Kyuubi: WTF, bitch. *heals*
1) NARUTO DOES NOT WANGST OVER HIS SAD PAST. It is Sasuke's domain.
Naruto does get depressed when things go wrong -- and then he gets back up and
finds a way to go past it. He doesn't obsess unhealthily over how everyone hated
him and he was all alone; he goes out and proves morons wrong and finds precious
people to love him.
2) NARUTO DOES NOT PINE OVER HIS FORBIDDEN/UNREQUITED FEELINGS. It is Sakura's
domain.
He has a canon crush on Sakura; apart from whining sometimes that she never
pays attention to him, does he go all sad and sigh, "Sakura-chan... I wish
you would take me with you..."? No, he does not. You could interpret it
as him outgrowing his crush, especially if you're a yaoi fan. But then, we have
Sasuke betraying him and leaving -- and what does he do? Act depressed, sigh,
and then bounce back with a promise that he WILL bring Sasuke back, he doesn't
care how. A promise that he lives with for years. Moments of depression are
canon as well as simply logical (no one can be sincerely happy-go-lucky 24/7);
but he bounces back, always, always.
3) Naruto does not. I repeat, NOT. WANT TO DIE. Naruto wants to live, and he wants to shove the fact that he's alive in people's face. He's never going to die, because then they'll have won, and he IS. NOT. A. QUITTER. What Naruto is, is ferociously, blindingly alive.
Not to mention the one big flaw in self-harm! and cutter!Naruto...
|
Naruto: woe, my life is horrible, I must now cut myself to
get rid of the pain... Kyuubi: WTF, bitch. *heals* |
(Want to use it? Go ahead, no asking or credit necessary.)
4) Naruto's laughter and grins are NOT A COPING MECHANISM. Naruto does not hide everything that is ever wrong behind a facade of uncaring smiles; when people hurt him, mock him, or bug his friends, Naruto gets FLAMING PISSED. And when bad stuff happens, he gets openly sad. He's very open with his emotions. He doesn't repress; he just doesn't obsess. So when he looks happy? Pretty good bet that he actually IS happy.
5) Naruto has more modes than "whee, happy!!" and "wahh, no one loves me." He gets irritated, impatient and even flaming pissed sometimes, and I don't mean only when he's betrayed. Naruto, in the manga, shows his middle finger to people he's annoyed with (and yes, he gets angry often, even if it usually doesn't last -- if he smiled half as much as people write him smiling, he'd have to have reconstructive surgery on his cheek muscles).
6) Naruto has no manners. He belchs, he farts, he pees in front of girls. He eats fast and messily. It's not his fault, with the way he was, or more accurately wasn't, raised -- but it still happens.
7) Naruto is a bit of a pervert -- he isn't totally obsessed with peeping on girls, but when he's got an occasion, he still does it, and even at 13 he still blushes and grins goofily when a sexy woman leers his way, if you remember that black-haired woman who hit on Jiraiya just before Itachi's attack. Post-timeskip, he seriously thinks about peeping on women in the bath.
He is not innocent or childlike -- in a sexual sense, at least, he's a lot more mature than Sasuke and probably several people his age.
(oh, and yaoi fans? Much as we would like him to be, he's not gay. Bisexual,
probably -- it would be very easy to justify -- and he's one of the rare characters
I easily could buy a "I don't like guys, I just love you"
from. But as far as purely physical sexual attraction goes? He likes the ladies.
How much? Not sure, probably not as much as Jiraiya does... XD But he likes
peeping on naked girls too much to be 100% gay. Just because you write him currently
in lust/love with a boy, doesn't mean his past interest in beautiful bouncing
boobies never happened. Or was a fluke. Or a front. Going the "oh, I was
just pretending to be straight all along" route isn't only cheap, it also
doesn't make a lick of sense. When he was twelve, he wasn't expected to like
ANYONE, and he still went all drooly and starry-eyed over big-breasted chicks.
In the other hand, I don't see him crushed under a mass of self-loathing because
he discovered that some boys make him pitch a tent in his briefs. He might be
disturbed by the revelation, and he might choose to keep silent about it, but
obsessing over it day and night for years? yeah... not really. We're talking
about the boy who's been hated all his life for something he has no control
over and still managed to react like so: "if you don't like me, I don't
care, I'm here to stay and I'll find people who DO like me as I am, and I WILL
show you how wrong you are to judge me on it." Being gay < hosting a
murdering demon. There should be other reasons why he refuses to yield to a
new crush for it not to look like cheap, generic angst.)
8) Naruto is sweet. In a very boyish, clumsy way. He's probably not going to be all that good at reading people's moods and knowing exactly what to say -- heck, even Sakura's beatings still haven't managed to make him understand what girls want or don't want to hear, and he still has no clue about Hinata's blatant crush. He's not sensitive like that. If you don't tell him that something's wrong, unless it's glaringly obvious, chances are he won't guess. He relates to boys better than to girls, too -- but even then, he completely missed the start of Sasuke's downward spiral. He didn't have anything in his personal experience that could fit on Sasuke's behavior, so he didn't understand it. Post-timeskip, he's gotten a little better, but he's still not all that.
9) OMYGOD NARUTO CRYING IS SO CANON. Yeah. Let's see what he cried at again -- when Iruka risked his life for him and accepted him unconditionally. For a 12 year old who had been hated all his life, it's a big deal. When he left Wave Country, and people he had spent a short but emotionally intense time with (and it was played up for laughs). About Gaara, because Gaara is what he could have been, and as corny as that may sound, he truly feels his pain. And when he fully realized that Sasuke was going to leave and wasn't coming back, unless maybe in a body bag -- and in that scene he also went Kyuubi. THAT'S ABOUT IT. He's not going to cry because of a sad song or because someone's mean to him -- if someone's mean to him, either they're a friend and he'll yell back or sulk, or they're an enemy and they'll get a fist in the face.
