Posted 27 January 2005 - 03:13 PM
I'm worried.
Yes, you heard me. Worried. That Kishimoto will have taken this opportunity to advance other, lesser characters without the objective justification that we would get otherwise. Read: I'm worried that he's just made other people more powerful without rationalizations, like Hinata or even promoted Shikamaru to Jounin.
Without us 'watching,' he doesn't have to work as hard to make things in the past realistic (as realistic as an anime with fireballs and illusions ever gets, mind you.)
I don't want lesser characters to get off easy, so to speak. I want to see Neji struggle for that chuunin vest. I want to see Shikamaru have to get off his ass and do some work to reach Jounin, because frankly, that requires skills and Shika doesn't have any.
As for Sakura and Naruto, yes yes, would you please hand Kakashi his belled ass so we can get on with the more important things, like Neji or Itachi or Akatsuki etc etc? A bell test? That's a great not-new-at-all idea!
Sakura looks... taller, I guess. But I can't really say she got older. Her face is almost exactly the same, excepting for the newfound pointiness of her chin (which happens when people lose weight.) As I figured, most of Sakura's development is centered squarely in her hips. ::snickers::
She looks too much like Tsunade, check the shape of her eyes if you don't believe me. Tsunade's got a large forehead as well, but that diamond seal mitigates it. Naruto's face is slimmer, and his eyes are proportionally smaller -a prime indicator of age differential in anime- but I can't buy two and half years of prime puberty time from such a minor change. I do appreciate the Yondaime tufts of hair, both because I knew it and I tried to grow them myself to no avail.
I'm not fond of Naruto becoming Ultra-perverted like Jiraiya and that's analogous to my dislike of Sakura becoming 'Tsunade #2.' Great, carbon-copies. Just what we wanted. (Although, should we run the numbers, we're probably closer to Jiraiya #3.) Sakura doesn't need hyper-strength because that is Tsunade's gag. She needs something of her own that doesn't suck and isn't useless in combat. It can be marginalized by Naruto's sheer force of chakra or the Sharingan, because really, the end fight is going to be Sasuke vs. Naruto. Naruto just needs to be cool and do something different. The frog thing is nice, but if he pulls out Gamaguchi Shibari, I'm having a seizure. I don't care about animalistic summons, I want to see some new jutsu and some clever combinations. The lack of cleverness in the Naruto manga nowadays really kills me. Hopefully, with this bland bell test, we'll get to see some spiffy new techniques.
To be fair, though, about the perversion, I don't think Naruto's a pervert by any stretch of the imagination. If he can look at Icha Icha Tactics and not see what the big deal is, then I think he's pretty much safe. That book may well be intelligent and poignant, but I don't hold any illusions that it's subtle.
Then again, if he's sixteen and he doesn't get it, he's got entirely different problems, Child of Bushido style.
More importantly, let's just get to some other characters! We've already seen most of the changes in Naruto and Sakura that we want to see (aging, development, NaruSaku hints) and now it's time to see the rest of the gang. Are they all genin still? (I could easily see the Rookie Twelve collectively turning down the opportunity to get promotions because most of them wanted to fight Naruto or Sakura.)
Tenten: Become my idol's protege, will you? Eat steel!
Ino: I wanna rematch!
Hinata: I'll f-f-fight you f-f-for N-Naruto-kun's... no, nevermind, I'll just sit down over here and disappear.
::mutters darkly:: For now, I'll hold off my dire prophecies. But after all this wait, Kishimoto had better come through...
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