Some Dude: Hokage-sama! The village has been attacked!
Hiruzen, doing calligraphy or some shit: How many ANBU are lying dead?
Dude: About six, in a creepy panning shot with a discordant chord!
Hiruzen, sucking on the tip of his brush like a weirdo: Ahhhh, yes. Despite the fact that we only graduate 9 genin per year, and only promoted one genin to chuunin in the last exams, six of our most elite soldiers dying is merely slightly alarming, because after all, none of them had names. This threat will call for… *camera zooms in* characters with names.
Basically, if you’re an Uchiha with a name you got the Sharingan.
Yeah the whole “strong feeling” bullshit is part of the cavalcade of bullshit in Naruto Gaiden: Scarlet Spring. What, Sarada is the first Uchiha to ever experience enormous joy and expectation? Really? Really?
The first Naruto Gaiden manga is so awful, and the second Naruto Gaiden (Full Moon) is so aggressively awful, that I’ve come to the point of headcanoning that Kishimoto actively hates his own creation and is trying to kill it. I don’t actually believe that it’s true, but it is more satisfying than the alternative, which is that Kishimoto actually thinks he’s produced a good story about admirable heroes.
I don’t need to have properly seen Naruto to know that Boruto as a series makes no sense. How’re you gonna have supervillains when you already gave all the characters from the old series god-like powers? Some Season 1 Shounen Villain Dude is gonna drop out of the trees and any original series character’s going to kick his ass with their pinky toe, not even dropping the cookies for the PTA meeting. They can’t do village-threatening conflict without going full DragonBall Z now, it’s gonna be planets on the line. More aliens are gonna show up. Divine War between heaven and hell. Whatever. The only legitimate conflicts left to be found are in the hastily forced relationships, emotionally-unfulfilling forced character arc endings, and slice-of-life tweenager problems. Tune in next time to see if Sarada survives Week 6 of Sakura and Sasuke in Divorce Court.
NAruto isn’t keeping in touch with him at all so no one is even believing that he was Naruto’s teacher. WHAT THE FUCK?
What makes me mad is that no kid in the village know how Naruto was when he was a kid. So no one speaks about how the entire village hated him? How they were cruel to a child who was alone since he was born? Who never knew what it was to have parents? That never felt loved because everyone in the village hated and avoided him and doesn’t knew why? So you really want to tell me no one speaks about it? Are they trying to change the fact that they traumatized a little child? Surprise! Just because you don’t speak about it the past will not change!
It reminds me of Sasuke and Naruto’s argument before their final fight. Sasuke wanted to delete the past and Naruto got MAD before saying he won’t let that happen… But the past is gone now and no problem is solved… This is so sad to think about tbh!
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.
When you think about how issue 700 is a “where are they now” issue, with characters getting 1-3 panels each, how they appear in that small space matters even more.
Let’s rate all the female character appearance in 700 based on how much they uplift or downcast the character.
Anko: one of the only characters whose face is bright and cheerful in 700… but, she’s fat… and while I would really like to believe that making her fat isn’t meant to be making her a joke… well. We’ll give this portrayal 8 points out of 10, since at least she’s happy. Hinata: genuinely looks happy, visiting cousin’s grave, being a good mom, 10/10 Tenten: miserable, failing business, all alone, 0/10 Temari: lecturing her son but gets ignored by him, is serving her brothers drinks but is uninvolved in actual ninja business, pinched face, 2/10 Ino:enraged, instantly blows up into bitch fest with Karui whom she addresses with utter loathing, the men trying impotently to calm the women down 1/10 Karui: tbh it is kinda fucking horrible that Karui treats the InoShikaCho formation so lightly. even if there is peace, there may not always be peace, and traditions like that are important to pass down. fight me, Karui. fight me right now. 1/10 Kurenai: hanging out at home in her kimono looking older than she should (does Kishimoto have any idea how 40-50 year old women actually look? Tsunade un-henged has the same issue in the original series, Jiraiya looks fantastic but Tsunade looks like the crypt keeper), looking confused as her daughter dashes off to Actually Ninja, 6/10 Tsunade: let the bitch fest commence! actually Tsunade is probably fine with this as long as there is an open bar. 10/10 Terumi Mei: one-dimensional character is one-dimensional. oh boo hoo hoo I’m a drop dead gorgeous kunoichi with two kekkei genkai but no body wants to date me boo hoo hoo WTF. in what possible universe would this woman have trouble finding a man. 0/10 Moegi:
Ga-chk indeed. At least she’s basically doing some kind of ninja thing here though. 8/10 Sakura: Woo boy. She’s shown dusting, complete with kerchief and apron.
