#if you hate sakura i diagnose you with im going to fucking kill you disease

[namisweatheria]

I can't believe someone actually wrote Sakura hate on my Nami defending post. Anyone who knows me would shriek in horror. I'm so enraged I've tried and failed to begin this post about a million times now.

While I find it a massive failure of a person's quality of intelligence and character to hate on misogynistically-written characters using the exact same language as the larger misogynistic fanbase who also hates them, despite thinking of themselves as somehow different, in general... when it comes to Haruno Sakura at this point if you're out here on the internet in 2024 saying negative things about her in random comment sections I genuinely think you're a clueless idiot and I hate your stupid guts. lol

The online mania of Sakura hatred left it's fucking mark on people who grew up as girls watching Naruto. I honestly wasn't a very online kid, so I only know about that from my friends' experiences, but how the show itself treated her left it's mark on me all on it's own. And I can see the legacy of that mania online now! Anything that so much as mentions female characters, or sexism, or annoying characters, in anime, will get mean comments about her. It's still here and it's infuriating!

Everyone should be able to separate the bigoted writing that can make a character unpleasant, and the character itself. Otherwise one just ends up contributing to the wave of hatred from bigoted fans. That always ends up hurting real people!

The widespread out-sized fervent hatred of Sakura is particularly something there is no excuse to continue to add to. At this point she represents so much more than a specific character. She symbolizes the continuation of a fucked up online culture that directs their ire at female shounen characters instead of the men who wrote them into horrible little boxes.

So, I don't even have to defend her actual character. It's not really about that. I'm going to anyways though. Because I love her to pieces and so much said about her is just slander.

Sakura fucking rules and is a compelling sympathetic character with a good arc, she was just written by a man who hates women and takes every single opportunity to put his female characters in their place. (The fucking background, kitchen, or grave.) Sometimes all three in that order!

Sakura's worst crime is being a 12 year old Girl. She's insensitive, as 12 year olds can be. She's hyper-conforming to hetero-feminine roles, as her society expects her to be, and she's over-the-top and embarrassing about it, because she's 12.

In the beginning she's often weak and scared in the background, because that's the box she was put into as The Girl. If she had gotten to have equal capability with her teammates early on then Kishimoto wouldn't have been able to focus totally on the male characters he actually cared about. To blame her for that instead of sympathizing with the angst it caused her is so heartless and backwards.

All the writing involving Sasuke fucking sucked, and Sakura's the biggest victim of that. The whole "charm" of their "romance" is that she'll stand by him and love him no matter how terribly he treats her. Does that not sound fucking familiar. It is some of the most basic misogyny there is. That is an age-old evil expectation put on countless women, not a cute story. Hating their "romance", but expressing it by blaming her for being put into that role by Kishimoto is so fucking stupid.

(Also, it's so, so, easy to interpret her hyper performative heterosexuality as closeted lesbianism. She's so unintentionally gay-coded, especially her relationship with Ino.)

It very much happens silently in the background, because I think Kishimoto will spontaneously start choking on his own blood if he tries to focus on a female character instead of his male faves for more than a single minute, but Sakura does have a good arc! Remember Inner-Sakura? She was treated as just a gag, but if you take her seriously for a second you'll realize it was actually deeply disturbing.

Sakura was repressing her anger and goofiness, because she was trying so hard to be this want-able, feminine girl. It wasn't just her unspoken thoughts, she had a whole alternate personality tucked away because of the trauma of being a girl in a sexist society.

Ino describes it here as "A whole other psyche" and is so disturbed by it she asks her, "What are you?"

The most interesting, satisfying thing about Inner-Sakura is: She goes away. She goes away after Sakura trains under a strong, successful, funny, angry, loud woman. Tsunade helps Sakura express her anger instead of repressing it, just by being near her, she shows her the kind of woman she can be. She encourages her and teaches her to be strong and shows her it's okay to be mad. Now when Sakura is angry she can yell and punch a mountain into dust about it.

It's very much in the background, but it happens. And it's everything. How could you not care about it, once you notice it? How can you not care about her?

One of the most annoying things people say about Sakura is that she became strong out of nowhere. I think those people just weren't paying fucking attention to her lol.

Not to mention, if Naruto and Sasuke can each get super-powered Sannin to train them personally, why can't Sakura? What's wrong with that? She wanted desperately to keep up with them, to be strong enough to protect them, and she knew exactly who to go to. Why wouldn't you root for her?

So what if there's nothing that makes her special, to those who only care about genetic abilities and tailed beasts. She works hard. She fights tooth and nail. There's a reason she gets along so well with Rock Lee. In Kakashi's words, "Like Naruto, Sakura possesses a heart that cannot bear to be beaten." In Sakura's:

God, just. How can you not be obsessed with her? It's not her fault the sexist mangaka couldn't let her keep developing on-screen for more than one chapter per 30 volumes without actually grappling with the fact that there's a third person in his stupid two person narrative. She's so fucking great she's crazy she's rude she's funny she's audacious she has guts!!!!!!!!!!! You absolutely cannot come into my space with a negative word on her name. Love and respect Haruno Sakura or simply die.