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One thing I find fascinating and hypocritical is that many people hate Sakura for loving and marrying sasuke but don't have that same reaction with karin. People go on and on how two characters that attempted murder on each other shouldn't be together, but at the SAME time, ship him with karin. By all accounts, they shouldn't be shipping them together. But for some reason, it make sense to them? And they mostly state that karin had a reason to like him? But he almost killed her. And was almost successful. Why is murder okay or even justified with sasukarin and not sasusaku?

to be honest with you, i don't really know... i try to avoid the business of puzzling over why people in the naruto fandom do anything... but there are some textual reasons that may make sasukarin a less "problematic" option than sasusaku (not that i have ever in my life cared about that)

i will say that sakura's attachment to sasuke is perhaps a more subtle thing than karin's. karin straightforwardly trusts him first and foremost because he intervened to save her life, risking great harm to himself, when they were competitors during the chunin exams. no one would have faulted him for standing idly by. of course, sakura has also been saved by sasuke, and encouraged, and supported, but it's complicated by her initial crush, which was as profound as most 12-year-olds' crushes get (which is to say, not very). there's also not a clean break between sakura's childlike infatuation and sakura's genuine love and care for sasuke -- the latter emerges before she's evolved past the former. in karin's case, her interactions with sasuke prior to the land of iron are completely recontextualized by the chunin exams flashback. i sort of see why people would view karin's affections more charitably, even though i think this is a misread of what sakura's got going on in part 1. (speaking mostly to the fandom here on tumblr -- the dudebros are pretty obtuse about both karin and sakura)

another distinction is that once the war arc sees both taka and 7 reunited, sasuke falls back into old patterns very quickly with all members of the former (karin included -- she even receives an apology!) as well as naruto. kakashi and sakura, meanwhile, get the cold shoulder. kakashi is also hardened enough that it doesn't, like, visibly get to him so it does come off a little bit like sasuke hurling shit at sakura in at least two separate instances for no apparent reason while she is too saddened by the state of things to respond. the persistence of karin's feelings seems reasonable to many simply by comparison.

that's my answer to your ask but i do want to elaborate on that last point to address the sasuke and sakura(/kakashi) dynamic during the war arc, because someone must.

i've seen people cite 1. sasuke just loving naruto more, and differently and 2. his myopic focus on saving the world as explanatory factors but i don't think either accounts for his harshness.

i suppose i could see why it would be difficult to stomach a sasuke and sakura reconciliation if sasuke's attitude towards sakura is so much more frigid than towards naruto despite his emotional neutrality... except, of course that there is no emotional neutrality here. like, ever. the sasuke fandom on tumblr is perplexingly averse to admitting that he has a bad habit of emotional repression/concealment/compartmentalization, to the point where i've seen the notion ridiculed multiple times by fandom-acclaimed sasuke understanders, even though it's one of the most textually concrete facets of his character. it's fundamental. (from what i've gauged this is a response to the most annoying contingents of the ss fandom claiming sasuke hides everything ever and thus has had a crush on sakura since he was 5 years old... nonetheless an overcorrection. and demonstrably incorrect.) anyway, he's repressed a great deal of emotion by this stage with relation to team 7 and what occurred at the land of iron. i feel pretty confident making this assertion because it's evidenced later following his battle with naruto, where sasuke's greatest source of gratitude towards naruto heartbreakingly, is that naruto never tried to kill him. even though, as he seems to believe, "everyone would always want to kill me"

sasuke speaks of everyone but there are like 7 people he holds in any regard over the course of parts 1 and 2. which murder attempts, aside from the obvious (itachi), do we think are the source of his distress here...

(to expand, it's not the specificity of a murder attempt that stings so much as what it represents: that two people he held dear resolved he could only be addressed through violence. i do of course think this falls flat on some level because sasuke is lying there with his arm torn off but, alas)

yes! i'm not particularly committed to it as a necessary step in their reconciliation -- i think most of the tough conversations would have taken place in konoha in the aftermath of the war -- but in a universe where they wind up "together" in some form, it makes a lot of sense. i don't believe that sasuke would ever want to permanently settle in konoha and sakura lacks the emotional or compulsive fidelity to state that seems to anchor the other members of team 7. so accompanying one another on travels elsewhere would be a nice kind of prelude to that life. i talked more about what i think that might look like here

i tend to be less interested in ss post-series... primarily i think about sakura learning of konoha's role in the massacre, which could be a direly needed moment of catharsis for sasuke. i feel like i constantly mourn how... almost cavalier the acknowledgement from naruto and kakashi was at the land of iron. to see someone profoundly affected by it, as i reckon sakura would be -- openly so, since she tends to be a crier lol -- would be enormously validating.

To summarize, it’s like someone looked at the Sakura hate on a surface level and decided to just avoid getting that by checking boxes instead of doing the actual character work.

i have no knowledge of jujutsu kaisen unfortunately so thank you for the breakdown! very reminiscent of what i felt during my viewing of the first half of the first season of fullmetal alchemist; brotherhood, for which i was quite excited after having been reassured that the girls were soooo much better-written than sakura. i was really like... our standards are so low. and wrong. they were unfailingly supportive of the male protagonists, never flawed.

it's a really weird fandom phenomenon, to deem a female character well-written only if she meets a narrow set of criteria for strength. likely it's an expectation of the genre but some women in the series very much meet these criteria -- tsunade gambles and drinks and talks down to everyone and is monstrously strong, konan is cold and quiet and stunningly skilled. i guess people want sakura to be this way, too, but idk -- naruto and sasuke and sakura all subvert these expectations at various stages and i quite enjoy it! what i am trying to get at is that there is diversity in the personalities of naruto's women. i don't know if sakura's failure to be "strong", i.e., aloof and emotionally detached and hypercompetent precisely as people demand is resultant of authorial misogyny.

i don't mean to give kishimoto too much credit. there are lots of larger critiques i think are totally fair and i've reblogged a few -- for instance, how fundamental men are to the arcs of like every woman while women are never allowed to drive the character trajectories of men in the same manner (shoutout to obito for being the outlier here, even if imperfectly), every woman reverting to the same blushing, stammering archetype in romantic scenes (in part 2 especially), and, most grating to me, the general lack of narrative and thematic investment in female characters and bonds featuring female characters where these would have enriched the text.

still, the manner in which these critiques apply to sakura is probably my point of contention with lots of fandom rhetoric. i've been a member of the "sakura should have been better-written" club from the moment i got into the series, but i can't help but think people overlook what should have been rectified (e.g., greater narrative focus, a fairer representation of her relationship with naruto, her learning major plot points like konoha's role in the massacre, following which there could have been better exploration of her relationship with sasuke, etc.) in favour of the same 3 boring takes like SAKURA LIKES SASUKE BECAUSE HE'S HOT and TO FIX HER WRITING SAKURA SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN OVER SASUKE. point 1 is patently false, point 2 is just terribly silly considering this would have changed a grand total of 5 panels in part 2 if we are generous.