Ok. let me get this straight. I’m a housewife, ok? Far be it from me to say that housewives are stupid, lame, useless, whatever. They/we are not. And housework and “low skill” cleaning is unfairly devalued, especially coded feminine tasks. But even I, who is comfortable in my identification as a feminist housewife, would not want to be depicted in a “where are they now” montage fucking dusting.
And Sakura is, at least supposedly, not just a housewife. She has really specific, important, rare skills regarding healing. It would make more sense for her to hire someone to do household chores (at a living wage!) so that she could spend more time keeping people from fucking dying. And then spend her well-earned off-time kicking back with a drink with an umbrella in it.
But it really comes down to this.
Did Kishimoto draw Naruto mowing the lawn? Did he draw Sasuke washing his clothes in a stream? No, he didn’t, did he?
Ok? THAT’S THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE, OK? DO YOU WONDER WHY?
0/100
Kurotsuchi: literally the only female in the room during the kage conference. She gets a 10/10 but we’ve gone from two female kages and three female bodyguards as of the fourth war, to one female kage and no female bodyguards. so that’s 10/50.
“yo, pops?” hinata walks into the room, hands together behind her back, and stands in front of her dad “got a moment?”
hiashi, tired and ugly, nods and gets up “sure thing beloved daughter whom ive never mistreated ever in my life like ever”
“hold still real quick, would ya?” hinata waits for him to settle in a comfortable standing position before straight molly whopping him as hard as she could
hiashi goes flying into a wall while yelling “dude, what the fuck?”
“thats for me and neji and uncle and everyone one else, pops” she pretends to wipe her hands clean “don’t come around my kids no more or i’ll beat your ass so hard you’ll need the byakugan just to see what’s left of it”
hinata walks out of the room and proceeds to treat herself to whatever it is she likes
the end
I’m screaming.
then when she’s done having her cinnamon rolls she sits down with her kids and explains to them what a charlie foxtrot her upbringing was and about the branch clan curse mark and the Konoha establishment’s indifference to it “and that’s why me and Aunt Hanabi are going to work together to end the legal and societal structures that allowed this kind of slavery to exist in the first place”
I can see both sides. On the one hand, just because your parent had a rough childhood does not mean that their failures in parenting don’t hurt. You also can’t expect children to understand the past if they are not TOLD about the past (and there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the Bort generation is told much of anything about their own parents history–Boruto knows nothing about Hyuuga branch slavery, Sarada doesn’t recognize Team Taka, etc).
Naruto is not a competent Hokage. He is overwhelmed by paperwork in a way that previous Hokages were not shown to be, despite having as many or more people to delegate to, and being younger and more vibrant to start with. He is also hypocritical with regard to how he uses his clones. He doesn’t make significant changes with regard to the shinobi system, in particular the fundamental unjust basis of it, which is “military and police work based on ability to pay”. The daimyo and his son feature prominently in the Bort manga and it’s made completely obvious that the ninja world economy and government is some kind of bizarre feudalist/capitalist hybrid, the literal worst of both worlds if you’re a have-not. Nor has anyone apparently learned any lessons from their recent history. The whole Sumire plotline for example–what the fuck were the Sixth and Seventh Hokages thinking with regard to Root that they let that situation happen?
On the other hand, Boruto’s predicament just can’t be as compelling and attractive to the reader as Naruto’s, and the reader is comparing them as stories. Moreover, what makes Boruto annoying to me personally is how much the narrative keeps giving him unearned rewards of people’s adoration. The whole “Boruto is Mitsuki’s sun!!!” trope is annoying as fuck to me, especially in light of the entire thing being shown to be Snakebert brainwashing Mitsuki into becoming obsessed with Boruto, so when next gen fans act like this is sweet and wholesome instead of creepy af, that annoys the hell out of me.
Mitsuki is not a sweet healthy boy with an appropriate crush; Mitsuki is a massively traumatized child who has been literally drugged and brainwashed into an obsession with the son of an extremely important man. Brrrr. Heebie jeebes. Y i k e s. But the franchise itself is so eager to recreate the S///NS “dynamic” for the $$$$ and is treating it like ship teasing and agah;dslfkjs it’s gross okay.
