gng

it was all a little funky to me, how everyone and their mothers from all of shinobi history basically came back to life. understandable that madara and zetsu was a massive massive threat, but still. all that deep history about the village got buried by the confusing alien myths. maybe i'm biased in how much i liked the first seasons in og naruto, but the will of fire was talked about like a lot, and the village was preached a shit ton. so where did it go? i'm not entirely on the bandwagon about the will of fire either, don't get me wrong, because it's literally js propaganda at its core to make shinobi willing to die in the mud, but objectively. the whole point of the akatsuki's existence was basically about the shinobi world's cruelty and village politics, no? so then why, at some point, did it stop critiquing the flaws of human society, showing its villainous byproducts, and instead paint war as this total inevitability that only two very specific reincarnations could fix?

plus anyway. if im talking about the reincarnations. if conflict became a pre-programmed sort of cosmic loop b/w ashura and indra's reincarnations, then wouldn't the characters themselves, as individuals, basically be stripped of their moral agency?

i quite liked yakumo and kurenai's. tsunade's tsukuyomi too. i rlly liked gaara's at the end. that filler arc especially showed the lingering hesitation around gaara and him being the previously psychotic and murderous one-tail jinchuriki. plus sand siblings together is always good.

still tied for first place fav village (architecture-wise tho, most definitely not economically or socially). whole place can't catch a break. frequent warzone, then totalitarian control, then post-war anarchy basically. like what we saw when the three sannin went to fight hanzo the salamander. i js know their citizens are gloomy asf, plus the poverty and constant surveillance. im lwk tied between amegakure and kirigakure.

they went from weaponizing jinchuriki and child soldiers to producing what arguably seems like one of the healthiest kage administration. I mean, gaara lasted throughout tsunade, kakashi, naruto, and shikamaru all being hokage. the village that raised gaara treated him as a demon or, at best, a military asset. a jinchuriki was a weapon and it was like rasa was making gaara's detachment be his "strength" or smth. actually, if i yap just about that, it's even bigger. suna produced emotionally repressed siblings on purpose. like, the sand siblings. gaara, temari, and kankuro were all stunted (in different ways, but they all had issues, no doubt) because they were raised where affection was actively discouraged, lived in a militarized state with dwindling resources, and had an unstable jinchuriki as a sibling on top of that. lwk the siblings only became like siblings fr after the invasion and rasa was dead.

by the time gaara's kazekage, the culture is radically different (tho the lingering hesitation is still shown in that last season of og naruto where gaara's student gets kidnapped). gaara's way more about leading with diplomacy instead of force, and protecting the next generation, not hardening them like he had been. also i'm a little lost about gaara never getting a childhood back. maybe that's why, unlike everyone else's infinite tsukyomi's about the future, his was in the past as a child. because naruto gains friends and sasuke eventually gets closure, but gaara immediately becomes kazekage. basically, his reward for surviving abuse and literal hell is more responsibility.

they're basically olympic games mixed with military recruitment. villages flex their strongest young genin to attract clients to their village and deter enemies. basically the only purpose of gaara's presence (tho the whole invasion thing cut the finals off), since he was crazy, crazy strong with his weaker jinchuriki seal. like the show showed, villages don't send all their genin that are eligible and want to be promoted; they only send their strongest as a message. they don't give a shit abt anything else. the exams cover intelligence-gathering (or js intelligence if you didn't need to cheat in the first exam like sakura), survival, and combat. but, realistically, actual chunins would have to do way more that isn't largely made to be demonstrated in the exams, like tactical command, instruction, cryptanalysis, or advanced chakra control. they could've even actually had them know T&I shit, that would be extremely useful in the field, since Ibiki and Anko were there.

like i mentioned with that mizuki escaping arc, all it took was him convincing two other shinobi, fujin and raijin, into staging a prison riot and it worked. like wth. then there should hv been breakouts everywhere, nearly all the time. although i do know that the two legendary stupid brothers are extremely strong, given that they beat asuma and kurenai, two elite jonin (tho it's not shown on screen, so im assuming that the other escaping prisoners and mizuki also helped in overwhelming them), but still. i could argue that chakra suppression fields, rotating seal specialists or smth, and anti-elemental jutsu architecture should be used. and thats tru. but most likely there's far more to be done, too.

logically, after such a large-scale war, with all kinds of gods and demi-gods and reincarnations or whtever, fighting each other and basically leveling the earth for miles, there would be nearly ten times, if not more, the work to be done. there would be displaced civilians, massive orphan crises, and whole slews of shinobi dead from all the villages. and that's just the life count problem. just inside the respective villages, forget about the world as a whole, there'd have been damaged infrastructure and veteran trauma (in the sense that there could be ppl driven mad from their experiences and lashing out). and then, on a wider scale, there's to be arms reduction, intelligence sharing, and especially war crimes investigations.

