#REAL TENTEN SCHOLAR HOURS

[tentenismybitch]

yeah chandu this is the BEST THING I'VE EVER READ!!!! such a through post about my best girl, so iconic, she deserves, SO GALAXY-BRAINED. i have a few additions/commentary but everything is on point:

"Tenten...focuses more on taijutsu than ninjutsu." this is interesting because obvi the main thing we see her doing with her weapons is literally not taijutsu, so i interpret this as her also being really good at taijutsu IN ADDITION to her weapons, and probably supplementarily - i don't think we ever see her doing hand-to-hand/close-range combat fr, but i think as in this iconic naruto ending, (also peep her lil smirk when naruto pulls out a kunai LMAO! team gai x team seven bestfriendship canon!) she likely is incredibly proficient with a bo staff and other hand-held weapons, and can probably also use swords pretty well too. Gai apparently tried to teach all 3 of them primary lotus, so i imagine he probably, at least up until the point where they begin to specialize, taught them all taijutsu in the same/similar ways, but i can see tenten adding in weapons to her taijutsu training (relatedly. i think gai would teach them all dynamic entry and that tenten sometimes does it. LOL)

re: gai teaching them all things + tenten allegedly having poor chakra control - i totally get why you'd ignore this bit of "canon" (i use quotes since i think it shows up in a filler anyway? but fillers are canon to me, a tenten stan <3) but for me. i think that she probably has higher reserves of chakra than average. why? well for one, sealing is a huge part of her specialty jutsu, and what clan is really good at sealing? oh right, uzumakis. who also have "strong life forces" (ie chakra.) what does that have to do with tenten? she's probably bad at chakra control for a similar reason to naruto - he would produce too much chakra so his chakra control was unstable and wonky. but because of the sheer amount of chakra reserve + stamina he had, he made up for it (also jiraiya does whatever the fuck with his seal to fix his chakra control but anyway.) tenten being great at sealing + bad at chakra control to me = she has higher reserves of chakra than average, esp for someone of her background. AND WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GAI? well. he tries to teach tenten and neji how to open gates too but only tenten can also do it <3

KAKASHI TRAINING HIS HUSBAND'S BEST FRIEND'S DAUGHTER!!! YES YES YES!!! i have a headcanon that basically feels canon that Kakashi spent most of his free/training time with team gai after his own students get new teachers, and who else is he gonna work with? obvi, lee can't do lightning jutsu, and neji works primarily with his clan, tenten is the obvious choice! also her having lightning release fits in with my "immigrant from kumo" headcanon so boom.

SUCH GREAT ANALYSIS OF TENTEN'S LOW SELF-ESTEEM + HER COMPARING HERSELF TO LEE. NO NOTES!!! MY INSECURE BABYYYY.

(ok. not to have nejiten brainrot but i think. neji being super confident in her abilities contrasts really well with her being insecure/having low self-esteem. "why can't you see yourself the way i see you" vibes. ugh. my heart.)

tenten and neji being besties and knowing each other's souls? canon. the other thing i really love about filler ep 192 is that kiba makes some snippy comment (fair, this is so soon after neji almost killed hinata) and tenten yells at kiba. don't you fucken ever speak ill of one of her boys <3

TENTEN BEING A BUSYBODY. YES. ABSOLUTELY. CANON. SHE GOSSIPS WITH INO!!

absolutely she is the type of person that gets people to open up. her calming, carefree demeanor and general people-person vibes are basically canon. again, as a tenten stan, i have to read into fillers so: in the iconic shipuuden ep 232, the girls' get together, she is the one who initiates the hangout between them–not sakura, the girl main character; not ino, the most outwardly extraverted of the kunoichi; not hinata, who seems to be the focal character of the episode. IT'S TENTEN WHO INVITES THEM ALL FOR A GIRLS NIGHT OUT! SHE EVEN INVITES THAT RANDOM SCIENTIST GIRL WITH THE GLASSES WHO WAS IN LIKE 2 EPISODES! everybody loves tenten and tenten loves everybody, basically canon <3

