#tenten | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bitchnojutsu · 19 hours ago

Text

okay HI i came back to this!! amazing work chandu i will be rereading this forever and ever and consulting it moving forward. you’re so right and should keep saying it; these are the things that stand out to me that i would love to scream about together:

- tenten def notices other people’s looks but is overall more drawn by what she thinks is cool about them. there’s another post about tenten’s style and characterization that i really like which emphasizes tenten’s lack of overt femininity, and i think tenten wants to be recognized - more than for her appearance; maybe more than anything, at some point, to a degree - as cool herself. tenten doesn’t want or have a ton of power (even socially, i’d argue), but she positions herself in the sphere of it. her icon is a “legendary kunoichi” and the fifth hokage. she bemoans her sensei and teammate frequently for being cringe in her vicinity. the one thing she can do that is really cool - carry any size or quantity of anything, anywhere - gets completely dismissed as “convenient” by lee and neji during their chunin exams in suna, and we saw how that affected tenten’s morale.

- on that point, hell, her entire friendship with neji: her bestie is a bully victim neglected child prodigy from a prominent and revered clan, set up in the first chunin exams as The Kid To Beat, and just like you pointed out, tenten was right at his side for that entire month between prelims and finals. also, i want to emphasize what you said about tenten being the mouthpiece during the finals: her whole interlude where she’s giving exposition to the viewers like us bragging on neji’s abilities? tenten isn’t speaking out loud to anyone. she’s just smirking to herself and staring down at the arena, thinking about how neji is so talented and so well prepared and so strong and so cool.

- re: tenten being one of those people you find yourself accidentally saying too much to. that has to be how her actual friendship with neji started tbh. and i think it was clan related, hence why we got tenten’s close up reaction among hiashi’s and hiruzen’s when neji started his lore dump. like you suggested, she already knew.

- tenten’s friendships with her teammates are notably different but consistent. like i think neji is her best friend and rock lee is her brother. (i’m getting a little ahead of myself, but tenten’s relationship to her teammates is what sakura’s would look like with her teammates if we removed sakura’s crush on sasuke and naruto’s crush on sakura)

- the databook stats have zero consistency but is anyone surprised lmao

- TENTEN DOES DID NOT LIKE HINATA. (we’re veering into headcanon territory, but especially after *certain events* toward the end of shippuden, regardless of everything else, y’all think tenten likes hinata now??)

- for reasons you already explained i also think tenten has complicated feelings about sakura. i’ve mentioned in a few of my own posts that i see team 7 and team gai as foils for each other, pairing tenten and sakura in that manner, which is giving me even more thoughts in this context. obviously they get along well enough, they seem to respect each other, but i’m considering tenten’s self esteem and mental health and her saying she wants to fight sakura and the goals she physically would never be able to accomplish while she had to sit back and watch sakura literally live out her dream…

- …which opens the door for a friendship between tenten and ino. hello, busybodies!

- while i’m talking about tenten and every other kunoichi, let’s go ahead and focus on temari. she handed tenten’s ass to her on a silver platter, publicly, without batting an eye, all while tenten was still confused because she uncharacteristically missed her mark. her disbelief is valid as explained, and the point of the fight was to poise temari as a serious competitor for the final round, but i’m also going to gripe at kishimoto here - tenten got done so dirty in this fight. if he wanted tenten’s error to be that she missed her mark, temari could have created a shadow clone for tenten to waste her time attacking, thus allowing tenten to show off her incredible skill while forcing her to “miss” her true mark and opening her up to an attack, and planting the idea to use a shadow clone in temari’s head for later purposes.

- you touched on tenten not liking people she perceives as weak, and how could tenten not perceive herself as weak after that quick defeat? in front of everyone? after waiting an extra year before signing up for the exams? the only member of her team to not break to the finals? and she missed her mark?! that’s a core memory. that’s ego-shattering, soul-crushing, reality-questioning, life-changing shit.

