Need to start over on Warrior Meet.

Soo, after careful consideration for about half an hour of walking or so I've come to realise that most of what I've got for the Flight Camp sequel kind of sucks.

The first issue is that I'm juggling two plotlines; one of which is in the past, namely Whimper's dealings with a certain ninja master, the other being Scootaloo and the rest of the CMC wrapping their heads around... well, evil Wimpy and the Kid in the Alicorn Armour, that oughtta paint a clear enough picture. The two plots are related, obviously.

The second issue, and this is the big one, is that I wanted to emulate Naruto's style: there's ninjas in it, there's a big Warrior Meet, and lots of fighting and expository flashbacks and jokes that hardly make any sense and gimmicky fighters and old grudges... why is this an issue?

Because so far, I've assumed that the Warrior Meet would last for only a day. Thing is, I have the CMC taking ninja fighting lessons from the Ashen Blizzard (old readers may remember who this is under the mask), but without Scootaloo. Scootaloo actually runs out of town in chapter two, as it stands now.

The problem with that is that even Naruto never did anything that dumb.

Okay, scratch that: I haven't read any Naruto that was that dumb yet. Haven't finished the series yet, got to the final, long, long, long-ass fight with the supposed Big Bad of the series who made the Norse references even more obvious than they already were (Sharingan's an obvious reference to Odin, just throwin' that out there). I mean early on, the training sequences in between the battles had a reasonable amount of time between them.

Naruto learned the basics of chakra manipulation in at least two years, since he was held back that long. After becoming a genin, it takes him seven days to master the tree running to the extent that he run into the branches and stick upside down. It then takes him and Sasuke another day, presumably, to make it to the top of the trees. A day later they have their second fight with Zabusa, probably the only ninja in the series with any right to call himself a ninja (along with maybe Sasori and Shikamaru), but that's neither here nor there.

At the chunin exam, there's a month between the preliminaries, where the greatest dumbassery of the series is revealed, and the final exam. In between that we have twenty-one days of him trying to master the kyuubi's chakra to summon frogs, under the tutelage of a grandmaster and a sage who is later revealed to be sort of related to him, in a plot twist that's more of a gentle curve in the road.

Not to get sidetracked on a rant about how awesomely stupid Naruto is at times, my point is that if I want to capture the look and feel of that series, and I do, then I can't just have the Warrior Meet be one day's worth of events. I can't, in good conscience, have Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, along with some other, less expected kids, learn ninja fighting from the Ashen Blizzard and expect to get away with them learning anything even remotely useful. It needs to be at least a week. And that means including Scootaloo in the lessons.

So yeah, the bits in flashback, I think I can keep, and most of what I uploaded earlier in blog posts will probably still be there, but on the whole I am gonna have to rewrite the concept and timing. Along with the NaNoWriMo novel, which I'm almost done marking down all the bad stuff in.

So, now that you loyal fans know, I leave you with a video from one of my favorite Youtubers, and one of my favorite action tunes. I'd make this the theme song of one of the protagonists in the fic, see if you can guess who.