#this is the man who sat down in the middle of a battlefield bc hashirama sent a clone to fight him instead of his real body

[evilkitten3]

this is an interesting concept but i'm going to disagree.

madara doesn't really talk about izuna ever, he keeps that to himself. madara kinda just…. doesn't tell people stuff. he didn't even tell obito he had more than one sibling.

moreover, i don't think madara really thought extremely highly of izuna's abilities - not bc he thought izuna was a weakling or something but bc his view of strength/genius is pretty much based around hashirama, and anyone who can't measure up to that had to do serious damage to him to even really register as an opponent at all. and izuna could have only ever really been his ideological opponent, and since madara took the side of izuna and his clan when it came to peace, that never played out.

almost all information we have about izuna at all comes from people who aren't madara, all of whom gave that information to the audience for the sole purpose of manipulating another character (almost exclusively sasuke) - that is, itachi, obito, and hashirama. we have no idea where itachi got all of his info from, presumably a mix of obito and whatever was accessible to him in the clan, but we know a good chunk of it was bs from the beginning, and itachi is both a known liar and also frequently just wrong about shit. obito actually got his knowledge straight from the source, but we don't know how much of what he was told was the truth, we don't know how much of what he told sasuke was what madara told him, and the only thing we really do know is that a good chunk of it was straight-up not true at all.

our final source is hashirama, who's probably the most reliable source regardless of his own agenda in his storytelling bc most of what he tells us about izuna is from having actually met the guy, but even then he's more focused on how izuna's existence affects madara, and all we really get from him is that izuna was actually killed by tobirama, it was izuna and the uchiha clan rather than madara himself who opposed peace (possibly also the senju clan; hashirama didn't really seem all that interested in what his clan thought about it lol), and presumably gave his eyes to madara willingly (which isn't nothing, especially since it kind of renders both itachi and obito's accounts of izuna devoid of much actual info on izuna himself).

what we know from madara is that he views izuna's eyes as the last remnant of izuna that still exists, and that he's willing to use those eyes to achieve his own ends in ways izuna likely wouldn't have been ok with (tell me he would've been down with his own uchiha eyeballs in an uzumaki's skull. look at me and tell me that. it's bs). what he told hashirama about izuna when they were kids was pretty much just "i have one brother left and i will protect him no matter what", which.... doesn't really speak to madara viewing izuna as a brilliant genius who could take care of himself (tho again this is in large part due to madara being so stupidly strong that most people are basically just not really going to register to him as threats).

in my eyes, madara's hurt over the clan's rejection of him was more due to how said rejection reinforced the deep-seated trust issues he's had since childhood (madara's relationship with trust is weird as hell, but i'm pretty comfortable saying he honestly didn't trust izuna all that much. not in a way where he thought izuna was going to betray him or the clan, but in the sense of not really thinking he could rely on him to support him, which. he couldn't).

madara is a character whose struggles with communication are readily apparent, but while i think he does resent his clan to some degree over their turning away from him, he's also aware that it's in part his own fault (tho i think his reasoning as to why is incorrect, or at best deeply flawed).

none of this is to say that madara didn't love izuna, bc of course he did, or that he wasn't proud of him (i assume he was, tho it's hard to be sure), but.... i really don't think there's anything in the manga that supports this theory; most of what i recall (can't get up to check rn bc most of my volumes are at home and also my cat is sitting on me) actively contradicts it.