information i have for you!!! let me know if you have questions and thanks for reading please join us in hell

sometimes as i continually pump out one million gai/kakashi fics i feel a little bad for the ppl who subscribed to me back when i was like this about transformers and even now hold out hope that i'll drop in one more little megarung fic. but then i consider the ppl who are still waiting for the doctor who fic WHICH IS IN FACT COMING, i have a gallifrey zine fic that i need to edit to post. so there's always hope. except for the mcu ppl. i used up all my thoughts about hawkeye you just gotta enjoy what's there

anyway i've spent the last couple weeks writing kakagai hockey au. it's just happening all the time. thanks for your support during these times but thanks mostly to dez who's the only one who understands what's happening to me

aw thank you :) i had a ton of fun writing them, I'm glad you had fun reading too

the last couple days (weeks, months) have been a little rough - not disastrously so, just kinda low grade Bad for all the reasons you'd expect (work, politics, etc). i'm not great with social media, but if you have any nice/fun things to say to me about fic, fandoms, music, whatever, they'd be much appreciated on whatever platform you choose to share them <3