like just practically, what different elemental releases could be used for. also imagine like businesses using chakra. water jutsus would do reservoirs, fire release would be hella useful in steel production, and wind release could be mills? idk abt wind, but probs that, some sort of energy production. and lightning release (my fav) would js accelerate the development of electricity's presence across the elemental nations. they did have things like TVs, even in og naruto. so im iffy abt what stage of electrical powering they had. but regardless chakra creates entire industries. earth jutsus could do, like, tunneling companies. i always felt like the anbu would've used some elaborate, secret and confusing underground tunnel system as their hq.

it'd be necessary for all those summits to be crawling with genjustu screenings and illusion experts. largely it's just combat and the more obvious and brute-force threats that receive focus. but there's no psychological verification or mental seals. that's why the idea of the ninja academy, even just the one in konoha, not having genjustu as a mandatory, in-depth curriculum is beyond me. there wasn't much worldbuilding for the academy, considering it was legit like max 2 episodes. but apparently the students only learn shuriken, substitution, clones, and transformation. and then apparently they good to go into wars...right.

with the sasuke retrieval arc, there was a much more realistic depiction of what shinobi actually need, skill-wise. diplomats, assassins, trackers, interrogators, spies, even doctors. so, if those skills are necessary, then, in their teachings, where's the logistics, survival (genjustu, my lord, it's underrated, kurenai too), politics and dirty tricks? shinobi aren't samurai. they use dirty tricks; that's like the whole point of 'em.

and there’s no doubt hiruzen knew. no just hiruzen, the hokage system and all the major clan heads and everyone worth their power in the village. it’s not legal. it’s hereditary oppression inside at the heart of the supposedly good guy village. but there’s no intervention, because nobody in the village wants one of the strongest clans to pull out and go somewhere else. so they don’t hold any accountability to em. and hiashi gets his abuse ignored because “oh no, he changed his ways and now he’s a good grandfather and trying to make up for it” gng i was ts was in real life. watch how many child abusers get let free because now they love children. after the war, it’s implied that the whole branch family system was abolished. And it’s all happy shit. except it shouldn’t because that system is so deeply ingrained into every single one of the clan members because they were raised with it for generations on top of generations. it couldn’t have been a easy movement. even if officially, technically, it was gone. many members, especially the uptight superiority complex main branch, wouldn’t change their attitude and treatment. and there’s no chance there wasn’t at least one bitter non-main branch person didn’t lash out and go batshit at others once the seal was removed and there was no fear of it. we never see any political struggle, accountability or reparations, as far as I remember. that would’ve been a nice arc. smth real and deep abt the shinobi world aside from gigantic explosions and deep talks to get ppl away from the evil side. as if the good side is any better.

by the time naruto and jiraiya gave her reason to go back, the village had been destroyed repeatedly, there was financial instability no doubt, and constant political pressure (istg I still despise homura and koharu). i still stand by my thinking that tsunade most DEF protected Naruto from the council for years. the third probs did too, as much as i'm iffy abt him. the council were the ones that came to the radical solution of genocide to fix the threat of the uchiha, so it’s entirely plausible they had some nasty plans for their only jinchuriki too. the scale of the shit she fixed, too, orochimaru’s attack, the akatsuki and pain’s attack. everytime i see some incel on twt talk abt tsunade like she was useless and just the girl who jiraiya was supposed to end up with, it pisses me off. jiraiya and tsunade's relationship is hardly a percentage of her character as a whole. same thing that happened with kurenai. ppl ignored her actual character, just writing her off as asuma's widow. bro dont piss me off.

and those scientific ninja tools that fire unlimited, absorption-proof jutsu. and that point, they're not shinobi. these tool things highlight the moral dilemma of the peace-era. there's no excessive necessity for human shinobi, like in naruto (where even in peace-time, things like the wave arc happened), basically just having an existential crisis for the ninja world.

even as far as the plot goes, like with villains, all those aliens replacing human motivations. the end of shippuden had kaguya, but boruto made the otsutsuki alien clan the central focus. just these totally evil other-worldly beings that're definitely villains. and all those ninjas with deeply philosophical and emotional motivations, like pain and obito are replaced by them. there's no good turned evil from the harsh reality of the world with wars and the suffering of shinobi life. i do understand tho that boruto did that to explore those themes of divinity, parasitism, and the "true" cosmic history behind chakra itself.

og naruto was about a hard-working underdog clawing to overcome a harsh reality and past. then in shippuden, it was demigods, all-powerful bijuu, aliens, and a rabbit goddess in the moon. mostly, yes i know all the aspects in og didn't disappear. but naruto spamming shadow clones, rasengan, and kurama's chakra was..a choice. like how are you going to have naruto calling himself the "unpredictable ninja", whilst being incredibly predictable. og naruto had distinct jutsu, more scrappy, clever traps and strategies. sasuke retrieval arc, namely, especially neji's fight. that was gorgeous. like kidomaru finding the byakugan's blindspot, and later, a poisoned and damaged neji figured out how to channel chakra via the web thread and destroy kidomaru's internal organs. since neji was low on chakra, in came the scrappy strategy, he allowed himself to be impaled on kidomaru's arrow just to pull his move.

although it did see sumwhere that this early part in og naruto was done before kishimoto fully solidified his whole thing with the jinchuriki. so probs in shippuden they tweaked the explanation with the monk having shukaku inside him or smth.