- the idea of a lowkey one-sided rivalry between tenten and temari a la lee and neji is so funny to me, and also plausible given how much of an impact losing that fight had on tenten. (though the exact same is true for sakura and i think tenten would be ready to fight both of them anytime)

- i love your point about tenten applying her enthusiasm for research to her weaponry because of course she would! she’s a one-woman museum and proud of it! there are easter eggs of this in reliance, but i like to imagine that she falls down all kinds of research rabbit holes; she may not be a med nin but she learns everything she can about the human body, we see her consult kurenai while in her ultimate tsukuyomi world for advice about genjutsu and i believe she kept studying that back in The Real World™️, she has to know a thing or two about space-time jutsu by nature of the transportation jutsu itself. but we also know that in the naruto world, “research” sometimes is a double entendre! a woman of many hobbies, truly

- you said the right string of words to trigger my activation phrase so now you get to hear me talk about one of my favorite venn diagrams in all of naruto: the overlap between tenten and shikamaru. she wants to be recognized so badly and works hard for it, he works hard not to be recognized so he doesn’t have to do hard work. / i would not be surprised if during that month between exam prelims and finals, shikamaru was constantly replaying and assessing tenten’s performance against temari in his mind, or if he straight up hunted down tenten (and neji by proxy) one day to ask about a few logistics and called his training done. / loud, strong women (like tsunade and temari) grate on young shikamaru while they’re everything tenten would want to be if she actually believed she could be like them. / re: tenten has chill vibes and can get people to open up. i think shikamaru opens up to tenten on purpose sometimes. perhaps on that one random mission they went on together; sometime approaching the war when naruto and yamato and gai etc. were on a boat for a long time and needed a supply drop (tenten’s mission), shikaku saw that shikamaru needed to take a step back from war prep and nominated him to accompany tenten. ironically enough for the both of them (considering shikamaru’s woes during the sasuke retrieval arc, the trap team gai encountered in the desert in their second exams, and the end of the upcoming war, unbeknownst to shikamaru and tenten at this time), the trap they fell into was a series of genjutsu creating perilous conditions for the boat. i think in the adult generation - excluding sasuke’s sharingan and the knack for genjutsu that sakura should have had - tenten and shikamaru are among the best equipped shinobi to encounter genjutsu.

i made your long post longer but i hope it was worth it <3

Just noting down some things about Tenten that influence my view of her characterization/personality. primarily for my own reference as i’m writing, as well as to kind of get a more mature and consistent characterization of her than i had before. this gonna be an extremely long and rambling post, (where I think I repeat myself a whole lot oops) and there’s not really anything profound, just some traits i’m pulling from canon and interpreting.

most of Tenten’s ’canon’ characterization comes from filler and databooks, which I then further interpret, so a lot of her characterization in this post is three degrees of fanon/headcanon, with some liberties taken where I dislike the interpretation.

We’re introduced to Tenten during the chunin exams, where she’s seen throwing kunai at a target dummy that Neji is sitting under. She casually throws her kunai and hits the target dead center, instantly showing her marksmanship skill, but also Neji’s implicit trust in her since he doesn’t even flinch and the target is pretty much right over his head. This ties in later but basically, he fully trusts that she will not miss.

We see Tenten again before the first round of the chunin exams, while Izumo and Kotetsu are blocking the door. The thing I find notable in that scene is Tenten not being immune to Sasuke LOL.

(Manga panel grabbed from @tentenarchive)

it's interesting to me that her thing is specifically that there's not a single scratch on him, and that he's "cool". Makes sense given that she's on a team with Gai and Lee and she desperately wants them to be cool too. And she dislikes weak people so yeah, of course it's cool to her that he's untouchable.

Actually on this topic, Tenten's taste seems to be "cool people"? In a filler episode (naruto 162) she thinks that the lord of a local land is really cute when she sees him get down for his palanquin. The lord's whole thing is that he's like cold and cool and pensive etc. so this seems to be Tenten's taste to some degree. He turns out to actually be a girl in the end so yknow. bi Tenten confirmed.

