I could go on forever listing everything wrong with the Naruto finale. Dozens of people have already done it - the post-war era, the untouched system, the Hokage as an institution, the fact that no one was held accountable. I completely agree with them.
But what I hate the absolute most is chapter 698.
A 17-year-old guy with the Rinnegan, ready to reshape the world order, lies there missing an arm and drops: "I was envious of you"… It's just laughable. In chapter 698, Kishimoto takes Sasuke's massive, scorched truth, a soul mutilated by state terror and genocide, and reduces it to infantile "envy," labeling his righteous anger a "childish tantrum."
Because if Sasuke had voiced his real, adult pain ("I just wanted to destroy the system that sent my family to the slaughterhouse, but you stopped me"), the finale wouldn't have been a happy one. Naruto would have looked like a regime's attack dog who broke a revolutionary. And the fucking problem is that Kishimoto never actually let Naruto understand Sasuke completely and properly. Those words were never fucking put into his mouth! But let's break this down in detail. Systemic gaslighting and double standards
No one in Konoha ever offered Sasuke justice. No one said: "Let's conduct an investigation, we'll give you power, and we'll declare a hunt for Itachi, an S-rank terrorist, who on top of everything else is our rogue ninja and slaughtered an entire district of our citizens". Not a single adult stood by him and said: your pain is valid.
The villages have been profiting from war and contract killings for decades. Kakashi had been slaughtering people in the ANBU since childhood. When Shikamaru wants to get revenge for Asuma, Naruto and Kakashi go to help him, and it's called the "will of fire" and noble grief. Sakura is okay with the idea of killing Sasuke when he becomes "inconvenient". But when Sasuke goes after Itachi - the man who destroyed HIS WORLD - the whole of Konoha collectively switches to saint mode. Sasuke's revenge for his massacred clan suddenly becomes the "curse of hatred" and a reason for isolation. This is pure systemic gaslighting.
You can understand a 12-year-old kid with abandonment issues who didn't understand Sasuke's hatred and aligned himself with the politics of the Village whose acknowledgment he desperately craved. But the problem is that even as Naruto grows up, the changes aren't enough.
At 15, in the forest, Naruto is facing Itachi. A maniac who massacred the clan, put a child through 72 hours of torture in Tsukuyomi twice, broke his psyche, and murdered his entire family in one night. But Naruto doesn't even remember Sasuke's pain in that moment. Naruto yells at him not as a sadist and an executioner, but as a thief who stole his friend. "You're a bad brother, and I'm a good one!" - it's an ego-driven competition where Sasuke plays the role of the prize.
And when Itachi drops his question: "What if Sasuke attacks Konoha?", Naruto obediently swallows it. Instead of telling Itachi to go fuck himself with the words: "Are you out of your mind? He's only looking for you, he hasn't touched any civilians, he wants to kill the perpetrator of the genocide!" - Naruto accepts the killer's rules. He promises to "protect the village and save Sasuke". In that very second, Naruto internally agrees that Sasuke's absolute uncompromising nature is a threat. Naruto voluntarily takes on the role of a human shield: he protects Konoha from Sasuke. But no one, ever, protected Sasuke from Konoha.
And then comes the crucial climax - the Danzo arc. Sasuke killed one of the elders, he's screaming about how Konoha always looked down on the Uchiha with contempt, and that destroying the village is a cleansing. Obito has already told Naruto the terrifying truth. And Naruto comes to Sasuke and drops: "I understand why you hate the village so much".
But what does this abstract "I understand" mean? You understood - now what? Just one line of dialogue, followed by blind, absurd suicide pact.
Naruto says: "If you attack Konoha, I'll have to fight you. Unleash your hatred on me! Only I can bear it. I'll take on your burden, and we'll die together!".
Oh, how fucking convenience! What a safe and perfect martyrdom for the System! Naruto refuses to judge Konoha. He is literally saying: "Konoha will stay the same, the elders will sip their tea, the rotten system will keep running, but so you don't feel so bad, I'll just fucking die right alongside you".
