Your post calls to me KnS, I feel exactly the same way. My disappointment with the ending is the first thing I think about when I wake up, and the last thing I think about before I go to bed. It sounds so silly and none of my RL friends would really understand, but my disappointment feels so very personal. My thoughts wander towards Naruto while I'm cooking, washing dishing, or whenever I have a moment of silence. It hurts and the only people who really understand, are my husband, and everyone here. My mother called me and she even asked me what was wrong, leave it to a mother to know, and I told her that I was just tired. I mean how can I tell my mother that her 32 year old daughter is sad over a comic book. I say comic because my mom doesn't even know what manga means XD but I just can't help it. People love to say that we arent real fans because we don't like the ending, but I feel that we're the real fans because we know better, and that ending was insulting.
This Naruto disaster might have hit me harder if I hadn't been previously devastated by the end of Harry Potter. Not because of shipping, mind you, but because of how many Good Guys JK Rowling killed. By the end, every character I loved -- or for whom I wrote fan fiction -- was dead. Remus was the worst. And Fred. She killed FRED. A twin. Even Dobby and Hedwig died, for crying out loud. No sensitive spot was spared a gouge by Rowling.
I was so sickened by the death toll, and by what kind of message Rowling sent to children by allowing the worst of the wizarding world -- except Voldemort and Bellatrix -- to skate without suffering any tangible loss. Fighting for what's right equals death, being a selfish POS who serves evil means getting away with it. (Malfoys, anyone?) Ugh. It still angers me.
But I digress.
@Everyone, I don't mean to drag this thread down with sad thoughts. But I cannot look at "what might have been" pictures without feeling the betrayal all over again. At least not yet.
As a real life friend of mine said in an email last night after I had sent some NS artwork, "Seeing the picture that looks like Sakura with Naruto's parents - why in the name of Jesus and the saints did Kishi bother making that parallel?!"
Good question.
And truly, it is not my own betrayal that bothers me so much. It's Naruto's -- the boy who worked his ass off for the unimaginably craptastic betrayal of an ending he got. Kishimoto might as well have killed him dead. It would have been better for Naruto than the humiliation he suffered in the final chapters. (And no doubt will suffer in the god-awful movie coming up.)
I get people not feeling as if others will understand. My family was ready to fit me into a straitjacket after Potter, so I have learned to keep my feelings to myself and my mouth shut.
But sometimes I wonder why it's so difficult for others to understand the sense of loss. Art of any kind -- including fiction -- is meant to be felt. It is intended to connect with people in a meaningful way, as a shared human experience. So why all the surprise then when a reading experience evokes strong emotion?
"Everything you can imagine is real." -- Pablo Picasso
, if we had saw this kid in the last chapter, i had 
