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sagemoderocklee · 4 years

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for the director's cut meme, how about the chapter of alliance where lee pledges fealty to gaara?

oooohhhhh, starting with one of my all time favorite things I’ve written ever. love that for me.

i could talk about chapter 13: a beast’s gratitude (x) for ever. especially that last scene, which was the moment that Alliance was always leading up to. god it’s been ages since i’ve done any work on the allied nations saga, so this will certainly be a nice change to maybe get me motivated to work on the sequel again.

whenever i talk about alliance, i always have to preface with the fact that alliance didn’t start out the way it ended up.

the idea came to me in the summer of 2010, sometime before I moved from the west coast to the east coast. I can distinctly remember sitting in the airport editing the prologue and first chapter while waiting for my flight with my friend/roommate. i had this mac book i’d bought off a friend who massively overcharged me for a computer that didn’t even connect to the internet wirelessly. it was a real rip off to say the least, but at least i had a computer to write fanfiction on lmao

anyways, those details aren’t important, mostly just nostalgia. the important thing about alliance is that when i started writing it back in 2010, there wasn’t a lot of gaalee fic content out there, and certainly not a lot that didn’t stick to the fandom’s most tried and true method of getting them together: Lee going to Suna.

now, it’s not like that’s a particularly bad trend. it’s certainly not inaccurate to send Lee there given that Gaara giving up his role as the Kazekage is... incredibly small. I mean, I have countless WIPs and ideas that send Lee to Suna for various and sundry reasons, but the trope does tend to fall a little flat when it gets done and done to death, and again at this point in the gaalee fandom that was really all there was--Lee goes to Suna as an envoy, despite his less than stellar political skills. it’s boring, tbqh. like can we get a little bit more variety here please?

anyways, that was my thought process when I set about starting Alliance. and with Alliance being my first real GaaLee fic, my first big Naruto project, i really wanted to do something different, something fresh: i wanted to send Gaara to Konoha, and not just for a short visit.

knowing me, you know that i like my stories high stakes and heavily political. well, actually, alliance is the reason for that. alliance sort of shaped me a lot as a writer. but like i said, alliance didn’t start out the way it ended up. it wasn’t going to have a sequel, it certainly wasn’t gonna turn into a saga with four parts, and gaara and lee were definitely going to be together by the end of it all. if you’d told me when i first made that document in 2010 that it would take me 8 years to finish just that one fic, that i’d end up with almost 300k words, an three more fics to write i wouldn’t have believed it.

so, anyways, i’m babbling and getting off topic.

back on track: at the time i started alliance, 2010, the manga wasn’t done, so we were still smack at the beginning of the Fourth Great Shinobi War, so that’s where my story was going to take place and then deviate from the canon. when i started alliance, i loved gaalee, but i didn’t have a lot of a foundation for them. this was, again, my first real big gaalee fic, and boy did i have grand ideas about alliance, about what it would be for the fandom.... i really wanted it to make an impact--and that impact is what this ask is all about.

so, when i first began the fic, i started off with the prologue, which came easily enough. but then i struggled with the first chapter because how the hell was i ever going to get gaara and lee together?

well, if you’ve read alliance you know they aren’t together... romantically.

i don’t exactly remember when it struck me that Lee was going to swear fealty to Gaara, but the idea came to me early on. i think after i’d started and restarted the first chapter, when i’d realized that i had a much bigger challenge ahead of me than i’d anticipated.

gaalee isn’t a ship with a huge canon foundation. it’s not a ship with hundreds of episodes of content for the creator to throw away at the end and toss them into hetero marriages for the sake of a cash cow franchise, thus undermining everything the series presented to us.

so the question was always: how do they end up together? what motivates them to fall in love? what is strong enough to bring them together as friends, as equals and allow them that chance at something more? what was going to be the one thing that would have that impact i was so determined to have?

lee swearing fealty to gaara was my answer.

and it was the answer to more than just the questions about gaara and lee as a couple. it also answered how lee specifically was going to change. one of the biggest frustrations with lee’s entire lack of character development in the canon is that he never stops being gai-sensei’s double. he’s never allowed to be a fully actualized character; he’s never his own man, not defined by the Springtime of Youth and the green suit.

swearing fealty to gaara meant forging a new path for himself and growing as his own person. and it’s so wholly Lee. It’s rash, hot-headed, passionate, reckless, and driven entirely by his emotions.

for me, alliance was always about that moment when Lee knelt on the uncomfortable gravel pathway in front of the hospital and swore himself to him. it was always about the moment when Gaara, confused beyond the telling, accepted Lee because his own heart wouldn’t let him refuse.

and the aftermath, the affect that Lee swearing fealty to Gaara has on their relationship... that’s what i was always after with alliance. alliance is just the foundation. it’s the stepping stone for more. and that all started with that final scene in chapter 13.

grand ideas aside, i know alliance isn’t like a super popular fic--i mean, god lee and gaara don’t even get romantically involved in it, so most people aren’t gonna be looking to alliance for their gaalee fix. but that fic will always be my baby, and that moment is so special to me. i think i still have my first two drafts of the scene since i hoard documents like i hoard notebooks lmao

anyways, i’ve rambled a lot but i hope you like the answer!

