In a tale as big as the Hidden Leaf Village, Bella Prodan explores the AO3 fic where Naruto stops being destiny’s puppet and starts asking the real questions—like, why the hell are we fighting again?
With over 800,000 hits and over 500,000 words, Inrainbowz’s Flip the Coin series is the 16th most read Naruto fanfiction on AO3.
“Writing still gives me such a rush. It brings me solace,” says Inrainbowz, 32, a middle school math teacher who has been writing fanfiction for eighteen years.
“I love contributing to fandoms, to put content out there, because I also really like to read like my readers do. If I want to read more, I have to go out there to find more fics. And so I also write because that’s more for everyone involved to enjoy.”
Across 194 published fanfics, Inrainbowz’s five most successful works all centre on Naruto and Sasuke, and together have surpassed one million reads.
Now, it’s been five years since Inrainbowz started the massive canon rewrite of Naruto’s 700 manga chapters. Having to dig into the Naruto canon extensively, it was with Flip the Coin that they realised “the original story is flawed.”
“As a kid, Naruto was just fun adventure. It spoke to kids who found themselves lonely or isolated because of that idea that friendship conquers all. But when you get older, you start to pick out the discrepancies, the problematic parts.
“Naruto’s original idea was that through hard work and genuine feelings, you would overcome any difficulty in your life. But then it turns out that it was mostly fate doing the work.
“The reason was, probably, mostly to do with the fact that the manga was so popular, they had to keep going and going and escalate the fights, escalate the stakes.
“I was pretty frustrated with that, and taken with what could have been, with the promises that weren’t fulfilled, I started writing this fanfic from a place of love, but where things finally add up.”
Inrainbowz describes it as an exercise unique to fanfiction because of the source material, with an audience that arrives with the same familiarity but different expectations.
“It’s a long process to decide what I can depart from and keep, in contrast to what I want and like.
“But what is interesting with the Flip the Coin series is that it’s a very long slow burn, and even if it’s branded as NaruSasu, nothing happens between them for a long time, also because it starts when they’re very young, but also because I want to build their connection the entire time, between each other and with everyone else.
“I love this idea about Team Seven being like a family, whereas in the manga you don’t really get that. The way I wrote the fanfic, Sakura plays a central role, so it’s not just Naruto and Sasuke and her on the side.”
Inrainbowz, who is aromantic and asexual, says some of the most important relationships in their life are friends.
“I know this prevents some people from reading [Flip the Coin]. But it’s such a shame that fiction, fanfiction and media in general doesn’t focus on friendship at all. I wanted to change that with Sakura’s role.”
Manga and anime are not often overtly political, but their worlds and characters are structured or portrayed in certain ways makes some dynamics difficult to ignore.
Inrainbowz describes the setting of Naruto as the definition of a military state: training children from a young age to be assassins and mercenaries for the interest of the states.
“In the original work, the missions they carry are not altruistic at all, it’s all for the money. They don’t have diverging values and initially there isn’t ‘one bad guy’. Naruto’s enemies could have been his friends if they were born in the same village.
“But this uniqueness is lost by the end, and Naruto becomes more standard: there is the bad guys who are bad because they want to enslave everyone, and the good guys are good because they want to stop that.
“In the end, the village remains the same. Winning didn’t change anything.”
As a political activist, the anti-establishment and revolutionary potential Naruto had was something Inrainbowz picked up in their fanfiction.
“In Flip the Coin, the younger generation question the eldest. They question their lives, what is being asked of them, why they are at war. It’s this idea that the young generation can fight and argue, but it’s quite hard to do it in real life.
“It comes from both my experience and my wish for the real world. This fanfic shows the young they can question their parents or authority figures, that it’s normal to do that.
“Overall, I don’t want to just focus on war and conflict. I will focus on peace instead, because that is also my wish for the future, in real life.”