#but also like. the sexism actively makes it worse. you can't make your trio story suddenly a story about a duo

[batsplat]

Oh rewatching Naruto to pick up languages sounds fun!

Naruto infuriates me so so much. I could go from 0 to 60 from a random Naruto post. There was a base a good foundation. Great character designs who could have grown and developed so well. We could have had so much nuance and issues addressed. Just slivers of brilliance and then trash. The whole students who faced war and pain go on to become teachers who do the same without empathy (there are days where Kakashi makes me scream in rage) My face when they introduced Kaguya as the big bad behind Madara. I won't even touch Naruto, Sasuke & Itachi.

But the akatsuki, oh loved every one of their stories.

You mentioned web novels and I flashed to the trenches of MTL. I do think the Chinese ones provide such delicious angst though. They don't hesitate. At all. To take the dark turns. The enemies to lovers trope in those are TRULY enemies. The pain is PAIN. but the redemption is worth it too. Yuwu by meatbun was the last one I read and that was heavy.

yeah, it is!! unfortunately the studio responsible for the dubbing... massively had to scale back production for war-related reasons, so the naruto dub does tail off shortly before shippuden. but well, they did dub a hell of a lot of detective conan episodes because apparently that's a major hit (rightly so!!)

and yeah character development in naruto was... well, look, it was never good, but eventually it REALLY became a mess. what you can say in defence of the pre-shippuden stuff is that it has some fairly clear themes and coming-of-age plot threads of like,, naruto gradually being accepted by the village, finding his own place within this community, making friends... I mean it was always a little bit threadbare because you don't really get the sense there's all that much naruto has to develop, except maybe 'accepting himself and calming down a bit', because from the framing of the show it's really just the world around him that has to change. (alternatively it's framed as basically fine that he needs to actively fight the village to be accepted which!! no!!) but that's getting in the weeds. it's fine. they don't have to reinvent the wheel, the basic character premise is all right

but then by the time to get to shippuden, the arc is... naruto learning about the horrors of hard choices? or something. I guess. also not giving up on sasuke, which really is his major driving motivation in shippuden beyond 'not getting his monster sucked out of his body', but the narrative never really takes a stance on the sasuke question, which?? it's your central conflict, you've got to take a stance on it!! like, is him never giving up on sasuke good because it shows his pure soul and power of friendship and how he knows this traumatised child soldier isn't beyond redemption, or is it bad because he's delusional and not paying enough attention to all of sasuke's victims and it keeps distracting him from this existential threat? we don't know!! it's not resolved! it's kind of resolved in that sasuke did come back to the good side, which you'd think would mean the narrative feels naruto was right, but then on the other hand naruto was really only very tenuously involved in this 'redemptive' process. they got to the point where literally everyone was telling him to finally drop the sasuke quest and then the narrative just... moves on. never resolves it!! so as a result of the whole plot becoming such a. mess. leading up to the final war arc, kishimoto kinda forgot to give his main emotional and thematic and character tension of the series a satisfying ending

the whole point of the sasuke character was... going through a lot of trauma when you are young and losing stuff you remember having can kinda fuck you up and send you down an ultimately self-destructive path of hatred and bitterness and close you down to forming new attachments. so sasuke functions as one of naruto's many shadow selves in the series (the other major ones being gaara and pain) about how naruto just escaped that path, but it's always a fairly thin line and naruto could also be consumed by bitterness if he isn't careful. and also naruto's got a saviour complex because he feels like the only one who can get all the bad boys and he empathises to a painful extent with them, so saving sasuke is also about like. confronting the monster within and needing to believe there's hope for sasuke still because that also means there's hope for naruto. which is all FINE, ignoring execution I do think that's a perfectly solid premise for your shounen protagonist arc. but then the itachi twist is... well, it's a lot!! it steamrolls a lot of this arc if you think about it for two seconds too long! like it's interesting and I don't HATE hate it but it does also just Fundamentally Change the moral logic of the naruto universe in a way the narrative never reckons with! because if itachi was following his village's orders in slaughtering their entire clan, then... well, sasuke is right! his revolutionary cause is broadly justified, even if it comes from a place of loss and trauma! the uchiha WERE right to think konoha couldn't be trusted! it's an unjustifiable crime! suddenly the entire calculus of sasuke being consumed by revenge changes, because unless your stance is that 'all revenge is bad' (clearly not true in ninja world), that is pretty much as justifiable a revenge quest as you can get!

