#narutos tragic backstory

[qlsvn]

so uhm erm shikanaru transmigrator au where shikamaru is the tm and things went a LITTLE bit different where naruto never got the love and acceptance in the OG and uhm.. Bingge’d it up (sans the 600+ wives) and no one, including Shikamaru, rlly gave Naruto the time of day,

and tm shikamaru is all like “omg im in my favorite animanga !!” but then also like “but as side character cannon fodder oh no” haha wtf

(so like ironically he doesnt rlly like any of the side characters for their mistreatment of naruto despite his jinchuriki status) but he does admit he relates a lil bit to shikamaru’s laissez-faire attitude and quiet lazy genius reluctantly meanwhile everyone who knows him and the story is like “that’s TOTALLY you dude what r u talking about !?”)

so anyway in true svsss fashion (bc its my favorite transmigration story shut up) he makes it his goal to befriend naruto and stay alive unknowingly completely throwing “canon” (the canon of this universe at least) off through Naruto

UNLIKE w sqq its not him directly who befriends and changes everyone, he just befriends and changes Naruto. Naruto does the rest

I’LL ALSO ACCEPT Naruhina w transmigrator Hinata bc i love love LOVE Shikanaru and Naruhina more than ANYTHING !! ♡

i’ll also maybe accept transmigrated author uhhh Shino or smth idk if anyone sees this u can decide this was a very shitty synopsis bye

[edgy-senju]

You bite at the hand that feeds you

[fungh0u1]

this THIRTEEN YEAR OLD killed FOUR HUNDRED PEOPLE with SAND ABILITIES! but i forgive him.

[keikaru]

Miyo Ariake, my Naruto OC I commissioned @/nikimarii to draw. <3

You can learn more about her on Toyhouse!

Special report from her sensei, Motochika: “Miyo Ariake—a promising shinobi who possess a rare blend of intelligence, hard work, and sharpness—stands out among her peers. Her intelligence shines through when she finishes half of the written portion of the Chunin exam questions without resorting to ‘intel-gathering’ means. Adept at chakra manipulation, she coordinates swift and powerful strikes without hesitation. Her lightning affinity is surprisingly devastating among the new recruits. Many paths fan out before her should she choose to become part of the Hokage’s council, or bloom into the midnight lighting shinobi. Interestingly, an old report states that she was rescued from a trafficking ring that was going to auction her off. Rumors have circulated that she’s from an influential clan from the Land of Clouds, but most of her origins are shrouded in mystery.”

[coockie8]

Sorry just remembered like over ten years ago my sister tried to play Oppression Olympics™ between Sasuke and Neji, claiming Sasuke's had a harder life and like yeah his entire family was killed and his brother made him watch it and that sucks.

Neji's family literally owns him.

Look I don't want to compare them or anything, and having to watch your family die is, objectively awful, but being actively kept as a slave by your own family is also an objectively awful thing lol

[beatriceportinari]

sorry can't get over this i know oc in fics are fine and often necessary if you want to flesh out a whole village so it's unfair to put them under more scrutiny but 😭😭😭😭😭 this poor lady only exists to punish izuna girl help

[placebozone]

《Naruto, Lucy & Sanji》

I used to think that my favourite character would always be the main character of an anime. But it turns out I actually just like the one who has a tragic past and then goes through even more shit yet still is the kindest soul to ever exist.

It wasn't until I watched one piece and realised I love Sanji more than Luffy along with a denial phase that I made the connection.

I've cried over and over again for these three and they were the only ones I desperately wanted to give a hug. They just hold the same space in my heart.

I don't know why I'm typing all of this out hahahaha I should have just posted the image. Anyways I'll probably be drawing more of these three together. After all, they are my top 3.

Also, I went through alot of work to get their ages before drawing and lucy is around 20 in 100 year quest so thats a relief.

[woman-respecter]

why is everyone comparing all the shounen anime mentors to kakashi when none of them will ever have suffered as much as kakashi did

[stjunebug]

“you can’t escape my eight trigrams” this “my eight trigrams will take you out” that. Yeah okay buddy i only need one trigram of fent to take you on

[qlsvn]

first actual post i think i never use tumblr

naruto like that kid never had parents but the anbu were always around ik their whole thing is detached unemotional invulnerable secret mission thing but imagine they (or at least SOME of them) felt some sort of emotional familial kinship w the kid

[elfgrove]

I feel like Sakura would point at the people around her and tell you they are exactly why she's "just like that."

Imagine if these folk (and those similar to them) were the majority of who you had to socialize with in your culture and chosen career field as well as these specific ones are you have to spend most of your waking hours with.

