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I haven't posted anything lengthy for a while now, not here or on tumblr or anywhere else really. I've mainly been processing the news and events following the end of the manga, the release of movie and everything else that's been going on since. I'm long since past the shock. That was the easy part. The disbelief that Naruto ended the way it did lasted a few days. I was in denial because I simply couldn't believe this was it. But as the days crept by I was forced to realise that, yup, this is it, this is ending we got. It happened.
The initial anger I felt is still there to some extent, and I'm afraid it will be there for quite some time to come because, if my anger and disappointment is to be proportional to the love I once held for this series - and I say once because the ending has well and truly ruined it all for me retroactively - well, I guess I'll be angry for some more days to come.
What I find so embittering about this ending I suppose, really more than anything, is in fact tied to the characters and the treatment they suffered in the end. I went through my teenage years with Naruto, I grew up, learned and experienced a lot of things, and the attachment I feel towards these characters is immense. The characters on Naruto weren't anything like the cast of seasonal anime. It wasn't that I followed them for 12-24 weeks and then said goodbye to them. No, I had these characters with me for years, on a weekly basis, and they were important to me.
That's why simply thinking about the ending can get me angry in no time flat. Even when I think I've gotten over it, even when it's been days since I allowed myself to get upset with whatever little tidbit of information that has made it over, even when I have no reaction at all - I can still get so angry about it I have to suppress the urge to write a lengthy rant on how and why Kishimoto is a liar and a horrible person that betrayed the expectations of his fans and mutilated his work to make a few more bucks to add to the piles of money he's already made. It's so easy for me to get upset, and I suppose that really just speaks to how invested I was in this series, how much I still care even though I wish I didn't.
There are a lot of things I can complain about when it comes to the ending of Naruto, from the unresolved plot points to the sudden disappearance of significant characters, to the utter lack of satisfactory closure. At the top of my list, I can complain about the fact we never got to see what Naruto's answer was to finding peace, to ending the cycling the cycle of hatred that had plagued shinobi world for so long. We never saw him become Hokage. We never saw him achieve his goals, only what came after. We were given all this build up, but where was the payoff? It was so anticlimactic to just have it dumped on us like that.
Yes, the world is now at peace, and yes, Naruto is now Hokage - but that's all we got. Nothing else. It's like we were shown the leftovers of a feast rather than being there to enjoy it in the first place.
No, instead of watching Naruto finally grow up and become the man we were waiting for him to become for so long, we were forced to witness his character assassination. We were forced to witness his defining trait of emotional competence to be thrown out of the window and for him to be reduced to a retard that couldn't tell the difference between love for an food item and love for the opposite sex (even though the manga clearly showed he knew what was meant), and we had to sit and watch as one of his strongest bonds, the bond of deep friendship and companionship he shared with Sakura, was ripped apart, reduced to a mere extension of his rivalry with Sasuke (which made so little sense my head hurt), and we then had to suffer through blatant retcons - all for the sake of propping up Hinata as his one true love, a character so insignificant her popularity was by and large resultant of beta males' fantasies and wish-fulfilment, and who had more screen time in filler than the original source material.
Everything about the Naruto ending was contrived. It didn't feel like the natural, genuine culmination of years of work, it wasn't the satisfying ending I had hoped to read. It felt manufactured and sterile. This was not the ending I had imagined, and I have a hard time imagining it was the ending Kishimoto set out to write, or even really wanted to write given the discrepancies and the violence it did to pre-established facts and developments within the manga.
No, the ending felt like the product not of an artist that had laboured with love and poured his heart out, but rather that of men in suits that had studied a bunch of graphs, facts and figures and used those to determine what would happen next, what would be best for the brand as a whole - and make no mistake, Naruto is very much a brand now. How can it not be given how closely Part III will follow, and with its own movie set for a 2015 release no less?
The pairings play a huge role in what I hated about the ending of Naruto. I cared a lot about these characters, so who they ended up with, regardless of how little importance that was in the grand scheme of things to the manga, was important to me. Aside from the Team 7 pairings, I really didn't mind all that much who ended up with who. Yeah, sure, Choji and Karui came out of left of field, but Shikamaru and Temari were obvious, and Ino and Sai at least had something in the manga, so, whatever, that was all fine and dandy.
The reason I hate the Team 7 endgame pairings though is different. To start, as the protagonist and the character I root for the most, I was invested in Naruto achieving what he wanted, and amongst a lot of things, Naruto wanted to be with Sakura, the girl he had a crush on since he was a kid, a crush that was never as shallow as some would like to believe, and which later blossomed into the truest, most selfless form of love Kishimoto had written (MinaKushi and their love for Naruto not withstanding). Naruto realised early on, in chapter 4 iirc, that the reason he liked Sakura was because of her determination to be acknowledged. She was like him, and he saw in her qualities that reminded him of himself, qualities he found admirable, desirable and attractive. None of this had anything to do with Sasuke, who was clearly not interested in Sakura whatsoever.
