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While the chapter isn’t finished yet, I’m sure many of those patiently waiting for chapter 67 will be happy to know I’m about halfway done with it. A lot of people- ncpfan included- are concerned with the speed of the story so I’m trying to fit all the ‘current’ events into this one and start on some very minor timeskips [Couple days to a few weeks] so that we’re back on track and making progress again.

That should mean this chapter ends up being longer but we’ll see. Current goal is to have this finished in the next day or so because I’d like to post by the end of the month. That would mean two posts in one month, which is definitely an improvement to my recent abominable update rate.

Remember back when I could crank out a chapter a week? I do. Gods above I miss having so few responsibilities.

Well, that’s pretty much all I wanted to say here for updates. We’ll just have to see if I can finish this quick enough for ncpfan to look it over. Considering I started writing this at 11:55 PM on 1/25 and wont’ even have this posted until 1/26, well, it’s a damn good thing I have tomorrow off, isn’t it?

Hopefully I can make good use of that day and stay focused enough to finish the chapter, or at least a majority of it.

I do want to try making updates like this more frequent so you know what’s going on in the long period of silence between my updates but I’m sure you’d all appreciate more frequent updates a whole lot more.

I’ll try to balance them.

Also, right before I go into this next section I’ll share a quick idea I had for this blog of mine. Originally I was just going to use it for Sealkeeper [hence the name] but FanFiction is a large part of my life that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Because of that, I was considering having a FanFiction blog to cover all my work and thoughts including Sealkeeper.

If it’s not too much trouble, I would like to hear from you [Feel free to tack it to the end of a review of chapter 67] whether you’d prefer I change this blog to cover all my Fanfiction [Which would involve me changing the name and may result in more frequent posts] or if you’d rather I just make a new one [I think I’ve got it down at this point, only have like four of the damn things sitting around collecting internet dust.].

Now, that’s the end of the update, so if that’s all you came for you’re good to go. What follows is a rant I typed up in response to a review on chapter 66 because it was really bugging me. Technically I got it off my chest then and I was just going to add it to the next chapter so everyone could see it but I’ve since thought better of it. People read the story for the story and while people have agreed with some of my other rants and opinions in my ANs this feels like a more appropriate place for them.

It’s kind of why this page exists after all, isn’t it?

So, after this segment is the rant I typed up right before going to bed which I haven’t touched since. There are probably points I could better make or ways I could improve the word choice but not only does spending time on it detract from time I could be working on chapter 67 but it goes from being a rant to a valid argument and I don’t care enough to refine it. Still, I did take the time to write it- which did make me feel a lot better, actually- so I might as well post it, yeah?

—The Rant—

To “blight23”, I must thank you for such a witty remark. Truly, to make comments about not using elements of other languages when writing in English was a superb show of humor. The delectable irony was not lost to me, I assure you.

Assuming, that is, it was intended.

I have a feeling it was not.

Better yet, you have disabled Private Messaging. I had a good laugh at that. It’s like you already know people will call you out on your comments. Oh, this is written in English, you can’t use Japanese terms.

I can, I did, I will continue to do so as I please with my story. What a strange concept. And the fact that I expect at least some of my readers to possibly have an iota of familiarity with the language the series I’m writing about is originally in? I don’t find it that far fetched.

Perhaps you enjoy things dubbed, but I do not. Add to that the fact that I’m more of a Manga man myself, where they do, in fact, mix the English translation with Japanese terms to preserve the feeling of the medium and you’ll find that I really don’t care that you dislike the fact that I use a small smattering of Japanese within my fanfic about fucking ninjas.

Next you’ll tell me to use knife for Kunai, dagger for Tanto, and sword for Katana. You may have noticed I am on chapter 66 when you commented this on chapter one. The chances of the rest of it being similar is high, the chances of it changing at this point is absolutely nill.

The fact that you apparently “Copy and Paste” this exact same message onto every story that does this (There’s a reason the amount of stories that do this is “surprisingly high” boyo, it’s because that’s the style a lot of people have decided made sense for the story they wanted to tell.) and have blocked PMs is a pretty good indicator that you know your comments are useless.

I’ve mentioned anonymous reviews in the AN of one of my other stories- which may be down at this point, actually- but this is rather similar so I’ll reword it to also include those who will put their name on the review but are still too cowardly to do anything productive with it.

“If you are unable to discuss your opinion then that opinion holds no value and to share it is worthless. Keep it to yourself and spare us of your filth.”

And that’s my rant on a stupid fucking review. Don’t think I dislike the review because it was negative- I don’t even care that Darck Master / Kiraxen decided that one review wasn’t sufficient and decided to post the exact same comment about the fact that they won’t be reading anymore- I dislike it because of how absolutely useless it was.

Everyone doing the same thing doesn’t make it right, but to be of the opinion that you must be right about them all being wrong with how they choose to write stories in their free time and post to the internet for others to enjoy is just pathetic.

