I specifically don't know exactly, but the first thing it comes to my mind is that he don't want the other pairing fans, who are reading the manga for the sake of their favorite pairing to see if it happens or not, to lose interest in the manga. You can say also that he makes fan services now just to please and move on for future purposes with the decided paring.
Exactly. See the answers are there, just need to ask the right questions.
It's not fan catering or making sure none of the fans are pissed off cause their pairing didn't happen. It's about giving the fans a satisfying end to what they want. If NS happened much sooner, you would have the NH fans and the SS fan screaming "WTF?" and a whole bigger mess. We know that if NH and SS were the intended pairing, things would have been done much differently.
Why go through all this trouble if the intended pairing was something different? It doesn't make sense. It can't be fan catering because NH would have been canon already 100-200 chapters ago and Sasuke would have been saved by now and be in love with Sakura.
What Kishimoto is trying to do is give all the final pairings a final salute. Giving them one last run and one last moment before he ends it with NS. It is by far the only explanation that makes sense and explain a lot of what is happening. NH fans will disagree with me, but even they can not answer why NH didn't happen before or ever will happen. All they got is this moment to work with.
It would also explain why SS is saved for last as one last hurdle to get over.
James S Cassidy, I will read your entire post later, I just scanned through it. Wow, wonder how long it took to write that essaypost. But you're among my fav posters on this forum, you deserve a medal. : D
Thanks, but you all give me way too much credit. I am no better or worse than the next person on this forum. Yeah, I contribute, but this is a team effort. We're all in this together.
If it wasn't for RomanceGirl, I would not have had the inspiration to have written it. She deserves the medal, not me. That, plus another very special person who has been making me smile a lot lately.
Edited by James S Cassidy, 04 January 2013 - 03:16 PM.