#shippingcenter

If you find yourself using any of the following words to describe your ship in relation to others....don’t.

“Objectively”

“Logically”

I am legitimately stunned it’s still going myself. I think a lot of it is because online people tie their identities to groups and some people have legit tied part of their Naruto Fandom Identity to hating Matsuri.

And yes, calling her out for being a fangirl is deeply ironic but I will admit that was HUGELY common back in the day as it originally was used against Ino and Sakura, who were seen by a lot of the fanbase (especially pre-Shippuden) as only even being ninja to try and impress Sasuke (also, reminder that the anime upped their cattiness and abuse of non-Sasuke guys, which didn’t help, and the endless filler made Ino come across as super shallow and a stereotypical popular girl type). “Fangirl” is pretty much a fanon in-universe insult at this point, it even crops up one of my fics (in my defense I wrote that chapter several years and years ago and it’s probably my most disappointing chapter in the whole fic). Like, it never even crosses a lot of fans’ minds that we never seem to bring up useless wannabe ninja fanboys at all (srsly, I cannot think of a single male character people regularly complain doesn’t take being a ninja seriously enough compared to way too many of the girls), and it’s something I’ve evaluated as I’ve gotten older. It also doesn’t help that yeah, Matsuri is clearly an actual fan of Gaara’s, but she does take him seriously in the time that she’s his student and at least her admiration from him comes from a place of actually knowing him.

I also think given the rise of social media there have probably been some fandom wars between Gaamatsu fans and GaaOC fans (and probably Gaara x anyone else fans) and there’s also bad blood from those to consider. Though I did laugh at the idea of Gaamatsu fans stealing GaaOC art to alter OCs into Matsuri. That has to be freaking staged. Like, it’s not like they even need references, Matsuri actually fricking exists and photoshopping her into pics with Gaara can be done using canon images to start with! It’s such a weird claim.

On the other hand, the wars can go on forever since Gaara’s son in Boruto is explicitly adopted and so theoretically Gaara could have gotten with anyone not already paired off or is still single (given Shinki’s skillset I think it’s pretty clear Kankuro did some co-parenting but that’s about it. God help us if the kid ever breaks out a rope dart tho…lol).

This can then lead to shock and possibly upset when you do actually encounter canon and discover that maybe what you “loved” most about it was being misrepresented in some way. One I’ve seen crop up on tumblr a few times is a certain ship from a show I used to watch. People introduced to the show by shippers of that ship or who came in through parts of the fandom heavy with support for that ship were convinced by their fellow fans that the subtext was all over the place, that it was their great and supportive relationship, and how obviously the show’s writing was moving towards making it canon. There are even some posts from people who were stunned at how much that fanon misrepresented both characters involved and how, when actually watching the show, it was clearly not a thing the writers were doing. The people who made those posts were more annoyed at the misrepresentation, but I can certainly see others lashing out at the show for not being what they were told it was instead.

Heck, take my recent experience with My Hero Academia. I mostly got into it thanks to a lot of funny and heartwarming fanart I was seeing, which really left out a lot of the angst and darker elements of the series and also (in some cases) really whitewashed Bakugou’s character. Now I personally didn’t mind that because I know fandom has a tendency to sometimes, say misrepresent stuff for comedy or play up the fluff for catharsis or not pay much attention to the worse traits of characters it likes. But someone else might not feel that way and again might get upset that something wasn’t what they thought it was. And since they’re likely to know there was no malice on the part of the rest of the fandom, they may assign the malice to the show itself. Which is also a wrong conclusion but those looking for something to blame might not care. In their eyes they were sold on something that does not exist and that’s lousy, so they get upset.

Matsuri is an extremely minor character. In canon she and her friend Sari only really exist as an example of how Suna’s attitude towards Gaara has changed over the timeskip by being two chunin with crushes on the Kazekage and then just mostly background stuff, a few lines here or there. All her other appearances are in filler arcs. And she’s gotten solid hate since the first one. 

What happened in that arc? She was an academy student who picked Gaara as her teacher since he went to say something to her but stopped talking when he noticed he was making the other students nervous (this is after all, pre-timeskip Gaara) and she wanted to know what he had to say. We also get some irony since due to her parents being killed in front of her Matsuri is terrified of weapons (yet still wants to be a ninja and protect people) and the person she picks as her teacher is a guy who was literally a living weapon. Matsuri is then kidnapped as the easiest person around Gaara to kidnap (given she’s an academy student while Temari and Kankuro are bamf!chunin) and we get a fun teamup arc with 10 of the Konoha 11 while rescuing her and thwarting a plan to weaponize Gaara/Shukaku. Outside of her intro and providing a bit of help near the end she’s almost more macguffin than character.

And for some reason people just lost their freaking shit about her. Like, she’s the closest thing Gaara has to a love interest (I guess) but again, it’s almost all filler so just ignore it if you dislike her character for whatever reason (now that I’m older I’ll admit her dub voice is terrible and I dislike it). Ignoring her is the easiest thing in the damn world to do because she barely has a presence.

And she’s gotten a couple more fillers. One was just her in the chunin exams along with two teammates, which wasn’t even focused on her but the exams and all the other genin in them (there’s another important Suna genin Gaara taught and several of the Konoha crew and Fu aka the seven tails host) and she’s in an expanded part of the war arc where they just added some extra scenes to fights. Like she actually gets some cool moments, but if you hate her, hey, it’s all filler anyway. Ignore it.

Yeah no the “die Matsuri die” feeling is still strong. There’s a whole club for it over on DA, too, has been for nearly a decade at this point.

Here’s the thing that pisses me off the most though. The people going “die Matsuri die”? Yeah they often use Sari as a possession sue, either to help in offing Matsuri, get with Gaara herself, or praise the ship the author likes with Gaara as “obviously” Matsuri wouldn’t care if her sensei was happy but Sari (who unlike Matsuri has no characterization outside of a crush on Gaara) is somehow okay in their books? I mean at that point it’s not even about shipping anymore it’s about hating Matsuri for the sake of hating her. And it’s going on to this very day!

Yep. I wasn’t being specific since it was on a general fandom post.

Seriously tho, I still consider Matsuri and the hate surrounding her as one of my most surreal fandom experiences. Like, Sure people also shipped her and Gaara but this should have been one of the easiest thing for anti-shippers to ignore. As I noted in this post here, Matsuri is easily ignored if you hate her, and yet tons of people went out of their way to hate her, including her in fics or drawing art about how much they hate her. She’s not like Sakura, Sasuke, or Kakashi in a fic about Naruto where you at least need a throwaway line or something since they’re main characters and ou have to mention why they’re not there even if you hate them, you can easily ignore Matsuri. It’d be like hating that chick from the Inuyasha episode “The Woman Who Loved Sesshomaru” (which as a Sesshomaru fan who easily experienced how rabid my fellow fans got at any woman around him I am surprised she didn’t get more hate but I guess they already had Rin and Kagura to hate so yeah)

I mean, it has somewhat gotten better in recent years. Like, if you search “gaara matsuri” on DA you’re not going to get much of the hate stuff in the early results which often happened years ago (to my chagrin), more positive stuff has accumulated to drown it out by now (tho if you keep scrolling oh the hate you will see~). But the hate club still exists and was clearly inspired by that chunin exams filler to keep adding to their shit. Like I only even went over there back when I made the original post to see if it was still active and hoo boy they are. I mean, I did get a giggle out of since since ridiculous fans gonna be ridiculous but still some of it is freaking creepy. Also their icon is an avatar of Matsuri and a noose gif which…erk.

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