Here's her page from the first databook (screenshotted from The Narutoversity). She gets annoyed at Lee injuring himself for Sakura's sake, which I'm pretty sure isn't really out of care so much as it is that they're in the middle of the forest of death in like. the worst situation possible. Love how Ino's just standing there like "what the fuck kind of medical care is this".

I generally dislike the stats since I find that they’re inaccurate to what we see on-panel (a whole rant I could go on another time tbh), and Kishimoto tends to skew them egregiously in favor of characters he particularly likes. Ex: genin era Neji’s total is 21, and shippuden Tenten’s is 20.5. You cannot seriously be telling me that Neji as a genin is stronger than chunin Tenten three years in the future. Come on Kishimoto. There are a few things of note here though, so let’s go through them anyway.

Tenten’s highest stat is her speed, at 3, which is the same as Sasuke from the same databook. So clearly, she’s fast, especially since Sasuke is known for his speed. She's not as fast as Lee, but still quick on her feet and dexterous, with fast reflexes. Makes sense, since the second databook describes her fighting style as “dancing flexibly and firing speedily”.

Her strength is a 1 and her stamina is a 1.5, which is insane to me. Like she’s on Team Gai???? They do 500 laps around Konoha and 1000+ pushups every day???? I reject canon here, fuck u kishi, I know she’s actually buff as hell and has hella stamina.

Her intelligence is a 2, which might seem super low but it matches Sasuke's intelligence, and is only 0.5 lower than Neji and Temari's. I think it just goes to show that the scale for these stats is skewed as hell. But basically what this means is that she operates at a similar level to Sasuke, Temari, and Neji, where she picks up on the things around her, and while she isn't operating on the level of Shikamaru, she's still a good strategist.

Back to the actual show, we get to the elimination round and her fight against Temari (episode 43). I’m basing this part off the anime because their fight in the manga is like three panels long.

So technically, this is “filler” (as if any tenten fan really cares lol).

From the Hokage's commentary, her battle sense is pretty good. She positions herself a perfect distance away from the enemy. She's trying to bait Temari into attacking, to see what her power is and figure out how to counter it, and Temari calls her out on it.

Tenten isn't a 200 IQ genius strategist the way Shikamaru is, but she is still a smart fighter. We can see she thinks in a similar way to him (and Temari) feeling out the enemy's power and what they can do before counterattacking strategically. I need them to be best friends tbh.

Her first reaction when she throws her shuriken at Temari and misses is surprise. She is deeply confident in her own abilities, so it's genuinely shocking to her. She yells "I missed? There's no way!" and in the stands, Gai also insists up and down that Tenten never misses.

She has the utmost confidence in herself, and from the rest of her team. None of them have any doubt in her, and this also ties back to that introductory scene. No wonder Neji let her chuck kunai at targets near him. It's probably something she does regularly too.

Tenten loses to Temari, and is immediately down on herself. We see a lot of this in Shippuden 237, where she's lying in the hospital and loses all her confidence in herself and her abilities.

Shippuden 237 shows us that Tenten does actually have self-esteem issues, even before this fight with Temari. During their first year as genin, when Lee keeps getting defeated by Neji, Tenten tells Lee that he really should just give up on beating Neji, because he's a genius, and Lee is not. It's clear in the voice acting and the expressions that to some extent, Tenten isn't just speaking about Lee when she says this, she's also speaking about herself.

She seems to compare herself a lot to others, often in a negative light, talking down about herself when others are better than her, but still trying her best to surpass them.

But the way she talks after losing to Temari is much worse. Her match with Temari affects her deeply, and likely for many years to come. I think it becomes one of her primary motivations to become stronger, as she keeps holding that moment as her lowest point and vowing to never be that helpless against an opponent again.

Headcanons here. After her fight with Temari, Tenten also throws herself into learning 1) fire jutsu to combat Temari’s wind (this is why she develops that dragon bomb jutsu she uses during the Konoha Crush filler episode), and 2) seals that can absorb/store away opponents’ attacks.

