Blue Flaming Wings

I have a confession to make: I don't think I'm a true Narusaku shipper.

Kinda odd to make a account just to say that, but it's true. And here's another: I dropped Naruto a few years back. It was just too much, too many episodes, too many chapters, too many "epic boss battles", so I want to give credit where credit is due for those who stuck it out until the very end. You have far more endurance than I do. Though I got into many different manga, story-driven ones primarily, I didn't fall out of the Naruto community entirely. I read fanfiction. A lot of it. Primarily, For Want of a Nail ones, and through it I came to this revelation:

I am a Naruto x Main Female Lead shipper.

I think the thing that drew me to Narusaku is the fact that Sakura was always by his side. We had 700 chapters to see them interact (smaller amount for me, but you get the idea). Naruto never was a romance manga - that wasn't even a faint priority for Kishi (he admitted as much in his new interview stating that the romance movie was "embarressing") so I just enjoyed seeing the two interact and deal with all the problems the story threw at them - truly developing a fire forged friendship.

Neither Sasusaku or Naruhina had that. Sasuke had betrayed Konoha and just wasn't present when Akatsuki and Pein were threatening the village, and the amount of conversations that Hinata had with Naruto could be counted on one hand. If Sasusaku and Naruhina were going to happen, I wanted to have it be shown to me in the manga not told to me that it happened off screen in the epilogue or in a movie as a afterthought. Showing not telling is kinda the staple of good storytelling, you know?