I am a KakaIru purist. Have been for 20 years. See, I don't care enough about Naruto to spend time trying to rewrite canonical facts and the joy of shipping KakaIru is that I don't need to do that. I get to fill in all the spaces from the delicious trail of crumbs from the official creative teams over the last 25 years and at no point did I need to reject reality.
I don't usually care when I come across random comments from people saying things like "I don't see it", or "KakaIru are not canon", or "they have no chemistry". I mean, it is literally the only ship in the Naruto fandom to achieve hegemonic status in Japan, so plenty of people do see them and feel they have chemistry. And I understand that not everyone can read Japanese or have access to original text and so they can't read any of the untranslated novels, or end up only having access to translated works where apparently the quality can be a total crap shoot (like the the weirdly done Viz Media translations that made up non-existent lines like "that's my Kakashi" or make stylistic choices like "dear" and "cherished" while cutting out the context of Kakashi and Iruka's relationship for the English translations) and are therefore not aware of the fact KakaIru has officially been given pretty much every stereotypical between-the-lines romance cue from any decades old j-dramas for capitalism and is therefore currently way closer to "canon" than any other kketc ships.
And most importantly, I don't normally care very much about the detractors because shipping is never about anyone else's opinion.
But that is not the point of this post.
Never, in my two decades of fandom, did I feel the need to publicly post about how much I dislike some of these so called "rival ships". One, most of the time they don't live in my head rent free because all my prime real estates have been given to my own ship. And two, if I am somehow forced to look at their materials because people can't use the tags properly, I keep my thoughts private, because I am old fashioned and agrees with Thumper.
Now, I get you don't like a ship. But why bother tagging the ship if you are just going to shit on it when you should know very well that tags are the main ways for everyone to filter for content? How narcissistic do you have to be to think anyone within that fandom cares to hear about your opinion?
Now that's out of the way, I am going to go back to my regular mental programing, like thinking about how Kakashi smiles at the memory of Iruka's face when he should be focused on choking out ten tokujos, or how Kakashi goes to Iruka to share his work difficulties and his private struggles like his insomnia, and that he still remembers Iruka's eyes years after Iruka stood up for him against Hiruzen and left an impression, and he uses a peephole to look into Iruka's classroom, and how Iruka is the only person Kakashi shows his face to by choice, and that Kakashi now shares Iruka's favorite hobby of going to hot springs, and talks to Sarada about how Iruka is so skillful at cooking and is good at housework; all the while the always proper Iruka Sensei applies no boundaries around Kakashi and teaches Sarada how to make Kakashi's favorite dish, and breaks professional decorum to warn Shino about Kakashi's childish side but still allows Kakashi to run the Genin exam, and that Shino chose to give Kakashi a chance because he knows that Iruka knows Kakashi, as they have both watched over Naruto as he grew up, TOGETHER. And how about the hilarity that even Naruto video games find ways for Kakashi and Iruka to refer to themselves as first person plural and finish each other's thoughts...without speaking out loud. (And yes, I checked, that first person plural was in the original Japanese text.)
Isn't it wonderful that none of these are headcanons?
