#kabukins

YOUR URL IS SO GREAT IT’S SO WONDERFUL I will keep singing this from mountaintops honestly but ANYHOW

HEY WOW so sorry for leaving this in my inbox, I started answering it and then I got distracted but I seriously can’t tell you how much I appreciate being asked about this, like……..guys please ask me these things all the time, indulge my garbage self

Basically Kabuto’s characterization in the Guren arc (as I refer to it) is EVERYTHING wrong with anime-only portrayal of him in general!! It’s actually so bad that I’ve come to love it for how awful it is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the anime has this nasty habit of taking ANY leeway they have with Kabuto to make him as 2D and sycophantic as possible

I haven’t seen the arc in a WHILE, so I apologize if I miss anything, but from what I can recall, what those episodes essentially do is show the VERY WORST facets of his personality without providing any of the necessary nuance that Kishimoto gives him. For example:

He’s a total dick to Guren, which is like okay, fine, Kabuto can’t help but feel irrationally threatened by anyone whom he perceives as a threat to his position as Most Valuable Subordinate. We get that from the Kimimaro incident, it’s a canon trait. But the anime frames it as “Kabuto is an asshole for the sake of being an asshole” and does this weird quasi-romantic(???) thing with Guren that just makes their dynamic a bizarre uncomfortable mess

He seems to derive genuine enjoyment from performing horrific and painful experiments on a child, which is just blatantly OOC. Granted, we never actually SEE Kabuto conducting any experiments in the manga, but he has an illustrated habit of shutting down emotionally when he’s about to do anything seriously fucked up—we know from his flashback chapters that the “shiny glasses + fake smile” thing that he pulled when telling a room full of prisoners to fight to the death is a sign of emotional withdrawal. He does what he feel he has to; the same guy who healed Hinata and Sakura “just because” and saw Obito’s murder of a random ANBU agent as “harsh” would not get a sadistic kick out of watching a child suffer

FINALLY there’s his murder of an Oto-nin who is obviously WAY farther down on the totem pole than he is, just because said Oto-nin said something stupid and cocky about surpassing Kabuto in Orochimaru’s favor. This guy is nowhere NEAR as potentially threatening to Kabuto as gifted host body candidates like Kimimaro or Guren—even Kabuto would realistically be able to see that. But the anime still has Kabuto kill this guy in a cheap, childish portrayal of his canon jealousy, and that’s not even the worst part. The kicker comes when he STRAIGHT-UP says something like “Lord Orochimaru doesn’t need anyone to serve him but me” which is owning up to the jealousy that Kabuto would NEVER EVER EVER want to admit to HIMSELF, let alone OTHER PEOPLE. It’s the prime example of the anime reducing his character to an easy trope (namely Obsequious Henchman) because the writers just couldn’t be arsed

but kabuto took like 2 naps already *shot*