So, I wanted to put this here, hopefully to put some stuff in context and get my thoughts out in a place where people can see it.
I owe the readers of SHINOBI: The RPG an apology. Why? Mostly to clear my conscience and to finally put this authorial misadventure to rest. At least, I hope.
So, here we go.
I, Fulcon, apologize for ruining the story and allowing my negative feelings toward fanfiction, Naruto itself and toward some of you to taint my worldview and sully a story you all enjoyed so much. For the sake of authenticity and transparency, I'm going to go through how I ruined the story, my thought process and the consequences therein. There'll be explanations, but those are there to provide context for my failure and not to excuse anything because, at the end of the day, injury was done and that's all that matters.
#1: Patreon.
So to be frank, at the height of Shinobi's popularity, I rushed through things in a vain attempt to turn the audience of a fanfiction into paying customers. Paying...for what exactly? Attaching their name to
my project. No advance readings, no special attention from Fulcon or behind the scenes stuff. Just a spot in the credits. Why did I do this? Because I didn't want to slow or halt my imagined career as a writer to go get a job. A job which I would undoubtedly quit within six months due to my own insecurities and how hard it is for me to deal with the jobs I got - dealing with customers, even most friendly and benign ones, drained my soul. Working in the service industry has been and still is a nightmare scenario for me.
The thing is? People in my position still get jobs in these industries or find work in a place where the environment suits their degree of introversion. I was, and am, weak. I still don't have a job and all attempts at trying to write a new story even to publish failed.
#2: Underage Harem.
...yeah. This is just awful on all accounts. No matter how you look at it, this was a horrible decision. This was a bad way to take the story and I apologize from the bottom of my soul.
I hope you'll indulge me in hearing my excuse and how this sort of thing got introduced in the first place.
After the blow-back on Shinobi after I tried to ham-fist a Patreon into SHINOBI, I got, well, bitter. Especially as the story started to fail and people grew more critical of every decision that I made. I grew hateful and resentful of the story, any of its readers that took issue with how things were going got added to the pile and I then turned my hate and resentment to
Naruto itself. To this day, I can't even look at a Naruto meme without getting ill. So...I wanted to destroy the franchise. Or at least, destroy it for some people whose ear I had. How would I do so? Well, Naruto was based on the Warring States period. During that time, there was a lot of things that, today, we would consider degenerate and evil.
You know Zabuza and Haku? There is an above 50% chance that they were sodomizing each other. Well, actually, Zabuza was sodomizing Haku. I don't remember what a pairing like that is called, but it was a thing in that time period and it grosses me out (was Zabuza a groomer?). Given the obsession everyone had with Kekkei Genkai, it also seemed logical to me that people with special bloodlines would get harems for the express purpose of spreading that bloodline. However, the powerful have this way of getting whatever the heck they want and Daisuke was a god. A god who had abandoned his identity as someone from our world and went fully native as he understood it. Which meant, yeah, inducting underage girls into a harem.
God, typing that feels disgusting.
However, a lot of my historical justification and perspective comes from ancient Israel. In the old testament, King David had over five hundred wives. Job, a man called Perfect by
God Himself, had seven wives to start and was awarded seven wives by God after his ordeal. Oh, and at the time of the Roman's, they arranged marriages between girls who were thirteen or fourteen to men who were in their thirties. The girls were that young to facilitate as many children as possible due to childbirth complications being common (as I understand it) and thirty was when men were actually trained and able to have a career to provide for their wife.
...this means that the Virgin Mary was 13-14 when she was pregnant with Jesus and
God Himself had no issue with that, which raises questions on how many morals are absolute and how many of them are simply cultural norms (but that is a topic for a later date). Or perhaps God is evil? Is religion just 'us verses them' on a spiritual level? Sorry, I'll stop now.
