Archive of Our Own

Dreaming of Sunshine by Silver Queen is a 700k on-going Naruto fanfiction with a very active recursive fandom. That is, for people in the Dreaming of Sunshine fandom, Dreaming of Sunshine (DoS) is the canon, and we write fanfiction of this fanfiction! This fandom primer is an argument for why you might want to join the fandom and an explanation of how one does that.

My hope is that this will be an interesting read for people with all levels of curiosity and interest. I'll be writing both for people who know nothing about Naruto and for people who know a lot about it, and for people in that first group I tell you this: a lot of people in the Dreaming of Sunshine community aren't actually fans of Naruto. Some of us never finished Naruto, some of us have never even seen/read it, some of saw/read it years ago and never again since, and some of us have seen/watched the whole thing — the fandom really is open to all levels of knowledge!

Premise

At its heart, Dreaming of Sunshine is a gen fic about what it's like to be a ninja, exploring Naruto's worldbuilding, characters, and themes using a lot of the classic staples of a time travel fix it peggy sue — although the main character of Dreaming of Sunshine is a self-insert original character, not a time traveling canon character.

(When I said "self-insert" some people reading this probably flinched back from their screen, which I get, but give it a chance! I did, and now I'm writing a fandom primer about it. Self inserts can be good, actually, don't be small minded. Back to the premise of Dreaming of Sunshine!)

Naruto is a popular anime/manga series about ninja who live in a village of ninja (Konoha) that serves as a military force for the civilian Land of Fire. Konoha is a military dictatorship originally formed by bringing various previously-warring clans of ninja together roughly 60 years before the beginning of the series. Naruto's ninja have super human strength and speed, and also a power called chakra, which allows them to do things like spit fire, make clones, teleport, summon helpful animals, bring ink drawings to life, and create powerful illusions. If that all sounds kind of way too flashy for ninja...and you were maybe expecting me to mention more sneaking around and/or assassination...well, it's just not that big of a part of Naruto canon, probably because Naruto canon is a shonen series (shonen is marketed towards boys) in a seinen setting (seinen is marketed to adult men)^[1] — but a lot of fanworks like Dreaming of Sunshine strive to explore aspects of the setting glossed over by canon!

Dreaming of Sunshine's main character is Shikako Nara, a Naruto fan who reincarnates into the daughter of Konoha's top general/strategist. We know almost nothing about her previous life before reincarnating into the Naruto universe, only that she was an adult with some kind of college/university degree who was a fan of Naruto in her previous life.

Shikako graduates from the Ninja Academy in Konoha, joins a team with two of her classmates, and moves up the ninja ranks — she goes on missions, participates in tournaments, overthrows some governments, makes friends inside and outside of the village, investigates powerful criminals, invents things, and all along the way her sharp, analytic first person narration guides us through the world with dry humor as she tries not to buckle under the weight of what she knows.

In fact, it's frequently backgrounded as Shikako deals with the immediately problems in front of her (navigating a deadly forest full of enemies, finding a ferret, getting petty revenge on someone who called her brother stupid) but Shikako's foreknowledge brings serious and compelling tension to the narrative, and like many other people I started reading Dreaming of Sunshine because I ran out of time travel fics to read. Shikako's continued quest for power feels both necessary and urgent, and the lives of Shikako and the people around her are frequently in what feels like genuine danger, but because Shikako is an SI OC instead of a time traveling canon character she doesn't have any kind of automatic leg up on powering up. Shikako's not overpowered and Silver Queen deftly avoids power creep; Dreaming of Sunshine is just solid action/adventure on top of its worldbuilding and friendship.

Characters

This section uses the naming conventions of Dreaming of Sunshine, so the names are in GivenName FamilyName format, in addition to a few other quirks. Also, the cast is really big, so this is just the main characters and some major supporting characters.

Shikamaru Nara

Shikamaru is Shikako's lazy genius twin brother, the first person she comes to love when she's reincarnated. Do you love complicated sibling relationships where they still would do anything for each other? Boy do I have good news for you! Shikako spent most of their childhood sticking close to Shikamaru and using him as a shield between her and a world she hadn't quite adjusted to yet, and since Shikamaru couldn't possibly understand her real motivation for seeking power and sticking close to her powerhouse team, they struggle to understand each other as the story progresses.

Naruto Uzumaki

Naruto is an orphan widely hated in the village because when he was a baby he had a giant nine-tailed fox made of chakra sealed inside him after the fox trashed the village and killed a bunch of people. He and Shikako are childhood friends and then teammates on Team 7, and in many ways Shikako depends on Naruto's strength and good nature to carry herself and everyone else through the future she knows is coming.

Sasuke Uchiha

Naruto and Shikako's teammate on Team 7 who was orphaned when his older brother killed their entire clan and fled the village. Sasuke wants to grow strong enough to avenge the massacre of his clan and is being targeted by a strong enemy from outside the village who wants to take over Sasuke's body because of the special eye powers that Sasuke inherited from his now-dead clan.

