This is definitely interesting though I guess I fundamentally cannot get on board with the Senju willingly letting people desert that's a recipe for losing a war and losing it badly. It makes perfect sense especially culturally right up till you realize that the Senju in canon are fighting a war of survival and than it just falls apart.
If I was Batsuma Senju I'd call anyone who voted with their feet a traitor and make sure they experienced a very public death which honestly fits well with everything we know from canon about how Shinobi clans work. The political fallout of that is just not enough to justify letting them live compared to the reality of what the loss of that many shinobi would do to the Senju.
If this is really how the Senju clan worked then the Uchiha would have won long before Madara, Harishima, or Tobirama was born.
That noted I still love this fic and it's not hard for suspension of disbelief to work for me because I enjoyed the writing so much.
Firstly, let me say that I'm really glad that you like this story so much and that you enjoyed the writing!
I guess - in many way - I could simply say that this AU differs from cannon in this way, but it's a little more complicated that that.
I set out to write a story that was more grounded in reality than cannon - the way I'm merging it with Japan would be an example of that - but also a story in which cannon events were plausible even if they didn't happen here.
That's why, when the Senju all but disappear from Konoha by the time Nawaki is a genin, I had to account for their dissolution as a clan. Simultaneously, I had to create the circumstances which would have led to them fielding a strong military unit - basically, a small army - during the warring clans era. This is how I chose to account for both of those circumstances.
Now, of course, in cannon, Butsuma could certainly have killed anyone who led the Senju messily. Most certainly. And he might not have faced any consequences for it - that would be up to Kishimoto.
However, here, in this AU, I do choose to give him consequences for it.
If he did something like that - no one would have chosen to fight with or for him - he's only one man, if many shinobi rebelled against him for actions they felt were unjust he would have had a major problem.
In effect, I posit a very old military problem - conscription vs an all volunteer military unit.
Conscription has often been shown to produce indifferent soldiers at best - history is full of accounts of unwilling soldiers refusing to follow orders and having to be punished in increasingly harsh ways in order to motivate them to stay together. At the same time, they often don't fight very well unless their lives are directly under threat and sometimes not even then.
That may be all that's necessary if a country is simply hurling warm bodies at another, but these are shinobi - every one of them is a skilled warrior of at least some note. They have agency - there are missing nin in many parts of cannon - and those shinobi have certainly been shown to 'walk with their feet'. Orochimaru, Zabuza, every member of the Akatsuki... they all left their villages and were not hunted down for it, not even Kisame who left a country renowned for it's brutal internal politics.
As such, I don't think it's that unlikely for a shinobi to leave a clan - many of them left their villages as well as their clans. There are Hoshigaki back in Kiri - Shizuma appears in Boruto - but Kisame leaves them behind to follow his own goals.
You make an interesting point when you say:
If this is really how the Senju clan worked then the Uchiha would have won long before Madara, Harishima, or Tobirama was born.
That makes me wonder - is an all volunteer military unit really so unlikely to be strong? There are many such units in existence today, and most modern militaries are primarily staffed by volunteers.
To me, I've conceptualised the Senju as a group of famers and shinobi who have banded together under difficult circumstances to defend themselves and the resources that they feel are theirs. The farmers and the merchants provide resources while the shinobi fight to defend them - they are the equivalent of many of the ideological movements that came together for a common purpose and then disbanded later once that purpose had been achieved.
I personally don't see why such a group would not have been able to fight and maintain themselves, but of course opinions my differ.
Thank you for taking the time to leave me a comment!
Canonically, Kohona has an entire unit devoted to hunting down and killing Kohona missing-nin as does every single ninja village and in fact, Haku claims to be a part of kirigakure's version of this unit in canon at first. These are the hunter-nin units.
Missing nin all have bounties on their heads as well canonically you can't desert from ninja villages without paying dearly for it unless you are an S class ninja like Orochimaru or Kisame. And you absolutely will be hunted down and killed.