I think Tenten’s primary chakra nature is actually lightning, which is also why she is so weak to wind chakra. I love this post by @/fineillsignup that goes into detail about chakra natures, and a lot of the traits listed under lightning nature fit with my interpretations of Tenten. I also am heavily biased toward the idea of Kakashi, who is basically student-less during the interlude period, teaching Tenten lightning jutsu since she's his husband's friend's student.

Going back to that scene in shippuden 237, I do think her talking down to Lee in their first year as genin is also interesting. Even though I love the idea of Lee and Tenten being besties before Team Gai and her standing up for him, I think the reality is that she probably didn’t really talk to him in the Academy, and once they were on the same team, she was kind to him, and learned to work with him.

Lee very specifically mentions in a flashback in episode 100 that nobody told him anything encouraging, sensei or student. This obviously includes Tenten. So while she wasn’t outright mean to him, she also didn’t have the greatest opinion of him.

She very quickly found herself relating with him, and that probably made her take out some of her own self-loathing on him at first. Eventually they become close, and form a very deep friendship, but things start out pretty rocky.

Kishimoto confirms that every day for a month between the second and final rounds of the chunin exams, Neji and Tenten train together in secret to help him reverse-engineer the 8 trigrams 64 palms and the rotation. It’s interesting that everyone else goes to train with a jounin and only Neji chooses to train with his teammate.

I think this implies Tenten to be a good secret keeper and evidence that Neji already told her about the cursed seal and all the clan drama. During Neji’s speech to Naruto, Tenten’s reaction is shown alongside Hiruzen and Hiashi’s, both of whom already know all about the curse mark and his father’s death. So Neji has told Tenten as well.

Plus Tenten is uniquely suited to help with Rotation, since she can throw a billion knives no jutsu.

During Naruto vs Neji, Tenten gets used as the mouthpiece to explain Neji's attacks, which also shows how well she knows him after training with him for the Chunin exams, but she's also genuinely impressed when Naruto wins, and even compliments him.

There's a brief scene during Shikamaru v Temari where Tenten comments about how she couldn't beat Temari. Also look at her arms. A 1 for her strength stat??? with those arms??? sure kishi.

Okay, we move on to when Orochimaru attacks Konoha, and there’s this filler episode (shippuden 192) where Hinata gets kidnapped by Kumo shinobi. This episode has some small Tenten moments, where you can also see how Neji thinks of her, and I like them a lot.

We start off with Tenten going to check in on Neji after his conversation with Hiashi, and he actually opens up and tells her all about what they had just spoken about, another sign that he's told her about everything with his clan.

When Hinata is kidnapped and the Hyuuga Elder makes Neji go get her, Tenten comes with him, not out of any particular concern for Hinata, but purely to back up Neji. I doubt she likes Hinata much at first (my eyes were opened after this post by @tentenismybitch), so she’s doing this more for Neji’s sake.

As they're chasing after the man who kidnapped Hinata, they get caught in a trap, and Tenten tells Neji to leave her behind (strategic thinking) and Neji only hesitates for a second before agreeing and going on ahead. Neji expresses that this is because he knows Tenten can handle herself.

We see her using a new jutsu (the Dragon Bomb), which as I mentioned before, I think she developed with Temari in mind.

During the Hokage’s funeral we do see her in funeral attire looking sad but is she really? debatable. I think no, but it’s not entirely relevant. This is all personal headcanon here, not based on canon evidence beyond extrapolating from what I’ve seen.

Tenten doesn't strike me as someone burning with loyalty to the village and harping on about the “will of fire” and whatnot. She does her duty, and that’s about it. It doesn’t go further than that. She cares about the people dear to her, but not really about the village specifically.

After the Hokage’s funeral, Tenten doesn’t appear again until the end of the Search For Tsunade arc, which I think is her last non-filler appearance in the original series other than a few flashbacks.

