Trivia / The Element of Time

• Ascended Meme: Double Subverted. Akari makes a sort of nod to the fandom's tendency to say Sasuke's hair looks like a duck's butt by calling him Chicken-Butt sensei, and then outright drops the subtlety later by choosing to call him Duck-Butt sensei instead.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Potentially for the sake of showing his readers that there were no hard feelings over the Suigetsu/Karin issue described below, the author allowed them the chance to help him pick who Kimimaro could get paired up with instead of Karin. In the end, he and the readers settled on Fuu.
  • After one reviewer pointed out the aforementioned Ass Pull that occurred at the end of Sasuke and Naruto's fight against Raizen at Uzushiogakure, the author made sure to have a flashback scene included in the very next chapter that addressed this concern by having Raizen himself realize that he'd in fact genuinely used up all the swords he'd had sealed up for the sake of his planned finishing move, and only manage to get the one with which he sliced an arm off of Naruto and Sasuke each sealed and ready for such a move by sheer luck.
• Schedule Slip: Due to a mixture of work outside fanfiction writing, the fact that the author often has to do his story writing at a neighborhood library, the fact that a laptop he bought to make his writing easier for him ended up breaking down, and the library he attends to be able to otherwise continue his writing currently closed down thanks to the Covid 19 pandemic, the story has undergone this multiple times over the course of its long writing period.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The author initially hoped to pair up Karin with Kimimaro. Reader demand caused him to instead pair up Karin with Suigetsu and Kimimaro with Fuu.
  • The author also initially hoped to have Sasuke become Yagura's successor as Isobu's jinchuriki. Much like with the above example, reader demand caused him to change things to have Hinata be Isobu's new jinchuriki instead.
  • Furthermore, the author initially planned to have Raizen use an especially powerful mind control feature within his sharengan on an important female figure in Naruto's life (likely either Hinata or Kushina) before later thinking up an alternate means for Raizen to use this feature.
  • If it hadn't been for Kishimoto eventually allowing enough developments to unfold in canon to make continued reconciliation between canon and this story's version of continuity impossible, this would probably have been one of the closet to official canon Naruto fanfics in history.
  • The author originally had plans for an original character intended to serve as Gai's sensei. He even had a backstory prepared in which the character in question would have successfully killed one of the previous raikage during a war between Kumo and Konoha through use of the 8 Gates. These plans were reluctantly discarded after the introduction of Gai's own father Might Dai in canon.
• Write What You Know: The Freudian Threat that Mebuki places Sasuke under to ensure he treats Sakura right in their relationship was inspired by a very similar one the writer's parents made to his brother-in-law.