Kakashi Hatake

Naruto, Sasuke, and Shikako's teacher, one of Konoha's strongest ninja, and a disaster of a human being because he's all grief and trauma. He was a child soldier in a major war at a younger age than Naruto, Sasuke, and Shikako graduate from the ninja academy and lost the two teammates he trained with as well as the teacher who trained him to various enemies. He takes his team's safety and training very seriously even after they're promoted out of his direct command.

Tsunade

Tsunade is Konoha's leader through the majority of the fic, a world-reknown healer who lost too many people to war and went on a really, really long gambling/drinking trip before being convinced to come back to the village and lead it. She prioritizes the well-being of her people over, say, military conquest or money, and also totally kicks ass because you don't get to lead Konoha without being a powerful fighter.

Sakura Haruno

In Naruto canon, Sakura was Naruto and Sasuke's third teammate, but Shikako accidentally takes her place on Team 7. Sakura is from a civilian family, so getting on a team like Team 7 was her best chance at the ninja career she wants — but Shikako is able to encourage her to start her medical training early in order to come at the combat medic career she settled on in canon from the opposite direction.

Selling Points

I definitely touched on some of why you should read Dreaming of Sunshine above, but here's where I get really obnoxious about it! My two favorite parts of Dreaming of Sunshine are the worldbuilding and the moral complexity that it builds on top of Naruto fandom, so I'll talk about those and about the fandom, because we're always hoping new people who read Dreaming of Sunshine will find their way to writing/reading recursive fic with us! If you want to hear more about what people have said about the fic over the years, there are some collected comments on Fanlore.

Also, a whole section about things you won't find doesn't seem worth it, but it probably should be said that Dreaming of Sunshine isn't a good place to look for incest, explicit fic, underage, etc — people interested in that might be out there, but so far the fandom runs mostly gen with some T-rated shipping and a few fics rated M for violence, death, etc. This is probably partially because most of our discussion spaces have been T-rated and partially because the kind of people who show up to write fanfiction of a gen, T-rated fanfiction lean towards writing gen, T-rated fic.

Worldbuilding

Silver Queen started the fic as a vehicle for working out why aspects of Naruto's world are the way they are, and the choice of POV character is therefore perfect: a woman from our world who had "always been safe before, born into a safe family, in a safe town, in a safe country" and now found herself in "a world where things were rough and wild and even civilized people hired assassins.^[2]"

When one of their first clients takes one look at Naruto and says, "You expect me to believe you're a ninja?" we're treated to Shikako's narration focuses on explaining exactly why this world's ninja aren't the same as what we usually think about when we hear ninja:

Like most people who met Naruto, I expect he was talking about the orange. Or Orange. It probably deserved a capital letter. Civilians have odd expectations for ninja. They expect us to dress in black, wear masks, and carry lots of weaponry. In short, they expect us to look like ANBU. Which is ironic, because to civilians, ANBU don't exist and they certainly don't take missions.

To a civilian bright, blinding orange wasn't an appropriate colour for a ninja. Therefore, it was actually a perfect colour for a ninja. Oh, sure, it stood out like hell in a forest, but the fact was, most of our time spent hiding wasn't among trees - it was among other people. The best ninja is the one you can't tell from a civilian.

It confounded their expectations. A tall guy dressed head to toe in black carrying a small armoury? Ninja. Small, loud blond kid in orange? Are you kidding? Ninja were invisible not because of jutsu (most of the time) but because they looked just like normal people.^[3]

The whole fic is like this, unpacking ninja government bureaucracy and international ninja politics with the same deft hand as it explores character backstory and elaborates on things canon barely brushed, things like:

• Is the head of Torture & Interrogation really a sadist, or was that an act put on to scare his audience of inexperienced and largely foreign ninja?
• We only see about a dozen young ninja on teams like Team 7, but there are a lot more ninja in Konoha than could reasonably be on three-man teams like that, so what alternate career paths are there?
• How did the village cope with the sudden lack of a police force when Sasuke's clan was massacred?
• If Tsunade could only send a handful of young ninja on these missions in canon, there must have been a reason — maybe all the more experienced ninja had their hands full with something else?

Likewise, the fandom itself is big on worldbuilding as well, extrapolating new ideas from what Dreaming of Sunshine give us!

Moral Complexity & the Difficulty of Finding A Better Way

Naruto canon had a lot of themes relating to the ninja system being broken — see: all the child soldiers and the way ninja are used as tools by those in power/those who pay them — and Dreaming of Sunshine isn't much different!

Naruto (the character) has a strong sense of right and wrong and a determination to fix things that he thinks are unfair or bad, but he's an optimist who starts out as a loveable dumbass, so Shikako's POV brings a delightful complexity to the problem that Naruto canon didn't have. On one hand, the analysis and worldbuilding in her narrative tend to explore how and why things are the way they are, while her perspective and previous life experiences bring a really delightful contrast with the people around her:

"I don't think anyone should get hurt," I said. "It doesn't… It shouldn't have to be like that."

