#anyways this is about naruto

[morepopcornplease]

No word yet exists for the sorrow of being unable to find that 1 shippy amv from ~15 years ago

[wasyago]

welp, didn't manage to get everything out before season 10 started, but i gotta post it one way or another so here we go! heard there was a fandom swap game going on, wanted to do a couple promts of my own :D

[atoriv-art]

skittish

[socra-time]

My current favorite genin team, I hope nothing bad happens to them ever😭

[summerhighlandfalls]

Crisis put on hold momentarily to avoid being murdered

[naturecalls111]

WIP!!! Stealing glances amidst victory celebrations in Suna….

[karmelarts]

GAY BOY

[yellowocaballero]

i very much enjoy the extremely scientific analysis of the naruto verse in which there are three genders, aka naruto, sasuke, and Woman.

AM I WRONG? AM I WRONG? pulls down projection screen and plays powerpoint

Obviously let's give room for nuance. A ton of Naruto characters don't fall into these gender norms. This does predominantly apply to the rampant proliferation of the three-person dynamics that were assigned by the government and dictate your entire life. And, like, society. It does not end. Gender isn't a biological factor in Naruto, it's a social dynamic constructed entirely by your homoerotic tension with other men. And there are so many.

Madara (S), Hashirama (N), Mito (W). Izuna (N) and Tobirama (S) - tragically, Izuna died before women could be invented. Sarutobi (N), Danzo (S, horrifically) - see above about women not being invented yet. Jiraiya (N), Orochimaru (S), Tsunade (W). Yahiko (N), Nagato (S), Konan (W). Obito (N), Kakashi (S), Rin (W). Shisui (N), Itachi (S), that little deeply unimportant girlfriend (W). Um, fucking, Naruto (N), Sasuke (S), Sakura (W). Even - even, fuckin, Rock Lee (N), Neiji (S), Tenten (W).

And what do they all have in common????

(OT3. They're all OT3s. Is what I'm saying).

There is some room for alternative gender expressions here, like being butch or femme. Naruto gender expressions: teacher, otouto, woman who you can't even tell is woman gendered because she has no backstory but you just have to kinda assume that she has a polycule-based backstory where she was Woman Gender. I feel almost as if 2/3rds of the Rookie 9 are liberated from this. InoShikaCho just doesn't fit (their chaotic cousin energy is just too strong and Ino's too much of a lesbian). Hinata's too busy being defined entirely by a different throuple's N to have codependent dynamics with her own N and S (and I'm hesitant to even say that, since I actually don't know if Kiba and Shino have a codependent rivalry - do they?).

I get, like, the reason for all of this. Curse of Hatred. Cycles. N and S Genders being sourced from demigods or something. Narrative parallelism. Sympathy points. It's not the bad guy's fault he's evil, his N and W gendered counterparts died :(. But an extremely strange side-effect of this is that all of the male characters are, like, Just Naruto or Just Sasuke. But the vast majority of the female characters are - like, completely defined by the men in their lives - but also they are more likely to be a unique person. Mito, Sakura, and Rin have actually nothing in common. Writing so sexist it creates more interesting characters?!?!

Unironically, this is why I'm always saying that Sasunaru is the ship of all time, nothing will ever top it, you will NEVER do it like Sasunaru, etc. Every important relationship in the series is meant to evoke Sasunaru. (Notably, none of the explicitly romantic ones. But we're beyond such paltry understandings of the most iconic pairing of all time as fundamentally based in romance. We're operating on a higher level than that). This unbroken chain of toxic yaoi has culminated at the end point of Sasunaru, and it exists to parallel Sasunaru and define their relationship by the dysfunction of generations of tragedy. That's why Naruto has to consciously break the cycle and free them from the generational hate - it was the only way to save Sasuke. This is also why I'm always saying that Sasunaru is the point of Naruto, and that the entirety of Naruto is about Sasunaru. Come back to me when your work has invented new genders in the all-encompassing pursuit of toxic yaoi.

This also means that the only truly gender non-conforming individuals in Naruto are its mightiest heterosexuals: Minato (W) and Kushina (N). Truly insane. The N/S/W configuration is the societal norm, it's bonkers to make a major good-aligned male character a wifeguy. By Naruto standards Minato and Kushina are the only queer couple.