For her part, Sakura initially saw Naruto as nothing more as a nuisance that enjoyed being an obstacle to her. Suffice to say, the relationship between those two arose from shaky beginnings. That's what made these two interesting I suppose. Here you had this hero, a misunderstood troublemaker with a heart of gold pining after the insecure bookworm. They were similar in many ways; they enjoyed juvenile pranks, hated to lose, had their own dorky verbal tics and the both of them even had a perverted streak. Of course that all changed, and really, on a number of occasions, we were given the opportunity to see Naruto's growth from the the perspective of Sakura, and it's really that which cemented them as a strong pairing.
The thing about NaruSaku that made it great was that was more than just a potential romantic pairing, it was a strong friendship. Naruto and Sakura were companions, they were close friends, they were fiercely loyal to and protective of one another, and regardless of the backtracking and denial, these two loved each other. Even if nothing ever came of it, a part of Sakura did love Naruto that way, and Naruto's first love was and always will be Sakura.
I don't buy for a second that these two had so much time and effort dedicated to them for the sake of misleading fans.
The fact Naruto's wants and desires were disregarded in favour of Hinata's selfish desires to canonise the parasitic relationship only she and her fans wanted - well, to be frank, I can't quite find the words to express how much that disgusts me, how much it makes me hate Kishimoto and Studio Pierrot, and how much I despise Hinata now, and everything post 698.
It's really Sakura that I feel the most for at this point though. I just don't understand why anyone would support her being with Sasuke, much less why Kishimoto had these two end up together. It is endlessly frustratingly to me. SasuSaku doesn't work. The manga is very clear on that. No matter how much SS fans want it to, it simply doesn't, and I hate that their inane theories and rationalisations were ultimately validated. Sasuke will never be the outgoing, caring Papasuke caricature they want him to be. He'll never be some cuddly, smiling figure that dotes on his daughter and cherishes his wife. That's not Sasuke. That's never been Sasuke, and from the looks of it, it never will be.
Sakura was at her best without Sasuke. She was at her best with Naruto. That simply isn't questionable. The manga shows us this very clearly.
So why did the manga end the way it did, why did Naruto end up with Hinata, and why did Sakura end up with Sasuke? It wasn't like these two pairings were ever actual bona fide rival ships when considering the manga and nothing else. NaruSaku had history, it had development, it had mutual trust, respect, and yes, mutual affection. It had hints, foreshadowing and parallels. It had real growth and real substantial changes that we could observe. Tangible progression.
So where did it go wrong?
Maddening as it may be to accept, ultimately, the manga itself had nothing to do with the final pairings. It had everything to do with money, popularity and convenience. NH and SS would make them the most money because they were the most popular by virtue of having the greatest combined number of supporters (NS is bigger than NH in Japan apparently), and therein lied the convenience of canonising those pairings and thus lending the series "grand" finale to launching a spinoff franchise.
It's not fair to the characters or to the real fans of the characters (you're not a Sakura fan if you ship SasuSaku, go kitten yourself). The message both these pairings send are nothing short of immoral, repugnant and generally reprehensible. And yes, there is nothing we can do but express our disappointment and hurt. That's all that we can do.
Maybe Kishimoto will one day express his sympathies with our disappointment, maybe one day he'll admit to the obvious that NH and SS were not the endgame pairings he intended, maybe one day he'll even give us an alternate ending...
But none of that will undo the damage that has already been done. The trust has already been broken. The ending happened. It will never change, it will never have not happened. No matter how much Kishimoto may be inclined to try one day, if ever, the ending cannot change.
It sucks, but this is it. This is the ending we got, and we're going to have to live with it.
</rant over>
Edited by SuperChief, 25 December 2014 - 01:22 PM.
If you keep making fun of my voice I just won't talk anymore. RUDE.
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Yeah, that's what I was thinking too, Rabbit 
. As to why Junko says this to him is bc before that kittenmoto said Hinata was his favorite female char now he says its Sakura but also likes Hinata in short the kittenhead is kittening around and going retard insane . Not to mention before this also insulted Sakura by calling her a terrible woman being a sexist kitten , saying that Hinata is more popular even with the little screen she has thus Sakura isn't a Heroine quality . Not to mention the destruction of Naruto's character and the story her comments about how NH just happened out of the blue speaks for itself .
(maybe it will be a flashback during the CPR scene...they also want to ruin that scene 
I still cannot take it 
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