Naruto Gaiden was the last time the tea was actually scalding in the Naruto fandom. Everyone agrees Boruto is bad so there’s nothing to even argue about anymore. Like I can’t believe I’m saying this but I want Scarlet Spring back.
If Boruto was a fanfic on FFNet this would be its summary:
“Boruto is the child of Naruto and Hinata but he is neglected by his dad! Will he eventually become a ninja that surpasses his idol Sasuke?! New doujutsu!OC! Eventual godlike!OC! Vote in the comments who Boruto should end up with!!!”
Selfishness is actually a rather complex topic. It’s also something that has become a contentious category within the past few decades. Here are two definitions:
“lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure”
“concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage”
Now, the thing is, that people who have mental illness and trauma are often excessively or exclusively concerned with themselves. Their failures and their worthlessness take an outsized importance in their view of the universe. People with severe agoraphobia or social anxiety, for example, truly believe that their every little flaw and mistake is hugely obvious to and dwelled upon by other people.
Now is this kind of self-consciousness selfish?
Some people argue that it is, that Hinata’s actions to twice put herself in deadly danger with uncertain benefit were focused entirely on her own desire to do something for Naruto, not his own wishes or desires (and Hinata even calls herself selfish). But I don’t think it’s a fair or useful concept to apply to people who value themselves so little that they think their life can and should be thrown away like that.
I also believe that the post-699 material deliberately robbed Hinata of the growth she should have had in order to keep her “properly” dependant on Naruto. The “a man likes to feel like a man” way of pandering to males who are threatened by female competence and independence.
Rather than her choices, actions, and growth, The Last dwells excessively on Hinata’s genetic value as the “Byakugan Princess”. Just as Naruto is now a “child of prophecy”, he must have a prize wife who is just as marked out by destiny as special. Then together, because he has Asura-line genetics and she has Indra-line genetics, their children will have blah blah blah oh my GOD this interests me so little that I can’t go on.
But back to genin and Shippuden Hinata. I would not describe her as selfish per se in the “concerned with one’s profit or pleasure” in the typical sense. Rather, her worldview has been so distorted by her upbringing that she has an outsized sense of her own unimportance, which skews her actions in a self-oriented way.
I would say Hiashi is a worse father, but a better head of the clan from the evidence we’re given in canon.
Hiashi is a worse father partly in fact because he’s laser-focused on the well-being/prestige/power of the Hyuuga clan. If Hinata doesn’t benefit the clan, she’s worthless, absolute garbage.
In contrast, while Fugaku isn’t exactly demonstrative with his affection (understatement), some sense of his affection/attachment to his children *as* his children still comes across to me. Crucially, while he definitely sees Sasuke as *less*, he doesn’t see him as *nothing*.
Hiashi of course has the advantage of having a brain-scrambling curse that he uses to keep his branch servants in line, but he does seem to be fairly competent at it. The Hyuuga seem to a materially prosperous clan, large in numbers, wealthy by ninja standards, highly respected.
In contrast, the Uchiha are a hot mess, internally bickering, swinging back and forth between pro-Konoha and anti-Konoha. Fugaku’s anti-Konoha coup idea was stupid, and his planning for it was even worse. He apparently missed that his clan had been infiltrated by spies, not just his own son the double agent. Can you imagine Fugaku leading Konoha? He’d be more incompetent than Hiruzen.
Fugaku doesn’t seem to have charisma, he’s not shrewd, he’s not discerning, he’s not intuitive, he just lacks all the necessary qualities of a leader in this kind of environment.
Hiashi has immoral goals and methods but he is effective at reaching his goals through his methods, which makes him a superior leader in a sense.
If Hiashi were allowed real redemption (instead of “sorry about letting your dad be killed, never telling you the truth, and scrambling your brain all those times, my b” to Neji and bupkis to Hinata), I think he could still be an effective leader, because he does seem to have a certain aura of command. I can’t imagine him ever being close to Hinata, but he could have come to express quietly his admiration for her accomplishments and acknowledge his failure to perceive her value. But instead the ending gave him a personality-ectomy.
This gif never gets less horrifying.
Gonna quote @takigakure again: “Your grandfather used to be very strict” WAS HE, HINATA? WAS HE STRICT???
haha anyway isn’t it great that Shikamaru and Temari have a healthy marriage with good communication where they both contribute equally and whatever children they might have are raised to respect her opinions because she is experienced and shrewd and caring and not because they are afraid of being hit
I think Kishimoto wanted a world that was low-tech–his views on guns and airplanes in particular are well-known, being two things he cited would ruin the atmosphere. The Japanese population today is very urban, but Naruto is almost entirely composed of little villages surrounded by wilderness; we don’t even usually see farms. So it has a folk-lorish quality.
At the same time, the society is very contemporary Japan, or at least contemporary Japan for Kishimoto’s youth:
tiny family sizes
women are ostensibly equal but not at all equal in practice
in particular, when you marry and have a kid you are a housewife. period.
crazily overworked dads who are dead inside
big emphasis on ranks and exams
Bor//uto is like contemporary Japan even more, with the urbanization; what’s more, Bor//uto strikes me as the parental generation justifying a lot of the toxic aspects of the Japanese culture of overwork to children. Accept that your father is never there. Embrace that your father prioritizes his work over you–his work is so important! Forgive your father for being unable to support you. (And that’s just Naruto and Sasuke–I don’t even want to get into the appalling matter of Snakebert and Mitsuki.)
So I would say that the Naruto world is basically contemporary Japan with some storybook window dressing.
Sunagakure: they talk fast with a very liberal use of contractions (it’s too hot to talk gdmit) Konohagakure: the easiest to understand out of the hidden villages. It has the most neutral pronunciation. Kirigakure: a lot of misplaced vowels. Due to isolation, a lot of the pronunciation has changed. Kumogakure: the language is very flowery. It is very soft and nice to listen to. Develops a lot of slang words; whatever is trending. Iwagakure: the words are a thick drawl. They are hard to understand, especially when drunk (doesn’t matter really, they are too busy having wars with everyone.) Amegakure: they converse in symbols mostly (because of rebreathers. Not much else is known because of heavy security surrounding the village and the ninja are silent even when captured.) Otogakure: they use coded sounds. Taps, notes or any sound really, has a meaning that they use to converse. They have conversations in Morse code. Also; The land of iron (Tetsu no Kuni): a lot of phrases influenced by the samurai. Their analogies and idioms differ to that of a ninja village. Ninja have difficulty conversing sometimes because of the cultural difference between them.
Although Konoha is said to be the largest of the five great
shinobi villages, we’re never really given an explicit estimate or guideline towards
how many people live in Konoha. The Allied Shinobi Forces are said to be 80,000
strong, comprised of shinobi from Konoha, Iwa, Kiri, Kumo, and Suna, as well as
samurai from the Land of Iron. However, I don’t believe there’s any indication
as to what percentage each force makes up in the final count. If you divide it
evenly among the six nations, it comes out to roughly 13,000 per nation, which
is utterly impossible in terms of sustainability—unless the ninja villages are
turning out thousands of new shinobi per year, there’s absolutely no way they
can contribute that many people to an army. The only way the 80,000 number
seems credible is if almost all of that number are samurai, because in my opinion,
Konoha can’t have more than about 3,000 people living in it.
Cheloneuniverse 