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cthulhu-with-a-fez · 6 months

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i started naruto a few years ago and made it to like the second arc in shippuden before stopping so i never made it to the kakashi backstory but....your notes compel me. tell me more.

okay so like take this with several grains of salt because the sum total of my sources here are "my understanding of the plot and characters as synthesized from the Abridged Revised Illustrated Edition my datemate's been writing me over the last two months", a handful of clips, and the only three (3) episodes of this 600+ episode show i've seen in my life, none of the three of which were relevant to the kakashi backstory

h o w e v e r

oh my god. my dude. my man. [holds him up like longcat] there is so much wrong with you and i'm enthralled.

so like here's the thing. here's the big takeaway that i'm understanding. this whole series is an ongoing exercise in generational trauma bullshit and everyone trying so hard to course-correct from their own tragic backstories that they accidentally set up their kids/students to have completely different but still somehow exactly the same tragic backstories, and naruto's chronic case of shounen anime power-of-friendship-itis is, i mean. yes it's him being the platonic ideal of Pure Of Heart And Dumb Of Ass but it's also a direct response to seeing ninja society's perpetual tragic backstory generator and going "this is bullshit, why are we even fighting? tell me what your side is, and i'll tell you what our side is, and then we can figure out how to make our sides the same side so none of us have to fight about it at all!" and honestly i love that but this ain't about him

so like. to explain kakashi we have to explain kakashi's father sakumo first. because sakumo was one of konoha's powerhouses, been on tons of successful missions, well-liked, well-respected, one of the earliest and loudest adopters of konoha's then-new and radical pivot towards a ninja being people first and disposable tools never ideology.

he really, genuinely believed in that.

except then he and his team went on a mission. and it went really, really badly. and he had to choose between completing the mission objective or saving his teammates' lives, and he chose their lives, because those who fail their missions may be scum, but those who abandon their teammates are worse, right?

... no, actually.

just because the ideology had been circulating and people were broadly toeing the party line didn't mean they actually believed in it, and sakumo's mission failure was already causing critical backlash.after sakumo made it back to konoha he was a fucking pariah for it. he was never officially reprimanded, but he didn't need to be if people went out of their way to personally spit at his feet, and... one day young kakashi comes home to find his father's body on the floor, wrists slit and suicide note devolving into begging apologies beside him.

this, as you may imagine, fucked him up, and didn't exactly predispose him towards believing the party line about the value of life.

he gets put on a genin team that was. basically the alpha build of the sasuke-sakura-naruto team dynamic. because it was him, and rin the healer girl with a massive crush on him who he never gave the time of day, and obito the Loudest High-Vis Uchiha Who Ever Lived who had a massive crush on her, and minato their teacher who was doing his absolute best to try and get them through to understanding each other, which is an Ordeal

because kakashi at this point has internalized that the party line is pretty lies for the gullible, that his teammates are only there to drag him down, and it drives obito nuts because that's the same exact bullshit that his family keeps spouting that he's rejected as thoroughly as a 12.9-year-old can, how does kakashi not see that it's bullshit? and there's rin who's looking at kakashi like i can fix him?? and getting upset when he doesn't let them in at all or even really visibly care that they're trying, and it's one hell of a dysfunction junction but minato is working on it.

... and then the worst happens. their team is caught out alone and everything goes wrong. rin is captured and obito's body is half-crushed under a rock and one of kakashi's eyes got slashed out and none of them are going to make it out of this, at this rate, until obito calls kakashi closer and tells him to take his eye. take the sharingan. he'd give him both but the other one got squished. kakashi will do more with it than obito ever did, so use it to save rin. please. and here's kakashi in the middle of field surgery on his dying teammate finally, horribly realizing that sometimes the win condition is, actually, protecting your friends, and he's already lost. but he can still try to save rin, it was obito's dying wish.

by the time he found her it was already too late.

the people who'd captured her had tried, poorly, hastily, messily, to seal one of the Tailed Beasts into her, and she was already dying. she had a demon thrashing in her soul that was tearing her to shreds around it and all kakashi could do was mercy kill her

and she thanked him for it.

and he goes back to konoha, sole survivor of his team, charred by the newfound comprehension of why you have to care and what it feels like to lose what you love and with obito's sharingan in his head and rin's blood on his hands and something in him that was already hanging on by a thread finally snapped.

and the only thing he could think to do, the only way he could even parse that grief through, is to just... make himself into a living memorial to them. he started trying to live as obito. adopt his mannerisms, his interests, craft his entire adult persona around his memories of his friend like a grave offering, and quarantine the bleakly mercenary anything-to-get-the-job-done ice in him off into the hound mask he wore as part of konoha's black ops division, which he joined at the ripe old age of way too fucking young.

he uses the sharingan to incredibly brutally efficient effect, copying enemy jutsus and bringing them back until the library's overflowing with them. but in the end, no matter how many he can technically use, they're still just cheap copies. and so is he.

and in the meantime the uchiha are collectively losing their shit about this random outside kid having one of their eyes in his head and getting all kinds of dubious 'glory' with it, and oh, wouldn't you look at that, they have a prodigy too!