There is no correct way to do fanfics- if there was I wouldn’t have to look at the pairings before the title of a story to make sure it’s not Yaoi- so let authors write how they want to write.

Thank you.

—End Rant—

And now, with that out of the way, I’m going to grab a bite to eat and get back to chapter 67.

Until I next have your attention,

–Eyazahrid

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I’ve found myself referring to this quite a lot as I write chapter 66 -though to be perfectly honest I haven’t made all that much progress- so I figured it may be helpful if my readers had access to it as well.

Pretty sure I mentioned that I was starting to use an actual map in an AN forever ago, well here it is. No idea who the creator is [It’s probably somewhere on the damn picture, I’m just blind] but it surely isn’t me. My mental image of the elemental countries was way different and didn’t make any sense at all when I really think about it.

Ah, turns out it was right there in the file name. xshadowrebirthx gets the credit for this masterpiece. I have a feeling I’m going to be using it a lot more in the future.

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I did say I’d be posting this next, so here’s the Flowcharts I came up with to help you keep track. The First two are complete and the third is my first attempt provided here so you can laugh at it.

As a quick note, these focus on Naruto’s relationships otherwise it would be way too complicated. Generally, Person 1 is [X] to Person 2, with Person 2 being the one the arrow is pointing to and [X] being whatever I wrote next to the line.

I’m pretty sure that was obvious enough.

PLI and MLI stand for Potential/possible Love Interest and Major Love Interest respectively.

These charts are by no means all encompassing and there will be relationships I left out, forgot about, or messed up on. This is also subject to change, so don’t try to use this to make any predictions. [It won’t help, I don’t know what I’m doing] .

Also, you may have already noted that these pictures are not small. It doesn’t look all that good in my previews of the page so for that I apologize. Were I to make the images smaller you wouldn’t be able to read it at all and if I’m making it big I may as well keep it at the original size, yeah?

With all that said, enjoy.

Not a small picture at all. This next one’s a bit better, mostly because it’s far more simple, but creating it did bring some rather odd thoughts about Naruto’s relation to Sasuke and Itachi. I’d explain, but I think you’ll get the idea well enough from the image below. I had never even considered that before but I kind of like how strange it is.

Definitely keeping it.

Not sure what the line in the left corner is from, but I’m having trouble getting the flowcharts up so I’m not going to try removing something that’s actually functional.

I’m not dumb enough to give Fate such a tempting target, thank you.

The picture below was my first attempt but was getting too complicated as I tried to show involvement with the Wolves/ Loyalty to Naruto within the same chart as the relationships. I think I did much better in the chart at the top of the page, but that might just be me.

Feel free to chuckle at my miserable first attempt. I spent way too much time on it.

I have one more I’ll be posting separately, but in case you were wondering how I made these it was with Draw.Io . It was free, which was good, and it linked to my Google Drive to allow autosaving, which was very good. I should probably play around with it a bit more so that I can use it better, but I really don’t have the time at the moment.

I suppose as I type this it is- where I am, at least- Christmas day, so merry Christmas to all of you who probably won’t be here until at least mid January.

The last chart will be posted momentarily and I’ll call it quits for the day.

Until I next have your attention,

Eyazahrid

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A little over three years ago, on December 4th of 2015, I posted the first chapter of SealKeeper; He Who Binds and so it began. Sixty-Five chapters and over 450,000 words later and I’m still here, though not nearly as much as my readers deserve.

I created this blog so that those readers would have somewhere else to turn between updates which, as of late, have become more and more infrequent and so that I had a place for material that FanFiction.Net – my first and preferred medium for Fanfiction- doesn’t support.

At the moment I have only a single set of images, inspired by a reviewer, that I wanted to be able to share. When they said there needed to be a flowchart for the relations between characters they weren’t kidding but actually trying to make one was far more difficult than I imagined.

My first attempt looked more like a circuit schedule than any sort of organized information. To be fair, the other’s didn’t look so good either but I was spending way too much time trying to complete the flowchart that could have instead gone to the next chapter.

I’m pretty sure I know which my readers would prefer I work on.

Most of you reading this will already know about my story and I may have said some things in my Author’s Notes over the last three years that have given you insight to my feelings and thoughts about the story, but nevertheless I’ll collect them here.

Sealkeeper is an irrefutable part of my life. Even if I take forever to update the story is in the back of my head near constantly, badgering me to sit down and write up a chapter for my readers to enjoy.

To this day, I still don’t know if I like it.

If you know me, you’re probably aware that I dart from project to project constantly growing tired of something and moving onto whatever catches my attention next. FanFiction is no different and despite having spent three years of my life working on it I really have wanted to move on for some time.

Another thing people who know me will be aware of is that I will do my damndest to keep my word, even when not in my best interest.

So, of course, my dumbass made a promise to myself that Sealkeeper would be the story I finish. That is, honestly, the only reason the story moved passed chapter fifteen. There have been, admittedly, bursts of inspiration that temporarily ignite my desire to explore the world I’m twisting more, but they don’t last long.

