Rakshas

I love the claims that western NS fans are bringing the votes down when we are so vastly outnumbered here.

Yeah, like others said, I'm not sure it can even qualify as a red herring even if that's what he intended it to be.  Kishimoto admits he is bad at romance.  So he pretty much leaves it out for the main character and his true love interest, then develops a budding love between Naruto and Sakura as a red herring?  That is completely asinine.  Maybe Kishimoto was able to write NaruSaku because he was intending it to be fake, the problem is it ended up being far to substantial for NaruHina to have a legit leg to stand on.  Regardless of what his original intentions were, Naruto and Sakura had chemistry.  If a couple has chemistry, development, and makes sense, you don't just throw it away for a terrible and  undeveloped side character pair EVEN IF that's what you planned on in the first place.  Why?  Because it's bad writing.  It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth either way.  The shallow nature of NaruHina kind of makes me want to vomit.

But I will say this.  I have disliked Naruto intensely since the hyperventilating scene in LOI.  I began to dislike it since the nature training arc.  I have a feeling Naruto started going downhill since part II where Kishimoto may have started having more free reign in his work.  Part I may have been good because of influence from the editors.  Here is the deal, from my point of view  Kishimoto had a decent concept to start with, and his editors helped him immensely in his creation of what would be a pretty good part I.  Kishimoto is not a good writer, the editors are.  The less influence they have, the worse his work becomes.  I only continued reading the series because I thought NaruSaku was an interesting pair and I wanted to see how it would be resolved.  Anyway, that's my take on it.

On a side note, I hope this same thing doesn't happen in Bleach, where the main pairing that's basically written as soul mates (with a bond far stronger than NaruSaku IMO) also gets thrown in the trash.  (Sorry if you like IchiHime XD).

You know what? The problem isn't that NaruHina wasn't well written.  It's that NaruHina wasn't written at all in the first place.

I'm just a bit down that I liked Sakura's character, but only when it was void of Sasuke.  Right now it feels like Sakura is dead and gone, or was never there to begin with.  Character deconstruction to the maximum :(.  It's weird, because now that she has been relegated to Sasuke's housewife, I'm feeling myself forgetting her relevenance and being altogether.  Makes it somewhat easier to come to terms with NaruHina in a sick sort of way.

kishimoto supports abusive relationships, if u are woman is ok if you boyfriend beat u or try to kill u you must forgive him

Man, I don't even want to touch on that lol.  I honestly don't think Kishimoto sees it that way, as the man himself seems blissfully unaware of the implications of what he is writing.  He was surprised that people though the Naruto Sasuke "friendship" looked insane.