Tozette — fandom journal

My takeaways are as follows:

• Kakuzu is way more stable than we as a fandom give him credit for being. He listens to Hidan. He stays out as requested. He steps in when necessary. He is impatient, cranky, and done with Hidan's shit, but he mostly treats him with the attitude of a 15 year old cat faced with a yowling kitten. Honestly I have become more confident in my maddieverse!Kakuzu characterisation, even though I was worried it was too even-tempered and friendly. Kakuzu actually isn't that volatile in canon. I think a lot of his characterisation is inferred from things we don't actually see on-screen, and so his murderous rages are mostly an informed character trait — he really only gets blindly angry, on screen, at Naruto, who has the main character vibes that make everyone act weird anyway.
• CONVERSELY. Deidara is way LESS stable than we as a fandom give him credit for being. We looked at him being cute, blond, young, and relatably annoyed with Tobi and decided that meant he was relatively emotionally normal, for a mass murderer. He is not. (I may be a bad Deidara writer. I've been doing him so wrong.) When we write Deidara we need to write him eating clay and trembling like a chihuahua.


• HE thinks he's normal though. Like very clearly. And he's judging everyone around him. He's the normal one in his own mind.


• Still Deidara: he dodged Gai AND Lee AND Neji. At the same time. With no arms. With a knife in his mouth. (Tenten was there too but in true Naruto tradition she did very little.) Food for thought?? Might need to revise my "Hidan could probably beat Deidara under specific circumstances in close quarters," assessment. If Gai can't catch him, Hidan can't catch him! RIP Hidan I love you but you might be smithereens.
• Hidan IS ten pounds of crazy in a five pound bag, though. We are RIGHT about Hidan. We as a fandom might need a reminder to write more of the mid-combat whooping and giddy laughter though. Also he is super athletic. I think we are all so focused on his weird sadomasochistic murder technique (he does roll his eyes back in his head and sigh about how good it feels to get 6 inches through his chest cavity, yes, that's still Hidan) that we've forgotten that, actually, absurd acrobatics are like 45% of his taijutsu style. He is so, so athletic. No, more than that. No, more.

He thinks they're pretty sad, for all that. Sasori's so-called art is... limited.

He watches him work and he wonders what happens to their consciousness when Sasori binds them in their bodies forever. Does it get trapped, too? Or is consciousness so changeable a thing that he discards it wholesale?

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.

"Only sixteen hours left, huh? I'm just saying," said Hidan, hurrying to catch up, "when are you ever going to get the opportunity to have sex as a girl?"

11. Tobi: Obito is a prude and you can't convince me otherwise. He views clone-fucking as crazy kinky shit only gotten up to in the annals of Icha Icha fanfic, not something real people do. Nevertheless he has 100% made a clone to hug him in the quiet privacy of his ongoing nervous breakdown, so take that where you like.

Surprisingly, Hidan is a way, way better cook than Kakuzu, but neither one of them gives a single solitary shit about food hygiene. That's pretty bad. Hidan is personally mutating a new strain of salmonella in his own blood stream as we speak and it is resistant to not just antibiotics but also to, like, bleach.

Itachi — He likes sweet food. He'll order something you didn't even know was real, like a lavender latte, or a smoked salted vanilla frappe. "Does your drink even have coffee in it?" you may ask, dubiously eyeing what appears to be cup of lightly flavoured simple syrup piled high with freshly whipped cream. Yes, yes it does. Itachi is the tiredest person on this team, and that's including the guy who is just 6 dead bodies in a trench coat. Do not order him decaf.

Kisame — He's pretty easygoing. He'll take whatever, and then while the barista is making it he'll tell them that sharks can have milk because some of them don't have umbilical cords. He consumed the milk shed from his mother's uterus lining, like a great white, after eating his siblings. How fun. Sir, here's your coffee.

First, an honourable mention goes to Orochimaru, who would win this ranking effortlessly but who is no longer part of the Akatsuki.

And now: the rankings

Obito goes back to Konoha and blends in, passing among the people who live in the village like he still belongs there. This absolutely enrages him. He likes to watch people do all the things Rin won't. It's at least 75% self harm. The remaining 25% is just getting the opportunity to play cruel pranks on random strangers who happen to live in the village. Please get some goddamn help, Obito.

Hidan: One time you were drunk at 2AM and found the face of god in an all-night pho restaurant. All-day bone broth, perfectly succulent meat unlike anything you've ever tasted, fresh crunchy mint and bean shoots; noodles with just the right amount of bounce. It cost $7.50, it made you incredibly unwell, and in the morning the owners made the papers. You're left unsettled, with a weird craving for offal.

Kisame: Pea and ham. Thick and meaty and delightfully savoury when done well, salty and bland when poorly executed. The power is yours.

Itachi: Tomato and garlic soup. Technically vegan, despite all the things we are tempted to add to it, and the process of peeling tomatoes is juuuust about weird enough that it gets you murmuring "trust the process, trust the process," in worried tones. It is, however, delicious. Also, it will dye everything it touches bright red. That's a metaphor.

Deidara: It's hard to say what flavour base this is, because the primary taste is capsaicin. Less a meal and more of an eating challenge. This is a soup someone cooked just so some guy could cry on camera while trying to eat it. Best eaten as fast as possible. Try not to let it touch your tongue.

Pein: Miso soup with cod. You can serve this with pretty much any meal, and you rarely get to write about Akatsuki as a group without considering where Pein fits in. He's a side dish to the main event. I was going to make him just miso, but then I remembered Yahiko and it seemed like I should pick a soup with an animal in it. Something had to die to make this.

Konan: Chicken and corn. Sweet, comforting, and well-liked — and just a little bit bland. Sorry, Konan.

Sasori: $20 instant ramen. Delicious and carefully crafted, but fast (for the impatient) and extremely processed. Likely to outlast a nuclear winter.

Tobi: Roasted basil and strawberry dessert soup. An identity crisis in a bowl.

Orochimaru: Shark's fin soup. Expensive, luxurious, controversial, and — like many big fish prone to mercury bioaccumulation — occasionally responsible for heavy metal poisoning. He's a delicacy.

Zetsu: Natto miso soup with mushrooms. The kind that's all mushrooms, natto, dashi powder, miso paste. Maybe some green onions on top. A textural minefield full of stuff that's masquerading as vegetables.

Kakuzu: A $1 tin of the kind of soup that makes you ask "Um... are you sure that's a meal and not just, like, an ingredient?"