I love how sakura is just unhinged and it gets funnier as the manga progresses because she literally doesn't have a traumatizing backstory (there's some bullying and while that's impactful, it's not something that changes her to her core).

like kakashi is a magnet for corpses of loved ones, naruto is hated by his entire village for something he never had a choice in, sasuke saw his entire clan killed by his brother, sai was raised by the Most Evil Man of the Century. they all have valid reasons to be batshit insane

whereas sakura keeps up with them in the insanity department and there's no reason. she's just like that

[bookanimeart]

It's been a while since I've seen or read it, but I think Haku and Zabuza are the first times Sasuke's seen death since his clan.

[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.

[haine-kleine]

rewatching Naruto and going insane over the extremely obvious way Horikoshi copypasted the essence of that story into MHA. funnily, the ending proves that he doesn't seem to fully understand the source material.

what really makes Naruto stand out is that every character is treated as a human who is worthy to make their story known. it's still shounen so the powerscaling and violence are ever present but the humane element never goes away. it might seem downright ridiculous that up until the undead evil aliens come to assume the big bad role in the end, every big bad that has been carefully hyped up before ends up revealing their sob story and leaving the spot vacant. but this was precisely what made the characters so interesting that they still have loyal fans nearly two decades later. the audience was always allowed to sympathize with the villain, no matter how evil, violent or how long their kill list is, because what it really comes down to, is a collection of various people's stories about their trauma and how they deal with it.

all of the villains have extensive kill lists: Gaara was a serial killer at the tender age of 12, Itachi killed his best friend, his girlfriend, then his entire clan and mentally tortured his 7 years old little brother, Sasuke later goes on a killing spree and nearly murders several people who considered him heir friend, Obito and Madara killed more people than there are named characters in the Naruto universe, and so on and so forth. the story still encourages the readers to sympathize with these characters, to the point of obnoxious stubbornness, but it drives the point home. Naruto's approach to writing the villain characters is the antithesis of 'cool motive, still murder'. the story is much more concerned with telling the stories about individual characters, their traumatic backstories and how they deal with the trauma, than it is with the worldbuilding angle of 'and what legal consequences are coming for them next?'. the story would rather conveniently lean to fit the chosen narrative for each villain character than deal with realistic consequences, just so that the character remains sympathetic and/or tragic in the eyes of the audience. Gaara was known for being violent and unstable in his village, but after he had his change of heart he is allowed to become the Kazekage and is accepted and supported by his village. Nagato wipes out the entire Konoha village because he is supposed to be introduced as the ultimate big bad to date, but then magically brings back everyone to life in a disney esque move, because after unlocking his tragic backstory, we are supposed to consistently feel bad for the guy. the story would rather be ridiculously unrealistic to overstress the tragedy and trauma, because realism was never the purpose.

then, in MHA, which is a story about magic people using their individual magic skills to fight and save people, you would assume that the realism wouldn't be a primary concern here as well. at the heart of the concept, before it fell apart, MHA seemed like a perfect successor to the message conveyed in Naruto, which excused the various rip offs. it seemed Horikoshi had successfully cracked what was the problem at the heart of every single villain in Naruto: trauma and mental illness, and capitalized on it. the concept of the story seemed to be 'what if Naruto set out to save the Akatsuki?'.

(and it is impossible to deny the heavy inspiration, because s1 Shigaraki is literally chuunin exam era Gaara. they are the exact same character)

as a fan of Naruto and not much of a shounen enjoyer, MHA seemed to take everything i loved about Naruto and amplify it. the kids characters got to spend more time together as a clas, rather than being paired randomly during filler episode missions. we got to spend more time with the Akatsuki League of villains and got to see how they interact with each other as a group and what their individual relationships are like. they got to build up their tragic backstories early on, to be dramatically revealed later, and not immediately die afterwards. Shouto got to actually talk to his older brother, and discover his tragic backstory from the source instead of hearing about it after his death and being powerless to do anything but cry about it.

but then, around the final arc, the story, or rather the author, seems to realize that it has become too big for a shounen. and his way of dealing with the issue was abandoning everything he has been building up for years. the comparison with Naruto really highlights how the issue lies not in the characters and their irredeemable actions but in the story straying too far from the main theme and eventually getting lost completely.

that is not to say the execution or the plotline wholeness were not an issue in Naruto, it's riddled with plot holes and retcons. but where it lacks the logic and stability, it makes up with the sincerity and compassion the author never fails to have for his characters. the uchiha massacre was a really shitty plot line from a political standpoint, but it's not there as a part of the plot. it has always served as a background for Sasuke, first and foremost, to the point Itachi's character was reshaped and retconned twice to fit what Kishimoto had going for him. the plot, the world are a stage for the characters, not the other way around.