She’s excited about Tsunade coming to the village, and tells Neji after he trains, and asks him to come with her to go see Tsunade. Neji tells her he’s not interested, and Tenten looks a little disappointed.

We see Tenten in some flashbacks to Lee's genin years (episode 100). As Neji is talking down to Lee, Tenten doesn't really say anything, which matches with what i said earlier. But, when Gai tells them that with hard work, anyone can be a shinobi, Tenten has a similar reaction to Lee, while Neji just looks annoyed.

What Gai says seems to give her hope. That with enough hard work, anyone can become great. She doesn't think of herself as a genius, and if anything, seems to group herself with Lee in terms of ability. This is also shown in Shippuden 237, which I'll discuss later.

After this we only see Tenten in the end-of-series filler, which will be part 2 of this post since it's already really long. We'll finish off by looking at data book 2, which came out after the manga for the first series had finished.

From the second data book (screenshot also taken from the Narutoversity), we see part of her personality is being a "busybody" LMFAOOOO. So yeah she's inquisitive and curious, being a research enthusiast, but also uses that same nature to get in on everyone's business too. We can assume she's also observant and detail-oriented, can probably read people pretty well.

I like this a lot! I think Tenten is a good people person, and many find her easy to get along with. She’s probably one of those people that you accidentally find yourself telling really important or deep stuff to without really knowing why. She’s just got this air around her that’s very chill and comfortable.

But I do think she’s nosy, and does wanna know about everything, just to be in the know. She’s a little detective LOL.

The research enthusiast part is a fun thing too. She strikes me as a tinkerer, messing with new weapon designs or seal ideas, constantly turning something over in her head.

The first and second databooks list her hobby as fortune-telling, which is also really cute. I think she knows palmistry and does readings for her friends, and has some knowledge of astrology. She isn't overly superstitious, but she does believe in ghosts, and gets fairly nervous when she sees or hears something that can be considered a bad omen.

She has pride in her weapons, clearly, and her arsenal is implied to be the largest and strongest of any ninja. I’d like to assume that some of her pride comes from the weapons in her arsenal that are of her own design.

Her 'carefree, smiling face' is also an interesting point. At first I was unsure how to interpret this, but to me it reads as her being rather laid-back and carefree, despite her power and lethality. Again, not very sure how to interpret this line and I'd love to hear how anyone else sees it!

It’s cute that Tsunade coming to the village and becoming hokage made Tenten train harder. I think aside from her defeat to Temari, this becomes another major motivation for Tenten. She wants to impress Tsunade, the kunoichi that she admires most.

She says she'd like to fight Sakura, so I think there's some kind of jealousy or something to prove there since Sakura got to be Tsunade’s apprentice and Tenten didn't. This goes back to her low self-esteem and those issues she’s been having since her fight with Temari.

Shippuden 237 touches on this but Tenten did actually try to become a medical ninja for a bit, she just didn’t have the chakra control necessary. Obviously this adds to her insecurities when Sakura turns out to be a natural at medical ninjutsu with unnaturally good chakra control.

I’m not a huge fan of the ‘trying to be a mednin’ part of this ngl, I think she’s a little too fixated on weapons to truly care about medical ninjutsu, and wants to emulate Tsunade just for the ‘strongest kunoichi’ part rather than trying to be her exact carbon copy. Plus, I think (headcanon) Tenten’s chakra control has to be at least decently good in order to do seals, but that’s a different rabbit hole. I tend to disregard this in my fics and will likely continue to do so.

I do like the thing of being jealous of Sakura in some way for being Tsunade’s apprentice, though. It’s some nice flavor and I appreciate the one-sided rivalry. I think it would be funny for Sakura to think of Tenten as the cool senpai and look up to her, meanwhile Tenten is struggling to not immediately challenge her to a duel, Gai-style.

Since this is already super long, I’ll do a part 2 for all the filler arcs she’s in, and then a part 3 for shippuden.

#char chats #the tenten bible #tenten #naruto headcanon #i know i forgot some stuff but this got long

59 notes · View notes