Branden

I suppose we have to remember that we're in the minority in the west. Other than this website, it seems like everyone on the internet hates Sakura more than anything in the world and they support Hinata simply because she's not Sakura.

Maybe I looked too closely at the characters and lost the ability to relate with the average fan. Maybe the real mass appeal was ninjas and fighting, and anything that impeded that got looked at with scorn. Sakura was often put in positions where she was either a liability in the fight or far outclassed by the other fighters. If you combine that with her bratty fangirl attitude at the start you can see why more casual viewers would hate her.

And then I have to ask myself, did anyone consider the ending to be good? If 100 random fans read the final chapter, how many would have thought it was a good end to the series? Would that number have been higher or lower if we got a NaruSaku end?

Honestly I think it would have been lower. Even if it was better writing, even if it was truer to the characters, even if it led to a better sequel series, it still would have been utterly rejected by the masses. Ultimately Naruto is just a product, and Jump is a business.

I would just really like to know Kishimoto's thoughts on what happened. It's frustrating even years later not having answers to all these questions and Naruto's continued relevance even if diminished serves only to remind me of the way Jump butchered a decade long story so they could keep it going just a little bit longer.

I just want to throw this out there. Many of you may recall "Road To Ninja: Naruto the Movie".

Do you think that this movie was perhaps an attempt to do what they couldn't do in canon? I don't know who was really responsible for the build up of Naruto and Sakura's relationship. It may have been Kishimoto's idea, or one of the editor's ideas, or maybe it was an accident. Regardless of whose idea it was, the manga showed us Naruto and Sakura's relationship developing into love and slowly into romance. It was never fully realized of course, and we got NaruHina in the end, but that doesn't change what led up to that.

Road to Ninja seems like a glimpse into what could have been. For me personally, I view this film as a writer's desperation to show what they really wanted, but couldn't make happen. There are so many details in this movie that indicate to me that the canon manga was a mix of 2 different people influencing the story. Someone at Jump wanted Road to Ninja, and someone else wanted The Last. Whoever wanted The Last seems to have been given complete control of the manga in its final chapters and that sudden change of direction is what made the ending of the manga feel so wrong. I think the reason it felt like the ending to a different story is because it was someone else making the decisions at that point.

I don't know if these thoughts are old news but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. If anyone happens to know if there disagreements between Kishimoto and his Editors or Jump executives then I'd be interested to know.

He wrote stories that he thought were interesting, not what he thought the readers wanted. I think many creators be they writers, game developers, or artists could learn from that.

He's definitely a part of history and I feel like his passing is the death of an era. The only comparison I can make is when Satoru Iwata died. There's a weight to their deaths that's difficult to describe.