To add to the Itachi Discussion- First and foremost before I get into the everything I should preface this with the fact that I have mixed feelings about Itachi, I both am instinctively fond of this idiot cat-bird-weasel-child and want to yell at him for three hours straight to detail all the ways he fucked up so hard he will be written in history books for it.
Its impossible to address Itachi totally as a person without keeping in mind that Kishimoto probably hadnât thought of Itachiâs backstory at that point and retconned it in with Shippuden(im almost certain thats actual fact and not a theory and that he said something that implied that?). Wether part 1 Itachi or part 2 Itachi is more âtrueâ to his character or if they both are depends on the person watching it. Iâm doing this analysis more from part 2 Itachi as I personally feel the middle-to-ending traits and plot points of a longrunner are more important nine times out of ten but its not like there was much to work with before part 2 anyway.
Now, I think at Itachiâs core he is very empty. At a very young age he was intentionally(?) traumatized and then tossed into active military service to be further traumatized before he even hit 10 years old. The thing about being repeatedly exposed to trauma at a young age is that often times you donât develop a concrete personality to cope- with severity ranging from very jarring code-switching like Minato does (how he is mild and friendly when out of battle but cold and ruthless within it) to flat and emotionless like Sai was in the beginning to full blown Dissociative Identity Disorder. You mentioned that you think Itachi really doesnât have much of a personality, and that is true, but if we go a full Watsonian perspective- it is most likely the product of being traumatized and then encouraged to internalize it by both his family and shinobi culture and then told he Must follow orders and Must be an emotionless tool until heâs not quite sure what he feels about anything that isnât named Sasuke or Shisui. And even then itâs kind of a nebulous and codependent âmine- must devote life toâ more than anything.
The passive emptiness Is his base character underneath everything. At least in my opinion.
As someone who has Issues with dissociation and the concept of the self, itâs pretty accurate to what happens. It took me ages of intentional and aggressive practice to fake a narrative voice in my writing in a way that didnât feel that same kind of passive-empty and it Still sounds a bit off.
The passiveness is another thing. When you are conditioned to follow directions for as long as you can remember- it is very Very difficult to break out of that pattern of thinking. Its another thing that lets me understand Itachi a little? How bone-chillingly Easy it is to just not think and just Follow and how appealing it is to do what others want.
How you find yourself halfway through a task you donât even like doing before it even occurs to you that it was a suggestion and not an order, or finding it easier to do something you hate and have a messy breakdown later than to say no and deal with someone being disappointed or angry.
Thatâs another thing too, you canât really trust yourself to be honest with people and you canât trust others to not take advantage of you. And you hate yourself and hate the orders and hate your leaders but saying no is scarier and harder to do than being complicit in your own further trauma.
And right there is the crux of Itachiâs comment in part one(?) that went something like âI donât like taking ordersâ.
I bet he doesnât. Itâs scary and awful how you find yourself craving and needing to please people you hate.
He wants to be and tries so hard to be independent and to work alone because he has learned that no one can help him and when they do they make everything worse.
Itâs a mindset a lot of traumatized children end up with, that you canât rely on anyone else.
And yes, it can coincide with with craving orders and, as I can again personally attest, it is Awful. Even after youâve mostly squashed the contrary instincts that make every action feel terrible and like the Wrong choice.
And yeah, Itachi is extremely suicidal too. His purpose in the plot is to die to make Sasuke strong.
Iâm fairly certain I remember Itachi tossing himself off a cliff as a Very Young child and deciding he had survival instincts halfway down.
He doesnât see value in himself and probably used to do a lot of risk taking to âtestâ himself for the adrenaline rush or nearly dying before the massacre and his decision to make Sasuke kill him.
Speaking of him deciding to test if he had a will to live by flinging himself off a cliff- he has a significantly particular thought pattern in which it just doesnât occur to him that there are other options than the one that isnât putting him in a hands-on and reckless situation by himself.
