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Did anyone ship NS the first time we seen Sakura?   I didn't get into Naruto until 2010 and even before then I thought NS would be endgame.

I didn't right away. I got into Naruto around 2011 and didn't ship it until 2013 when I was getting into Shippuden and did all the way until the end.

Then all we got in the end was Naruto seeing her as "muh trophy girlfriend" to win over Sasuke, which kind of destroyed them as a couple or as even friends in my opinion.

I still cannot look at them the same way as I used to.

Much sooner for me. At the very least, it was since his hyperventilating moment with Ay when he refused to spare Sasuke's life. 

Yeah that's true and the way he treated Sakura over the confession was pretty despicable too. All in all that arc was a contender for the worst in the series.

Thanks I apperciate it. I guess I eventually just got tired of trying to justify why I didn't like the ending with other things besides the pairings.

Kishimoto and co made the pairings front and center for the ending and this movie that for me it will always be a main point of contention. Because Naruto's story had been bad for years leading up to this point that seeing NaruSaku become canon was a big reason for me to keep reading.

After the manga ended I haven't bought or read anything Naruto or Boruto canon related because I will never be able to get anything out of the series again.

Well obviously for us the only reason to read this is because it is NaruSaku. If it tried to fix the other plot points but was still NaruHina none of would bother.

It's been so many years since the ending and our fandom has dwindled so much because of said ending that I could care less if that's seen as hypocritical.

The ending to the manga was inexcusable, but the Last was just on a whole nother level. I still haven't watched that movie, the cliff notes were enough for me.

It was just a cash in on Hinata getting with Naruto. Zero respect or care for any of the characters or story.

There was just no way for Boruto to have any chances of succeeding in my book as a follow up to that travesty of a movie.

Thank you for answering my question. As someone who comes from a communist country, I have so much I wanna say, but this isn't the place for it, nor am I in the mood for it now.

 

On Naruto. That's just stupid. That means there's no point in following a pairing because of the development when it will be thrown in the trash on a whim for the first bimbo that says she likes the main character.

I agree that it is stupid, but it seems there is an impression that since it's a battle manga it doesn't matter if the romance makes any sense or not. In Naruto's case, Kishimoto made zero effort actually establishing how NH and SS could come to be in the ending, but it didn't matter since it still was enough to get the sequel series established and wash his hands of the series (until he came back just recently).

I mostly know what happens in it, when it came out I've skimped the whole season in like a couple of minutes to get a general idea of what was going on hoping that they would fix it, I also know some things from other people, but I haven't watched it entirely so I don't know exactly what happens in its entirety.

I do know about the shift that happened with the culture stuff, but that happened with season 3 with the new showrunner.

I've heard they promoted or said that communism is a good thing with the Black Communist Rebellion Underground or whatever the new faction that came out of nowhere were called and some black guy burned an American flag saying what have you ever done for us or something like that. Can you confirm that?

 

I also started following Naruto when I was in high school. I was going through some things in life and Naruto actually helped me get through them. I loved that never giving up attitude that he had. I remember checking YouTube videos and everyone there was talking about pairings about how NH is the only pairing because Naruto clearly loves her and Hinata loves him and Hinata deserves him.

And I didn't understand what was going on because I was wondering are there chapters or episodes that I'm missing because there's nothing that indicated any of that. I got people liking NH, but there was nothing in the story that was saying the things that they were saying particularly from Naruto's side. So I started talking to people on YT and then I discovered this forum.

 

The Last didn't help at all especially with all the fake advertising that they did. At first they promoted it to be a Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi focused film, then they showed Sakura's new design with the narrator saying "Sakura is so beautiful now, surely Naruto....." or whatever that line was. It was the definition of fake advertisement. Then after they got the money from the sells of the tickets before its premiere, only then did they reveal what it really was. And yeah it was the knife twisting in an open wound, but not just to the pairing fans, but to the whole fanbase. Retcon after retcon after retcon, insulting the fans.

I haven't watched that season since it came out, but I don't remember an American flag being burned. I think they just said they weren't going to use the American flag for their new nation state they wanted to form. Which you could make the case for since in that timeline all they knew from the old America was slavery and Jim Crow. I guess the reasoning for them being communists was that they had only ever lived under American democracy and Japanese fascism and neither were ideal, even though obviously communism wouldn't have been any better.

 

Anyway with regards to Naruto, it seems like more and more Shonen writers don't want to make their male characters look bad by rejecting a female character that is interested in them. That's the lesson I took away from Naruto and I have noticed the same pattern in other Shonen series as well. I'm not necessarily for or against that being the case, but it seems to be a pretty good indicator of what the endgame is going to be regardless of there being tons of development or none at all. 

I did not expect another viewer of the show since it was kind of unknown show and niche. Did you finish it? After season 3 I stopped.

I made the mistake of investing myself in this ship mostly because of the actors. They had amazing chemistry plus Frank Spotnitz's of telling their story intrigued me. Spotnitz was the creator, showrunner and main writer.

