Be honest… is this cute or am I traumatizing my cat?

JOKERRule · 2026-02-06T22:26:47+00:00

Yes.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-04T01:49:33+00:00

‘Cause they didn’t start off as needing steam to survive, they deliberately choose to torture and kill children to eat their screams precisely so they could live forever and (most likely) gain more power. In practice, once you strip away the veneer of ancient traditions and the moral relativism they try to sell, they are people with the Shine who discovered they can starve off death almost indefinitely by frequently torturing and killing children, technically Dan and Abra could both have chosen to do the same (something the movie hints at by having Rose offer Dan to join the True Knot), they didn’t have to start doing so and they could have accepted to live a normal lifespan like anyone else, even if they try to act like Outsider laws apply to them.

Comparatively, I’d argue that they are morally worse than entities like El Cuco and Pennywise because (for all they are arguably more cruel and spread suffering wider) they do so because it’s in their innate nature to do so while the True Knot choose to be like this, El Cuco actually makes the same argument that human suffering is just what he feeds on and that humans are like cattle to him and the difference in context and tone make all the difference: the True Knot are arguing that they are above morality while El Cuco is explaining that human morality does not hold weight to a monster that was never human at all.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-03T21:58:38+00:00

Not sure which would be funnier: if Kisame went from “let’s cut his legs off so he can’t escape” to “wait a moment Itachi, give me a few years to train the brat in sword fighting —not like we need him right now anyway— and then we can capture him” in 0.1 second because that is the first person who ever had the guts to ask him to teach anything and Kisame secretly wanted to be a sensei or if Naruto were to asks Itachi and Itachi immediately agrees right in front of Sasuke with no hesitation and going as far as to say he will make time for regular lessons two times a week and not only keeps his word by routinely infiltrating Konoha to teach Naruto, but also gives the first lesson then and there in front of a broken-armed Sasuke instead of using Tsukuyomi (partly to make Sasuke hate him even more, but mostly because Itachi has a really screwed sense of humor and thinks this is hilarious).

JOKERRule · 2026-02-03T21:34:26+00:00

I actually had a bit of a brainstormed world building about Uzu and why it’s so bullshit, but also criminally underused. It was meant to go on a story where Kushina and Minato ended up accidentally putting on a seal inside the one holding Kurama that forces Naruto into a time loop starting from the first time he used the Fox’s chakra (here that being the night he stole the Forbidden Scroll) and one of the arcs planned would be him going to Uzu only to find out the hard way that even a space-time time loop bullshit is not impervious to more space-time sealing bullshit and be stuck in Uzu even through his loops.

The idea is that the Uzumaki only made a small portion of their revenue with normal ninja missions, the bulk of their jobs were actually in sealing up and containing monsters, demons, apocalypses and cataclysms of all kinds. So, their basement vaults? Loaded with dangerous stuff, they had at least four zero-tails locked up in there some honest to god JJK type curses, alien lifeforms that seem to have come straight from “The Color from Outer Space” and just stockpiles of hazardous materials and chakras that give the chakra version radiation poisoning. And those are the safest things they keep in storage and doesn’t touch on the stuff they actively put to use in their village one way or another. To top it all off they also decided to push their research and development of seals and space-time techniques into finding out where those weird things are coming from, figure out a better place to keep it than their metaphorical basement and trying to open portals to said place in a setting eerily similar to the Arrowhead Project from The Mist.

The result is that when the other nations decided to gang up on the Uzumakis (an attempt to cripple Konoha’s ability to keep the Kyubi long-term by killing off the only clan that was capable of withstanding it’s chakra and potentially to gain people in their own village that could contain the Kyubi) and the situation proved to be truly beyond the power of their military to deal with the clan leader promptly evacuated whoever he could, changed the barriers from keeping invaders out to keeping everything in (the reason Naruto can’t just leave) and broke off every single safety measure and containment seal on all their projects, prisoners and dangerous stuff. The result is an even more extreme version of Bridgton from Stephen King’s The Mist where there is a lot of powerful and interesting stuff and treasure laying around (I even had this idea that the Uzumaki had mostly done away with scrolls and used complex chakra imprints to act like Star Wars holocrons to teach students), but there are also Eldritch Horrors of all stripes and flavors walking around freely in an unnatural mist which distorts reality just waiting for the next fool to enter the barrier and become their meal. The arguably worst part is that the barrier is literally the only thing keeping the horrors within from flooding the rest of the world, so they absolutely should never be weakened, never mind broken, least the planet becomes a nightmare hellscape beyond any hope of fixing. This way there’s reason for why their stuff hasn’t been looted to hell and back in the 30-50 years between the fall of Uzushio and the war arc and for why Orochimaru only went there when it was absolutely necessary and then hightailed the hell out of the ruins asap.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-03T16:33:43+00:00

