“Everyone who knew of my righteous triumphs has died.”
— Kraft, “Winter in the Northern Lands” (Sousou no Frieren)
Dear NotebookLM,
What do you know about the Naruto Manga Battledome?
You have described your involvement with the Naruto Manga Battledome as an addictive hobby that shifted from a competitive to a nostalgic focus over several years.
When?
January 26, 2009: You recorded that you officially won the Manga Battledome Tournament, though you noted a “strange lack of satisfaction” following the victory.
August 16, 2013: You mentioned looking over the “new Manga Battledome” and recommending it to your brother, Eli. During this time, you spent several late nights “thinking very hard about theories of optimal team construction” and even developed a draft for a WordPress post on the subject.
October 16, 2013: You admitted to a “disastrous Naruto binge” while you were supposed to be writing an essay about the Manga Battledome.
I still have the notes for that essay. Better late than never.
Naruto isn’t one of the truly great manga. It has 700 chapters, and the last 200 were bad. Masashi Kishimoto put every one of his beloved characters on the same stage for a showdown, but it took four years to finish and bled the life out of the franchise.
But those early chapters? Before ninjas became gods, and every battle came down to the color of a man’s eyes? When you’re a 14-year-old boy, that shit hits.
Naruto wasn’t even meant to be a game. It’s a comic about ninjas, drawn one chapter at a time with only faint regard for logic. The powerscaling is wildly imbalanced; most of the characters would die if Sasuke Uchiha so much as looked at them.
Still, in the early days of the internet, a few nerds desperate for content mashed up the comic with barroom boasting, correspondence chess, and competitive debate. And the result — the Battledome, now hosted on Fanverse after the death of NarutoForums — is one of the better games I’ve played.
You start with 76 points. You can buy anyone you want.
For one point, you get Sakura, a 12-year-old with a pocketful of shuriken and zero combat skills.
For 48, you get a man who killed the king of the desert and turned him into a puppet that fires blocks of poisonous metallic sand the size of houses. You can’t hit him with weapons, because that puppet is also Magneto. He has 99 other puppets.
Both have their uses.
The battle begins. Two teams gather in one of the series’ iconic locations. Both players publish a strategy, then a counter-strategy. Everyone argues.
Creator contends that Jiraya can ascend to Sage Mode before Killer B runs across the valley where Kiba nearly died.
Tiocfaidh retorts that even a tortoise like Usain Bolt could make it across that valley in seven seconds flat, ample time to reach Jiraya, and furthermore that the official databook clearly demarcates the difference between ordinary clones and shadow clones, making Tsunade’s part of the plan completely useless.
We vote. Maito Gai kicks in Tsunade’s teeth. Jiraya takes a lightning sword to the face mid-meditation. Neji deflects Shizune’s needles and explodes her heart with a palm strike. Creator drops from the bracket.
There’s no one way to build a team, or fight. Everyone has a weakness. Some characters can’t hit you if you’re flying on a clay bird. Some of them bleed when you stab them — and you can’t just give your blood away like that. Some of them aren’t aware that if they stand around without moving, the little blond girl with pitiful chakra will take control of their minds.
(Sakura knows about the little blond girl. That’s why she’s worth a point.)
At the end of my character arc, I battled Materpillar in the Valley of the End (where, in chapter 699, Naruto finally punched the evil out of Sasuke). I took advantage of Orochimaru, the series’ first Big Bad, and his oft-forgotten ability to summon gigantic inexplicable gates that have nothing to do with his other abilities.
Materpillar, you see, didn’t realize that simply standing on these gates would let me hit him even if he flew on a clay bird.
The Battledome faded out in 2015, when the manga ended and its fans wandered away. It lives on in the spirit of r/whowouldwin and the Vs. Battles Wiki. But much as I enjoy those spaces, I miss the tournament structure, and the surprising competitive balance of the Naruto metagame. You can’t run a tournament on One Piece cartoon logic or Dragon Ball beam struggles; for all of Kishimoto’s faults, he drew realistic landscapes and legible fight scenes anchored by something resembling physics.
I wonder if anyone from those days still remembers me? As a writer, a gadfly, an annoying little snot, a champion?
More about that “strange lack of satisfaction” I felt upon winning:
That sentence comes from my fourth journal entry. I think of the first entry, three days before, as the beginning of my adult life — the first time I sat down to consider what I wanted and who I was becoming.
Imagine waking up from a sixteen-year blackout and hearing “you just won the Naruto debate tournament!” What would that imply about your priorities? Would you be happy?
At 16, I was ambivalent. At 20, somewhat embarrassed: when I went to college, I realized that other people spent high school learning to program, or at least winning real debate tournaments. The Battledome made me think about falling behind.1
At 32? I still wish I’d learned to program back then. But at least I was part of something, however small. And it’s nice to see who I was before the journal — to see that I was, in fact, someone.
Between 2007 and 2009, I wrote multiple novels’ worth of content on my road to the title. Tonight, I realized it was all still there.2
The result: I went on a disastrous Naruto binge while I was supposed to be writing an essay about the Manga Battledome.
But this time, I finished the essay.