"her real power is being recognized by her two teammates." first of all, i love this, and this coincides i think with her loyalty being for her friends and not her village. big AWWW lee and neji are so proud of her <3

but also. the "carefree, smiling face" thing, i interpret in two ways. for one, it immediately follows the above line that i gushed over - to me this implies that it is contrasting her in some way with her two teammates. neji and lee are both SUPER intense, as evidenced by their first/major introductions: lee, with him immediately falling in love with sakura and vowing to protect her (and making good on that vow when he defends her against the sound nin, putting himself in harm's way in the process), and neji who is really introduced to the audience when he almost kills his much-weaker cousin, lmao. tenten, by comparison, is the carefree member of team gai - she takes her training seriously, and is fervent about it esp after tsunade becomes hokage, but on the whole, her vibe is more chill than lee or neji's. she's more of a grounding force - generally in terms of her demeanor, but also specifically for neji and lee, which is why it is highlighted immediately after the point about her being recognized by them. she is the pillar of the team, the emotional glue, the one who keeps lee and neji's temperaments warm, as opposed to the fiery and passionate intensity of lee's youthful exuberance, and the ice cold resentment and pain of neji's curse mark and clan issues.

now, a headcanon of mine that comes in here is that tenten is the team captain, not neji. common fan interpretation is that he is, cus he becomes a jonin first obvi, but before that i think it's her. for one, she's a busybody. i'm projecting but she's probably bossy too. but also, she is the grounding force on the team, and her two teammates recognize that. her sensei probably would too: if i were gai, i'd put her in charge whenever i could. couple this with her insecurity, it makes sense why her real power comes from neji and lee's recognition: when she loses faith in herself and her abilities, it is them who remind her that she is team gai, they would fall apart without her. a cord of three-strands is not easily broken.

BUT SECOND, i agree with you: i mean, let's be real. if naruto was a LOT more grounded in reality, miss "throw a billion knives no jutsu" would be way more deadly than she is in canon. also, someone who loves weapons and using them, with perfect accuracy? that implies lethality. contrast this to lee and neji, who again – in a more grounded work, would mostly be incapacitating people, while miss throw a billion knives no jutsu would be straight up SLAUGHTERING!! as you said tho, despite that! she has a carefree and smiling face :) remember that meme that was like, "looks like a cinnamon roll, could kill you"? yeah, that's tenten.

last point, i agree that i don't really buy the "tenten would try to be a mednin" thing. part of this is b/c it doesn't really gel, to me, with the whole "loves weapons" thing cus TO ME her love for weapons implies a bloodthirstiness that does not vibe with being the ninja version of a doctor. but also, tbh, i think team gai as a whole are so well-matched in their abilities + have such great confidence in themselves (lee and neji) and each other that they wouldn't think they need a medical nin. AT MOST, neji probably has some basic knowledge of it, but i don't think he nor tenten would bother to learn beyond that, simply because they don't think they would need it 🤷🏾

okay sorry for blabbing, so looking forward to the next few posts on this omg <3 <3 <3

Just noting down some things about Tenten that influence my view of her characterization/personality. primarily for my own reference as i’m writing, as well as to kind of get a more mature and consistent characterization of her than i had before. this gonna be an extremely long and rambling post, (where I think I repeat myself a whole lot oops) and there’s not really anything profound, just some traits i’m pulling from canon and interpreting.

most of Tenten’s ’canon’ characterization comes from filler and databooks, which I then further interpret, so a lot of her characterization in this post is three degrees of fanon/headcanon, with some liberties taken where I dislike the interpretation.

We’re introduced to Tenten during the chunin exams, where she’s seen throwing kunai at a target dummy that Neji is sitting under. She casually throws her kunai and hits the target dead center, instantly showing her marksmanship skill, but also Neji’s implicit trust in her since he doesn’t even flinch and the target is pretty much right over his head. This ties in later but basically, he fully trusts that she will not miss.

We see Tenten again before the first round of the chunin exams, while Izumo and Kotetsu are blocking the door. The thing I find notable in that scene is Tenten not being immune to Sasuke LOL.

