The Case-Book of Kakashi Hatake

Notes, Storyboard, and Final Thoughts

Hello to anyone who happens to read this, a full nine years after I started writing this story and about six/seven years since I updated it with any sort of regularity. As any person who has seen the sporadic and half-hearted posting of this fic, with its unannounced years-long hiatuses, could have guessed, The Case-Book Kakashi Hatake is now officially dropped.

As made abundantly clear by the years that it took me to come to terms with this reality, this is not something that I had wanted to do. I LOVED writing this story, Jin is my favorite narrator, and I am genuinely so proud of, even after all these years and the awareness of my own cringe that have come with them, many things that I wrote for this story. Thus, partially for myself and partially for anyone around who still cares, I could not just drop this story without doing anything else.

I have decided to include two things in this last update: an explanation of why this story became so impossible for me to write, and more importantly, all of my storyboarding, notes, unfinished scenes, and planning that would have come later. Each section will be marked with its own heading so you can skip around to what you are interested in reading.

I hope that this provides some measure of closure to anyone who had waited for years to find out how this story was supposed to end. Maybe I am flattering myself and no one cares, ah well. Also, this is maybe a too personal (and a bit embarrassing) peek into my mind and the organized chaos in which it functions. I have tried to order my notes in a way that might be at least semi-intelligible to other people, but my success may have been limited.

BBC's Sherlock, Biting Off More Than I Can Chew, and Why I Had to Drop This: An Unasked for Explanation

1) Sherlock Holmes Stories

There is something fundamentally competing between the two main sources of inspiration for the murder mystery portion of this story: the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the BBC adaption Sherlock created by Stephen Moffat. A fundamental fissure in storytelling ethos that I was blind to when I started writing this story and later, fruitlessly, spent far too much mental energy trying to overcome.

In the original Holmes stories, there are four novels and dozens of serialized short stories that were published in The Strand magazine. Each of these stories can be read independently and still be fully understood and appreciated: there is no overarching plotline, no big bad villain, and very little to no character development for Sherlock and Watson. Even Moriarty only appears in two of the Holmes stories with brief mentions in five others. This is a tiny portion of the canon when it is taken as a whole. The draw to the Holmes stories is well-loved characters interacting with an interesting mystery and solving it in a clever and unexpected way. Everything is subservient to the case/crime/mystery to be solved.

BBC's Sherlock is all about the characters, overarching plotlines, big bad villains to be bested, and everyone being just oh so very clever. The entire show revolves around the central character of Sherlock, how smart he is, how incredible, how amazing, and how much of an asshole he is, and the mystery of each episode is subservient to the depiction of his character. In about half of the episodes, Sherlock solves the "central mystery" off-camera with information the viewer never even had access to.

I had attempted to include the best of both worlds: a serialized story where each installment was focused on an interesting mystery whose investigation and unraveling was the central purpose but with each story also serving an overarching narrative with character development, big bad villains, and even romance. To my credit, I think that I did manage to accomplish this (to varying degrees of effectiveness) for what parts I had published. As I continued writing, however, and we drew closer and closer to "overarching plot," this tightrope became just exhausting to walk. If I had more time, no real-life commitments, and a more enduring interest in the canon of Naruto, it is possible that I might have pulled it off. But more than that, my growing disillusionment with the BBC Sherlock and storytelling about a great duel between the incomprehensibly brilliant minds of two genius men had reached a peak, and I had, unfortunately, already baked my own BBC-esque Holmes/Moriarty showdown into the very core of my story from the start. Therefore, I was left with two solutions: drop almost everything that I had already planned and start planning anew or drop the entire story. I lacked the passion for this story to rethink everything, and so now we are here.