So in the end, my biggest mistake was that I gave Kishi way too much credit. I thought that he actually had a plan as well as a backbone. Silly me.
Right. Me too. I kept thinking it was all going somewhere. But it wasn't. And that doesn't mean I'm saying it just becuase it went in a direction I didn't want it to. No, in the end, none of the development was made good on. In fact it seems like Kishimoto went out of his way to create pairings that had no basis in the story, no support from the characters and no reason to be together except for shock value.
All of the discussions we had, all of the theories, all of the development for NS — it all went nowhere. Because Kishimoto pulled a bait-and-switch in the last two chapters. Still astonishing, even a month and a half later.
And yeah, as someone posted earlier, I really have not been able to go back and look at any of the chapters. I'll never read the last two again. But the rest? Eh.... I can bear looking at images supporting NS. But looking back at the manga itself...it's like looking in the windows of a house I no longer live in. I can see where everything went, I can remember the life I had there, but no matter how familiar it feels, I know it's no longer mine. And I have to move on.
There's no happy ending for Naruto. Just an end.