#allied nations saga #naruto #shippuden #gaara #rock lee #gaalee

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midnight-in-town · 6 years

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BTW I still can’t get over the fact that Sorachi-sensei gave us the Love Potion arc, because it’s one of the best written comedy arcs of the whole series: I love how you can either take it at face value and say it doesn’t mean anything, or you can try to see a little beneath the surface and acknowledge how meaningful it is on some aspects, just like all the other comedy arcs.

Knowing how popular and famous Gintama is, it’s logical that Sorachi-sensei will never voice a clear position about which ships he probably has a soft spot for, but it’s not like he gave an arc or several to all the possible ships of Gintama. And I’m not talking just about GinTsu.

For example, is it really a coincidence that the other ship getting a lil’ focus in this arc is the love triangle Kondo/Otae/Kyuubei? Is it? Considering the Dekobokko arc or even, later, Kyuubei’s own resolution along with Tsukuyo’s about being a woman and being in love, during half of ch620? Or even just Kondo’s failed gorilla marriage in the last arc?

I don’t think so. :)

(more rambling under read more)

Anyway the whole arc is presented as being comic relief and as not to be taken seriously for those who don’t like the ships it is focusing on (that’s Sensei’s skill right here), but still Sensei subverted the whole thing and that’s what’s so unbelievably cool about this arc.

Like, I love how the introduction is that “whoever smells the aizen kou drug will fall in love with the first person they see” but even tho’ he applied that to Kagura and Shinpachi for a short while, Sensei ended up throwing even that to the bin, especially when you see how the arc went for Tsukuyo and Kyuubei.

The first thing Tsukuyo saw was Gintoki’s dick after she smelled the drug but the whole arc is about realizing her feelings for Gintoki, the man.

On the contrary, you have Kyuubei who ended up going after dicks for most of the arc (no matter who the guys were), even tho’ I doubt that she actually saw a forest of dicks right after she smelled the drug.

So it’s interesting how Sensei adjusted the very first rule of the arc to eventually make it about what he wanted to explore for his characters.

Even when you see the monologues for Otae and Kyuubei, it does seem to reflect what their personal arc is revolving around: Otae always had conflicted feelings to sort out about Kondo; Kyuubei always had this hesitation about whether to live as a man or a woman (until she made her final choice in ch620).

Granted that poor Kondo himself is often reduced to comic relief, but it should be pointed out that his monologue only reached us after Otae kinda manhandled him so, ahem, hard to have any conclusion on what he said, even if it’s not like his feelings about Otae needed any clarification. :)

It gets trickier for Gintoki because, on the one hand you could argue that “he smelled so much of the drug that he lost his sense of reason” (something I’m sure a lot of readers who disliked this arc did), but on the other, why shouldn’t he also get serious/honest moments in this arc about his own feelings when everyone else did?

Sensei is just way too good at hiding these moments amidst all the jokes, so that no one can complain about him having a soft spot for a few ships in particular.

Anyone who’d argue that Gintoki was never serious once in this arc is just shooting their own foot actually, because Tsukuyo acted way unlike herself because of the drug several times and so did Otae, Kyuubei and Kondo.

So even though Gintoki did/said stupid stuff because of the drug, if everyone else did too but also got to face/admit about some of their inner feelings, then it’s logical to think that the same happened with Gin.

And that’s what’s so amazing about how Sensei wrote this arc: I’m not saying that this arc is implying GinTsu is ever going to get canon (tbh I doubt it, even if Tsukuyo is the one who got the most focus about her feelings for Gintoki out of everyone), but to say that Gintoki has literally 0 interest in Tsukuyo would be misreading in my opinion.

If anything we already know that she’s physically his type (that pool episode/chapter with the Shogun) xD

Anyway, Gintoki has way too many issues about not wanting things to change + being scared of getting too attached to many people (because of everything that happened with Shoyo and the consequences of his choice back then) that this arc could only go max comic relief in appearance, as far as he was concerned.

Since the last arc is finally targeting Gintoki’s whole emotional trauma surrounding his choice towards Shoyo back during the war though, I guess that if Sensei wanted, he could choose to hint towards a Gin ship maybe becoming canon at the very end after daily life kicks in again, but as I said I doubt that, mostly because of the massive ship wars (tho I’m also all for Gin/Hasegawa :)).

Final thing: if anyone were to argue that this arc is only comic relief and can’t be taken seriously on some aspects, then I guess they wouldn’t see the homeless arc and its heavy focus on Katsura’s complicated dynamic with Ikumatsu as being literally the same thing but in another context, because Zura just didn’t need the aizen kou.

Just like Hijikata didn’t need it either when it came to Mitsuba.

tl;dr Sensei is good at crafting the tone of his arcs depending on what he wants to address for his characters and that obviously includes the love potion arc, which is in my opinion one of the best examples of a comedy arc that’s actually hiding a lot of meaningful stuff.

An arc is hardly ever a stand-alone in Gintama anyway, so the love potion arc can’t be meaningless if what took place ended up having consequences at some later time (like ch620 or even the last arc, post time skip).

Dissecting the narrative isn’t going to lead anywhere: no one “has to” ship Gintsu or enjoy the Kondo/Otae/Kyuubei triangle, but let’s not pretend that the characters are oblivious to each other and that comedy arcs can’t strengthen their feelings, whatever they are.

#gintama #sakata gintoki #tsukuyo #gintsu #kontae #kyuutae #yagyuu kyuubei #shimura tae #kondo isao #sorachi hideaki #i don't know why i am in a rambling mood today #my analysis

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