And oh, wasn't that something strange? I came from a world where everything that hurt people was bad. Everything was regulated, everything dangerous was minimised, even prisoners were kept safe and unharmed. There was no – or very little – 'they deserved it'. Here, it was different. Sometimes it was close enough that I missed the cultural difference, but sometimes it was so obvious. I'd learnt to live with it, it had crept into my thought processes until I barely even noticed, but sometimes… sometimes I felt so other.^[4]

On the other hand, Shikako is a realist whose primary motivation is to get the people she loves through the danger she knows is heading right for them. She's someone who will take the path most likely to lead to her desired outcome while minimizing the risk to herself, her people, and her goals. She would like for things to be better, but that's not what she's focused on, and it leads to some really interesting moments! During an argument with Naruto about whether or not it was right for one of their enemies to die rather than letting the enemy go after he was defeated, Shikako points out that unlike some of their previous enemies defeating this enemy on behalf of their client would only protect their client for as long as they were around; killing the enemy was the only way to actually save their client's life. They have this exchange:

"It's still not right," Naruto said. He looked troubled.

"Then find a better answer," I snapped. "Because I don't know what it is."

I tried to reign in my temper, because I didn't want to be mad at Naruto. Not when he was right. Maybe I was mad because he was right, and that meant we had been wrong. And I didn't like that.^[5]

Dreaming of Sunshine isn't a grimdark gritty take on the Naruto universe, to be clear, but it doesn't flinch from the complex and unhappy implications of a world full of highly trained killers, and it doesn't flinch from really examining what kind of worlds and people that would create — startling a ninja means risking getting stabbed, especially if they're young or injured, and going through your own daughter's bag while she's in the hospital is a bad idea because it might have lethal traps on it, that sort of thing. The characters of Dreaming of Sunshine live in a dangerous world, so they're dangerous right back, and it's wonderful!

Community & Fanworks

Common Tropes & Fic Types

• Time & dimension travel — The venn diagram of people who like time travel and people who like Dreaming of Sunshine is probably a circle. Fic frequently features both physical and mental time travel. Examples: Desert Lily by Juno-nine, if there is time enough by VagabondDawn, and the dark fire will not avail you by wafflelate
• Reincarnation — Silver Queen wrote an anthology of short fics about if Shikako had been reincarnated into a different situation, available here. It's also a popular trope in the fandom — frequently called "alternate reincarnation". A popular variation on alternate reincarnation is further reincarnation, which is essentially future fic that takes place after Shikako has been Shikako Nara and then died. This is frequently a vehicle for a crossover, such as in the Avatar: the Last Airbender crossover A Cup Filled with Listening by the_rck
• Outside POV & canon compliant missing scenes — Silver Queen occasionally releases a "Side Story" about something that happened when Shikako wasn't around, and the tradition is strong in the fandom, too! Outside POVs on Shikako are especially popular and often serve and character studies. Examples: The Grass Chūnin Exams by witchbreaker, Focusing on Inuzuka Kiba by Ashen Author (part 2, part 3), and this comic by Kmichie.
• Worldbuilding — As mentioned above, the fandom really loves worldbuilding, especially through OCs and minor characters! Examples: Nara Takatori POV by Mac Ceallach (Part 2) and Alternative Problem Solving by tuesday

Getting Into the Fandom

We'd love to have you!

• Here's a link to Dreaming of Sunshine again and also Sunshine Sidestories.
• If 700k is too much for you to read, you can also listen to the podfic by jacksgreyson on mixcloud or itunes.
• If the problem is that you don't want to read Dreaming of Sunshine on fanfiction.net, there are a number of sites that will help you create an ebook — Silver Queen has asked us not to pass ebook copies of her work around between ourselves, because that's pretty close to use just hosting her work elsewhere, but making your own personal copy is fine.
• The most active Dreaming of Sunshine social space is currently this discord.
• If you want to read fic of fic, we can help with that too!
  • A lot of short, older fic is on the forums, most easily browsed via the recursive index and the crossover index.
  • Some of it is also in the fanfiction.net community Heliocentrism.
  • Newer fic gets posted to the AO3 collection Heliocentrism.
• Fanart can most easily be found by browsing Silver Queen's doc here or the dosbysilverqueen tumblr's fanart tag, but there's also some on AO3!
• If you want to write Dreaming of Sunshine fic, yay!
  • It has a pretty good exchange presence and its own single-fandom exchange.
  • This post has resources like timelines, minor character list, and a text search.
  • You'll want to add your fic to the Heliocentrism collection so that we can find it, although if you put "Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen" into the fandom tags it will A) still show up in the Naruto tag and B) get picked up by a bot in the Discord linked above.