Still, I think we may be getting ahead of ourselves here.

SealKeeper; He Who Binds started with a single scene I wanted for my story- ROOT agents kneeling before Naruto in one of the training grounds. That’s it. That’s SealKeeper.

Well, not exactly, but without that scene I wouldn’t have invested the time to develop the story into what it is today.

The concept of ROOT- and ROOT specifically, I hadn’t intended for him to build anything from the ground up because it should take years and I wanted this when he was young- loyal to Naruto lead to the biggest problem to overcome- how does Naruto come into command of ROOT?

There were a couple of ways I could have done this, but for some reason I decided he would take over their seals from Danzo. Great. How does he do that? Personally, I love the concept of Fuinjutsu, but even I can admit it’s overused and typically not done very well.

Sealing is the kind of thing that can create a solution to anything- but using it to solve every problem you have ends up devaluing it. Sort of like in Harry Potter FanFictions- which, yes, I do read from time to time despite never having read the books and only seeing the first four movies as a child- where Runes are used to solve every problem imaginable. Funny how absolutely no one else thought to use them in that manner within the last millennia.

So that was the next problem. How do I make this original?

Well, what if it wasn’t Naruto’s Fuinjutsu work? What if it was something someone else did that he’s benefiting from? Really convenient that his dad happens to be one of the best Fuinjutsu users of all time in cannon, isn’t it? Even better, he’s dead, which gives a pretty damn good explanation for why he’s not using it.

The final masterpiece of a self-sacrificing hero. I liked the sound of that, so I ran with it.

Sealkeeper- a seal that can change the function of any seal into anything the user wishes it to be.

And with that, my planning was done.

Seriously.

That was it.

Or, that’s all I can remember, anyway. I just started improvising after that, which was a horrid idea. Trying to figure out why Kushina left when she was already gone wasn’t all that fun though I did get a lot of help from ncpfan.

Going through some of the older messages between us I’ve found some lists of events I had thought about happening- some of which already have and some of which never will- and even a list of possible endings(There are fifteen, only one of which is close to the one I’ve since decided to use).

My improv had some interesting effects on the story and I never imagined it would go in the direction it has, but I cannot deny it is my most successful work to date. I hope i can make use of the lessons SealKeeper attempted to teach me in future projects, but who knows how long it might be until that happens.

Something I have enjoyed immensely while writing is finding opportunities to slip in ideas I had for other stories as part of the plot. Mikoto taking Tobi’s place, for instance, was something I had at one point wanted to use as a basis for an entire story.

The fact that I can use it here without having to write a whole other story for it pleases me greatly.

I didn’t really have a plan for this when I sat down to write it- big surprise, yeah? – but i don’t think I’ll keep you for too much longer in this post.

If you’ve read as far as chapter ten – The Weight We Bear – you are more than likely familiar with Tatsuki, an OC I whipped up in chapter once completely unintentionally because I, quite frankly, hated OCs with a passion.

And before we continue yes, I am well aware that the ending of that chapter makes no sense. I forgot I was supposed to be writing for an eight year-old and wrote as if he was cannon+ instead. My bad. Not going back to fix it at this point.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes, OCs.

I loathe OCs. Most of you are probably pretty confused because, at this point, I have three or four running around my story. Well, living ones, at least. Rather hypocritical, yeah?

Absolutely.

I have quit reading fantastic stories at the hint of an OC and yet here I am with Mai as a pretty big part of the story. I will admit that Tatsuki, who was for some reason wildly popular, did soften me up a bit to the idea of having OCs which is probably what allowed Mai- who, again, was not actually supposed to be a major part of the story- to slip in.

Unlike Tatsuki, however, Mai has managed to keep herself alive.

And worm her way into my heart, but that’s not the focus right now.

My experiences with Tatsuki and Mai has lead to me giving more of my Wolves names and trying- See; “Failing Miserably”- to keep track of what orders Naruto has given them. It does, I believe, make the world seem just a little bit more real, which I would consider to be a good thing.

I still typically avoid stories with OCs, though. I don’t have the energy to keep track of an entirely new person in the series and I don’t particularly care for your self-insert no matter how you disguise it.

Because I’m not completely unreasonable, I have read stories with OCs and enjoyed them, too. It’s usually just more trouble than I’m willing to go through when I’m trying to relax.

And with all that said I’ll leave you with one last thing before I call this post finished-

The name of my story is SealKeeper; He Who Binds.

That will not change, regardless of why you feel it should. I’ve gone over my reasons before in an Authors Note but I’ll try to remember to post it here too.

Now, if for some strange reason you’re still here, I’ll release you back into the world. I’ll probably be posting Relationship Flowcharts and Family by Gaara next followed by An Anonymous Rant, A Tittle Bound, or a link to the one piece of existing fanart I’m aware of for this story.

Until I next capture your attention,

Eyazahrid