And Your Little Dog Too

At the end of second stage of the Chuunin exam, the Hokage sees that seven teams have survived the Forest of Death. That's twice as many as he was expecting. To reduce the number of people advancing to the third stage, he decrees that the survivors must fight an elimination round, with the fighters chosen at random. The winners go on to the next stage. The losers go home...possibly. That's how it usually goes. This year, however, most of the surviving genin are from his own village. And they all seem so deliciously young and good-looking. Being the not-so-closeted perv that he is, the Hokage decides that this year's bouts will be sexual rather than (or in addition to) straight combat. RULES: The participants will be the original 21 survivors of the 2nd stage: Team Kakashi, Team Asuma, Team Kurenai, Team Guy, Team Dosu, Kabuto's Team, and the Sand Siblings. You may allow some to quit before the bouts begin but don't overdo it. You may set the pairings as you wish. If you want to throw in a two-on-two or a tag team, that's fine. The elimination round, or even each individual bout, will have clear rules for who wins and who loses. You create the rules. It can be as simple as making the other fighter orgasm first, or one forcing the other to submit, or perhaps something a bit...darker. Don't make them parodies. One or two is fine (Chouji's bout, for example) but not all of them. Gender bending, even for each bout, is fine. Any combination of yaoi/yuri/het is permitted. Aging the participants to 18 (or whatever) is allowed. Any fetish is fair game. I'll leave the handling of Akamaru to your discretion. Each bout should be written primarily as a fight scene. Give us surprise moves, secret techniques, reversals, lots of tension, and the back-and-forth shift of power. Not all chapters need to be truly erotic, though all must be sexual in nature.

You just about gave me a heart attack. For a moment, I thought you were asking for fanfic based on the book Push, which became the movie Precious. Loved them both, but there's no way I'll attempt a Precious fanfic

Naruto-as-playwright came from the movie Cruising. Much of Chapter 4 is based on the scene where Al Pacino's character first goes undercover and moves into his apartment. The playwright neighbor comes out of his room, starts a similar conversation, and invites Pacino out for coffee. His description of his play (boy meets boy, boy loses boy. boy goes out with analyst) is taken directly from the movie and, like the movie, also serves as confirmation that the neighbor is, in fact, gay. Itachi is no longer around (alluded to in Chapter 1) for reasons that are currently a mystery, at least to Sasuke. The canon material can only stretch so far, and I won't cover the entire 4th Hokage/Naruto/Madara backstory. It just doesn't add to the plot. If you're curious about what this whole Cruising-the-movie thing is, check out the trailer at . A sample of the backroom bar scenes is at http://youtu.be/Wi0CxmDYKGA. Now you might understand why I'm infatuated with this superbly homophobic mess of a film. Just imagine Sasuke as Al Pacino, Sakura as Karen Allen, Naruto as the gay neighbor (not in any clip I can find), Kiba as Skip Lee (the violent guy by the pinball machine) and that about covers it.

When I started this story, I thought that I would only get a few reviews, and most of them would be flames. After all, this story isn't set up in the same way as most yaoi fics, and the sparse appearance of the Sasuke/Naruto relationship would piss off most SasuNaru fans. In short, this forum was originally for camage control. Since I seem to be getting a lot of positive reviews (so far), I will start responding to the ones I've skipped Thank you. The killer will certainly be in the list of characters already introduced (or at least talked about.) Thank you. The chapters will now come out about once a month. I've had a lot of time in June to write but my work is now monitoring for any 'non-work-related' computer activity even during my lunch hours, so most of my writing time has vanished. Personally, I've always hated both SasuSaku and SasuNaru. Part of the reason for this story was as a self-challenge: can I write SasuSaku & SasuNaru fiction that I do like? Thanks. I will.

Sasuke's not the type to waste words on description, so I've got to make every description count. And you're right. I've got to stop starting every chapter with a question. It was a cute trick at the beginning but now it's getting old. Sasuke is definitely responding to Naruto's personality, just as everyone eventually does in canon. And, down deep, Sasuke could probably become a pretty good guy. But first, he has to get past his deeply-entrenched thoughts and values, which will require extreme measures. This fic is a chronicle of those measures. Thank you. And your review summed it up. Sasuke's never experienced anything other than military life, with its long-standing values and assumptions. He's never encountered anybody who's gay, or that he knows to be gay.

Thank you. Exactly the effect I was looking for.

I understand your confusion. A majority of fanfiction is written in the Romance genre, or as one of the genres. In Romance, the intended couple meets in the first few chapters or in the first fifteen minutes of the film. After the "meet-cute", the central question become "How will these two people overcome the forces that keep them apart and achieve their happily-ever-after?" The pairing is obvious, the ending is obvious, and the only room for creativity are in the struggles they endure in between. Romance isn't one of the genres of this story. Here, the central question is "Who is Sasuke Uchiha?" Once that question has been answered, fully and completely, then everything else follows: we will know the direction of his life, who he chooses to pair with, and how he comes to terms with his orientation, his family, and his role in life. Being a mystery as well, finding this answer must also show him who the killer is, or at least provide the key for unlocking the mystery. Revealing the pairing now would spoil the story. HOWEVER... The "Self-Indulgent" in my username is not an accident. When I work up story ideas, I often do so according to my own dubious tastes and desires. And I often forget about the needs of the readers. To that end, I will reconsider the ending chapter. The original is a bit of a downer and is not likely to satisfy anybody except myself. I can easily made the ending more fan-friendly with only minor alterations in the theme and plot. Thank you for reminding me to be less self-indulgent.

