#and i can’t tell if my personality is bred from trauma or just bc i’m in my 20s now

[pastelninjaimagines]

lol this is my time to shine I love this sad puppeteer very much.

So his characterization is honestly one of the best in the entire series, and it’s very easy to miss due to his appearances being confined to the very first arch of shippuden and a brief cameo in the war arch, but besides the uchihas and nagato/konan, Sasori has the most backstory that we can really delve into out of the other akatsuki members (credit where credit is due Kishimoto did a fantastic job of fleshing Sasori out in a very short amount of space). 

For the question of how emotionally stunted Sasori actually is....well he’s a lot less than he claims to be. He claims to be emotionless just like a puppet. But, is that really the case? I don’t believe so, and only bc of what Sasori himself displays. The emotions he openly displays are mainly annoyance and impatience. Yes, these are emotions, negative, but definitely emotions. Him making little remarks of impatience at Deidara is indeed him being annoyed. If he truly didn’t have emotions like he claims, then he wouldn’t care how long Deidara kept him waiting. We can also see that when Orochimaru defected from the akatsuki, that Sasori, having been his partner held a grudge against him saying that he wanted to be the one to end Oro (Deidara also comments later on backing this up as well). Sasori would never admit it, but being Oro’s partner when he finally defected, Sasori felt a level of betrayal. What level he felt and why he felt betrayed I’ll tackle in a later point but lets keep it in mind. Also it’s stated by Chiyo after Sasori’s death that he let himself be killed. Like lets be real for a second, he was the best puppet master in the world at the time. He could have taken out Sakura (who was incredibly inexperienced at the time) and Chiyo (an elderly woman) if he really wanted to. He didn’t. That’s the whole point. He was so in denial, so far gone and out of touch with humanity that he deep down wanted an excuse to end it. Even though his whole “aesthetic” was basically to achieve immortality, in his subconscious he wanted it to end. Those are feelings. Awful feelings, but they’re there. 

Now that we’ve debunked the “Sasori doesn’t have feelings” thing, lets look at why he feels the way he does. The root of Sasori’s problems comes from his parents’ untimely deaths and his subsequent care afterwards. Now I’m going to be referencing some of the filler episodes from shippuden (it’s up for debate whether they’re truly canon but they were decent episodes - not much wrong with them). In those episodes we see Chiyo not wanting to tell Sasori that his parents died, that they won’t be returning from the mission that they promised him they’d be back from. Sasori, who was maybe 5 years old at the time maybe even younger, had to figure this out all by himself bc Chiyo was too selfish to just tell him. Think of the trauma that could have been avoided if Chiyo had simply told her grandson the truth. Instead she distanced herself from him, which in turn made Sasori distance himself from the world. Sasori is a fantastic example of disassociation, because that’s ultimately his way of coping with all of the sadness that’s suddenly thrust upon him when he himself comes to the conclusion that his parents aren’t coming home. He can’t go to his grandmother who has inexplicably a) kept this secret from him and b) has drawn away from him for no apparent reason. He’s now dealing with tremendous lose, has no support system, and is starting to develop trust issues because his only relative has betrayed him in a sense that Chiyo is refusing to be there for him when truly he needed someone. 

Now, let’s look at how Sasori copes when all the odds are stacked against him. His grandmother did do one thing that did help Sasori which is introduce him to puppetry (an argument can be said that this also set him down the path of self destruction as well). Sasori found that he was extremely well adept at making puppets and controlling them, and like almost every only child, found that his “toys” were fantastic companions. Now unlike other only children, Sasori was extremely lonely (which obviously was from the lose of his parents). He found solace in the company of the puppets he made (he made the mother and father puppets to pretend that his parents were still there). They made him feel not as alone. And they also couldn’t hurt him like actual humans. His grandmother hurt him by distancing herself from him, others constantly hurt him (especially seeing normal families) by being happy while he suffered in solitude. These feelings of course bred a sort of resentment for the rest of the village and led to Sasori isolating himself. Now the nature of Sunagakura while Sasori was a child allowed him to mold himself in the way that we eventually see him. Sunagakura was very militant, only respected power and skill (aka unique kekkei genkai or other skilled ninja). This sort of harsh environment breeds harsh results. Higher ups (including Chiyo herself) saw Sasori’s talent with puppets and allowed him the opportunity to excel in the field. This continued Sasori’s trend of isolation however and with his connections to Chiyo, he began to experiment with puppets (as seen in that filler episode). He had a complete disconnect from society which led to his defection from Suna. This is a definite nature vs nurture situation. The harsh political environment of Suna at the time further “nurtured” Sasori to be what he became. If his upbringing had gone differently, he definitely would have turned out differently, he might still have been an introvert, but not a psychopath. 

On the topic of Orochimaru that I said I would get back to, I mentioned how Chiyo early on in Sasori’s life sowed the seeds of trust issues. Sasori was, for whatever reason, very loyal to the akatsuki. The organization let him do what he pleased while offering him a level of protection for doing missions for them every now and then. He had every reason to have a level of loyalty to the akatsuki which he spent about half of his life being apart of (kind of the timeline is a little fucked up but ya know) Orochimaru was Sasori’s partner when Oro ultimately defected. To Sasori he probably did take this as a personal betrayal, and tbh puppet boy was kinda petty - just like his future partner. But again, he was obviously vocal about his hatred (oh look another emotion) bc Deidara mentioned this. But it kind of does beg the question as to why Sasori would have been so offended by Oro’s defection. I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps there was a part of him that never wanted to completely right off humanity. That after all of these years, Oro’s betrayal hit him harder than he ever thought bc he never expected it. He was comfortable with how the akatsuki was running (I like to think of him as a massive creature of habit) and Oro disrupted it, threw things off balance, and bc Sasori has never had healthy coping mechanisms, his only viable option was to swear to kill Orochimaru for betraying the one thing that had ever given Sasori’s life any sort of stability. And that’s what the Akatsuki was to Sasori. The only thing that didn’t judge him and let him do as he pleased. It was the only stable time in his life and it made him feel somewhat secure, he wanted it to last forever.