In terms of longevity yeah you're right. Naruto had 15 years and all was destroyed in weeks. It had a lot of impact due to being so long and being apart of people's lives for all this time. Imagine starting reading the manga as a kid when it came out and then 15 years later you read the last 10 chapters and watch the last movie and then everything else that came after them.

Yeah, I finished it. I watched all four seasons, and the ending was acceptable enough but I did think it was the weakest season. A lot of people were angry about a bunch of culture war stuff in season 4 and I steered clear of that drama.

 

I can't imagine people that started reading Naruto since it's inception and had been a NaruSaku fan for that long. I only started watching Naruto in 2012 when I was in high school and believe it or not I was actually a casual NaruHina shipper until it got to Shippuden and things started to gradually change for me as Naruto and Sakura got to spend more time together in the early days of Shippuden. I only became a member of this board a week before the ending and I was firmly convinced NaruSaku was going to happen.

 

I was really crushed from the ending and I can remember everyone at the time thought the Last movie would bring some sense to the ending (maybe even save NaruSaku), but that movie really was like twisting a knife into an open wound and I was done following any new Naruto content after that.

It's too bad that wasn't allowed to happen. NaruSaku was treated with disdain by the rest of the Naruto fandom and in the canon itself too post chapter 698. It really seemed like everything was done in a very hostile and belligerent way to destroy any possibility of them as a couple or even as friends really.

 

I don't think we'll see a pairing in any media treated as badly as NaruSaku for quite some time.

It really does suck that Naruto and Sakura's relationship even just as friends was permanently destroyed to make way for Hinata. It was a big part of Naruto and Sakura's character arcs how they interacted with one another and now there's nothing; everything that happened between them in part 1 and 2 might as well not have happened. Neither one of them seemed to have made any lasting impact on each other, so it was a total waste of time.

 

I still can't believe Kishi did this deliberately to two of his main characters, as he celebrated that stupid "scene of separation" in The Last. It's this kind of toxic attitude towards the characters that made me never start reading Boruto as I can't trust these writers to keep a cohesive story together if any development for the characters can be thrown out at any moment with no regrets or no looking back. 

From what I understand, I recall hearing something about Studio Pierrot shoving 'The Last' onto Kishimoto a few years before the manga ended. There was plenty of time to plan a sequel. Especially if they were plotting to push NH onto Kishimoto before even presenting it to him.

Right, I still can't believe they spent years on that movie and that was the best they could come up with to explain why Naruto and Hinata get together. That movie was an embarrassment and set the stage for the disaster Boruto is.

It was already clear that these true fans couldn't give less of a kitten about the story, they just want to see their otps tie the knot and reproduce like rabbits. As far as I know, the only fans that still follow this series are the ones that asked the very one exclusive question, "When is Naruto going to marry Hinata, when is Naruto going to marry Hinata?"Just saying. And any new fans that Boruto attracts are those that never watched Naruto at all, and are most likely kids that watch Boruto because it is in theri weekend timeslot.

I sometimes wonder if we would have stuck by Boruto (or whatever he would have been called) if Naruto and Sakura had ended up together. It took the utter destruction of NaruSaku and the way Kishimoto had treated his characters in the ending to truly realize the deep, massive problems plaguing the series years before the ending.

 

It would be interesting to see what the fanbase would look like today in that scenario. I would have to guess this forum would have remained a lot more active, but NaruHina fans did make a big portion of the fanbase so I wonder if Boruto could continue to be successful without them.

 

I guess we'll never know but it's just a thought.

Is there even a reason for having an election at this point? The way things are looking now there isn't a chance of Trump losing the election. The media will never show it and they're pulling the same crap as 2016 y saying Trump can win against such and such...

 

Fact of the matter is Trump has raised more money than all the Democrats combined. He's gaining more supporters by the day, even with people claiming they can't stand him but would rather vote for him than a leftest, no Republican can rival him, and Trump has a lot of secret supporters out there who are just keeping their mouths shut because supporting Trump is apparently a crime, which is another factor being used against the left. You can only call people racists, bigots, sexists, and so on for so long until people start rolling their eyes and laughing in return. 

Be careful what you wish for. That's the attitude that Clinton and her supporters had going against Trump and look what happened. Plus Clinton had way more money than Trump, so the money has proven not to be that significant in modern politics.

 

It will be tougher for Trump this time because Democrats are really pissed with the way Trump has acted has president for the past three years so I am willing to bet their turnout is going to be higher than it was in 2016.

 

Here is my political compass test: https://www.politica...=-5.63&soc=-5.9

 

I got left libertarian as well, a little more right though.

I'll be honest it hurt a lot. I can still remember the day those final two chapters came out. It was like a nightmare and it felt like a total and complete betrayal by Kishi. His comments immediately after the ending and the years since have only made things worse.

We should just say that this is canon, and Boruto is actually a universe where Madara won and everyone is still in Infinite Tsukuyomi.