[notkakashihatake]

Everyone wants to talk about Gojo and Kakashi but no one wants to make the real connection to Kakashi and Nanami

[keepyourpantsongohan]

Meaningful Highlights from Kakashi Retsuden:

Minato catching Kakashi before he falls, the same way Kakashi always does for his students. And Kakashi, even at eight or nine years old, straight out of his father's funeral and before being his student, immediately relaxing when he runs into Minato: His feet tangled beneath him and he pitched forward. Into someone’s back. “You were really strong back there,” a voice told him, and he suddenly saw bright golden hair. He felt his breathing become a little easier. The Yellow Flash of Konoha. Namikaze Minato.

Kakashi describing his current feelings about his father: Now he felt proud from the bottom of his heart to have been born the child of the White Fang of Konoha.

Kakashi wanting to help the people of Redaku in a way that they can sustain themselves, even as he actually is providing a great deal of support through the process: The people of this country had to learn how to stand up and walk under their own strength. Give a starving person bread or teach them how to grow wheat. As Hokage, Kakashi had always chosen the latter.

Kakashi reflecting on his time as Sixth Hokage he eschewed tradition to build something that developed beyond shinobi: A never-ending peace. That was what Kakashi had sought as the Sixth Hokage. An orderly society that would go on and on even when he was not the Hokage, even when the day came when the role of Hokage disappeared. To create a framework so that they would never again fall into the quagmire of war.

The way Kakashi shows that he still views all of the former students taught by him and his friends in a parental and protective way: They had long since reached adulthood, and some were now parents while others were active on the front lines as shinobi. Even so, no matter how many years passed, to Kakashi, they were his precious students and the next generation who needed to be protected. Seeing them having so much fun was enough to ease his heart.

[heleizition]

this is my naruto oc age 12 and age like 15 lmao she goes through it

[team7-headquarter]

Whenever someone tries to make a point about something the Konoha kunoichis, I need to make a pause and remind them how out of character they were in some of those moments.

Kishimoto pretty much abandoned Sakura and Ino's friendship and then tried to bring it back during the War arc. Ino lost her sensei and then her dad, and when was Sakura? You mean to tell me she wouldn't care? About any of it? Or when Sasuke was declared to be killed, do you mean to tell me that Ino wouldn't have run to find Sakura?

The way Hinata was written on Shippuden???? Naruto aside, people forget that Hinata refused to give up during the Chunning Exams and forced Neji to almost kill her if he wanted the victory. She was stubborn, she was prideful too, she had more going on than simply a crush on Naruto. She was told by her father she was a failure and yet she didn't give up on becoming a kunoichi, did she?

Then why is that Shippuden wrote her like her sole ambition was Naruto, hm?

And Tenten? She was MEAN when she wanted to be because she was highly competitive. We know that she wanted to train under Tsunade, so where did the death of that dream take her? She's such a powerful kunoichi and yet we know so little about her personality, her life...

We got "Ino and Hinata know some medic min techniques" in the most random way possible... We know Sakura would walk around with Hinata even, so what about their girl bonding moments during the genin to Shippuden years?

It made me so angry whenever the girls treated each other like strangers in Shippuden. So many stupid situations made to highly their teammates even if I meant to write the girls out of character...

[wasyago]

hinata 🤲🤲🤲🤲🤲

[atoriv-art]

older designs for my specialest guy

[tavina-writes]

I'm not exactly sure how I want to phrase this yet, but I think a lot of the utterly weird takes I see sometimes float by me on our cursed blue hellsite (esp when it comes to mdzscql fandom) is coming from a refusal to meet the genre where it's at.

Like, why are we trying to interrogate classism in MDZS society, MDZS is a romance, the societal worldbuilding is just enough to support some general big ideas and the provide context for the romance. We can't get ANY kind of read on general classim/sexism/anything else from. this source material. if you think you can get granular when your sample size of characters from various social and gender strata are so small and we don't know how the vast majority of people in here live you are making stuff up.

Like, meet the story where it's at: it's a romance novel.

[teatitty]

Iruka casually dropping that his ma was ANBU and his friends are like "oh that's cool - WAIT WHAT???" and this is how Kakashi finds out that Vulture, the commanding officer who struck fear into every new recruit and once used a barrier to crush someone into paste against a wall, is Iruka's mother. The same mother he used to describe as "not big on affection and kind of a tough love sort but had a soft spot for sushi." The same mother he said "burst into tears one time because she was high on pain meds and was overcome with Feelings"

And now he just has to live with that knowledge. Forever. At least they finally have an explanation for Iruka's infamous temper