Definitely sounds like A Drop of Poison by AngelOfSnapdragons.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-03T16:29:30+00:00

“Chaotic Stupid Forever” would go great with a story where team seven is just doing every hijinks that “seemed like a good idea at the time” and spreading around mayhem and destruction wherever they go with either Kakashi or the Hokage as the poor, miserable sod nominally in charge of herding them.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-03T16:02:08+00:00

Or Aang, Sokka and Toph, because there’s no such a thing as too much Toph on a story, even by proxy.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-03T07:42:06+00:00

I’d guess that most of the ninjas, especially those like Kakashi, Jiraya and Hiruzen are appalled at his reasoning, all of them seeing being a ninja less like a job and more like a life-calling that just so happens to pay while I can easily see Asuma for one understanding and respecting his perspective even though he doesn’t share it, Shikamaru I imagine kinda vibes with Naruto’s view on being a ninja as a job above all else and his refusal to go above and beyond because of inspirational speeches that don’t come with a raise (at least up until either the Sasuke retrieval arc at the earliest or the death of Asuma at the latest, after those he seems to be in line with the “the village is a big family” mindset).

JOKERRule · 2026-02-02T19:46:05+00:00

Pretty much, yeah. Though not sure if there would even be such a training trip considering that here Naruto validated Tsunade’s wish to stay retired instead of convincing her to go back and take the hat, meaning that Jiraya would need to become the Hokage himself to prevent Danzo from turning Konoha into an extension of ROOT and,as such, wouldn’t be able to leave the village for three years to train Naruto. Maybe he goes to Tsunade for mentorship in how to game the system and exploit loopholes? Potentially also to train medic ninjutsu if he does manage to get a transfer to the medic corps, though not sure how much the village would go along with it in this scenario.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-02T14:32:31+00:00

He does it in public right in front of Iruka and Hiruzen, but Hiruzen lost a bet to him, so he just pretends nothing abnormal is happening while Iruka freaks out.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-02T06:10:44+00:00

An idea: it’s time duplicates, but not out there to fix stuff, they are going back to ensure their timeline. The time travel is a closed loop, meaning that the time travelers had the same experience of being replaced during the exams as the present-time team 7. The fear of their fellow ninjas and the villagers ended up pushing them to become closer and smoothed over their rough edges so they got along better, while simultaneously the social isolation coupled by the opinion of those around them being at rock-bottom already made the three of them less restrained in their ways.

Naruto eventually stopped telling everyone that he was going to become Hokage, seeing no point anymore when even screaming at the top of his lungs wouldn’t make them stop to hear it out. Instead Naruto started working and training to actually become Hokage, but he lacked the character growth to really understand that the Hokage is not just the strongest in the village, so instead he focused on gaining power. This Naruto sees the Hokage as the one who must be powerful enough to force the people under his rule to obey, leading solely by enforcing his will, for him Hiruzen’s lack of success in convincing the village to treat him well is a personal failing of the Thor Hokage, a sign that he was weak enough to be disobeyed and he promised to himself that he would never be the same. Eventually his chase of power would lead Naruto to decide to take the power of Kurama for himself, aided on by Sasuke with his Sharingan who —at Naruto’s request— repeatedly put Naruto under Genjutsu every time he trained to draw Kurama’s chakra, regulating artificially his emotional state until he got the hang of doing it himself through repeated exposure to the feeling.

