Amaterasu – Posted 2019.06.17

The following are the recorded responses of Eyazahrid to the feedback he received on the above listed chapter and the story in general for the week following. This document is to serve as a replacement to the traditional Author’s Note at the beginning and ending of chapters and will be kept separate from both the above listed chapter and any future chapters unless deemed sufficiently important.

Secrets

This seems to be a very big concern among my readers- and understandably so – but I don’t think anyone’s quite as vocal about it as CamTheThief. While I won’t go too far into the specific secrets I do want to address an aspect of them that I fear might be misunderstood.

This should not be a spoiler, but if you’re a massive fan of the secrets being kept between Mai and Naruto I would advise skipping this section. It shouldn’t be too long.

First, I would like to make two things clear.

1. No, this is not good for any relationship. With all they’ve been through together they shouldn’t be keeping secrets from each other.
2. Neither of them are keeping secrets with any intention other than to protect those they care about. Is it a good idea? No. Are the intentions good? Yes.

When it comes to Mai and her secrets, it’s not a matter of subverting Naruto or because she doesn’t think he’s capable of handling the situation. She’s keeping this from him to spare him from knowing his actions caused more deaths of his children. Her intentions are to resolve the matter so he doesn’t have to but she knows that if she cant’ she has to turn to him. Again, she has more faith in his abilities for this situation than in her own, she just doesn’t want to burden him with them.

As for Naruto, he was well aware that Mai would find out that he had been injured almost immediately he was just avoiding a scolding. It would have been very easy for him to keep her from knowing at all.

Was it a good idea? Not really, because the way she then learned makes her thing he’s unaware that she knows when he was fully expecting her to find out that way rather than telling her himself.

Oh, look, I’ve started going into specifics after saying I wasn’t going to. Fuck it, let’s just finish this part up.

The existence of Tsukuyomi – refering to his clone- is probably somehing else being considered a secret.

That is not intentional on his part. He’s been meaning to tell her, he just keeps forgetting. recently, I believe- it can be hard to remember what you’ve read versus what I’ve written, so I hope this has happened already – he even had a thought that he was forgetting somethingimportant- Tsukuyomi- but figutred that if it was important Mai would have reminded him.

You can see the obvious problem there. Naruto’s still getting used to there being two of him as well and usually doesn’t think of Tsukuyomi as himself until after it dispells. When he has all the memories of spending time with Mai as Tsukuyomi and was for all intents and purposes there with her, it doesn’t even cross his mind to let her know he was doing it through a Jutsu.

To him, it was simply him being there.

I do hope I managed to explain that part well enough.

In summary; Yes, secrets bad. No, they aren’t intending to hurt each other with them. Yes, this will effect their relationship when it all settles.

And for now, I’ll leave it at that before I spoil anything.

Gaara’s Picture

Yes, It’s going on the fridge.

Smut

There are still a few of you who would like to see some Smut in the story but I’m afraid it just isn’t going to happen. I’ve taken plenty of risks with the story already- and you all know how well those turned out- and I thought those were good ideas at the time. I know smut is going to end poorly and I don’t feel comfortable trying to interject it into this work.

Perhaps in future works- after a couple of dirty oneshots- I’ll feel more comfortable about it but I just don’t think I could do such scenes well enough to fit the current story. if any of you are familiar with Botsuraku you’ll know of my only published lemon and the quality you can expect if I try in Sealkeeper.

It’s less than inspiring.

Then again, I wrote that forever ago so maybe I would do better these days. I’ll have to try it on a different project to see how it goes before subjecting Sealkeeper to it.

We’ll see.

RuneCrafter

A guest review from RuneCrafter was near the bottom of my list when I was going back through them but what they mentioned stood out to me.

I’d like to welcome them- and I hope everyone else will too- to the Naruto FanFiction Community. Apparently Sealkeeper was their first introduction to Naruto stories and we managed to not scare them away.

If you’d like to find some better works feel free to peruse my favorites list where I’ve stashed many dozens of them but I’m glad to hear you enjoyed Sealkeeper and I hope to one day see some Naruto stories of your own on the site.

In Closing

Once again responses seem mostly favorable and I hope to continue that into the future. The next chapter should be posted about seven hours after I post this and I look forward to seeing how it’s received.

Until I next have your attention,

–Eyazahrid