Said thought pattern of very *sure* and bright convictions/plans is less pronounced but still there in other Uchiha. Madara stuck out his rage into to his 90s(?) to see the Eye of The Moon Plan happen. Sasuke decided to kill his brother Himself and that no one could help and no one should know.
The kind of alien way of ârationalâ decision making(which isnât rational to anyone but a Uchiha and not the âstronger emotionsâ thing that was outright said as a trait) is really interesting because is shows off the fact that they are not fully human. And that certainly is part of it- He isnât fully human so he doesnât have the same wiring(with this comes the headcanon that Hyuugas, Senju, and Uzumaki all have the same kind of adjacent thought processes). On top of this, however, is the fact that Itachi is fundamentally still different in his thinking, decision-making, and intrapersonal skills from other Uchiha.
He just kind of Lacks the ânormalâ steps in thinking between the starting facts and the conclusion even when he was like 5. Other folk have mentioned to you about this too, but it really is an important fact that he just genuinely doesnât understand how others think and it doesnât really occur to him to ask or try to adjust for them.
He misses and goes around steps in the same way that Shino obsessively outlines them and it weirds people out in kind of the same way too.
Someone said to you earlier that he would âmiss the forest for the treesâ or something like that and I definitely agree! And I should mention, that kind of cognitive processing of âdetails first then the big pictureâ rather than âbig picture than detailsâ IS actually a trait of a lot of âgiftedâ folk.
His social skills are also Really Bad, probably as a result of this. It doesnât occur to him that others might not think the same way or that something might be read as arrogant or showing off or would hurt someone or is just plain creepy. There isnât much evidence either way if its a inherent misunderstanding of social cues or just stunted growth from spending his all of his time training or running missions. It could go either way.
This runs into the gullible thing. A lot of people with inherent social impairments(particularly âgiftedâ students which is usually teacher code for âwe donât want to call that autism/aspergers because youâre pointing your interest at something convenient for schooling but itâs pretty much thatâ by the way) -if we are going with that idea- are very gullible and take things at face value. Also one of them, also awful to deal with. Sometimes I know itâs probably not true because people are liars but still believe it anyway because it not worth the effort to call them out and potentially be wrong, though I think Itachi is more of a âdoesnât even question it because questioning it will make people who can get away with killing you or arranging your death upset and thatâs Worseâ kind of person.
Another sign of social impairments is facial expressions, even as a small child, his were pretty static and only occasionally looking anything less than dead tired and usually only for Sasuke, Shisui, or very outstanding situations.
I think I have a contrary opinion to other folk in that I think he does have a lot of emotions and empathy, they are just kind of divorced and dissociated from himself so badly itâs kind of like they are raging beside him but he doesnât really feel anything he just knows they are there. He is deceptively calm and cold and largely gentle until he isnât anymore. And then he is dangerous.
He isnât immune from the Uchiha wiring to have more intense emotions than an average baseline neurotypical human. Itâs just buried a little too well under conditioning and trauma.
And trauma really did shape Itachi in the kind of soul-rending way it shaped young Kakashi. He just broke and stayed that way and didnât have anyone encouraging him to try to connect to people like Minato did for Kakashi.
Maybe if he had a sensei that didnât just want to foist him off somewhere else, or teammates that could keep up with him in some way and wanted to connect and werenât getting murdered, or literally Any friends other than Shisui whos more like a weird babysitter going by their probable ages then he might have done better and might have been more stable.
Heâs kind of like what would have eventually come of Kakashi if Kakashi had never gotten the wakeup call in the form of Obitoâs eye. That Kakashi probably would have carried out that massacre order too.
He was never really given a chance to be more than a tool for the state and ever saw anything else as an option. Itâs not noble or brave or evil or selfish or clever, I think.
Itâs just kind ofâŚ. Sad.
Im not sure how coherent all that was or if im forgetting anything but yeah IDK hes just a very unstable mess with no social skills pretending to be a halfway functional and calm person.
(hope you have a nice day!)