(Manga panel grabbed from @tentenarchive)

it's interesting to me that her thing is specifically that there's not a single scratch on him, and that he's "cool". Makes sense given that she's on a team with Gai and Lee and she desperately wants them to be cool too. And she dislikes weak people so yeah, of course it's cool to her that he's untouchable.

Actually on this topic, Tenten's taste seems to be "cool people"? In a filler episode (naruto 162) she thinks that the lord of a local land is really cute when she sees him get down for his palanquin. The lord's whole thing is that he's like cold and cool and pensive etc. so this seems to be Tenten's taste to some degree. He turns out to actually be a girl in the end so yknow. bi Tenten confirmed.

Here's her page from the first databook (screenshotted from The Narutoversity). She gets annoyed at Lee injuring himself for Sakura's sake, which I'm pretty sure isn't really out of care so much as it is that they're in the middle of the forest of death in like. the worst situation possible. Love how Ino's just standing there like "what the fuck kind of medical care is this".

I generally dislike the stats since I find that they’re inaccurate to what we see on-panel (a whole rant I could go on another time tbh), and Kishimoto tends to skew them egregiously in favor of characters he particularly likes. Ex: genin era Neji’s total is 21, and shippuden Tenten’s is 20.5. You cannot seriously be telling me that Neji as a genin is stronger than chunin Tenten three years in the future. Come on Kishimoto. There are a few things of note here though, so let’s go through them anyway.

Tenten’s highest stat is her speed, at 3, which is the same as Sasuke from the same databook. So clearly, she’s fast, especially since Sasuke is known for his speed. She's not as fast as Lee, but still quick on her feet and dexterous, with fast reflexes. Makes sense, since the second databook describes her fighting style as “dancing flexibly and firing speedily”.

Her strength is a 1 and her stamina is a 1.5, which is insane to me. Like she’s on Team Gai???? They do 500 laps around Konoha and 1000+ pushups every day???? I reject canon here, fuck u kishi, I know she’s actually buff as hell and has hella stamina.

Her intelligence is a 2, which might seem super low but it matches Sasuke's intelligence, and is only 0.5 lower than Neji and Temari's. I think it just goes to show that the scale for these stats is skewed as hell. But basically what this means is that she operates at a similar level to Sasuke, Temari, and Neji, where she picks up on the things around her, and while she isn't operating on the level of Shikamaru, she's still a good strategist.

Back to the actual show, we get to the elimination round and her fight against Temari (episode 43). I’m basing this part off the anime because their fight in the manga is like three panels long.

So technically, this is “filler” (as if any tenten fan really cares lol).

From the Hokage's commentary, her battle sense is pretty good. She positions herself a perfect distance away from the enemy. She's trying to bait Temari into attacking, to see what her power is and figure out how to counter it, and Temari calls her out on it.

Tenten isn't a 200 IQ genius strategist the way Shikamaru is, but she is still a smart fighter. We can see she thinks in a similar way to him (and Temari) feeling out the enemy's power and what they can do before counterattacking strategically. I need them to be best friends tbh.

Her first reaction when she throws her shuriken at Temari and misses is surprise. She is deeply confident in her own abilities, so it's genuinely shocking to her. She yells "I missed? There's no way!" and in the stands, Gai also insists up and down that Tenten never misses.

She has the utmost confidence in herself, and from the rest of her team. None of them have any doubt in her, and this also ties back to that introductory scene. No wonder Neji let her chuck kunai at targets near him. It's probably something she does regularly too.

Tenten loses to Temari, and is immediately down on herself. We see a lot of this in Shippuden 237, where she's lying in the hospital and loses all her confidence in herself and her abilities.

Shippuden 237 shows us that Tenten does actually have self-esteem issues, even before this fight with Temari. During their first year as genin, when Lee keeps getting defeated by Neji, Tenten tells Lee that he really should just give up on beating Neji, because he's a genius, and Lee is not. It's clear in the voice acting and the expressions that to some extent, Tenten isn't just speaking about Lee when she says this, she's also speaking about herself.

She seems to compare herself a lot to others, often in a negative light, talking down about herself when others are better than her, but still trying her best to surpass them.