... yeah.

itachi gets shoved through the rank advancements on a timeframe of "whatever he did you have to do it faster and better." and then the kyuubi broke free. and minato and kushina died, and a fuckton of the home guard uchiha died, and suddenly he's the most able-bodied fighter in their clan overnight at age 11 and the uchiha pull strings to get him into ANBU as well.

and kakashi is his teammate.

kakashi is his teammate and kakashi sees in itachi a whole awful lot of the edges of the way kakashi used to be, sees itachi trying to live up to and embody the absolutely impossible ideal of the perfect ninja, and he tries so god damn hard to nudge him gently towards something, anything, other than that.

but in the meantime, the uchiha have been... scheming. with danzo, Guy With The World's Biggest Chip On His Shoulder About Not Being Hokage, who's been marinating in a paranoia spiral for years. danzo had tried to set himself up as kakashi's palpatine, and tried to get him to assassinate hiruzen, and kakashi hears him out, and turns right around and goes to hiruzen with it instead, and danzo is pissed. the uchiha are pissed. danzo warns hiruzen that they're almost definitely going to try again and they're gonna make the uchihas' little prodigy do it this time, and kakashi silently braces to have to fight and maybe kill his teammate he was trying so hard for, and then...

and then itachi, who'd been watching his clan get. worse. for a long time. finds his cousin shisui, his best friend shishui, bleeding out in the dirt, who tells him everything, tells him danzo tried to have shisui killed for finding it out, and it worked, he's dying, but he's not dead yet, so please. make it count.

.......................................... And Then The Uchiha Massacre.

and now itachi is one more person that kakashi tried to care about who got destroyed.

and then fast forward a little bit further, he's been retired from active-duty ANBU after a decade-plus of service because the sharingan is starting to burn him out, he's starting to lurch to a halt like unwound clockwork without something to Do, and... he gets given team seven. the worst of konoha's gremlin children.

a bitter, disillusioned loner with a chip on his shoulder and the skill to back it up, the healer girl with a crush on him that he never gives the time of day, and the Loudest High-Vis Pest In The Village.

you see where this is going.

kakashi who at this point has been coasting along by bouncing between mask-personae for years is now having to dynamically engage with life again because if he isn't present and actively responding to his team then there's a nonzero chance he'll turn around to find all three of them chewing on the drywall and he cannot default to scripted responses because they don't work on a pack of middle schoolers hellbent on squabbling til the cows come home. and it's kind of good for him?

but also, uh. [gestures broadly towards... Sasuke(TM) and the rest of the plot]

and yeah i'm not gonna get too much further into it because i'm not confident enough in my own comprehension of the timeline to do that XD but like.

hatake kakashi is a scarecrow of a man stitched together out of his dead best friend, a hunting hound, and his dead best friend again, who's spent his entire life behind one mask or another, who over the course of the series keeps surviving shit that by all odds he shouldn't have, or survives specifically because the people he cares about throw their plot armor around him before they die, and he has a personality mostly composed of the crumpled-up pages of the memetically worst-written trashy bodice-ripper novels ever published because obito used to love them and the inexplicable receipts of other people's love for him, and i want to put him in a gas station hot dog roller and perceive him.

thank you for coming to my ted talk XD

#answered asks by cwaf #snorlaxlovesme #kakashi hatake #naruto #yeah so like this very much is a thirdhand synthesis Take on it XD but oh my god. holy shit #this series is a masterclass in what is quite possibly the oldest story beat humanity has ever had #which is 'growing up realizing that your adult is fucked up because Their Adult was fucked up because THEIR ADULT was fucked up'#'and responding to it by either becoming them; becoming as different from them as possible; or a secret third thing'#anyway here i am showing up to the weeb-ubiquitous kakashi stan phase 20 years late with starbucks lmao #mr from-accounting you have so many things wrong with you and i love that for me

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