#-tobirama seeing a screencap of his tumblr post on twitter

[evilkitten3]

#absolutely good analysis OP#also about Obito being an unreliable narrator I agree he is#I agree with you the antagonism mainly came from Tobirama’s side#sure Madara refused the truce for a long period but there’s no indication in the story that Tobirama and the rest of the Senju wanted the#truce#only Hashirama did#in fact Tobirama wanted to kill Madara after he lost#and despite Madara declining to get revenge for his brother’s death#Tobirama was still paranoid and started politically isolating him#it’s this isolation that started leading Madara to despair in canon#so Tobirama’s paranoia is the self fulfilling prophecy here#as his actions continuously isolate the latter pleading to him lashing out#I honestly don’t think it’s fair to blame Madara for the Uchiha oppression#as the one who started this pattern is Tobirama himself he’s the one who couldn’t let go of past grudges despite the Uchiha themselves#exiling their leader and voting for Hashirama as Hokage#about Madara coming back to attack Konoha#how is this justification for the oppression of the Uchiha and Tobirama’s paranoia??#it’s not fair to blame the collective for an individual’s actions#and Madara’s conflict itself isn’t this simple#he tried to cooperate in the flashback it’s explicitly stated#but because he was an Uchiha he was isolated politically#the conversation between Hashi/Tobi in the flashback confirms this#is Madara an angel?#no he did fail as a leader of his clan#but the fate of the Uchiha and Tobirama’s paranoia is unjustly blamed on him#also last thing to add in Obito’s story it wasn’t stated the clan distrusted him because he refused the truce for so long#Obito state it was mainly because they didn’t want another confrontation with the Senju after establishing the village and we know that Obi#lied here as in Hashi’s version Madara didn’t want to fight Hashi over the Hokage position and instead actually showed him the stone tablet#Hashi is the only reliable narrator IMO

at the risk of sounding like i'm defending tobirama (not my intention), i'm gonna argue that it's a tad unfair to heap all the blame for his bigotry on him alone, as contradictory as that feels to say (and type).

like a lot of characters in hashirama's flashback, tobirama is pulling double duty - story-wise, he's acting as a character doing and saying character things, but from a storytelling sense, he's also representing a sect of people living in an entirely different time period that there just wasn't enough time to properly flesh out in-story.

the major players in the flashback aside from hashirama and madara themselves are butsuma, tajima, tobirama, izuna, and itama (technically also kawarama, but he's literally dead on arrival, so i'm going to just kinda. lump him in with itama tbh). hashirama and madara are the focal points of the story, and both of them are established as outliers from the get-go: insanely talented shinobi, yet also dreamers hoping and making plans for a better world.

there are seven active characters representing the entire warring clans arc, and madara and hashirama are too busy representing themselves to do the same for anyone else (although they do help the others by virtue of interacting with them, but that's pretty much how. existing as a person on planet earth works). what that means is that the other five characters are left carrying the people in that time period. since it's hashirama's story, we of course see more of his family, and since tobirama is the one who. y'know. lives, it falls to him to be the one representing literally everyone else alive and relevant.

this leaves us, the readers, with two ways of interpreting pretty much anything tobirama says or does in the flashback- either at face value, being tobirama in and of himself and unrelated to how we're meant to perceive the other people in the village, or as an embodiment of the attitudes and ideas of said people. both interpretations are valid. and imo it's best to try viewing him as a combination of both to keep things interesting.

in other words, while it's not untrue to say that tobirama actively and intentionally isolated madara, it's also just as possible in my eyes that tobirama is meant to be a reflection of the growing distance between madara and the rest of the world. probably it's a bit of both.

i'd say it's equally possible that tobirama's enmity towards the uchiha was meant to show that the establishment of the village hadn't exactly erased inter-clan tensions, but it's impossible to say either way, given how little we know about the senju clan as a whole save that they eventually got whittled down to just tsunade (this is to my knowledge never explained? the uchiha clan might've had some problems with the village leadership but the senju seem to have simply. mostly decided not to exist anymore. i guess they all went out for cigarettes. probably they'll be back soon)

one pet peeve of mine in founders-era fanfics is when madara's whole,,,, everything is solved by izuna just being there

like maybe this is just me, but i don't think izuna surviving or even coming around to the idea of a truce with the senju would've been enough to keep madara from the path he ended up on.

izuna wasn't the reason he left - he was definitely part of madara's issues, but he wasn't the why. even if izuna had stuck around, and even if that had been enough to keep the uchiha clan from losing their faith in madara, i think he would've still come to realize konoha wasn't what he'd hoped it would be.

best case scenario, i think izuna's survival might've caused madara to stick around a bit longer, but i don't think it would've lasted. honestly, even then, that might've just made the inevitable break-up between madara and hashirama even more agonizing (particularly for izuna)

it's a fun idea to play around with for sure, but frankly i don't think canon!madara could've ever been 'saved' from that path. certainly not if the hidden village system ended up getting set up in the same way.