#icha icha

sakura is icha icha's #1 defender, mostly cause if she can scream everyone down and they stop talking about it then she doesn't have to deal with her sensei interrupting girls night AGAIN to argue with her drunk friends. does she actually like the books? the world will never know. will she throw you through a wall for saying something that'll make her whore sensei open his mouth? yes. kakashi is SO unspeakably proud because he is convinced she is authentically on his side. he may be the only one who still thinks this. naruto calls her on not actually reading the books and kakashi looks HEARTBROKEN. she refuses to admit it and somehow talks her way out of making her sensei cry by swearing that she will read one. and then she makes inner do it because sakura doesn't actually want to.

JIRAIYA HAS BEEN A NINJA SINCE HE WAS FIVE. it's all he knows! I thinki icha icha is SUCH a weird piece of media to any outsiders looking in on shinobi life, because Jiraiya has NO CONCEPT of a normal life, really. BUT I think they'd be popular amoung shinobi for that exact reason. They're SEEPING with like. Shinobi logic and paradigmns and ways of living in the stupid subtle ways that civilians can't understand. like jiraiya has maybe one character he's ever written who straight up just doesn't like killing people. at all. and it is a civilian. The main love interest is, to those who know how to look, a VERY obvious and slightly disturbing mash up of his orochimaru angst and his tsunade angst. one book's main conflict is having to guard a caravan through 'the territory of stone', home to only the most brutal savages. and it ends, tragically, one short. Kakashi will NEVER recover from that fucking cliff hanger.