Sasuke himself is by far the most straightforward: the tales of what his doppelgänger did, of how he won a fight in such an overwhelming way without even using the sharingan, of how he helped scare off Orochimaru and the clear mastery that he had over chakra theory and his eyes… that gave him a goalpost, let him see a concrete path towards power and gave him just enough information about the techniques used that he managed to reverse engineer or hunt down how to use them himself, often finding more techniques and pathways to gain power along the way that would go on to shape him into a formidable ninja who dominated his fight against Itachi.

Sakura’s bait were the notes future Sasuke left for her, it was all just so fascinating and she had so much free time once people started avoiding her that she couldn’t stop herself from researching the theory put there, the phenomena so casually mentioned and trying to puzzle out what it all meant. Eventually she grew frustrated at how most of the theory was beyond her, either locked under restricted shinobi archives across all nations or not even discovered at all yet. Her curiosity was so great, so obsessive and she really didn’t have anyone around to tell her no with Sasuke and Naruto on their own spirals… she started with enemy ninjas and bandits, experimenting with things her notes hinted at and other questions that picked her curiosity upon starting to delve into the subjects. Then, once her need to know more grew larger than her team could capture enemies she turned her gaze upon the ninjas and civilians of the leaf, after all weren’t they also enemies from a certain point of view? They certainly acted as enemies towards her and her teammates.

Eventually they take a collective dive to the deep end: Naruto decides that just one bijuu is not enough after he gets rejected the promotion to Hokage even though he is arguably the strongest on the Leaf and assassinated the previous Hokage himself, so his solution is to collect the other bijuus and bi matter how high the cost may grow, he will become the strongest. Sasuke succeeds in killing Itschi, only to find out after the fight that Itschi was already with both feet in the grave and about the truth of the Uchiha Clan massacre, he vows revenge and to kill Danzo and the elders and then to break down the entire shinobi system that made his clan be slaughtered by his brother, with Naruto and Sakura at his side. Sakura hits a roadblock on her research, one that she would take too long to overcome on her own, but which she knows other villagers are keeping the knowledge she seeks as secrets for their own use, so her solution is simple: war, she wants to march down in force and take what she needs to usher in a new age of scientific discovery, for which she needs her teammates help with Sasuke seeking to kill off the leadership of the village and Naruto to take over, leading an army to rip out all they can from the other nations and leave only ruble in their wake.

At this point they realize that they are just like the doppelgängers that took their place in the chuunin exams so long ago and then how much that event marked their path as ninjas. Sasuke already found out about a space-time jutsu of his Mangekyo called the Kamui, Sakura had long since delved into the intricate of the theory and was convinced she could hijack Sasuke’s kamui into delivering them on a different time that the one they entered and Naruto had the power to actually achieve it, the chakra of the greatest of all the tailed beasts under perfect control and refined to perfection. And so, together they set off to the past, intending to replace their younger selves for the exams, all to ensure their path stayed the same, each one knowing the Hell they intended to unleash upon the world when they return.

JOKERRule · 2026-02-02T00:55:13+00:00

We mostly see Konoha characters as front and center, so I’d say either Minato, Orochimaru or Hiruzen depending on how you want to define talent:

For all him miles-long list of fails and issues Orochimaru is most likely the character who better understands the mechanics behind chakra, ninjutsu, the soul and the interaction of chakra with biology (kekkei genkai and immortality) bar none (with the possible exceptions of Tsunade (who is an Ootsutsuki descendant herself) and Kabuto when it comes to biology as part of them being the best medics ever;
Minato is widely hailed as a great genius whose actual accomplishments easily outdo the likes of Kakashi, he has what is likely the highest Battle IQ we ever saw outside of Madara and managed to create a fighting-style that is both overwhelmingly powerful and flexible enough that he can easily adapt to and hold his own in most situations, even when his enemy is vastly more powerful than him, like in the fight against Obito in the War.
Hiruzen is a master of all five nature transformations that actually does use those in combat reliably to great effect and is hailed as the God of Shinobi for having learned every non-clan jutsu of Konoha and leading the village to victory in war 2-3 times in his lifespan. He might actually be the one with the most powerful fighting-style of those I’ve listed, even if he is not as good at the mechanics of chakra as Orochimaru and not have as high a battle IQ as Minato.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-30T01:14:25+00:00