Here is what it should have looked like if Naruto had truly understood:
Naruto: "Sasuke... damn it, I understand what happened. As the future Hokage, I promise you that right now I'll do everything in my power to ensure we arrest everyone involved..."
Sasuke (rightfully growling and telling everyone to fuck off): "Arrest? You think I need your trial? You slaughtered my entire clan! I will destroy every single person in your village!"
Naruto: "You know I won't let you do that. You can't spill innocent blood. If I have to, I will take your hatred, but I swear I won't let things stay this way!"
But that's not in the canon. Naruto's death wouldn't have solved anything for the world, but Konoha would have conveniently gotten rid of two problematic elements through their "great friendship".
And here we must make a crucial caveat. I don't want to completely demonize Naruto, because I genuinely love him. His drive to hold onto Sasuke at any cost is not devoid of genuine, heartbreaking sincerity. This is the boy who knelt in the snow before the Raikage, begging to spare his friend. Yes, there's a degree of selfishness in his obsession, saving Sasuke became his personal fixation, and Sasuke is frequently passed between him and Itachi like a baton, but his desperate "you are my friend" comes from absolutely real feelings. Naruto is not a hypocrite, and he truly is ready to sacrifice himself.
But the tragedy is that the author simply doesn't put political will into the character's mouth, nor the readiness to take actual steps toward Sasuke's adult truth. The author denies him the understanding that a soul mangled by genocide demands justice, not just a mutual suicide. Naruto is genuinely willing to lay down his life for Sasuke, but he is incapable of offering him the dismantling of their repulsive world order. His love is colossal, but it is locked within the confines of a System he refuses to put on trial.
The bait-and-switch in chapter 698
By the finale, Sasuke is not insane. After the truth from Edo-Itachi and the conversation with the Hokages, the veil of blind rage falls away. He is absolutely sober. He arrives at the ideas of revolution simply because no one - literally no one - offered him an alternative.
And this is exactly why the narrative brings us to the absurd bait-and-switch I mentioned at the beginning. To avoid acknowledging Sasuke's scorched truth, the author violently shoves this fucking word into his mouth - "envy."
Because "envy" is infantile. If Sasuke was just "envious" - it means he's not a revolutionary demanding justice. It means he's just an insecure teenager pouting at a more successful friend. Kishimoto uses the word "envy" (うらやましい) to completely invalidate all of Sasuke's political and philosophical grievances against Konoha. He reduces the character's massive, scorched truth to banal childish egoism. The author is literally telling the reader: "Guys, everything is fine! Sasuke isn't a revolutionary! Konoha isn't to blame! He was just a little jealous of Naruto since childhood, and now he realizes he was wrong and has calmed down!"
In reality, what canon slaps the label of "envy" onto was a crushing existential collapse at 12 years old. Sasuke's entire life was wired to be worthy of Itachi's attention (even if it was for the sake of dying). And then the maniac who killed his mother and father steps over him like trash and reaches for Naruto. Itachi denies him significance. Of course, the psyche of a 12-year-old kid can't articulate: "I am experiencing severe frustration due to the devaluation of my right to exist". A child's mind codes this as anger and "envy" toward the one who was chosen instead of him. At 12 years old, this is understandable. And when leaving, he severed his ties - absolutely, because no one wanted to help him catch that very rogue ninja who came for your jinchuriki and was simultaneously considered a threat to another "son" of the village. And Sasuke quite soberly articulated the reasons for his departure in those manga chapters - but in chapter 698, we cross all of this out.
