#zykamiliah-naruto

i cooould? see some parallels? at the top of my head wwx and naruto both have a mischievous side, both are orphans, but their stories are wildly different. wait i already replied to a similar ask.

they have four distinctive personalities, there are different forces at play moving the plot. you cooould say is an opposites attract each other, star-crossed lovers kinda deal, but their conflicts are different, even if they involve the outside world. you can't make a 1:1 comparison between the characters.

mdzs and naruto are different stories, even if, in a broad, more general spectrum, you can glimpse similarities in the themes: the individual vs the society, genocide as a way to silence a political opponent, contrasting philosophies between the two characters in question etc. etc. but if you go to the minutiae of the conflicts between both relationships,

narusasu have a mutual understanding in that they both know the pain of loneliness, and that's what initially link them together. they didn't know how to approach each other, so naruto uses the excuse of rivalry, and sasuke, in the face of the goal he was set to accomplish, didn't want to feel weak, which his feelings for naruto did, and tried to reject them (and failed. and failed. and failed).

narusasu's conflict starts with said rivalry and naruto's emotional immaturity, plus their conflicting goals separating them. sasuke is aware, even if he tries to deny it, that his feelings for naruto are a tremendous influence on himself, that's why he has to cut him off. naruto knows he has huge complicated feelings for sasuke, struggles to defines them, but at the end of vote1 they both KNOWN because of the white space astral communication thing, that they have SOMETHING. throughout the manga, the story evolves so naruto grows to understand sasuke's goal, struggles and views of the ninja world and focuses in saving him from self-destruction (and from the other people who wanted to kill sasuke), already declaring his full acceptance of who sasuke is. he'll go as far as dying if that's what it takes, but it is either both of them alive and safe or both of them dead, because Naruto knows that Sasuke loves him and he doesn't want to live him alone, and by the end of the manga Sasuke also knows Naruto loves him. like, most of the story they are both HIGHLY AWARE of the depth of their bond. EVERYONE knows. the one misunderstanding is the NATURE of that love (it's gay), which is also addressed at the end when sasuke ask him what tf does the word """friend""" means to naruto lmao (naruto is very closeted it's depressing)

Naruto Chapter 698

Captive Prince Book#2: Prince's Gambit, Chapter 14

Another gay media/book where the phrase "You remind me of my brother" didn't suddenly invalidated all the romantic and sexual tension in the relationship. It's just a way for the character to express how highly he regards the main character by comparing them to the most important figure in his life. If you don't know Captive Prince, you should at least know that Damen and Laurent end up together.

(Crediting @laurents-laces 's post for bodyslamming this realization upon me)

Acceptance kanji on the left, heart kanji on the right.

(The sun and moon seals are on their dominant hands)

Reconciliation seal, the union of two hands... (Naruto's fingers are inside Sasuke's hand lol)

And finally

Okay so my theory is that Kishi always knew that the final villian would be a woman because otherwise Naruto's reverse oiroke jutsu wouldn't have worked. And Naruto was seen flaunting his new jutsu (that he practiced more than Rasengan 😏) from the first chapter of Shippuden. But Kishi took care of not showing it to us. Until Kaguya. Because she is a woman and will only be distracted by naked men. 🙄 And even though war arc was written a bit lazily, he must have known that he will have to introduce a new villian keeping in mind that they had to be a woman. And all the existing villians were men. At least, he must have had the barebones of that idea, even if not fully realized at the time. Kishi mindfully created a situation where Naruto would have to use that jutsu, which really speaks volumes, the jutsu as in. It also didn't escape my notice that Sasuke had to comment on the fact that Naruto's kage bunshin jutsu (often mixed with his oiroke, as was the case when he distracts Kaguya), is an attempt to dispel his loneliness. He distracted Kaguya with his oiroke men, many of whom suspiciously look like Sasuke, and Naruto does think he is cool looking (way more than Sai 😤😂). So that brings us to the conclusion that, Naruto must have practiced making Sasuke looking clones a lot in the blank period. Heheh aww. When Konohamaru makes the reverse oiroke with Sasuke and Sai, Naruto is mad. Because he does feel very very possessive towards Sasuke, as was already established. So he can make Sasuke looking clones to distract women but he wouldn't have Konohamaru making a quite explicit looking reverse oiroke of Sasuke. But again, Kishi guised it under comedy, like usual.

What do you think Kishi's intent here was, throughout? I feel like he played it very cleverly.

Heeeeey! Sorry for the wait, I had a lot going on these past few days.

From my point of view, the author's intent is not so easy to discern. In any piece of media we’ll be reading their work through our very particular perspective, no matter how much we try to be impartial and analytic about it. In the end is going to be OUR reading of the work in question, which often enough aligns with others but not always. Naruto fandom is a pretty good example of that. There are things you can establish as facts (Example: Naruto and Sasuke are important to each other. That’s a fact. Now, the way any fan chooses to interpret the nature of their relationship differs even between fans that ship them romantically) Art is already polysemic, allowing different interpretations of the same work, and I think that in NARUTO’s case Kishimoto tends to be a little (a LOT) ambiguous about some things, be it to have plausible deniability or to touch on themes that he can’t write explicitly.

Kishi mindfully created a situation where Naruto would have to use that jutsu, which really speaks volumes, the jutsu as in.

I’d say that he always had the Sexy Reverse Harem jutsu in mind and was just waiting for an opportunity to put it in the manga. The Last was announced in 2012. Already at that moment in War Arc he had to know how his story would end, and that there would be a sequel and all that entailed. He had plausible deniability if he wanted to try anything “funny”.

