Meta: thinking about Hidan's ritual technique thing

[tozette]

I think you could argue for Hidan's ritual technique being a pure yang chakra release. Much like the Nara shadow manipulation, he uses something belonging to his victim to establish a sympathetic link between them. But whereas the Nara clan use shadows, which make sense as a vehicle for spiritual energy, Hidan's ritual uses blood, which makes a lot more sense as a vehicle for, like, physical energy. Blood has many associations with action and energy and vitality! And then, instead of an invisible binding on people's limbs, the technique opens physical wounds transmitted through that sympathetic link, so I think that's yang stuff as well.

It also makes sense with Hidan's actual skills and character. He might be a spiritual character, in his way, but all his devotions are incredibly physical. Even his meditations appear to involve catastrophic self harm while he does whatever religious contemplating he needs to. And outside of that, he shows next to no ability with non-physical skills like genjutsu or even elemental ninjutsu.

I think any talented yang chakra release specialist could crack that ritual technique wide open and reproduce it if given enough time (most people aren't, obviously) but I also think that the technique itself isn't really the thing that matters? Like, alone, it's not very useful. It's Hidan's execution of it that makes it dangerous. He made it as a vehicle for religious devotion, so he doesn't fuck around with psychological warfare or hostage taking ("kill me and your teammate dies!") or whatever, he just sticks a spear through his ribs and obliterates his own heart.

This technique would only work in very specific circumstances for non-immortals. For example: 1. hostage taking, 2. a suicide technique, 3. if the victim had a very different body type to the user of the technique and therefore things that the user could withstand would kill the victim, or 4. if the user has mad healing skills like Tsunade, Sakura or Kabuto, which grant a certain kind of temporary invulnerability in which they bounce back from lethal damage. Which is basically like time-delimited immortality, really. Are they even non-immortals for the purposes of this list?

So I think Hidan's ritual technique is eminently reverse-engineerable (and Shikamaru could probably tell you exactly how it works, given the whole 'sympathetic link' situation and his own cleverness!) but it's kind of... er, useless.

Except if you're hella religious or functionally immortal. Or both.