But Kishimoto goes even further and forces the 17-year-old Sasuke to drop this in his internal monologue: "And to this day, nothing has changed...". And this is the real absolute bullshit. The author claims in one fell swoop that Sasuke's entire Shippuden journey - his realization about the genocide, executing Danzo, resurrecting the Hokage, questioning the founders about the nature of the world, and forming a conscious doctrine of revolution - didn't change him at all. His entire political intellect is completely erased. We are shown panels where he is already in his Shippuden clothes, where he was screaming for his family and destroying Danzo, but all of this is cowardly reduced to "I just wanted to be as strong and cool as you". As if his whole life, his pain, and his independent decisions existed exclusively to spite Naruto or for the sake of chasing after him. Sasuke is turned into a mental appendage stripped of autonomous will.
And look at the monstrous asymmetry in this scene. There is no dialogue between them. Sasuke delivers a giant, agonizing internal monologue, dissecting his psyche and breaking his own bones to fit himself into Naruto's world. Even lying there without an arm, he thinks like a strategist until his last breath and offers a systemic, functional solution: to die, transplant his left eye to Kakashi and release the Infinite Tsukuyomi. And what does Naruto do? He blatantly declares: "I just wanted to punch a friend who was throwing a tantrum to wake him up!". In the original, Kishimoto puts the word "dadakoneteru" (だだこねてる) into Naruto's mouth - an expression used for spoiled children throwing a capricious tantrum and stomping their feet - and I refuse to believe it was chosen by accident. Seventeen years of state terror, existential shock, and the scorched pain of the Uchiha clan are called a childish tantrum by Konoha through Naruto's mouth: "Damn it! Just try... enough whining already!". Naruto's moral position only appears strong because the author artificially gagged Sasuke, forcing him to invalidate his own motives.
Yes, in chapter 698 Naruto performs one miracle - he proves to Sasuke that he won't die alone. When they are lying there without their arms, bleeding out, Naruto essentially drops to the same level and declares that he is ready to die with his friend. He removes the very necessity of the race. He is no longer "running ahead". He holds his hand and broadcasts: "You don't need to prove anything anymore. You already exist to me". The emotions in this scene hit from all sides, Sasuke's tears are real, the pain of witnessing a friend's suffering is real. Yes, this part of Sasuke's emotions is true, there's no arguing that.
But that's not the entirety of Sasuke. Where is the rest? Kishimoto simply broke the character over his knee. He carved out a 17-year layer of ideology, genocide, and corruption, leaving behind only a lonely boy. Canon desperately tries to reduce their absolutely different traumas to a single common denominator - "we were both lonely". But this is a lie. Naruto has no betrayal from the system. Sasuke does. Reducing personal rootlessness and state terror to a shared feeling of loneliness is intellectual dishonesty. And the author places a hypocritical equal sign here: "You've realized you are loved, which means all your grievances against Konoha are dismissed".
Naruto had an absolute obligation to say directly: "Your pain and fury are completely justified, Sasuke. Everything you've been through is monstrous. Konoha used your family, with the blood of your loved ones, it preserved peace and the faces on the Hokage monument. But I cannot let you kill my friends, and I will absolutely not lose you to this bullshit. You want to build a new world? Let's build it together".
You have to distinguish between methods and truth. Naruto should have stood against Sasuke's methods and punched him in the face for them. But he should have acknowledged his pain and rage. The price for stopping Sasuke didn't have to be the erasure of his truth.
In the end, a true catharsis would have been Naruto's absolute rejection of the Hokage title. A title whose foundation is permanently soaked in Uchiha blood.
Naruto spent his whole life chasing this acknowledgment, repeating his main mantra for years: "How can a guy who can't save one friend become Hokage?". But while they walked this path - each their own - everything changed. Naruto should have outgrown his childhood dream. He should have realized by then: becoming the head of this System meant becoming part of the machine that chewed up Sasuke's family, the machine that manifested Pain. The true salvation of his friend lay not in dragging him back to Konoha, but in rebuilding this Konoha alongside him.
Naruto would have forever remained Hokage in people's hearts. He would have always been the one who managed to embrace someone else's pain. But for Sasuke's sake, for the sake of their equality, he should have sacrificed this title, acknowledging: the old world is held together by spit and duct tape, and it objectively needs to change.
