Other, Kishimoto has never mentioned the Dragon Quest anime you watched as his primary inspiration for Naruto in any interview. He has mentioned that the NartuoXSasukeXSakura dynamics were based off of Slam Dunk. Which I assume you have not watch/read. Hanamichi Sakuragi was a dumb punk that falls in love with Haruko Akagi an avid basketball fan that has a crush on the ace's of her high school's basketball team the gifted Kaeda Rukawa. To win her affection Sakuragi joins the team and is rivals with Rukawa. In Slam Dunk, none of them end up together at the end. Rukawa was never interested in Akagi, and Sakuragi eventually became more interested in focusing on basketball. So if Haruko got together with Sakuragi, She would have been Haruko Sakuragi. Haruno, Sakura.
Crimson Fox, it is clear that you have given a lot of time to thinking deeply into why the ending happen, and you hope that Kishimoto's reasonings were just as deep to justify your contemplations.
The simple truth is this. Kishimoto did not have any long term story with tons of intricacies. His story is quite simple. For most of the characters of Naruto, unless they managed to hold his interest, their initial story was all they were going to get.
For Sakura that means, near the end of the manga she would discover that Naruto was the one that gave her the forehead comment and fall in love with him. Of course plans change, as there was a change in how girls are portrayed in shounen, going from rarely fighting and mainly just hit the main character comically, to can and will fight while still hitting the main character comically, but that meant Kishimoto never really knew what to do with her beyond that. As he never fully understood the change nor embraced it.
Yahagi was Kishimoto's editor until right before the Pein arc. He was his editor for about 10 years when the average is 2. After Yahagi, Kishimoto went through 14 different editors in 5 years. Rumors have it that after Yahagi his next editor was a big fan of Hinata even wanting her to become the love interest/heroine and was the one pushing her to have the scenes she got in the Pein arc.
You seem to think that just because they didn't get together after the Rescue Gaara arc that Kishimoto abandoned it right then and there. When again, it was more him wanting them to get together at the end of the manga. If they did end the pairing at that arc. Why did Sakura have the moment when Naruto was in 4-tails? Why did she try to feed him ramen after the Shikamaru arc? Why she hug him after Pein? Why did she keep having scenes like that till near the end of the manga? The answer is again, they were suppose to get together until Kishimoto was 'convinced' to change it at the last minute.
Sakura is Kishimoto's type. He married a woman that everyone says is very like Sakura.
Kishimoto has said multiple times he does not get the appeal of Hinata, but went with her because he was told she was what the fans wanted. He understand why people like SS and thinks it's cliche. That might have changed after seeing how far Naruto-Boruto has fallen, but he can't do anything right now without it look like he is stabbing his former assistant in the back.
As for the Japanese fanbase...what has happened to Star Wars is a good analogue. Naruto's manga average sale was 3.47 million. Boruto averages out at around 100k. The SS manga got about 50K. Most of the Japanese fanbase either understand that the ending was a move to appease the Western Fanbase, or just assume it was his intention. Either way most have moved on with only nH and SS really staying around, with SS being the larger one by far.
Good to see Bail.
I assumed the first paragraph was a response Totherpage at first... got very confused at first glance. It seems like age is starting to have an effect on my memory that I developed soo many gaps over the years . I skimmed back to thought included my memory of Ramentasu and Rikudou (that used to be Japanese translators here in this forum) made the NS pairing comparison to SlamDunk and that I never watched SD and played the DQ video games in my response to Totherpages. So it was a mistake lol.
The first highlight in your post is what I failed and try to live up to. Again my memory/knowledge is so outdated compared to you guys. I already started to developed a series case of amnesia on this franchise related to the content, media and fans. So that's what why I'm compilating from what I can remember about the series. In fact, I don't not even remember most of the character introduced after the Pain Arc and Choji's wife (I forgot her name) that I thought had the potential to become another girl that likes Naruto because she's part of Killerbee's team.
This goes for the interviews. Mainly because I emphasized on the end game pairings at most, that I neglected other parts of the interviews. Now that you mentioned Team 7 dynamics based off of SD, was during the post ending interview Kishi had with Yahagi? Because now I do recalled Kishi said something like that during that interview.
Although the fault lies in the NH assistant/editors for mislead Kishi, its Kishi priority to get his information outsourced. I know it easy to say this, but unless his former is related to him in anyway as being close friend or kin, Kishi should care less if he backs stabs his former assistant.
I do not know if this is true or not, but I've read Kishi does not know how to operate a computer. It would have been easy for see that he was being deceived from within his workplace if he new how to surf the internet.
Man I started to get worse. Better end this before I blow my find to smithereens
Nice seeing you again. I wish NSforlife/TouKenForlife was still to give in analytics on the series