and what made MHA's writing fall apart was switching the focus from the characters as the driving forces for the story to the sociopolitical plot starting to use those characters as tools. before the war arc, it wasn't meant to be realistic, the 'reality' was a playground for the characters. just look at the MVA arc (the best MHA arc). what about a malnourished insomniac Shigaraki defeating a CEO who happens to be the leader of a terrorist organisation so hard said CEO is so impressed with him that he gives up his spot for Shigaraki is realistic? alternatively, what about the Sports Festival arc makes sense? nothing! the students of the most prestigious hero academy having the competition where they show off their quirks and all of its drawbacks for the entire country to see on live TV is the opposite of sensible, and during the licence exams the students of the other schools even point this out! Horikoshi just wanted to have his own chuunin exam arc, and can you fault him for that? it was cool as hell.

the thing about MHA is that it was never meant to be too realistic. it can't be, because the realism hurts this kind of story. shounen isn't meant to be realistic, it's meant to be flashy, cool, over the top dramatic, perhaps tragic, but realism really has no place in shounen. most importantly, because shounen is supposed to tell the story of the main character, whose epic journey is as enjoyable as it is inspiring.

but the main character's journey is supposed to have an end purpose, and successfully achieving it would be the culmination of the story. Naruto's purpose was saving Sasuke, who was taken in by the Big Bad Orochimaru, when everyone else has given up on him. Izuku's purpose seemed to be saving Shigaraki, who was taken by the Big Bad All For One, and the entire world has given up on saving him when he was just 5 years old. thus, Izuku would become 'the world's best hero', because he achieved an unprecedented fit of saving a villain. hell, he would have been even cooler than Naruto, who mastered the therapy talk jutsu on all the villains he had successfully reformed, but still had all of them die on him.

but no. funnily, Izuku fails spectacularly at achieving the purpose he had set for himself. Izuku doesn't save Shigaraki, he actually kills him. not even on purpose, Tomura's death was entirely an accident. (to really drive home how ridiculous that is, can you imagine Naruto murdering Sasuke on accident during their final battle, and then moving on with his life? an even more accurate example, imagine Naruto killing Gaara instead of giving him a heartfelt speech in s1)

by simple shounen logic, this means Izuku failed as a shounen character. he doesn't get his happy ending, because he didn't deserve it through consistently written and developed hard work towards a singular goal the character had chosen for himself. this also means Izuku didn't become the world's greatest hero. he lies to us in the prologue.

but we can't have a tragic ending to such optimistic and hopeful story now, can we? so the story does a very awkward and forced job of switching the perspective to drive the audience attention from the reality of the tragedy the ending brought on it. to drive attention away from Izuku and his failure, we have the public aggressively blaming Shigaraki for the destruction. his story is never made known and Izuku is not particularly interested in making it known, putting this responsibility on Spinner. Allmight, who felt personally responsible for Shigaraki's kidnapping by AFO back when he was alive is suddenly unbothered by his passing. the epilogue has nothing to focus on because every hero character had failed at achieving their personal goals and thus peaked. it is also weirdly stubborn in its refusal to seriously view the aftermath as tragedy, following the characters (acknowledged!) failure to save the villains they intended to save. the explanation was still warranted however, so the chosen strategy was focusing on the outside world and how it was affected by the consequences. but it simply won't work because the story was never focused on this before! it's no Avengers Civil War, The Boys or even MHA Vigilantes. MHA was always about the characters and their individual experiences. the world leaned into the characters plot points and shaped itself accordingly, not opposed the various socioeconomic and political problems that the concept of heroes would bring. the heroes ranking and HPCS are the highest authorities we know of in MHA. who is the president? who are the politicians? why is so much budget spent on the heroes, to the point the devastated and ruined after the war country deems it important enough to build various statues of them? the issue of quirk racism is consistently important, but why aren't any anti racism organisations brought up? isn't there any legal punishment for violence against mutants? does the law just permit harming or even killing mutants? shouji had his damn face cut up as a kid and his parents never went to police or made a lawsuit about it? we do know that police exists separately from the heroes, but how does law work at all in this universe? the answer is, it doesn't, because Hawks has a footage of him committing a murder shown on national TV and he doesn't face any legal repercussions at all, and is in fact promoted to a HPSC president shortly afterwards.

i hope the above paragraph conveys how utterly cartoonish MHA's 'realism' is. and what makes it bad isn't the illogical inconsistency or even the double standards, it's that the realism is used as a coverup for the author smashing the core theme of the story he took from another manga with hammers and setting it on fire. it's 400 chapters too late to make the core theme of the story the society in general and various social issues as concepts. it was supposed to be a story about Izuku saving Shigaraki, Ochako saving Himiko, Shouto saving Dabi. i don't have to reach to get that message from the source text itself, because no one forced Horikoshi to repeat the world 'save' 27363279 times throughout the story. it was supposed to be a story about saving traumatized people who had no one to save them. it didn't have to be, Horikoshi could have easily continued with Kishimoto's established trend of having his villains die immediately after finishing their therapy session. but he didn't take that direction, and capitalized on the theme of saving people, even those who don't seem to deserve it, even those who say they don't want to be saved. and in the final, crucial moment, he didn't carry through.

