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sasuke doesnt even care about it

But when you strip naruto and sasuke of their powers and shounen attributes, when you take away the op eyes and gundam and giant glowing fursuit thing, you just get two teenage boys having a fist fight in a parking lot. And it’s not surprising to me that kishimoto himself insisted that the fight come down to this while the animation directors wanted a straight up explosion battle - he wanted it to come down to them just flailing and throwing fists and screaming to convey that it’s ultimately a very juvenile fight between two kids who don’t know how to process their actual feelings towards one another. It’s just been placed in an over the top context and embellished because of the genre.

I know what post you’re talking about, i wasn’t inclined to take it seriously because 1) the OP has also said sasuke is selfish for not kissing sakura or replacing his arm 2) they ship kakasaku and i try to avoid engaging with blogs that espouse pedophilic ships

But I’ll address their points if you want.

1. Individual guilt vs. collective responsibility

The argument is that shikamaru’s revenge arc is more sympathetic than sasuke’s because sasuke holds a collective responsible for his trauma, and shikamaru does not. I dont think this is a fair comparison.

For one, collective responsibility is not an East Asian principal like the post you’re referencing states, it’s not really specific to any culture. It’s just a reality. We are all, to varying degrees, complicit in the suffering of others. This is particularly true in cases like state sanctioned genocide, lol. Which the uchiha massacre obviously was. Casual discrimination ——> systemic oppression ——> state sanctioned violence. Sasuke is (irrationally) holding a collective responsible because, well, there was collective profit.

Shikamaru isn’t driven mad by the concept of collective guilt because his peers arent living in ignorance of a government issued cover up of his people’s massacre, and their families weren’t tacitly or directly complicit in said massacre in the first place. His people are very much alive. Asuma’s death was at the hands of a fringe extremist, not the state. There’s no ‘collective’ to hold responsible. I suppose there’s the akatsuki, but again, theyre not representative of a general population and theyre being targeted by shikamaru’s government anyway.

Of course, systemic problems can’t be always be pinned on individuals. Danzo and the elders are guilty, yeah, but the average civilian in Konoha is not. By this metric of judgement, everyone, including sasuke, deserves to die simply for being alive and benefiting from another’s suffering.

What sasuke should be doing is shifting his focus towards a system as a whole rather than civilians, and he does. His endgame goal is reform. Of course, his actual plan sucks, and it has to because kishimoto needed to justify a fight with naruto. Not that naruto’s leadership model, which already incorporates genocide denial (he agreed to cover up the uchiha massacre for itachi) is that much better, but naruto is the protagonist so it’s framed differently. Their fight ends in a stalemate, sasuke doesn’t just back down because he’s been beaten - he reconsiders his philosophy further from that point on.

Sasuke also comes to the realization that the uchiha have been complicit in the oppression of others as well, in the kishimoto approved/illustrated novel that was animated into episodes to wrap up sasuke’s arc…like, it’s canon…chino tells him “people are no better than the assailant if they don’t try to help, you’re no better,” and he reflects on these words as he shuts down a gladiator trafficking ring.

Is the development clunky ? Yeah, the entire latter half of shippuden is a mess. But with how vehemently people post about him you’d think these clear developments straight up didn’t exist at all.

2. Collateral Damage

I’m gonna be real, i think the samurai are irrelevant fodder, and i don’t believe anyone actually cares about them lol. But if i have to take this argument seriously, I’ll just say that they were guarding a genocidal maniac. Not a run of the mill corrupt politician, not a misguided liberal. A legitimate genocidal dictator in the shadows. In fact, every kage in there is responsible for heinous crimes (except gaara, because he’s new) and this is spelled out in detail. Gaara calls them on it. They are also planning on killing sasuke for crimes they commited themselves, and much more extensively at that.

Did you all watch ATLA and consider team avatar terrorists for slicing through blimps and crushing soldiers on their way to break into the FN or EK palace? No? Because that’s how ridiculous the samurai argument is

Karin, however, is collateral damage and i completely get the general repulsion to him stabbing through her. I agree he should’ve had to apologize more sincerely or get some sort of commeppuance.

But here’s why comparing shikamaru’s lack of collateral damage to sasuke stabbing through his teammate is nonsensical: sasuke got to that point *after* several mindfucks and zero help from anyone besides the team he assembled, and offered freedom to from their captor/abuser, while shikamaru’s revenge was just part of a mission. Had kakashi agreed to help sasuke attain justice for his family eventually, would he have left? Sasuke avoided collateral damage at 13. He wasn’t going to orochimaru to conspire with him, he expected to die immediately. That plan was postponed, so once he got there, he immediately began plotting to kill him and succeeded. He was clearly disgusted by his torture of prisoners.

This is why people consider shikamaru’s revenge arc hypocritical. Sasuke’s wouldn’t have looked much different if he had been given the same consideration as shikamaru from the start…

Shikamaru and his team were willing to defy tsunade to get their revenge, btw. If this had happened while they were 12 and no one offered help, there’s a good chance they’d become missing nin.

3. Something about looking to the future

Shikamaru frames his revenge in the context of, hidan is a bad person who must be stopped, and i must protect asuma’s unborn child.

Sasuke framed his revenge in the context of, never again will i see someone close to me harmed, and his initial reason for seeking out itachi again is because he could hurt naruto. Later on, he compares itachi to orochimaru in his head as he considers his abuse of prisoners, then he kills him. It’s clearly about more than just personal indulgence.

He acts selfishly at the kage summit, true, but danzo is still clearly someone who needs to be stopped. He reels himself in and chooses to protect the village, wants to reform the system, which again is recontextualizing his need for revenge in a way that can benefit everyone, even if his actual plan is very flawed

There’s also the fact that shikamaru has the luxury of looking into the future because he wasn’t branded a traitor and criminal by the same government that is responsible for his trauma in the first place. Like, there is that.