CloudMountainJuror

Reflecting on the pairing and on how Naruto's final couples turned out a bit. I really, truly could have lived with NaruHina if there had been any effort at all in the last stretch of the manga to solidify it. In a way, I feel like that pairing may have been done even dirtier than NaruSaku. That ship was realized, only for it to have been realized in such an underwhelming way. It just feels hollow, empty. A shell of a shell.

For NaruSaku's case, I remember people here defending this scene to death, but...that false confession scene, in retrospect, really was the overture to NaruSaku's downfall. Not because it made the ship impossible, or even because it was a bad idea or strategy (Sakura's motivation behind it makes perfect sense, as does Naruto's reaction), but because Kishimoto just did not handle it with tact. And the fact that he didn't communicates something in its own, I think. In execution it came off much more as emotional manipulation than it did a desperate (and maybe even a little honest?) play, the latter of which being the more compelling and sympathetic way to write it. And the follow-up on Sakura's end from that point onward left a lot to be desired.

Sakura was done so dirty. This subject has been beaten to death, but god, it's true. I think the biggest reason I would say I'd ship NaruSaku now would be that the further Sakura is from Sasuke, the better. I could have lived with NaruHina, but SasuSaku? No. That's the ship that stung the most. And while I've grown numb to it now, with Boruto becoming as much of a meme presence as it has, that ship and the way it was forcibly made canon, barging on through every toxic wall it could on its way there... it'll always astound me.

I don't know if NaruSaku's positive elements as a ship were accidental. If Kishimoto accidentally wrote a healthier partnership than the obvious side ones he'd been bluntly, one-sidedly teasing. Part of me thinks it might have been. Considering how Kishimoto wrote many female characters, and how the writing of the romance in all aspects turned out... maybe NaruHina and SasuSaku had been the intention all along, and he'd written them the only way he knew how. One-sided crushes. Re-emphasized, over long periods of time. Maybe we were looking for a nuanced romantic relationship in a series that was determined to have superficial ones. Maybe we were hoping for too much, and the series had been more honest than we wanted it to be.

I'll always long for what NaruSaku could have been - scratch that, what Sakura could have been. We'll never get it. But what a nice dream it was. What a nice dream it will be for us, forever, somewhere buried deep in us.

The real NaruSaku was unironically the friends we made along the way.

Since last I was here, I have seen Revolutionary Girl Utena. And I adored it. Like, a lot.

Shameless plug plus an answer to the question "what have I been up to"? I made this AMV for it earlier this year. (Among several others.)

AMV editing is what I've really been throwing myself into over the last few years, and it's been great being able to explore that so much more actively.