this is the story of how Izuku didn't become the greatest hero.

my not-hero academia

[flower-of-knighthood]

Why Toga didn't work for Me

Toga's plotline and how it ended felt hollow to me at best. To begin with, while tragic backstories can help make a character more sympathetic, characters with tragic backstories tend to lose their effectiveness in provoking sympathy from me when the course of action from said backstory is completely disproportionate such as Toga deciding to help Shigaraki kill pretty much everyone.

Secondly, the foundation of her plotline being the mental effects of her quirk which was only revealed after 100 chapters in, and the idea of Quirks affecting how people think while interesting should've been revealed a lot earlier and with more grace because shouldn't characters such as Mina have an urge to destroy things? Shouldn't Shinso have an urge to brainwash people, which undermines his mini arc? The point is the idea of Quirks having an effect on how individuals think is something that should've been brought up ages ago because it's not something that would be obscure like the Quirk Singularity theory, it's something that would be relevant in various fields and would be one of the fundamentals of how Quirks work.

It doesn’t help that it feels to me that Uraraka's response to Toga back in the first war arc of if you're going to hurt innocent people, I will stop you is treated as wrong by the narrative with Uraraka actually apologising to Toga for her treatment of her during their travesty of a rematch in the final arc.

And yes, I consider Uraraka's rematch with Toga a travesty because Uraraka spent literally most of the fight caring more about Toga's feelings then the victim's and wasting energy constantly trying to talk her down even after Uraraka got stabbed. Sure, it ultimately worked out with Toga deciding to die saving Uraraka from blood loss she inflicted, but that only happened because Uraraka decided let's not subdue the threat to literally everyone there before going talk no jutsu on her, and ended up getting stabbed for it.

You can have the most tragic backstory known to man, but it doesn't justify harm to innocent people. There has to come a point where the tragic backstory will no longer function as an get out of jail free card from responsibility.

You know what's the funny thing, people criticise Naruto for talk no jutsu on his enemies, but the thing is that each time Naruto actually waited until his enemy could no longer pose a threat to anyone before trying Talk No Jutsu.

[razorblade180]

HEAVY MHA MANGA SPOILERS

People: Horikoshi loves subverting expectations! How could this be what he’s written!?

Me:…You wanted the 15 year old Shonen protagonist to achieve everything he ever wanted and for everyone to make it out okay. He did subvert expectations. They just weren’t yours.

People:I like how realistic children of Endeavor acted in the end because that what happens in abusive households. You don’t have to reconnect.

Also People:I can’t believe we didn’t save the villains, some citizens don’t care, and Deku failed.

Me:Man, it’s almost like it’s realistic that a teenager with strong conviction came up short despite trying everything he possibly could against someone who never once said he wanted to change; how could a growing boy possibly not achieve perfectly going against the weight of the world?

I don’t mean to be completely insensitive but a section of this fandom really just can’t seem to balance reality with extreme optimism. (delulu) Admittedly, I’m shocked about Toga but when it comes to everyone else there really is no reason to have expected them to get any semblance of a nice ending. Bare minimum they’d all go to prison because they destabilized a country and murdered so many people. No tragic backstory is getting you out of that.

Now I will say the most recent chapter feels a little rushed to me but the overall message the show has been preaching is still communicated. They never looked away from taking the hard path; to the very end, they tried to save everyone they and they will do it again despite the risk. We even get the panels of an old lady deciding to reach out this time instead of waiting for a hero to take care of it because “The essence of being a hero is meddling where you don’t have to.” People are starting to actually look at their fellow man! That was the original complaint from the league; hero society just letting people fall through cracks without a second thought!

Everyone has a right to be mad, but you can be mad and still see the point even if it’s not point you wanted to be made.

All and all I can’t say I’m particularly mad about how most things generally went, but that’s because anything that would’ve upset me would have to come from immense character favortism/bias that muddies narratives and character traits. For example, you can’t have Izuku save Tomura and he gets some kind of decent ending, but then have Overhaul rot in prison. Touya can’t have a happy life but Endeavor is condemned forever by everyone. Doing that doesn’t make with any sort of messaging and character ideals that want to be presented. None of that happened though so I’m chillin.

As for the shippers, I don’t know what to tell ya? Welcome to your Naruto initiation? Balance your preference with what text and scenes are actually saying to see the obvious boats that will probably make it to end so you can at least brace impact next time. You can ship proudly and be fully aware your boat is sinking, or in some cases, smile snuggly because you always knew you’d make it to the finish line.