And it’s not just Mitsuki; Bort gets all kind of “barely adolescent male power fantasy” shit that only makes sense when you realize it’s meant to appeal directly to 12 year old boys. Like a lot of people shit on Hinata for the way she blesses Boruto going off into deadly danger even though he just failed the chuunin exam for cheating and there are certainly many experienced adult ninja available (including Hinata herself!!!), but you need to understand Hinata isn’t a three dimensional character anymore; she’s purely “Boruto’s mom” in this power fantasy where the 12 year old boy gets told “oh yes, sweetheart, I, your mother, think of you as equal to an adult male–no, BETTER than the average adult male, a HERO among males, TOTALLY ready and able to go and SAVE THE WORLD while I stay here!”
To me, THAT is the annoying shit.
The problem isn’t that silly adolescent power fantasies shouldn’t exist. I have no problem with Dragon Ball type franchises where there’s no societal depth and everything is pure escapism about power rankings and people’s hair turning colours even though it isn’t their final form yet.
But original Naruto teased us with so much more than that. But either they didn’t have any intention of following through or they chickened out.
I liked Naruto because he was a boy who wanted to become Hokage to get validation, and then he was a boy who wanted to become Hokage to DO things with that power to help others.
Boruto wants to be like Sasuke, because…? He’s a “real” ninja? He’s cool? He fight real good?
That’s annoying, and off-putting. All style, no substance.
Fool me once, I’ll fuck off to fanfiction land before I ever let you fool me again, Naruto franchise.
Imagines how powerful Neji Hyuuga would have been as an adult if he hadn’t been unnecessarily killed off for the sake of a plot point
Gets super pissed over all the missed opportunities, had Neji lived. Wonders about the change in the Hyuuga clan didn’t have but would have had, had Neji survived. Thinks about how great it would have been for Neji to have been Boruto’s sensei as opposed to Sasuke (tho I do love Sasuke) and how epic it would have been to have incorporated and widened Neji’s potential as a Main rather than supporting character.
Is bitter because the Hyuuga never really did change and seems like it would have had Neji lived long enough to try to change it. How unfulfilling his ending was because his death didn’t even feel like it was about him, rather a plot device used to strengthen Hinata’s character. That apparently the takeaway here is that the caged bird can only be freed by death but hey, that’s fine as long as you die for the people that you love. Yeah okay, that wasn’t dumb at all I mean he didn’t have a novels worth of potential, no it’s fine just kill him off. It’s not like it was a smack in the face to his fans or the character himself. No not at all…
Imma add – I always felt like Hiashi would have been a better sacrifice for this plot. It would have meant all the same shit and more seeing as his brother gave his life for the clan (already locking in that caged bird fate shit).
And he could do the whole “zomg lesson learned clan must be changed” dying wish.
Fucking right! It would have been better and would have meant more that Hiashi would died protecting his child whom he was ambivalent towards at most, and the nephew that was wronged. It would have meant that change was inevitable that it needed to be changed from the ground up and who better to do it than Neji and Hinata. It would have given both a significantly larger role in the next series. Instead of the hot mess of the next series being so close to the original narrative that was Naruto it could have focused on Boruto and his sister being Hyuuga and Uzumaki dealing with where they stand in the clans ever changing infrastructure.
Then again, it would have changed the theme of the series and would have been branded for adult audiences as it would have been steeped in political intrigue but who gives a shit. The point is that it would have been better for Neji to have been given the chance to change his and the fates of the branch families with his own hands, his father’s death would have been avenged with the death of his uncle.
I swear I’ve been saying all this for the longest! THANK YOU!
yeahhhh and ending defenders are like “oh but it was already resolved before the end of the manga 🙂 Hiashi told Hizashi that the branch house and main house now fight alongside each other as equals :)”
Yeah? Talk is cheap.
1. Neji, pre-Talk no Jutsu, told Naruto that his inescapable destiny as a branch house member was to die for the benefit of the main house.
2. Neji died to protect the heiress of the main house.
Some resolution of his storyline. Neji was “free” to “choose death” more or less exactly the way his father Hizashi was “free” to “choose death”.
And then his death was wasted! “Does Uncle Neji like sunflowers?” Let me tell you about your Uncle Neji, Himawari: when he was younger than you are now, he had a painful seal placed on his head that humiliating branded him as property, and his uncle, your grandfather, regularly punished him by activating the seal and causing him intense, seizure-inducing pain. Nobody stopped your grandfather from doing this, and he said sorry that one time so everybody forgave and forgot.
Sounds pretty horrible, right? I mean, God, what kind of horrible Hokage would let someone torture a child and just do nothing?!
Oh yeah, your dad, Naruto! He knows allll about this but he does nothing 🙂 🙂 🙂
Cheloneuniverse 