do you think that people that praise nobara but bash sakura actually cares about a good written female character in the shonen? idk it seems like ppl attach this title to female characters that have a “no shit attitude” and good physical strength. but what’s wrong with being vulnerable and insecure but having the agency to grow from it? In fact, I would argue sakura has more agency and these traits and complexity than nobara does.
Bluntly speaking? No, I don’t think they do. To me, what’s been so influential about Sakura as a character and her impact on female shounen heroines to follow is the fact that she is very much a product of shoujo tropes and narratives moreso than shounen ones, and that caught people off guard (to the point that it angered them, obviously). I would actually say that what makes her so likeable and relatable to me as a character is that emotionally she’s far more messy than Naruto or Sasuke, who are actually pretty straight laced in the majority of their actions and decisions. They respond very logically to their individual traumas in opposing manners, and that’s what sets the stage for their series-long clash as rivals or something more.
Sakura, in comparison, isn’t someone whose feelings, decisions, or actions are as clear cut. In the beginning, she’s a little bit selfish, a little bit mean, and it takes the range of her experiences during Part I to mold her into someone with a broader sense of empathy and kindness. Sakura is a normal girl living a normal life who just wants to have a normal crush, until she’s thrust into a team of people all traumatized in some of the worst ways possible, and she has to learn to cope with that while maintaining her own sense of identity and purpose. That’s something that especially becomes a focal point of her growth after the time skip, and as a whole it’s a narrative arc very reflective of the classic shoujo. The thing about her story that’s compelling is there’s this constant back and forth between loyalty to love or duty. Sakura is someone dedicated to building up her strength and skill for the purpose of contributing to and supporting her village, but at heart she’s also the same girl from her childhood who just wants to live a normal life, for her friends to be okay, and for the boy she loves to realize that he is someone worthy of love in the first place. The complexity of that interplay over the course of Part II absolutely fascinates me, especially because it’s something she struggles so much with. A lot of people tend to act like Sakura is naïve or blind to the reality of her circumstances, but I would argue that she’s the most emotionally and realistically grounded member of her team. It’s what makes her internal emotional struggle so hard, because she’s fully aware of the realities, but they nonetheless break her heart and she doesn’t actually like having to acknowledge them. It’s an incredibly human response, and why I think her actions during the Kage Summit Arc and even afterward are so understandable, because, yes, there is strife and blood and war, but doesn’t love still mean something in the end? I think shounen fans who tend to hate her absolutely abhor that aspect of her character, because they can’t stand to see someone who would dare go against the grain of what makes battle shounen so addictive and enjoyable a genre. They’re being asked to contend with a character with more complex motivations and feelings, and they can’t stand it, especially because that complexity manifests in the form of a character who doesn’t have the heart to hurt the people she loves, because more than anything, she just wants them to be okay first. It’s not wrong that Naruto’s philosophy with regards to Sasuke is to fight violence with violence, that’s his prerogative, and there’s reasoning behind it. But there’s also nothing wrong with Sakura trying to appeal to Sasuke’s emotional side first, especially since he is someone who has been so thoroughly traumatized into relying on violence as a coping mechanism. That’s something she acutely recognizes, and yet somehow, it’s almost impossible for a good portion of shounen fans to recognize this themselves, and so you have either people who egg on Sasuke’s dismissive behavior with her or people who act like he’s the devil incarnate because his extensive trauma makes him respond non-ideally. There’s no room for nuance, because at the end of the day, a girl who cries over the boy she loves, or who cries at all, is a miserable human being and has no place in a shounen, regardless of her feats otherwise.
And then, we have Nobara, who admittedly is a cool character, too! I like how her back story shapes her philosophy with regards to her admiration of and cooperation with the people around her, and how that mindset of hers grows and changes as she spends time with the other students at Jujutsu High. But, while it does present an interesting premise and fairly logical growth pattern, there’s honestly. . . not much more to it beyond that? Nobara is never paid the same amount of attention by the narrative as are Yuji and Megumi, and then it’s not like challenges to her philosophy are a significant focal point of the story (in the sense that it’s not really like her personal arc majorly shapes the story itself). It shows up where it’s needed, and then it’s more or less pretty neatly resolved and tied up with its own bow within a hundred or so chapters. Could she come back from the “dead”, and there theoretically be more done with her character? Maybe. The recent interview from Gege where he talks about the circumstances of her death was interesting. But something he also talked about in that interview is how the series is more than halfway over, and it’s like, is there really a lot more that he can accomplish with her narrative arc when there’s so much else that’s more important and needs to be resolved? I think people like Nobara because she’s someone confident in her own motives and her own sense of self, and that’s great! I love to see characters like that. But it’s also ridiculous to see her constantly lauded over Sakura when she’s hardly afforded a comparable significance to her own story, let alone an extensive character arc where her own personal development matters and is constantly challenged at large. People are far more concerned with dominant expressions of feminism, and that being synonymous with a “strong” female character, than anything actually bordering on a complex and fully realized character. And I don’t mean this in any sense as a criticism to people who like Nobara’s character. I’m just saying that it’s sad to see shounen fans constantly settle for bare minimum and not ask for more, or seek out more for themselves. Nobara, and several of the other female characters in Jujutsu Kaisen, deserve to have their narratives and characters be fleshed out on par with those of the boys. I wish more people were willing to acknowledge that.
