Never thought I'd actually have the guts to write this, but I feel a lot of people were misreading Naruto from the beginning.
People looked at Naruto and saw him as a victim, the underdog who is going to fight his way to #1. They connected to him because of his sob story and believed the story would end with everyone seeing how great he actually is. This is why Hinata's love is seen as so pure even though it started way before his character development as an adult. People even played up his victim status, leading to fanon like a civilian council making Naruto's life a living hell and him chased by mobs of villagers with the intent to cause bodily harm in retaliation for the Kyuubi attack years prior.
But that's not what the story tries to say, isn't it? It doesn't indulge in Naruto's victim status, with Kakashi saying during the Wave arc that Naruto never cried about being alone. Naruto's situation created a darkness within him, one that allowed him to relate with villains he saw as evil versions of him, and a big deal is made at the end that Naruto could have easily joined them. But he didn't, he didn't allow the hate to consume him. Instead, he learned to work towards the good of the village. To serve it, and when his son is dealing with his own loneliness Naruto tells him to suck it up.
You see, this is the thing: For all the messed up stuff we see Konoha do, in the end it's all about contributing for this community. The Hyuuga create a slave class of their members? Doesn't change, and Neji chooses to die protecting main member Hinata like he was supposed to as a branch member. Naruto ends up yelling at his son at the end of the manga for the same prank he himself pulled when we first met him. The Leaf ostracized the Uchiha clan and when the plan to brainwash them into being loyal didn't work out, instead they have Itachi massacre his entire family for the good of the Leaf. And then after learning the truth about this, Sasuke wants it to remain hidden while performing jobs Konoha can't officially be tied to as a form of trying to make up for what he did. Sarada comes to idolize Naruto and follow in his example, while Boruto wants to serve the Leaf like Sasuke.
Naruto was not about fighting the system. It never was. For as messed up as it is, the characters still want to protect it with Kiwaki being set up as the bad guy for wanting to end it. It's about joining the system, not rebelling against it. If you get wronged by society, it's on you to just suck it up while still contributing to it.
Which, really, makes sense considering how bullying is handled in Japan. In Nippon, teachers will tell students suffering from bullying to try and fit in better with their classmates. The kids doing the bullying justify their actions by saying because the victim doesn't fit in, they are rejecting the rest of the group. There's even cases where kindergarten teachers encourage this behavior, telling the other kids to laugh.
This starts in preschool, where children who seem to be a bit cranky are often made to feel different from the happy ones. A preschool teacher will ignore a sad child, hoping that the indirect pressure of the group will encourage him to get over it and come back to play. A perfect example of this comes from an education researcher observing a loner child avoiding activities in a Japanese preschool:
“….the teacher encouraged the children to ostracize him by pointing him out as ‘strange’ and ‘peculiar’ (okashii), words applied to any child who cries or looks unhappy at kindergarten. ‘Fancy not wanting to come to kindergarten’, she had said at the beginning, ‘what a funny boy.'”
https://thisjapanese...-ijime-bullies/
And then people wonder why Japan has high suicide rates among students, along with students who refuse to go to school. And consider who Naruto was targeted at. He's not the escapist character people make him out to be, his story is him getting in line with the rest of society. That's what not giving into hate and absolving people for their crimes comes down to, it's about letting go of your personal feelings and supporting the group that victimized you. Because they're not at fault here, you are if you lash out in response. And it's why when Naruto became a ninja and contributed to Konoha, protecting it, that people other than Hinata began to approve of him.
It's a very Japanese moral that doesn't translate well to Western culture, which values the individual more. We were raised on the scrappy underdog coming out on top with everyone recognizing how great they actually are. Naruto is the anti-Rocky. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. And in a sense, it makes you wonder how compatible Naruto really was with Western sensibilities.
Consider that the tradition view in Japan is group harmony (what I've been talking about here), male leadership (Tsunade being a woman being used as a reason why she's weak) and submissive women (Hinata). Naruto is a distinctly Japanese series, but because of the escapist nature of anime few Westerners actually picked up on this.
Edited by RulesofNature, 19 January 2018 - 10:58 PM.
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