Work Text:
When Jiraiya wrote The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi, he put his heart and soul and dreams into it.
He wrote it for his students, and he wrote it for his teammates, and he wrote it for himself. He wrote it for wide-eyed, and fearfully brave genin the world over, so young and full of promise.
The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi was about war and peace and love and loss and living, and maybe at the end of it all, daring to hope for something better.
The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi failed spectacularly.
It was a children’s book, but it was not for children in general, because Jiraiya had never been, generally speaking, a child. Civilian mothers banned it for being too violent, too dark and cruel, too bloody and graphic. Shinobi, on the other hand, mocked it for being too fanciful, too naive and idealistic, too unrealistic.
(Minato and Kushina read it to each other over and over again and promised to make the world a better place. Kakashi read it for the first time when he was eleven, and he cried and cried. He still sleeps with a copy underneath his pillow.)
So Jiraiya wrote porn instead. The porn sells very well.
No one complains that it is too violent because porn is not for children. No one says that it is too naive, because who expects porn to be realistic?
The Icha Icha series is about war and peace and love and loss and living, and maybe at the end of it all, daring to hope for something better. But it sells because it is also about sex.