And then Minato's sacrifice wouldn't have been in vain - he died for life, for the sleeping people in the village, for Kushina, for the future. Tobirama built his brother's dream, and Itachi died for peace, and all of that was important. But the time for that ideology had passed. The System fulfilled its protective function at a certain stage, but then it began to rot and turned into a monster demanding blood sacrifices to maintain the illusion of stability. Rejecting the title would have been proof that Naruto understood this. And the two of them would break the cycle of hatred as equals, capable of building a new, far stronger future without denying the past.
But where does the ending lead us? The victim, whom no one understood from the very beginning of the manga, whose side no one took, whose family was politically assassinated - is apologizing to everyone. All the elders are still sitting pretty, while this guy supposedly realizes how "lost" he was.
This is victim-blaming on a national scale. Konoha orders the genocide of an entire clan by the hands of a teenager. They shatter the younger brother's psyche, lie to him his whole life, and turn him into a living weapon. And when he learns the truth and quite logically decides to tear this rotten system down - he is labeled a "monster consumed by darkness". And in the finale, instead of the newly minted hero Naruto accepting this and taking Sasuke's side for once, and Kakashi and the surviving elders dropping to their knees before him for what Konoha did to the Uchiha - it's Sasuke who is brought to his knees. They turn him into the "problem kid" whom all these "beacons of light" graciously deign to forgive.
What mercy! They put up with his antics, they suffered because of him, and now they forgive him for resisting their hypocrisy. And they send him off on a humiliating "journey of redemption" - to atone for his "sins" before the village that murdered his parents. And the name for all this is "he figured it out himself".
How fucking convenient for the plot. First, it instantly absolves the System of guilt. If Sasuke's entire problem is just a personal internal block against friendship, then Konoha is no longer guilty of anything. The elders, Root, Danzo - it's all technically swept under the rug. Sasuke isn't suffering because the shinobi world is nauseatingly ugly, but because he himself, like a fool, got "lost" and just can't shake an outstretched hand. Second, it legitimizes the finale. Because of this bait-and-switch, the canon ending looks like a triumph of healing rather than a substitution of concepts.
What am I ultimately trying to say here?
Naruto truly didn't understand Sasuke. That's a canon fact. Did he save him? Absolutely. But all their vaunted equality at the end was simply stolen. I believe a true synthesis between them was possible. Canon gave them everything they needed for it. And I will mourn this loss endlessly (which is exactly what I'm doing), because the synthesis of Naruto and Sasuke was necessary in a much more honest form.
Instead, the narrative turned Sasuke into a passive figure in every sense of the word. His entire scorched truth, ambitions, and political clarity were erased, reducing him to a shadow whose sole purpose now is to protect his friend. The fact that Sasuke had his own, separate, equal path was simply voided.
I perfectly understand that I am not sitting in the editorial office of a weekly shonen magazine and I am not limited by censorship, where Konoha's status quo is an untouchable baseline. I am not devoid of context and can assume that the Japanese cult of social harmony dictates its own strict conditions for the return of a rebel. Just as I can admit that Kishimoto, being a twin himself, heavily centralizes these bonds and projects his own understanding of intimacy onto the heroes. It is highly likely that for him, the highest form of vulnerability is exactly this kind of family dispute, and therefore the complex, bloody trauma of the surviving Uchiha is replaced in the finale with the pain of "brotherly estrangement", which is much more understandable to the author.
In any case, the logic of the character, his inner world and development within the given conditions of the universe must be separated from the author's arbitrary will. An author has the right to their own ideas in their own world, but when solidly built characters with their pain, thoughts, and ambitions suddenly collapse at the end under the pressure of a divine "I am the author, I need to wrap up the plot on this note" - that is no longer the character's voice. And these are the kinds of things that truly need to be separated.
