Thanks for the reply Lemon Sage.
Climate wise are you envisioning Central/Southern California or Japan? As the north of both regions can get snow regularly during the winter. (Japans year-round weather http://www.statravel.com/japan-climate.htm)
Excellent point about the foot wear. Though I wonder if it's either a holdover from before the village system was founded, or more likely, another example of Kishimoto not thinking all his choices through; as Kumo-nin are also depicted with open-toe foot wear (v45 pg 94) despite residing in a village situated up on the side of a mountain in the Land of Lighting, which is far to the north of Konoha and beyond the Land of Frost (which I'm going to assume has a fairly cold climate).
Fair enough, I can certainly understand where your coming from with wanting to give your readers more lee-way in imagining what a given scene looks like. I guess as someone who used to extensively play table-top RPGs like D&D, and is a heavy reader of fantasy novels (which to my mind tend to put extra effort into characterization and setting descriptions to make their fantastic worlds seem more real), I'm just accustomed to seeing more details actually detailed out for me. Speaking of fantasy novels, the context for the excerpt, which was taken from the 1st of a 14 novel series where most of the books clock in at between 550-650 pages, is that Richard (a woods guide) is taking Kahlan (a mysterious woman,later revealed to be the ruler of a neighboring land), who is on a quest to find a reclusive wizard, to see his grandfather Zedd (who turns out to be the reclusive wizard), after narrowly avoiding a run in with the Darken Rahl (the BIG BAD), who was trashing Richard's house for a book of mystical instruction that his father had stolen from Rahl.
True, most of the examples I gave were for how the weather could be utilized as a source of conflict; that was more to suggest a way in which you could use natural phenomenon to impact that story if you desired, much like you have also used politics and economics as tools to drive the story. In terms of denoting the passage of time through the use of weather, I was thinking more along the lines of mentioning what the weather was like every couple of chapters or so to peg what season events were taking place in.Though I certainly can understand your point about how using a thematic element sparingly can make it more memorable. I also agree whole hardheartedly that trying to peg events all events to a specific week, or even month, could open you up to potential continuity errors.
Speaking of the Land of Snow, is it, or any other area of the continent, close enough to the poles that they experience times when the sun (or moon) never seem to set during the summer (or winter)?
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When I refer to both I'm talking the more year round temperate locations, as almost any place can have a radical extreme from what most of the state or country sees.
I would always lean towards Kishimoto just not thinking it through. After all, as your Kumo example would infer, regardless of how the rest of the Country looks like, if you're that high up in the mountains its going to be rather cold with plenty of snow. Which if that is the case, you aren't going to be using sandals since toes would be the first thing to go when the frost bite hits. But, I tend to view Kumo to be built on a relatively small mountain, particularly as the combined shinobi army gathered in the valley leading up to it, and it could still be seen in the background. The Land of Lightning also has a desert so truth be told I imagine it as being more like Nevada or another western state then a cold frozen one.
Which leads me into your question at the end about Snow, to which my answer would be no. I'm imagining that when you see the Naruto map, you are imagining a world pretty similar in size to ours. Thus you may picture the Elemental countries as taking up a portion of the world similar to Asia and Europe. But you see when I look at the Naruto world map, I picture it as taking up about as much room as Japan does. Meaning the world is actually much larger then our own. Naturally this doesn't come up since for the most part the Elemental Countries are rather isolated. Thus to me the reason Snow was perpetually frozen, was because of how high most of the country was located above sea level, rather then how close it was to the pole.
Well, despite not playing D&D myself, I do understand why you would need things defined so clearly. There you are working with a party, and you can't exactly leave room for interpretation when everyone is needing to base decisions off of the same information. You can't have a guy thinking a troll is coming at him from one direction while everyone else believes it is on the opposite side of the room. Since a lot of Fantasy novels were born from it, I can see why it would carry over into the writings.
The other reason that I wouldn't use weather as a determinate about a point in time , is because of places like the land of snow. There does it really matter if it is summer or winter, if it is a place with constant snow fall when the generators are not on. If I reach a point where Naruto is bouncing back and forth between locations, then I feel it could lead to more confusion if I'm describing snow in one chapter, and then a boiling hot day the next, provided people are using the weather to determine the passage of time.