But the way she talks after losing to Temari is much worse. Her match with Temari affects her deeply, and likely for many years to come. I think it becomes one of her primary motivations to become stronger, as she keeps holding that moment as her lowest point and vowing to never be that helpless against an opponent again.

Headcanons here. After her fight with Temari, Tenten also throws herself into learning 1) fire jutsu to combat Temari’s wind (this is why she develops that dragon bomb jutsu she uses during the Konoha Crush filler episode), and 2) seals that can absorb/store away opponents’ attacks.

I think Tenten’s primary chakra nature is actually lightning, which is also why she is so weak to wind chakra. I love this post by @/fineillsignup that goes into detail about chakra natures, and a lot of the traits listed under lightning nature fit with my interpretations of Tenten. I also am heavily biased toward the idea of Kakashi, who is basically student-less during the interlude period, teaching Tenten lightning jutsu since she's his husband's friend's student.

Going back to that scene in shippuden 237, I do think her talking down to Lee in their first year as genin is also interesting. Even though I love the idea of Lee and Tenten being besties before Team Gai and her standing up for him, I think the reality is that she probably didn’t really talk to him in the Academy, and once they were on the same team, she was kind to him, and learned to work with him.

Lee very specifically mentions in a flashback in episode 100 that nobody told him anything encouraging, sensei or student. This obviously includes Tenten. So while she wasn’t outright mean to him, she also didn’t have the greatest opinion of him.

She very quickly found herself relating with him, and that probably made her take out some of her own self-loathing on him at first. Eventually they become close, and form a very deep friendship, but things start out pretty rocky.

Kishimoto confirms that every day for a month between the second and final rounds of the chunin exams, Neji and Tenten train together in secret to help him reverse-engineer the 8 trigrams 64 palms and the rotation. It’s interesting that everyone else goes to train with a jounin and only Neji chooses to train with his teammate.

I think this implies Tenten to be a good secret keeper and evidence that Neji already told her about the cursed seal and all the clan drama. During Neji’s speech to Naruto, Tenten’s reaction is shown alongside Hiruzen and Hiashi’s, both of whom already know all about the curse mark and his father’s death. So Neji has told Tenten as well.

Plus Tenten is uniquely suited to help with Rotation, since she can throw a billion knives no jutsu.

During Naruto vs Neji, Tenten gets used as the mouthpiece to explain Neji's attacks, which also shows how well she knows him after training with him for the Chunin exams, but she's also genuinely impressed when Naruto wins, and even compliments him.

There's a brief scene during Shikamaru v Temari where Tenten comments about how she couldn't beat Temari. Also look at her arms. A 1 for her strength stat??? with those arms??? sure kishi.

Okay, we move on to when Orochimaru attacks Konoha, and there’s this filler episode (shippuden 192) where Hinata gets kidnapped by Kumo shinobi. This episode has some small Tenten moments, where you can also see how Neji thinks of her, and I like them a lot.

We start off with Tenten going to check in on Neji after his conversation with Hiashi, and he actually opens up and tells her all about what they had just spoken about, another sign that he's told her about everything with his clan.

When Hinata is kidnapped and the Hyuuga Elder makes Neji go get her, Tenten comes with him, not out of any particular concern for Hinata, but purely to back up Neji. I doubt she likes Hinata much at first (my eyes were opened after this post by @tentenismybitch), so she’s doing this more for Neji’s sake.

As they're chasing after the man who kidnapped Hinata, they get caught in a trap, and Tenten tells Neji to leave her behind (strategic thinking) and Neji only hesitates for a second before agreeing and going on ahead. Neji expresses that this is because he knows Tenten can handle herself.

We see her using a new jutsu (the Dragon Bomb), which as I mentioned before, I think she developed with Temari in mind.

During the Hokage’s funeral we do see her in funeral attire looking sad but is she really? debatable. I think no, but it’s not entirely relevant. This is all personal headcanon here, not based on canon evidence beyond extrapolating from what I’ve seen.

Tenten doesn't strike me as someone burning with loyalty to the village and harping on about the “will of fire” and whatnot. She does her duty, and that’s about it. It doesn’t go further than that. She cares about the people dear to her, but not really about the village specifically.