Besides, when he cries, it's big, manly, snotty tears that leave him grimacing and red-faced, not pearls of crystalline liquid falling from his luminous cerulean irises.
10) Yeah, sometimes he needs to be protected. But he HATES IT. He intensely dislikes not being strong enough, and it will almost always provoke him into trying three times as hard. It's been shown several times; he even swore a blood oath not to freeze up and need saving ever again! I seriously doubt he's going to swoon into his seme's arms and stammer and babble about how it was so awful and he was so scared. Naruto can get scared, yeah -- but he works very hard at not letting it slow him down too long. He wants to be stronger.
(if he was raped? First, don't forget that he's a ninja; he would fight, and he can escape most normal bonds. Also, he has Kyuubi. Please think about ways to get past those obstacles if you really want someone to succeed in forcing him to take it up the ass. If any, it will make your fic a lot more detailed, believable and interesting than if he was captured in two seconds and started crying in fear the third. Second, don't forget that he's male. Most males, especially straight and/or macho men, don't react to rape the same way lots of girls do; there's lots more shame and anger, because society tells them that they're not supposed to be weak enough to be victims of that kind of thing, and also because it feels like a negation of their virility. Not to say that they inherently suffer more, that's bullshit, but they just tend to react differently. Please give some thought to these issues if you want a serious, realistic rape fic. Now if it's a rape-fantasy fic where he ends up liking it, it's another matter entirely.)
11) The filler arc is working against me here, (omg it's so not canon anyway [/elitist bitch]) but Naruto actually has smarts -- not book smarts like Sakura, but do you remember the plan to free Kakashi from Zabuza's water prison? Yeah, all Naruto's idea, all on the fly. He's a practical joker, he knows how to think on his feet and has moments of insight where he finds new and inventive ways to kick ass.
12) In the other hand, he's not secretly a genius à la Shikamaru either, and he's not "just pretending to be stupid". Dude, he would have slipped up at some point. He doesn't like classroom learning -- he always learns better by example, with hands-on training. (I can hear the perverts snickering from here. Shush.) Long explanations put him to sleep. He's intuitive and physical, not logical and intellectual. And most of the time, his harebrained schemes work, not because they're fool-proof, but because he has the balls to see them through and the devil's own luck.
If you want to write What-Ifs with those, more power to you! but please think a little farther than OMG COOL. He's already the hero, he doesn't need to be buried under a hundred eleventy-twelve super-speshul things.
-- A bloodline limit. Naruto has enough on his plate with Kyuubi, and you want him to have a bloodline limit? Isn't he already special enough? Also... Wouldn't the bloodline and Kyuubi, like, interfere? Sure, it can be done, but can it be done well? Not often. ('course, it's different in Alternative Universes where he isn't the Kyuubi's host in the way he is in canon, but still... It's been done and done and done, seriously.) If it isn't an AU, please think about explaining why the bloodline didn't show up before, and why no one knew he had it.
-- A twin sister. An older sister. A bestest-childhood-friend-adopted!sister. Any kind of family. At least, any kind of family that was willing to take him in. One of the big themes in Naruto is the way he still manages to build himself a family out of his precious people; it's cheap to make him have a secret loving family all along, without taking into account how that would have changed the whole universe. (and without also making him go through the whole "Where were you when everyone hated me and I actually needed you?" phase.) Naruto is friendly, so he probably wouldn't be angry THAT long; but neither would he instantly trust and love the new character more than he loves his team, Iruka and Jiraiya. Just because they'd be related by blood doesn't mean he would instantly prefer them to people who were actually there for him.
-- The ability to give up on Sasuke. Ever, ever, ever. He was hurt when Sasuke betrayed him; and in his place most people would want nothing to do with Sasuke, except maybe bring him to justice; but Naruto is not most people, and Naruto still wants him back in their team. He's not about to kill him in disgusted anger, or to shrug and lose interest. Not even to run after a specialer love interest (whether he loves Sasuke like that or not). As he is now, post-timeskip, he's borderline unhealthily obsessed with the idea of getting Sasuke back. Sasuke is Naruto's First Emotional Bond (tm); Naruto doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks of this. He just wants Sasuke back. Just because the author doesn't understand WHY, doesn't mean that it isn't here.
-- The ability to suddenly hate Sakura, despise her, or think that she's a whore. His crush existed, deal with it. Even if he's stopped being in puppy-love with her, she's his friend and his teammate. He has never, ever despised her for "shallowly" loving Sasuke and not seeing HIM; sure he has whined because he wanted her attention too, but he has never resented the attention she gave Sasuke. There's a huge difference. Chapter 172, Sasuke wakes up from the Tsukiyomi; Sakura throws herself at his neck and hugs. What does Naruto do? He stares a little, and then HE SMILES. It's a slightly wistful sort of smile; not a dismissive grin, not a "I totally don't get how Sakura must feel" smile. It's a "well damn, she really must love him" smile, with perhaps a touch of "I'm glad he's finally awake".
You don't understand why he likes Sakura, when for the longest time she never gave him the time of the day? Well, I'm wondering why he started to crush on her at the very beginning, too. But whatever the reason, he did. Sakura eventually learns to respect him, and that makes him happy. (If your fic takes place anywhere after the Chuunin exam and you have Sakura blowing off/insulting/being a harpy to Naruto and mindlessly drooling after Sasuke, it's OOC. Besides, Sakura is not a whore for loving one guy so much that she doesn't see any others; if she's a whore by that reasoning, then what does that make Sasuke, who in lots of fanfics blows off all his fangirls for Naruto? -- oh hey, maybe I should do a IC!Sakura page too.)
And more to be added as I think them up. ~