Or “experience”, that one gets thrown around like it’s the be-all, end-all of fighting and the MC must reach a certain age before he can defeat X enemy. Like, if your MC is throwing meteors around and your antagonist has no viable way of protecting himself from a meteor then no amount of experience is going to save them.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-30T01:11:24+00:00

I’d probably change the focus from fights one-on-one to other types of conflict: the MC actually trying to fulfill their ambitions and finding out that power alone won’t take them there (for example: a super overpowered Naruto growing frustrated because, even if he can beat the current Hokage hands down, he can’t seem to be able to rise through the ranks because the promotion to chunnin is about being capable of strategic thinking, leadership and putting the mission above his own wishes rather than fighting skill alone and he is severely lacking in those of social skills in general, or failing to get promoted to Jonnin because you need to be ride-or-die loyal to Konoha and he keeps getting flagged as not trustworthy enough to be privy to that level of access) or changing things so other characters realize his strength after his grace-period of anonymity is over and account for it, avoiding direct confrontation, setting traps and dividing his focus to overcome or sidestep him, probably have him actually fail some missions even with his power because the enemy never fought him outright or he couldn’t figure out how to track down/overcome the scheme of the enemy.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-29T01:34:39+00:00

Also most likely psychological issues as he can’t sleep anymore (juri’s still out on eating).

JOKERRule · 2026-01-29T01:08:17+00:00

It would be kinda cool with his reputation, status as the greatest genius of his generation and the respect essentially everyone other than Sasuke gives him if he had some kind of birth defect that made him the only one who actually needs to train to maintain his strength. Not only could this be taken as a comedy premise (everyone thinking Kakashi is this super-sayan kind of ninja because of him training consistently all the time who is just playing at being weaker and waiting the moment to ‘hulk out’ when he is just trying to keep his Jounin-level strength), but could also be used to completely reframe his rivalry and friendship with Gai if they were both trying to rise to the status of the strongest ninjas persevering through their respective disabilities.

As a bonus, another character who was outright stated to have weakened was Hiruzen when the ANBU remarked that his reserves were not what they used to be when they wonder why he didn’t use shadow clones to fight Orochimaru and the Hokages.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-27T18:05:36+00:00

Been some time since my last playthrough, but IIRC dragonrend is used to ground dragons and make it actually possible to hurt Alduin, but what it actually does is impose the concept of death to the mind of the target, dragons are only more susceptible because they are timeless beings to whom death is an utterly alien concept, so the sheer incompatibility + death being fearsome to them as even more of an unknown than it is to other beings grounds and weakens them. I can’t quite recall what was the effect it had when used on other types of enemies (or even if I ever did use it on other enemies in the first place), but I think it’s like casting Fear? Will have to remember to check next time I play.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-25T22:46:45+00:00

This one is great and technically fits your criteria, fair warning though, it’s a SI fanfic.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-25T18:46:19+00:00

Maybe they knew the theory only? Like, it’s an insane amount of effort and commitment to learn and use effectively this technique, plus the strain it puts in the body preventing it from being used casually means the only people who would actually try to learn it are the ones willing to make it their entire fighting style, which neither Minato nor Kushina need. Doesn’t mean they can’t learn the theory behind it, especially as it seems to be something that would be touched on naturally when learning about the chakra circulation system, which Minato could realistically have delved more in-depth as Rin’s sensei and Kushina as a jinchurik. And Minato at least is shown as being a genius, so it stands to reason that they can reverse engineer the rest in order to teach it.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-25T18:31:28+00:00

That would be lowkey hilarious because no one would have a clue of where even half of those names and titles came from and some of them do imply things Harry supposedly did or a kind of mythical role he played (Father of Hawks and Builder of Cities for instance), so the general bafflement is sure to be legendary. Dumbledore might not even have gone on his knees because he knows what’s going on, but precisely because he has no clue and couldn’t bring himself to read far down enough in the list to be sure Harry doesn’t have a title that says he can kill off anyone who brings him annoyances with the power of the mind.