Now you'll notice that all of this is the wrong country and the wrong time period. I was literally transposing one cultures values and norms to another based on judgements I made on my limited perspective of warring states. I know Polygamy was a thing and I know that marrying age is 13 in Japan to this day (depending on the province) but I was making a lot of assumptions that may, or may not be accurate and I was doing it to air my negative feelings about the franchise
and my own sexual frustration.
(I hate myself right now).
I got flak for taking the fic in this direction and I took it badly, thinking that moving to QQ was enough to insulate myself from criticism because, well, look where we are. I don't really go to the NSFW section of the site, but that section is the whole reason this site exists. But it followed me because they didn't want to see the fic go down this road. And...I'll be honest, I agree with the critique. That's why it stung so bad ('Don't you understand? That's the point!') They got mad and rightfully so! I was doing it on purpose to destroy the franchise.
#3: Godhood and Marriage.
The only things I regret was not clarifying that Daisuke used a non-murderous
Impure World Reincarnation to 'ascend' to godhood. Also, that his 'godhood' wasn't in the vein of God the Father and Jesus Christ (or Buddha or any other Monotheistic religion), it was in the vein of Zeus, Thor and Raiden. Of course, him going to create a world did
not help that at all.
Also, I wish Daisuke and Anko's marriage wasn't framed so heavily in 'he did something great for her, now he owns her soul'. I had a lot of misconceptions about relationships and marriage, in spite of how much research I had done. Most of these being the misconceptions born from my parents dysfunctional marriage (Dad is a narcissist. Not clinically diagnosed, but he exhibits most of the symptoms) which is not a fun thing to read or recall writing. I apologize for this failure and will strive to do better in the future.
#4: Naruto vs. Daisuke.
I wanted Daisuke to assume Sasuke's role in canon. I thought it'd be a fun ideological conflict to have Daisuke and Naruto clash. Instead of it being a mission for revenge (actually, wait, that's a lot of what it was) it was a moral change. I wanted Naruto to be the main POV character of Act 2, Daisuke and he would fight a lot and both Naruto and Daisuke convince each other on some things and are able to come to a compromise as they work, together, as friends with Konoha, to bring the world to a brighter future.
But that just wasn't going to work. Daisuke would fold the second Naruto opened his mouth. Naruto couldn't fight Daisuke no matter how hard he tried. Daisuke could literally just stand there and go 'are you done? Are you done? How about now?'. Act 2 needed a much stronger division between Daisuke and Naruto in order to work because Naruto literally brings about world peace
and Daisuke believes in his ability to do so. Act 2, as I imagined it, would not work no matter how hard I tried to force it. And try to force it, I did. No matter how hard it wouldn't work, I was going to have Naruto and Daisuke fight.
Which included having Naruto turn evil. I'm still convinced that could've worked, but I don't think anyone actually wanted to read it. In fact, people were pretty hostile to the idea, leaving the fic entirely over the conversation between Naruto and Jashin. Which means it wouldn't have worked because what is an entertainer without his audience? So I apologize for trying to force a character arc that was completely out of place and trying to include themes that, while potentially realistic or plausible, clashed with the story and source material itself (Sasuke never got a harem and you know how valuable the Sharingan was). It was wrong, and I will strive to not repeat my mistake in the future.
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...so there it is. Typing this out, I feel a lot of relief and that, maybe, I might be able to move on. I mostly continued the story because I liked having hundreds of people follow my work and felt like I could bring it back if I continued my work. That was the worst possible mindset to have and I am really, really sorry I took so many of you for granted. I continued well past burnout just to stay relevant and then, to try to regain my status. But it's not really
me you guys care about, it's the story. After all, very few people care about J. K. Rowling herself, we just love
Harry Potter. So I apologize for my ego, my poor decisions and my personal weakness. I'm sorry for taking a story you loved and twisting it into something that didn't match why you fell in love with the story and ignored your feedback.
(Some of you I ignored because you were unpleasant but 99% of you? Yeah, I should've listened).
If I could go back in time, I would give myself one piece of advice.
"Ignore the people telling you to write what you want to write. Instead, focus on writing what you want to
read."