at which point. you just get to this weird place where the politics of naruto-verse become kinda fucked, because the only reason why konoha is 'good' is for some vibes-based 'well, the status quo is fundamentally preferable' argument. chaos reigned before the villages, so The Village needs to be preserved at all costs! and it's kinda... look, I don't want to over-examine the politics of the naruto-verse, but I do think it's a bit of an issue if your 'it's wrong to judge outsiders and especially innocent children for stuff outside of their control' story becomes a 'well the institutions of power have a few Bad Actors but the real villains will always be those traumatised by the institutions of the state who attempt to change the status quo' story. when I was a teen reading shippuden the first time, I was introduced to the 'uchiha's are doomed to a curse of hatred where unless they're super careful they're genetically locked into becoming the baddies' stuff and was like 'oh yeah what this is leading to is a big lesson about how this kind of thinking that demonises an entire population is exactly as misguided as the villagers being mean to naruto' because apparently I was an idiot who thought this story was going in a thematically coherent direction. in the end, the stance of the whole narrative is basically 'yeah the curse of hatred is a thing, the uchiha ARE all kinda genetically predisposed to losing themselves to hatred', which? please stop? think about what your story is saying!! this is a bad bad message!!

basically, kishimoto needed to ignore all this ninja war stuff - you needed some kind of vaguely satisfying conclusion to THAT story and all the other stuff can sort itself out. I don't even massively care what stance you end up taking on sasuke as long as you take one!! I mean ultimately I suppose I'd prefer naruto being able to save sasuke, but also y'know convince me on whatever you want, just do SOMETHING with it rather than like. the endless war arc. that simply would not end. it just became too convoluted!! super easy and common flaw for long running series to fall prey to, but still! fix it! obviously there's a few other glaring issues here like 'clearly if you've got a trio then you need your third main character to also play a role in this central conflict', where they just. extremely fluffed it with sakura. I have zero problem with a lot of her early characterisation like her being mean to naruto or having a crush on sasuke, she's a young girl it's FINE. but obviously the power-scaling of this series ends up being like,, inherently sexist, and they progressively ruin all of naruto's underdog charm by not only making the monster inside him a clear upside (given using the nine tailed fox came with diminishing costs and he got control over it... way too easily) but also ensuring he too has a deeply significant bloodline lineage with the uzumaki's. his dad minato has underdog appeal because he didn't come from a significant family!! not naruto! and I'm fond enough of minato and kushina that even though I hate this retcon for thematic reasons, I can't hate hate them, I think they're cute, but!! at a certain stage you need to figure out how you're going to somehow remain true to the starting point of your story

and figure out what to do with sakura - on paper you'd think she'd be the mediator between naruto and sasuke in their extreme stances, but you don't actually need a mediator because naruto is already completely pro-sasuke!! and had a more significant relationship with him than sakura did from basically the start, like there is nothing about sasuke that sakura knows and naruto doesn't. (there are very obvious implications for which of these characters should have been given a romantic ending, but let's not even get into that.) and obviously they were never going to do this in their shounen power fantasy, but it should have been sakura to embody the ultimate underdog power fantasy - because narratively she's actually the only underdog left. she's konoha's will of fire personified, she's the one who can function as a narrative stand-in for the village with all its fighting spirit and nominal egalitarianism and prejudices and flaws. it's fine if shippuden is mostly operating on different thematic ground than the first bit of the series, though you do still need to take a stance on the sasuke question... which means it should obviously have been sakura, as practically the first character in the series to judge both naruto and sasuke and make up her mind on both of them, to be symbolically granted the power to Give Them A Chance and ensure they're both not doomed to the monsters within by bringing about change to the structures that demonised and isolated them in the first place. I'm not asking for socialist utopias in my ninja worldbuilding, but if you're going to introduce 'the state ordered the deuteragonist's brother to do a genocide on his entire family' as a major plot point, you do have to find SOME kind of resolution to it idk. and the fact sakura was like?? knocked out during the naruto and sasuke fight at the end?? genuine insanity. zero interest in the third most important character in the whole story. what was the plan. I have thought for many years about what is wrong with that series and what I would fix and I will spend many more doing so