After the Hokage’s funeral, Tenten doesn’t appear again until the end of the Search For Tsunade arc, which I think is her last non-filler appearance in the original series other than a few flashbacks.

She’s excited about Tsunade coming to the village, and tells Neji after he trains, and asks him to come with her to go see Tsunade. Neji tells her he’s not interested, and Tenten looks a little disappointed.

We see Tenten in some flashbacks to Lee's genin years (episode 100). As Neji is talking down to Lee, Tenten doesn't really say anything, which matches with what i said earlier. But, when Gai tells them that with hard work, anyone can be a shinobi, Tenten has a similar reaction to Lee, while Neji just looks annoyed.

What Gai says seems to give her hope. That with enough hard work, anyone can become great. She doesn't think of herself as a genius, and if anything, seems to group herself with Lee in terms of ability. This is also shown in Shippuden 237, which I'll discuss later.

After this we only see Tenten in the end-of-series filler, which will be part 2 of this post since it's already really long. We'll finish off by looking at data book 2, which came out after the manga for the first series had finished.

From the second data book (screenshot also taken from the Narutoversity), we see part of her personality is being a "busybody" LMFAOOOO. So yeah she's inquisitive and curious, being a research enthusiast, but also uses that same nature to get in on everyone's business too. We can assume she's also observant and detail-oriented, can probably read people pretty well.

I like this a lot! I think Tenten is a good people person, and many find her easy to get along with. She’s probably one of those people that you accidentally find yourself telling really important or deep stuff to without really knowing why. She’s just got this air around her that’s very chill and comfortable.

But I do think she’s nosy, and does wanna know about everything, just to be in the know. She’s a little detective LOL.

The research enthusiast part is a fun thing too. She strikes me as a tinkerer, messing with new weapon designs or seal ideas, constantly turning something over in her head.

The first and second databooks list her hobby as fortune-telling, which is also really cute. I think she knows palmistry and does readings for her friends, and has some knowledge of astrology. She isn't overly superstitious, but she does believe in ghosts, and gets fairly nervous when she sees or hears something that can be considered a bad omen.

She has pride in her weapons, clearly, and her arsenal is implied to be the largest and strongest of any ninja. I’d like to assume that some of her pride comes from the weapons in her arsenal that are of her own design.

Her 'carefree, smiling face' is also an interesting point. At first I was unsure how to interpret this, but to me it reads as her being rather laid-back and carefree, despite her power and lethality. Again, not very sure how to interpret this line and I'd love to hear how anyone else sees it!

It’s cute that Tsunade coming to the village and becoming hokage made Tenten train harder. I think aside from her defeat to Temari, this becomes another major motivation for Tenten. She wants to impress Tsunade, the kunoichi that she admires most.

She says she'd like to fight Sakura, so I think there's some kind of jealousy or something to prove there since Sakura got to be Tsunade’s apprentice and Tenten didn't. This goes back to her low self-esteem and those issues she’s been having since her fight with Temari.

Shippuden 237 touches on this but Tenten did actually try to become a medical ninja for a bit, she just didn’t have the chakra control necessary. Obviously this adds to her insecurities when Sakura turns out to be a natural at medical ninjutsu with unnaturally good chakra control.

I’m not a huge fan of the ‘trying to be a mednin’ part of this ngl, I think she’s a little too fixated on weapons to truly care about medical ninjutsu, and wants to emulate Tsunade just for the ‘strongest kunoichi’ part rather than trying to be her exact carbon copy. Plus, I think (headcanon) Tenten’s chakra control has to be at least decently good in order to do seals, but that’s a different rabbit hole. I tend to disregard this in my fics and will likely continue to do so.

I do like the thing of being jealous of Sakura in some way for being Tsunade’s apprentice, though. It’s some nice flavor and I appreciate the one-sided rivalry. I think it would be funny for Sakura to think of Tenten as the cool senpai and look up to her, meanwhile Tenten is struggling to not immediately challenge her to a duel, Gai-style.

Since this is already super long, I’ll do a part 2 for all the filler arcs she’s in, and then a part 3 for shippuden.