So my best friend and I were having a discussion about Sakura, and he brought up something about Sakura which led to an interesting conversation.
I was telling him about why fans were bashing on her since the beginning and why she didn't really go through a lot of development in the story from a retrospective standpoint, and when she did it backfired because of how the ending turned out.
He told me for that those fans don't understand what Kishi was interpreting for her character, and it made sense for Sakura to be the character that she ultimately ended up becoming in the end. She was never given that badass status and that's what Kishi wanted because she was the smartest, but not a total badass.
The biggest reason he brings up was that Naruto is an emotional series thus her being the way she is makes sense and that includes the excessive flashbacks (uchiha hideout, naruto and sasuke, etc.) in the story we got too because of the realistic aspect it brings with the real world standpoint like naruto and sasuke's bond, sakura's love for sasuke, and hinata's love for naruto. Love works in mysterious ways from a real world schematic because it's not about the person you spend the most time with it's about the person who truly loves you from the good and bad times and sometimes the one that's important isn't the one you realize it to be.
Which okay I get that perspective when it comes to love, but it's a mutual thing, where you and someone special reach to that certain point which is something NaruHina and SasuSaku don't quite frankly have. I mean let's face it NaruHina could've happened at the end of war, but nope Hinata didn't talk with Naruto about the confession until two years later which quite frankly wasn't on his mind. Then you've got SasuSaku which many of us can already see the issues with that specific relationship.
Bottom line is, you reach a certain point where it goes too far in Sakura's case for Sasuke where he didn't care until literally the last minute, and the same thing can be said about Naruto's connection to Hinata too. That's particularly why I love the relationship between Naruto and Sakura because that to me is accurate when it comes to love.
Okay time for MY picking apart of your friend's logic, my good dude.
1. Sakura was not meant to be a total badass but the smartest. Okay, then ask this friend of yours, Why is it that Sakura does some pretty damn impressive feats in the manga yet she is called "useless" by those that do not care for the story and only look to character shame her to make Hinata look better? Why is it that Sakura defeating dozens of Juubi clones by herself, defeated an Akatsuki member which no other K11 member besides Shikamauru can claim, one-punched one of Pain's many giagantic summon creatures to save a little girl, deduced and crushed a zetsu clone posing as Neji, and several other things that ups her status in actuality still puts her in the "useless category" by her anti-fans, but Hinata loses every fight she gets into, does not appear for many many chapters at a time, and essentially became Naruto's girlfriend and wife by playing as an old fashioned "female prize" that needed to be won and earned instead of talking to her crush like a human being, and that is considered badass? Why is it that every other character is called "badass" at one point or another but for Sakura it does not seem to fractionally apply? And as for her intelligence, she pales in comparison to Shikamaru and Shikamaru is a lazy bum that hates studying or putting effort into anything. Sakura is suppose to be the pure intellectual one upon introduction but she is "out brained" by a guy that thinks academics is too much wasted energy for his time. Either way that argument falls flat.
2. Love works in mysterious ways, he says. It is all about who loves you the most through the good and bad times, he says. And yet, through said bad times WHERE WAS HINATA when Naruto needed encouragement and someone to smack him out of his depression? Does Hinata ever assure him that Sasuke will be found and saved (Naruto's prime goal to the detriment of himself and everybody else) or express absolute confidence in his abilities that she tells her self Naruto can take care of HIMSELF. And last time I checked, it was SASUKE that CAUSES the bad times for Sakura. He berates her on occasion even at his best and has tried to murder and emotionally destroy her at his worst.(chapter 693, anybody?) And where are Hinata and Sasuke through the good times I wonder? When Naruto is chilling and having a good time off duty he doesn't seek out Hinata in particular nor is Hinata ever in his company alone without someone else. Sasuke IGNORES Sakura or tells her to leave him alone even when she finds him and asks him out when he was/is in the village and denies her intimacy after they've married. Yet Naruto and Sakura find each other through the good times and bad in the manga. When Naruto beats himself up over how he couldn't bring Sasuke back despite training all that time in Part II Sakura told him that he won't accomplish anything by sniveling and that they would grow stronger together. When Sakura was being depressed or bursting into tears over Sasuke, Naruto comforts her and tries to spare her feelings when Karui was interrogating them and demanding information on Sasuke. It was Sakura that tries to help feed Naruto at first, when he broke his hand over using his Rasenshuriken for the first time. Plus it was Sakura that hugged Naruto in front of the whole village when he was starting to be "celebrated as a hero" for the entire population. Has Hinata ever done that?
2-b. Even if NaruHina and SasuSaku was suppose to be that typical fairy tale romance gig, they fail EVEN AT THAT. For those types of romances to even apply, there must be some sort of spark and mutual attraction to go along with it. How did Naruto become an item with Hinata? By spending half of a movie dedicated to their budding relationship ignoring her despite her confession two years before, during Pains invasion in the story, had to have everyone pushing him towards Hinata's direction (prime examples, Sakura, Shikamaru and even Toneri) and developed his feelings and love by watching a illusion of how Hinata held a torch for him over the years and told himself he must return her feelings because he went unawares to it for over a decade, rather than thinking back on the bond that they share and that he took for granted (not that there was much to work with, hence the movie dohohohoho). And WHERE was Sasuke's spark with Sakura? Even in shojo manga/anime, even the most cold, aloof, $h!theaded and brainless targets of a girl's affection would at least show some chemistry and interest towards her. Where is that with Sasuke? Pinpoint it for me. SHOW ME WHERE AND WHEN his words and actions showed that he had a particular soft spot for Sakura.
Point being, this is yet another, proof of ignoring context in the story and providing only one's head canon when dealing with debates. It is not grounded on facts or explanations would make the decisions of the writing even plausible. Sakura is not misunderstood, she will always be that "ball busting shrew" that was never there for Naruto when he was abandoned abused and alone during childhood in the eyes of her haters and Hinata fanatics, and therefore does not deserve to be acknowledged as his love interest or even a halfway decent character no matter how she improves in personality or what accomplishments she has to her name.The romance in Naruto is the most garbage, last second cluster kitten I have ever read/seen in all of my years of reading/watching/hearing fictional romance stories, and also in my experiences of witnessing real life relationships, bar none. I'm just saying that justification of your friend is as weak as it gets and especially if he is not even a Hinata cultist.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edited by Phantom_999, 28 February 2020 - 02:03 AM.
