#sometimes characters/people don't have whatever the Bad Person Disease trait of the century is

[evilkitten3]

so i have a take on this that some people may not love, but bear with me.

let me start by saying that no, tobirama is imo not a character i think would be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. this is in part bc it's very difficult to diagnose any fictional character with anything they don't canonically have, as fictional characters are by necessity significantly more two-dimensional that real people. this is especially true in forms of media like manga, in which characters have exaggerated reactions to help inform the reader of their personalities.

in any case, it's extremely difficult to apply a modern diagnosis of aspd to anybody in naruto, because that whole world exists on kind of a different morality axis. while i'd say it's possible to make an argument for aspd concerning most naruto characters, by the nature of the manga, you'd have to rely on a lot of guesswork.

(also, brief side note - we have no idea how he came up with edo tensei. there's plenty of possibilities, but i think it seems most likely that it started as something else and only became edo tensei as we know it on accident. it's not a jutsu that makes much sense for someone in tobirama's position to be actively seeking out; it seems more like,,,,, idk a college student who hasn't slept for four days running on red bull and accidentally writing an essay on the history of throat cancer instead of an explanation on the thematic parallels between goku and luke skywalker. but this too is just a guess)

that aside, if i was going to diagnose tobirama with something (aside from ptsd/cptsd, which plagues the naruto universe like fleas in 14th century europe), it would probably be autism.

here me out. (also, i am autistic. this is the pot calling the kettle autistic, that's what this is)

first, i'll start with social norms. while, as mentioned earlier, naruto's morality axis is a tad more murder-happy than the one we're familiar with, the way the characters speak to each other is not, as they are speaking in a real language. of course, since it's manga, everything is to some degree exaggerated, but there's still enough to take a look at imo. for starters, tobirama is rude. i don't mean like telling his brother to shut up or speaking casually to his father; both of those are fairly normal. what i mean is, from hashirama's flashback through the rest of the war arc, tobirama doesn't speak with anything close to the degree of politeness that would be expected of a man in his position. this isn't particularly unique to him in and of itself, since as mentioned manga almost always presents exaggerated emotional responses, but in tobirama's case we're actually shown this clashing with expectations (see hashirama repeatedly telling him "don't say stuff like that" and the only time to my knowledge when he actually speaks politely being when the fucking sage of six paths shows up)

tobirama's (affectionate) nickname among japanese fans is hiretsu-sama (卑劣様), which basically you can translate as "lord/mr despicable/crude/mean/sneaky", which comes from muu's description of the edo tensei (「二代目火影の卑劣な術だ」 - "it's the second hokage's despicable jutsu"), and i bring this up bc it led to a meme that i personally find very funny of pasting tobirama's face over "despicable" moments (such as kakashi tying sasuke to a tree). i also bring this up bc tobirama is a rationalist and, as the author of the piece linked in this paragraph mentions, edo tensei can be described as rationalism gone too far (it's super effective! also sir where are your morals) (side note 2: i recommend looking at this article even if you have no way of reading it bc the edits are quite funny)

anyway, on to my next point! tobirama is extremely strict about schedules. this is mostly brought up as a joke, since it's common to have a lazy-responsible sibling dynamic, but it's still worth mentioning.

my third and fourth point, which are also sort of one combined point, are inflexiblity and strong sense of right and wrong. the latter may seem to contradict everything i've said so far, but having a strong sense of right and wrong doesn't equate to having a good sense of right and wrong. for example, if you're starting with an already unhealthy "x = good, y = bad" base (in this case, "senju = good, uchiha = bad"), that's the foundation that your sense of right and wrong will be built off of. this is why you can find so many people on places like twitter who manage to be the seemingly incompatible combo of "autistic" and "nazi" (i am not joking. there are so, so, so many of them. some on this site too. very depressing)

tldr: no, tobirama does not have aspd. he's probably autistic and definitely in need of a better moral compass (but, to be fair, so is almost everyone else)

Every time I think about how Tobirama created some of his jutsu, it makes me… well, let's just say it FUCKS me.

Okay, okay, I know a lot of people have probably talked about this and written about it, but let's think about it again. The point here is not even that in the world of "Naruto" the existence of the soul and life after death is objectively known, and most likely before Tobirama created Edo Tensei (and this, of course, explains why the characters so easily treat them as their own, and to the death of others). It’s not even that Tobirama, knowing this, decided to not care about the will of dead people and once again return them to the “impure world”, where they must fight according to his will - and for this he needed their DNA. And not even that LIVING human bodies were used as vessels (yes, there were no White Zetsu then).

But. Jutsu have been created over the years. It took Minato four years to complete the rasengan, but it’s just a ball of chakra, it’s not even a ready-made jutsu, because Minato couldn’t and didn’t have time to add elemental release to it. How long did it take Tobirama to summon souls from the afterlife? Did he immediately realize that someone else's life would be required in exchange? He probably should have known that Shinigami wouldn't allow something like that to be done for free. But even taking this into account… how many prisoners of war, criminals and some other people whom the state does not feel too sorry for did Tobirama kill? He couldn't have developed Edo Tensei just as a theory, otherwise how would it have been known that the original Edo Tensei was much weaker than Orochimaru's more advanced form?

So yes, he probably experimented for a long time. Secret from Hashirama, MOST LIKELY. Thinking about this, I imagine something like Lovecraft's "Herbert West", where the dude spent years plundering the graves and corpses of recently deceased people, injecting them with various solutions until he succeeded (of course, in the process he created several indescribable monsters that became cause of his death).

And Tobirama dealt with all this, hell, he even came up with such an idea, NOT being a maniacal psychopathic nihilist like Orochimaru… Dude is really cold-blooded.