that fucking post about sasuke’s protective arm socks is a serious game changer, man
because this undermines the basic premise that gave rise to an entire generation’s worth of highschool AU fanfiction and cosplay where sasuke was always like
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!
i dont even knoo w w i spent an afternoo n on this
modern au because we all know thats my favorite and i wanted to see nar and sas already being in a relationship while sakura is the single pringle chasing after skirts and pants
-whos had enough of nar/sas pulling her down w their presence so every time she wants to get ahead of any misundertsandings by getting rid of them she just slaps sasuke in the shoulder and you know the drill
Kako says that the things he learns at the Academy are more like general suggestions than hard and fast rules. “The point of the Academy is to standardize everything so that shinobi who haven’t worked with each other before can function as a team if needed. Teamwork is Konoha’s forte, after all,” she says, “But even concepts that sound good have their faults.”
Kako says a lot of things like that, things that force Kamaru to reconsider what other people say. Look underneath the underneath. Mostly, it’s just to prompt him into critical thinking, but there are some Academy lessons that she outrightly dismisses, practically spitting on them.
“A shinobi must never show emotion?” Kako sneers, reading over Kamaru’s shoulder at his homework on the kitchen table, “How stupid.”
Kamaru blinks, looks up at his sister, surprised. More for her venomous tone than the opinion itself.
Kako sighs, softens, explains. She tries to find teaching moments in everything. Sometimes, Kamaru wonders what she’s preparing him for. “Of course, professionalism is important while on duty, and stoicism in the face of danger can be a shield of sorts, but to say never is overly restrictive and impossible to do. Also, emotions can be weapons of their own. Well. I don’t need to tell you that, you’ve met Gai-senpai.”
Kamaru shudders. Yes, he has met his sister’s zealously enthusiastic senpai.
“Not to mention things like killing intent or positive intent… And for all that we’re shinobi, we’re still human. Emotions and all.”
Kamaru nods, marks a bold line through rule #25 on his homework, and keeps going. But he doesn’t really consider the entirety of this conversation until later in the evening, after he’s gone to bed then woken back up, thirsty and blearily walking to the kitchen practically still asleep.
Kako is already there–mostly because their apartment is so small that the kitchen is also their dining and living room–standing in front of the framed picture of their parents, the small stone tablet with their names on the shelf beside it.
It’s the closest thing their parents have to a gravestone. After they died, the Nara had offered to bury their father in the clan graveyard with his family. But they hadn’t extended the offer to their mother.
Unsurprisingly, Kako had refused. “They would want to be together,” she had said. Kako hadn’t cried then.
She’s crying now.
“It’s harder than I thought it would be,” she says to the two dimensional faces of their parents.
Kamaru freezes in place, unable to move forward.
“But I’m going to keep doing it. Even if you wouldn’t approve. I have to protect him. I don’t know if you would have let me. Sometimes I think… it’s awful… but I know that a few weeks more and you would have followed procedure.”
Kamaru’s thoughts whirl. What procedure? He’s pretty sure that Kako is talking about him, but what is she referring to? Her next words send him retreating to his room.
“I can’t help but wonder if maybe it was for the better that you’re gone.”
Actually GaaNaru has a lot of the same potential pitfalls/challenges as NaruHina, ie that Gaara thinks Naruto may have literally hung the moon and the stars, is the reason the sun shines in the sky, and makes the world spin.
Gaara: wow I can’t believe Naruto invented smiling and being a good person
And darling Naruto, he means well, but he is oblivious to subtext and occasionally even to outright communication. Even less than Hinata, I don’t think Gaara is communicative by nature. So that would be a challenge.
I also like the orangey-red palette! A+++ aesthetic.
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”
Cheloneuniverse 