#my naruto otps btw are naruhina sasusaku and obikaka to name a few

[squirrelwrangler]

Why do you dislike Naruto/Sakura? Please don’t tell me it’s because of the whole ‘Naruto harasses Sakura for dates all the time in Part 1’ because while I don’t know if that’s fanon or from the anime, it’s definitely not a thing in the manga.

shipping tastes are subjective, (and I’m half-delighted, half-befuddled? amused? concerned? to get a Naruto ask in 2020 and shipping main characters at that) but from the very beginning I felt zero appeal for Naruto/Sakura. Part of it is that I immediately pegged the trope of “immature teenage boy has the shallow crush on the pretty and older girl as a manifestation of his desire to be more adult and also to have that social acceptance and status that his awkwardness or in this case actual social isolation and ostracism has denied him”. In Western media this is usually the crush on the older teenage babysister/older sibling’s friend - Dipper from Gravity Falls is a good recent example. Also why I had problems from the get-go with Kataang and why the resolution to that particular ship felt weird and contradictory to both tropes and what was being established. Any time a ship feels like it’s encroaching into that trope, 99% of the time I refuse to ship it. And there is a strong gendered element to this. But if a character is introduced at the start of a story crushing on a character, I know my plots. Main character? That first crush is not endgame. Especially if male. Female character or secondary lead is more nuanced.

Naruto as presented at the start of Part One is blindingly clear about the “He Wants this but Really WantsNeeds This” - he wants Hokage at first as validation and recognition, and the point of the Wave Arc is to transform that desire from the ego boost status of “If I’m Hokage, they will have to recognize me” to “I want strength not for solely self-centered reasons, but because I recognize others have pain like I experience, and thus I want the power/status of Hokage not to stop my pain but to actively protect others from going through this too”. Le Basic Core Manga Theme.

So in that first episode I immediately looked for the Option Two - where’s the actual endgame love interest, because it’s blindingly clear that the Sakura crush is going to resolve into that double-barrel of ‘you aren’t entitled to a girl just because she’s pretty’ and ‘what you really need is supportive friends and once you mature pass the shallow crush you two are going to ride or die friends and she’s your team-mom that she will momma-bear protect you’ - which lol, I was right. And right away there was Hinata, the complimentary contrast designed character who wholly believed in Naruto for what he was innately (his true desire) unknowingly to him, which meant his character arc would obviously entail as part of his maturation recognizing this. I saw this trope; I beamed with delight.

(There’s a parallel discussion of why Sasuke/Sakura is my other instant otp and why I’m not sure which I love more, where core issue is accepting the proffered love instead of denying it out of trauma and fear of tragedy repeating. That ship is also pure heget id candy and that the park bench scene so strongly paralleled the firefly goodbye scene of Ruroni Kenshin broke me when first watching it.)

I’m far more upset with how the anime screwed over the Sasuke/Sakura moments.

But their personalities didn’t read as balanced to me in a good story romance way, absolutely none of their manga interactions came across as romantic instead of platonic or familial (there isn’t a single part that reads as genuinely romantically framed to me), and visually they don’t look good together. Colors clash. Fanart of the two otps always looks pretty, never narusaku.

...any other anime shipping asks?