Thank you for the nice review and for enjoying my story. "Straight cop infiltrates gay leather underground to catch a killer" is the high concept of the movie Cruising. It would have been an interesting film, too, if the director (William Friedkin) didn't turn the whole thing into a homophobic mess, where Al Pacino spends half the film drowning in a orgiastic sea of grinding male flesh. (To get an R rating, forty minutes of flesh-wallowing bar scenes had to be cut out. Forty!) In short, it's a lot like it's more famous predecessor, The Exorcist, except that Catholic guilt and ritualism has been replaced by fits of homosexual panic and messages of gay=serial killer. Yes, you are right. The whole point of this story is to explore these exact issues. The film Cruising does none of this. We have no idea what goes on under the surface of Al Pacino's character, or anybody's character. It's like somebody's holding up a cue card saying, "Resist the urge to act." We never find out who the real killer is; in fact, we see at least three separate killers...if you don't count Al Pacino's character, who is strongly implied to be the killer of his gay neighbor at the end of the film.

Sorry, Tribalista. I ran out of time before work and didn't include your review. I will rectify that shortly. Sasuke's life is compartmentalized because all of our lives are. We are one person at work, another at school, still another in bed. This also has to do with the mountain of exposition that I have to shovel out, and getting it to sound semi-natural is tough. The nice part about writing in the first person is that we have instant access to Sasuke's thoughts. More importantly, we can watch those thoughts get increasingly less logical and detached once the feces start hitting the fan.

[quote name=Reviewer Jen' Well so far, this scenario is all kinds of complicated romance-wise, but I like it. It seems like Sasuke really enjoys being straight and has a good, serious relationship with Sakura--to the point where he's even thinking of marrying her in the future. Sakura seems to really like him too, but may also have a soft spot for Kakashi. But as happy as the two of them seem, there was that weird scene at the end of the chapter where Sakura took too long in the shower to kiss Sasuke goodbye (on purpose?) and Sasuke suddenly felt out of place in her bedroom. Was that foreshadowing a deeper problem in their relationship--Sasuke thinks he's managed to emotionally connect with Sakura, is he wrong?--or was that indicative of a deeper problem within Sasuke--maybe he doesn't have as clear of an idea of himself as he thought?--or perhaps both? And then there's Naruto who, whatever his involvement in the gay leather underground may or may not be, is the son of a man who was probably assassinated by one of Sasuke's relatives. These are some serious hurdles for all of them to clear, will be interesting to see how you resolve them. I'm a little worried about Sasuke's mission in the next chapter, though. It sounds like he's got all the military training he needs, but has never been on a serious police investigation like this one. (He's done secret missions for the military, but has he ever done police undercover work before?) I hope whoever Sasuke's contact person in the civilian police is that s/he can help him out with some of the finer points of investigating, particularly since he'll be the bait, more or less, for a killer! (I almost wonder if there isn't some kind of setup in choosing the relatively inexperienced Sasuke for this type of mission.) Wow! Nice review. There are deep problems in Sasuke and Sakura's relationship. Future chapters will show this a little more. Their biggest problem is that the core of their relationship is no longer valid. He likes her because she is the exact opposite of the women of his clan: bright instead of dour, outspoken instead of subservient, sexually assertive rather than prudish. In short, she is one of his forms of rebellion. He performs the same function for her. His ne'er-do-well antics and punkish attitude are exactly the things which drive her parent up the wall. That's fine, until they reach the age where marriage starts looking less like a prison sentence and more like a personal goal. So, how do people who spent their idle hours deriding their parents drop all that and become parents themselves? Can they do it without shattering the relationship? (And many stories do exactly that--shatter the relationship--and then they reforge it into something stronger,) And you're right, Sasuke's completely unsuited for this investigation. His only real qualifications are that he's the right age and looks similar to the victims. His father, who has spent all his time grooming Itachi to be the next chief, is too focused on his fantasies of restoring his clan's honor that he doesn't question the orders. And Sasuke questions everything; why should this be any different? And what's Ishikawa's motivation? Does he believe in Sasuke, or is he simply desperate enough to throw an inexperienced, hot-headed punk into the lion's den? Is he hoping that Sasuke will freak out and knife somebody, so he can claim the corpse as that of the killer? We'll see.

It's fear. Pure fear. If the author pretends that they don't take their writing seriously, then they can't be hurt when somebody hates it. Which is silly, since it hurts just as bad. Write! Dream! Dare! Be brave! And grow a thicker skin. In the circle jerk of life, everybody has their turn at being the pivot boy.

When you ask us to leave our usual places, are you talking about fandom (Sailor Moon instead of HP), genre (political thriller instead of romance), content-wise (instead of slash, doing something, uh...less slashy), or spiritually (in my case, writing fluff instead of making cartoon characters act out scenes from my twisted psyche)?

This forum is for my story Cruising (http://naruto.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600103689). It's a place where readers can ask questions and I can respond to reviews and comments. More to the point, it's also a place where I can respond to flames, since there will be sections of this story where flame-retardant underwear might be needed.

--- Reply removed, on account that the person who wrote it has suddenly realized that he is a pedantic boor. Sorry.