Quote Originally Posted by Rater202 View Post
*cut for length*
Naruto works hard for his power-ups. It's just, people ignore the Downsides of the Nine-Tails and have a narrow-minded view that Lee's intense, body breaking workouts must be the only kind of hard work there is.

(Honestly, Lee would probably be stronger if he worked out slightly less. Keeping going till your body breaks is going to drastically reduce the returns you get from it.)
1. cool, thanks for making me like Naruto even more.

2. if you want to see a naruto fan fic point that Rock Lee thought there out and do something with it, I recommend Yet Again With a Little Extra Help its bonkers in all the right ways.

3. but to steer the conversation away from the naruto misconception, I'm reading the disciplines and the classes within and I honestly do not see how one could connected Naruto abilities with these. like, these disciplines can't even emulate half the stuff a naruto ninja can do. in fact I'd say that looking to most modern anime even shonen battle ones for inspiration for these disciplines, would be a little misguided. Devoted Spirit could work for the animes where your strength of virtue matters more than your actual skill, and Diamond Mind seems to be the Iaijutsu discipline, but Naruto doesn't do the latter and the only time you can argue the former with Devoted Spirit is when the Rasengan is pulled out...

but overall I wouldn't say ToB is emulating anime, because if anything its a little too grounded in actual fighting styles, and would say its more accurately emulating wuxia. which is a chinese genre, not a japanese one. you can still say its "anime", but its like confusing it with shonen anime's twin chinese literary cousin. I mean I get why you'd mistake one for the other they have a lot of similar elements, but they're technically not the same. I won't go into the differences unless people ask.

(and even in the ToB itself references things like final fantasy, soul caliber, kill bill, and the Matrix, none of which are anime, its says japanese anime is apart of it, but so is hong kong action movies and popular video games, so....anime is far from the only influence ToB seems to have. I get the feeling that things like Jade Empire and Thunderbolt Fantasy are better sources of inspiration than Naruto or Bleach for ToB)