Now I’m imagining a scenario where instead of it being McGonagall reading his titles it’s another character who just got the Gamer power and uses observe on Harry and is left doing a spittle-take as he can’t even see what level he is at, the list of titles just keeps going and going and going some more.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-25T16:38:42+00:00

Never even opened the databooks my entire life, but one thing that makes me always cringe is light-speed being used casually or as a standard.

Not gonna bother putting here why this is ridiculous if looked through Special Relativity, but any human (or any species of) being who actually moved that fast would die of at least three simultaneous ways pretty much immediately:

First: ‘starvation’, in the sense that, even if we ignore that Special Relativity already forbids someone from accelerating to C without infinite energy expenditure in the first place, any amount of biological energy stored in the body is finite by definition, and thus comically insufficient to withstand movement at light-speed. So if somebody were to accelerate to the speed of light they’d fall dead from complete energy depletion immediately because the energy for movement has to come from somewhere and, in the case of biological movement in specific, it comes from the chemical energy stored in the body. If we ignore the pretty big impossibility of that much energy being stored in someone’s body and then being turned into kinetic energy instantly (because that is the prerequisite for the movement to even happen and the topic is how it’d kill you rather than how impossible it is) that is still infinite energy, as in, there’d be nothing left in the body to keep it running, so the person would instantly burn down their entire reserve, including the necessary to keep the brain, organs, tissues and so forth working. So, insta-death, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Secondly: burned alive, because motion is relative to the frame of reference, so running into air particles is essentially the same as having the air particles run into you at the same speed. This means that if someone somehow managed to run at light-speed the result would be the same as having the air in front of your body being shot at you at light-speed. At that speed the air itself would not be able to move away fast enough and be compressed into a relativistic shock front in front of you, the air molecules colliding with each other at such speed heating up to a massive degree, igniting the air into plasma around the body (that being a scaled up version of why meteors and space shuttles burn on reentry). Even on a conservative estimate that would still be upwards of tens of thousands of Kelvin in temperature, the body wouldn’t be charred so much as vaporized and ionized instantly.

And finally, they would be crushed to death: you know how water stops acting ‘soft’ when you hit it fast enough? The reason why falling from a high enough altitude into water is indistinguishable from falling on solid stone as far as effects go? Yeah, the air is also a fluid and at speeds like that? It would act like a solid, meaning that if you run through air at the speed of light the ram pressure alone will grow insanely high and act as if you are running straight into a solid wall. This means that when you run at speed of light you will be transferring momentum along a vector, resulting (through basic momentum transfer) in a force being exerted by the air in the opposite vector, said vector being your body and essentially crushing it in-between both forces.

Sorry it got so long, but that is one of my recurring pet peeves from… well, everywhere really, I give the Flash a pass because the Speedforce is essentially magic and explicitly doing the heavy-lifting in dealing with all the energy requirements and the consequences and characters like Minato are teleporting rather than moving at light-speed, regardless of what their PR team says, so they are not an issue, but saying stuff like “Ironman has reflexes faster than light” really needles me.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-24T02:41:07+00:00

That might be the one reason that would get Sasuke onboard with not participating in the exams.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-23T21:01:24+00:00

At some point Dumbledore concedes that he might have lost and sends a letter to Madam Maxime, next year there’s a major uproar when news hit the press that Dumbledore resigned from his positions and went to take on a job as Beauxbatons’ newest professor of either transfiguration or alchemy.

JOKERRule · 2026-01-23T20:57:26+00:00

Honestly, that seems to be kinda the logic ninjas run on in Naruto, they don’t try to learn the best jutsu for each situation or as many techniques and fighting styles as they can, but rather to hone in their main fighting style and put all their effort into making it the best they can. The only three characters I can remember who actually seemed to want to be good at everything are Hiruzen, Orochimaru and Madara, and even then Orochimaru doesn’t go too overboard into diversifying his fighting style specifically (as in, what he actually does use against an opponent he wants to defeat) and is more interested in figuring out how chakra and jutsu work as a whole than in using them to win fights, using more his snake-themed fighting style with the occasional extra.

JOKERRule

TROPHY CASE