As for Kaguya, I really can’t say if he always had her in mind. She’s the most underdeveloped villain in all Naruto, besides maybe Gatou. But hey, he had to create her to make sense of the sequel. Doesn’t mean he can’t take advantage and put something as “questionable” as a bunch of naked men in a shonen manga. And make Naruto say he had practiced it a lot. But of course he’ll never explain that, and will use the plot to distract the reader from those little things he drops now and then. And it works, right? Because the most casual audience has never stopped to think: hold on, is it a normal hetero behavior to obsess over sexy naked men to create a jutsu that Naruto just got to use against one enemy??? Naruto, who wasn’t very good at transforming into other people in the beginning, who failed that first test to become genin, was able to transform himself into Sasuke perfectly in chapter 3? What does it all mean, really? -shrugs- But most people aren’t interested in that part of the story. So Kishimoto can get away with putting very ambiguous stuff into his story as long as he uses a distraction to take the attention from it.

I think the fact that Kishimoto was so insistent on drawing this scene speaks volumes about how relevant he thought it was, or at least how much fun he had doing it. It takes you back to the beginning of the manga, when Naruto used the Sexy Jutsu against his teachers. Sometimes you spend so much time on a story you need to remind yourself why you love it.

But as I was telling you, I don't know to what extent everything was planned that way. Sometimes readers can notice more connections between parts of the story than the author himself, and being a 15 years old manga, we can’t say that something Kishimoto wrote for chapter 3 was intended to have an impact beyond the first arcs of the story. But regardless of Kishimoto's intention, it’s a fact that Naruto spends time and effort on things that interest him, that matter to him in some way. And the fact that he put so much effort into pulling off a reverse harem jutsu with different types of men, all very attractive and different (despite the fact that some have that sexy dark haired look lol Naruto has a type), unlike his sexy harem jutsu which is just clones of his female version, shows how much attention Naruto pays to how other men look NAKED. Does that mean he was ogling guys at the onsen? Did he buy magazines with pictures of sexy men? Did he observe men in the village and practiced how to transform into them? It was something he did frequently, if his comment about how he practiced it more than Rasengan says anything.

It also didn't escape my notice that Sasuke had to comment on the fact that Naruto's kage bunshin jutsu (often mixed with his oiroke, as was the case when he distracts Kaguya), is an attempt to dispel his loneliness.

And you combine that two things, Naruto practicing the Sexy Reverse Harem Jutsu with his clones, his Kage bushin Jutsu being and expression of his loneliness, with this panel from the Road to Ninja Oneshot

That was one facet of the ending that made me see red honestly because of how insincere and quick fix it felt. What is your impression of it?

Hey there @sneezemonster15! Thanks for the ask, this has been interesting to think about.

From the moment Hagoromo showed up, it all felt extremely Deux ex Machina to me. He gave Naruto and Sasuke power ups that were pulled out of nowhere. The thing with Ashura and Indra and Kaguya, if taken literally, (and not as a metaphor about how power corrupts people) it’s just so cheaply convenient for the plot. Oh, Madara was too hard to beat, so let’s just magically remove him (Zetsu “killing” him was another Deux ex Machina, lol) and set up how to solve the puzzle of defeating Kaguya: you just have to touch her with the seal hands; easier than fighting a godlike Madara, right? By the way, let me just take my time to make a lengthy exposition about who this Kaguya is, as I have never mentioned anything about her or chakra fruits or an original source of chakra, whose history turns out to be, rather conveniently, the origin of everything that’s wrong with the world. This will also make it easier for the sequel, because the future villains can’t be shinobi from other nations, obviously. Not after the War Arc, where apparently all conflicts between the shinobi villages were abolished, and the power of nakama was highlighted. It would look like going backwards, especially if the new Kages are the good ones, and Naruto’s allies and friends.

By bringing Kaguya and all her siblings into the plot Kishimoto shifted the blame from the shinobi system and humanity to the aliens. Now it wasn’t that the shinobi system was corrupted from the actions of those in power, it was that these entities were manipulating everything from the shadows. Madara and Sasuke were just being influenced by some cosmic chackra and were not actually affected by discrimination and violence and all that. The characters' suffering is not a product of the system they grew up in, it’s all because of Kaguya, an otherworldly entity that’s not human and so killable without regrets or upsetting shonen sensibilities.

And now I’m thinking that, ironically, by introducing Kaguya, Kishimoto did present a “solution” to the big problem of: how to stop the cycle of hate and violence between nations and people? How to unite all shinobi so there’s no more wars between different villages or communities and so ninja stop being used as tools of war?

In the end Sasuke was right: the only way to keep shinobi together in an alliance is to have a common enemy, so that’s the route Borruto took (I really don’t know what’s going on in Borruto because I don’t follow it, the movie was enough for my weary heart lol)

I think this is common in countries with a strong sense of nationalism: Japan or the United States, my own country… There has to be an enemy that threatens everyone but serves as cohesive element, so that people can set aside their differences and unite under a common cause.

The first important arc is the Land of Waves, and it is established from the beginning that the system is corrupted. I suspect that it being a shonen manga and operating within the limitations of Shueisha, Shonen Jump and the demography itself, Kishimoto wrote himself into a corner with that theme. Kishimoto, are you encouraging young teens to question the authority and the system that regulates their lives? Are you saying that all the cool ninja stuff is actually bad because ninjas are weapons, trained in the art of violence since they’re children? That’s not in the spirit of a shonen manga. Even if he still addressed this theme throughout the entire manga, it was not something that he could make his protagonist face upfront. It became a bit peripheral, something related to the characterization and motives of the antagonists (Madara, Nagato/Pain, Sasuke), and by the end, completely dismissed.

and now lets listen to this song to lighten the mood lol