kishi’s top 5 biggest writing mistakes? go wild

fineillsignup:

*stretches, straps in, buckles up, hydrates*

1. Edo Tensei is too easy

When Edo Tensei was first introduced, it was extremely powerful yet it also had some very serious drawbacks that kept its power fair. These included, most notably, the mention that Edo Tensei could only summon souls from the Pure Land. This was brought up initially as a clue/explanation for why the Fourth Hokage’s summoning didn’t work (because he was already inside the Shinigami’s stomach).

In very very very (very) very broad terms, the Pure Land in Buddhism/East Asian folk religion is for people who have gotten off the cycle of rebirth. They’ve sufficiently worked out their karma etc and while they haven’t achieved enlightenment yet, they are on a one-way road there. Their soul doesn’t need to come back to earth, let alone any of the many many MANY lower realms (hells).

Ok. I’d be willing to accept that Hashirama and Tobirama made it to the Pure Land. But Deidara? Kakuzu? Fuguki? Rasa? Madara? All these people died without negative karma? Really??? (Without wanting to get into discourse about how evil each of my examples are, I hope everyone can agree that by East Asian morality, they all died having caused more harm than help, and many specifically did things that are extra special bad in that value system and are usually considered worthy of being sent to a hell rather than being reborn in the human world.)

It’s made more insulting when we’re shown that Sakumo didn’t make it to the Pure Land but has been hanging out in a purgatorial state.

That’s some lazy ass bullshit. Come up with another explanation for how you summoned a who’s who’s of “most selfish bastards ever to live” other than that they all made it to the Pure Land. Edo Tensei, as originally portrayed, should be very specifically limited to truly selfless people, which is part of what makes it in itself a cursed jutsu–you’re pulling people who have escaped samsara back into the human world, which is Bad and Selfish.

Moreover, Kishimoto used the extreme ease of Edo Tensei to give Kabuto and Obito an instant army, just add corpses, without any of the narrative difficulty of needing to get people to choose to fight for his side. Moreover, by making the enemies already dead, it was a cheat code way of letting good characters visit explicit violence and death without having them kill living humans.

This brings us into:

2. The Zetsu Clone Army is too easy

Again, just a way of getting a huge number of mooks that good guys can slaughter wholesale to look cool.

Which brings us into:

3. Zetsu’s real identity is some bullshit let me tell you

Hahaha! You thought that this story was about the shinobi system, a human-created societal problem that humans needed to solve to achieve peace and justice? You fool! You utter buffoon! You absolute unit! The shinobi system was just a red herring.

~It was aliens all along!~

Is Sasuke such an emo downer about the village because his clan was killed and the killing was covered up by his village and he never received any kind of treatment for his trauma but was left alone to stew in his hatred and trained to become a child soldier?

No, don’t be ridiculous!

It was because a ¼ rabbit alien dude thousands of years ago was also super emo downer and had a daddy issues tantrum so hard that his chakra has been continuing the tantrum ever since, and also that dude’s rabbit grandma had an evil plant baby that existed purely to manipulate this dude and all his reincarnations.

Luckily, Naruto was the chosen one, because prophecy and also fate. Hurray!

Boy I bet all you people who thought that the “shinobi system” plotline was going anywhere have red faces now!

4. Leaving the Beheading Sword on Zabuza’s Grave and Having it STILL BE THERE Years Later

what the fuck

5. Not Embracing Retcons

Look, I get that Kishimoto was writing Naruto as he went, I get that he was a very young mangaka, that he just wanted his work not to get canceled, and that he was under a lot of executive pressure in part one.

But he could have published some author’s notes to fix some of early Naruto’s issues. In particular, people not knowing things that, from later canon, they should have already known. Naruto’s famous clan surname Uzumaki is a huge example of something that somebody somewhere should have cottoned onto during the Chuunin Exams, but they didn’t because…?

They didn’t because Kishimoto hadn’t decided that the Uzumaki were a famous clan yet. So retcon that. Please. Retconning is not a bad thing if the work as a whole improves. I believe write-as-you-go works should anticipate needing to retcon, and readers should accept and encourage it.