The reason that missing-nin like Kisame and Orochimaru are still alive is not that they are not being hunted down but because they are good enough that they are able kill or evade any and all forces sent by their village to bring them back or kill them to the point where the village probably had to cut their losses. https://naruto.fandom.com/wiki/Hunter-nin
The average shinobi that attempts to desert from a village is going to probably going to end up killed by their version of the hunter nin unit in canon.
Fundamentally, when I look at the warring states period of Naruto I'm thinking of the era of japan before the Tokugawa Shogunate was formed but even more bleak because in canon we know that the war between the Senju and the Uchiha is so desperate that both sides are sending out 6 and 7-year-olds to fight as well as having specific squads that literally hunt down children. That's a level of desperation that doesn't happen in a war unless the consequences of losing are so bad as to be unthinkable. That is if the other side wins they will wipe your entire clan out entirely that's what I mean by a war for survival. (I'll note here that I was more thinking of the Senju like other ninja clans as a family where they are all related to each other just like the Uchiha are with some of their members being civilians aka farmers and merchants).
If you are at the point where you are sending very young children out to fight the argument of conscription vs. volunteer force is mute. At that point, you're already past the point where the effectiveness of each individual soldier matters, because if you have to do that it means that every single fighter you can get is vitally important no matter what you have to do to get them.
I'm not sure if you've read this fic but the interactions between Tobirama and Batsuma when he tries to get his father to consider a prototype of an academy are a great illustration of how I see the war between the Senju and the Uchiha ( this is an AU where Harishima dies young and Tobirama becomes the heir): https://archiveofourown.org/works/22827214
I think that the desertion rates in the kind of war outlined above would be very high if the Senju just let anyone that wants to leave and that would be catastrophic in a war of survival where the Senju have are already desperate enough to send their young children out to fight. It would leave the Senju with a much smaller fighting force against the Uchiha who have a powerful dojutsu, are a tight-knit clan, and not losing people at the rate the Senju are.
The Uchiha in this situation may well outnumber the Senju as much as 3 to 1 or 2 to 1 eventually because this is a war that has taken place over centuries and allowing anyone to leave the clan whenever they choose sets the Senju up to in the best case gradually shrink down in size. There is a point where it doesn't matter how good each of your fighters are numbers will win the day.
I think we may just have a differing view on what the Senju vs. Uchiha war looks like canonically which explains our wildly differing headcanons on what's probable for the Senju.
Again, I adore this universe and your stories they are a lot of fun. :)
I have to say that I was always under the impression that the hunter-nin were an organisation that was solely from Kirigakure - I've never heard of Konoha having anything like them. Narutopedia does specifically locate them as being from Kirigakure, but of course that's not definitive.
I must say that I've never actually read the manga or watched the anime so these stories are based far more upon fannon than cannon. I didn't even know that the world of Naruto wasn't based in Japan! So, really, if you're looking for stories that hew close to cannon, mine really aren't those!
I do understand where you're coming from and there is much evidence for the views that you express. Ultimately, I decided not to go with that route for this series for several reasons - I wanted a gentler world, I wanted to account for the dissolution of the Senju clan within three generations in a way that wouldn't kill them all, and I wanted to match the timeline up with the real world so that Naruto's childhood could have the technological background that the anime shows (electricity being the dominant marker there) but also allow for the Founders to live in a feudal society.
That meant that I literally could not place the founders during the Sengoku Jidai because that ends in the 1600s. Electricity was first used in Japan in 1878. There was no way for the timelines to match up.
I do agree that thematically the founders era is very much like the Sengoku Jidai - they even share the same name! - however I could not have that societal structure and yet still make the timeline work with the history of real world Japan.
So, I suspect that yes, your view of what the Senju vs Uchiha war looked like in cannon is fundamentally incompatible with this series. At the same time, this series isn't canonical - though it does use cannon as a touchstone - and the war here is indeed different to the one in cannon.
Thank you for taking the time to leave me all of these comments, and I hope that you'll continue to enjoy the series.
Comment on The World Building of Courting Culture Confusion
fightingdreamer1000 on Chapter 5 Wed 15 Dec 2021 02:28PM UTC
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