What I'd like to know is where this obsession with Hinata even came from with SP. She was never that interesting and she didn't appear for at least a year or two into the manga. She got her ass handed to her by Neji, then disappeared until Shippuden if I recall correctly.
Good question. I'm not even sure what the answer is. I can only give assumptions. As I've said countless times Hinata's personality type is sort of ideal in Japan, shy, timid and unassertive etc. etc. But there are many other characters with her type of personality in many other manga and anime. My guess is a two fold whammy that lead to her popularity. I will always mention this point, the difference between Hinata and other shy girls from other series has nothing to do with her at all but rather with Naruto's back story. Naruto is a social out cast and emotionally abused orphan that had the entire village against him including his love interest, so Most likely SP over sympathized vicariously with Naruto and as a byproduct sympathized with Hinata and therefore wanted the two of them to get together because they both have self esteem issues so they thought the two made for a "cute couple". The second factor, my assumption is, that Kishi practically let SP have free reins on the anime production and probably did not give any input and if he had problems with how the anime was being produced he either did not voice it or just meekly said okay. I mean he never really stood up for his story either since several times he bended to the trend of popularity in his story arcs because Yahagi told him it was what popular manga were doing or to please executives; prime example being, I heard somewhere Tsunade was suppose to fight against Pain during the invasion but it was cut because they wanted focus to come back to Naruto before the year ended. So again that is just to illustrate that Kishi probably did not put his foot down when it matter and that is probably why Hinata's popularity is so rampant in the studio even though like I said there are countless "shy girls" in manga/anime.
Edited by Phantom_999, 10 February 2023 - 11:11 PM.