Guess who?
Yes; tis I, one of the advice columnists persons, or whatever, and this is gonna be one long-ass rant-ish article, so grab some snacks and a cup of tea, and get comfortable.
I've been seeing a lot of people complain about what's popular on wattpad and what's not popular, and a lot of the anger grows out from the Naruto fandom on this website.
I don't exactly know how to start out this article, but I do remember that there was a point to it...
Moving on,
A lot of the Naruto fanfictions that are popular on this website are ones that make a lot of us cringe and shake our heads violently. This is mainly because these fanfictions have been here much longer than others; therefore it received a lot more publicity and "exclusivity" compared to others.
Unfortunately though, the first fanfiction ever written on here contained a lot of mistakes and, currently known as, "cliché" or "typical" ideas. Even so, these fanfictions gain a lot more reads and votes, to this day, in spite of the other new ideas out there. (I mean, literally, that Ashley Minami story's comment section is filled with people saying stuff like, 'reading this for the seventh time!!!!!!!' and whatnot.)
I still search for Naruto fanfictions to read in this website, but alas, once I find one that has a very interesting blurb and read it, it turns out just like the others. It's not a bad thing, not entirely, because what's popular is always going to be popular, yaknow?
But it truly upsets authors like me, who try to change things up. But hey, no one wants to read a Naruto fanfiction that revolves around an author's own, original characters because it's "boOORINGGG". I mean hell NAW, we need stories that have a lot of love pentagons between most of the male main characters against each other (especially Naruto male characters I mean psht have u seen kiba wow *licks lips*), a really powerful main character (OP, Mary-Sue, whatever the hell you wanna call her), a "booty-licious" main character (that not all of us can actually relate to), and so on and so forth.
Basically, we need to make a fantasy/romance/erotic?? fanfiction for those out there that purely want to quench their thirstiness for Naruto male characters. That's how Naruto fanfictions came about, I think, and that's what most of the "extremely popular" fanfictions represent.
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Now, I'm going to get into the boring part of the article and share my own experience with you guys, because I adore youz mwah ♥:
As an author, I came on wattpad purely for the sake of writing. Fanfiction wasn't even what I wanted to do, but I ended up doing it. In order for me to "feel out" the audience of the Naruto fanfiction readers, I read a couple of Naruto fanfictions. They all started the same way or other:
1. MC lives in Konoha her whole life, gets put into Naruto's team (yes yes, we all know about the"special case" of having 4 shinobi in one damn team), and the rest of the fanfiction basically plays out just like the anime, except there's an MC there that fights for Team Seven, defeats Zabuza, notices the puddle of the Demon Brothers...yadayadayada (of course, it includes a lot more makeout/humping scenes with Sasuke and/or Naruto, even Kakashi and Iruka, and so on.......)
2. MC is a lost child, an orphan, who ran away from her village after her clan was massacred (wow dude, didn't see that coming at all!), and randomly chooses to live in Konoha (cuz yknow, the "HIDDEN Leaf" is a pretty obvious place to find). From then on, for some reason, the Hokage allows her to stay in her own apartment (or maybe stay with the dude she's supposed to end up with, meh), allows her to become a ninja (because she's the only survivor of a really awesometastic clan that was wiped out) and then she's even allowed to graduate as an official genin from the academy (she could've been a ninja beforehand or graduated from her original village, but that hasn't been done yet, for some reason).