One thing I've always wondered is how some people claim to have superhuman hearing as a passive trait, but also have immune/resistance to ototon techniques/general loud noises.
Should be like Kiba's weakness to Naruto in the chunin exams.
How can people claim to be able to walk, but also be able to run. D:
That's not comparable. Having super hearing should actually make the target more susceptible to sound based techniques period, Ototon or otherwise.
... If you want an explanation of how. Here it is...we have naturally more 'durable' ears you could say. Most of the time in the real world (if not all the time) hearing loss is due to the cilia cells (The little hairs atop the fluid) to be damaged which they can repair themselves, but go too loud and they die.
How others define their resistance I do not know. Mine is based on a reinforced ear system that can withstand sounds of varying levels without haring loss. (Which I rp'ed) Allows me to hear all without the ear being hurt at all.
People are injecting themselves with mokuton DNA and have all that other jazz so I don't think having done this RP to myself is far fetched even so in RL they have cochlear implants which allow deaf or near deaf people to hear sounds once again by bypassing the cells they had lost.
Bypassing the lost cells and having an ear completely custom made to withstand incredible sounds are lightly different. I will not claim to be a sound expert but how would you protect those cilia from damage from chakra enhanced sound attacks, or even ordinary sound waves of great strength? In order to have enhanced hearing, general logic would dictate that the ear would have to be more sensitive to sounds.
That would mean that a significantly greater or lesser volume (and even outlier frequencies) of sound can generate the fluid and cilia action that causes the sense of hearing when a lesser ear would be largely unaffected, much like how a dog whistle is not heard by humans, but by dogs.
The durability of your ears can be enhanced either by replacing the cilia (durability through restoration) or by protecting the cilia from the harmful sounds to begin with (such as blocking harmful waves, which would prevent one from hearing them perfectly fine).
In a narutoverse bid of logic, this protection can be granted either by using chakra to redirect the sound, by absorbing the sound, or by channeling the sound into a space in the ear where it cannot reach the inner ear (nor be lost to another part of the body) and having special cells "register" the strength of the sound before passing this information artificially to the fluid and cilia, aforementioned cells being far more resilient than the cilia. Or some other body enhancement/KG-like thing that subconsciously regulates how much of the sound is permitted to actually hit the inner ear at one time, which would basically be an auto-regulator for sound much like how the eyes auto-regulate for different amounts of light.
So how does a more "durable" ear in Otogakure work? Does it focus on defending the inner ear from harmful sounds or does it simply have more resilient cilia? Because beyond either of those two, I'm a bit stumped on what good a more durable ear would do you, because while the ear itself would not be damaged, incredibly loud sound should still have other adverse effects on the listener, even if permanent hearing loss is not a great issue.