Logic's Insight: Naruto 4/4

Part 4...

Problem 7) The Importance of Sasuke

The biggest hurdle of getting connected to the Narutoverse and the series in general is Sasuke himself. He's way too emphasized in the series for poorly explained or logical reasons.

And look, it's got nothing to do with the Uchiha massacre stuff. Having his character development shaped around that one night is pretty realistic and he reacts how anyone else would've. Especially after finding out that he'd spent half of his life trying to kill one guy when it was actually someone's fault.

It's not even the fact that he spams his sharingan or that he's a jerk most of the time. Those don't help, but it's beyond that.

The problem with Sasuke is that his role has been expanded as an end-all dilemna to Naruto's goals for no other reason than that he's Sasuke. I don't mind having a secondary protagonist, but there's even times when Sasuke's situations are emphasized as more important than Naruto's.

Why? Because Sasuke is involved.

But when you look at him in Part 1, he was just a troubled elitist with an inferiority/superiority complex. Kakashi made fun of him to his face and tied him up a lot; Naruto jumped him and tied him up so that he could disguise himself and try to get a kiss off of Sakura; Ino glomped him; Sakura annoyed him; and every rival/villain was out to get him to test his skills against the mantle of the Uchiha Legacy.

Most of the time, he was beaten pretty badly.

I don't even think Sasuke is a bad character. I just think that he's being cramped down our throats for the wrong reasons.

See...Sasuke worked best as an equal-opposite rival to Naruto. They're both talented, both have dead parents, both have a signature A-ranked technique where they punch through someone's chest, and have priority issues as well as nigh impossible goals. The difference comes in the details of those broad facts.

Naruto's parents died when he was a baby while Sasuke lost his when he was 8. Sasuke was pressured by his clan's legacy while Naruto was pressured by the village's hatred. Sasuke wants to right his wrongs by murdering them while Naruto wants to be the best and prove the village idiots wrong. Sasuke's technique is a lesser version of Kakashi's signature while Naruto was taught a technique that was intrinsically incomplete.

Got it.

But did this warrant cutting out Naruto's development time in favor of Sasuke?

Then there's the whole retrieval arc...a series of chapters/episodes that are strung together as a means of having Sasuke leave the village and make Naruto motivated to go after him. It's fine and all, but here's a few things to consider.

1) It doesn't make sense for Naruto to want to bring back a willing deserter and traitor.

2) Why didn't Gaara and Lee try to catch up to Naruto?

3) Where were Might Guy, Kurenai and Asuma during the Arc?

4) How did Sasuke leave the village without anyone knowing about it until he and the Sound Five had a decent head start?

5) Why didn't Tsunade put Sasuke's name into the Bingo Books?

6) Why didn't Danzo's Root agents try to stop Sasuke from joining a legitimate threat to Konoha?

7) How come when they dueled the Chidori and Rasengan cancel each other out but earlier, the rasengan busted open it's water tower while the chidori just made a big hole...

8) During the numerous times that Naruto had Sasuke pinned down, why didn't he just knock Sasuke out and drag him back to the village?

9) Since Sasuke was still technically under medical watch, why didn't someone force him back into his bed?

10) How come nobody saw the first skirmish between Sasuke and the Sound Four and immediately attack the foreign shinobi?

This just illustrates another major problem with Sasuke. Things happen for Sasuke because the story contrives it to happen that way. The basic amount of common sense and applying any of the above ten questions would have foiled the Sound Five and Sasuke's attempt to defect. But it didn't happen because Sasuke needs to be become Naruto's antagonistic enemy.

Because Akatski didn't already fill that role.

In fact, if you take out all of the Sasuke-centered arcs and focused on Naruto up until the Pain Arc then what would be lost?

Nothing.

Maybe add in a scene here or there or have Naruto hear about what Sasuke does and have Sasuke show up as a bad guy. Or...simply make Sasuke the main character of the series so that we can focus on him.

One or the Other!

Now some will argue that Naruto is boring compared to Sasuke because Naruto is a generic good guy while Sasuke is a complex Anti Hero. That has some merit except that we see several reasons why Naruto acts the way that he does towards his friends or his goals in life.

You could say that he's only nice to the few people that he interacts with because he just wants someone to care for/care about him. Or that his goal of becoming Hokage is a way of coping with a life filled with neglect and abuse. So I wouldn't call Naruto a generic good guy.

As I said before, Sasuke has legitimate motives and emotions...but the contrivance of the story and that his goal becomes a generic "revenge path" makes his whole character arc dull. At first he wants to avenge his family by killing Itachi...then he wants to avenge Itachi and his clan by destroying Konoha...so he really hasn't changed since Part 1.

Naruto got an heart attack over this guy?

Generally, there are a few things that couldn've been done to mitigate this effect:

1) Make Naruto nut up and maturely deal with Sasuke

Naruto should be willing to accept that Sasuke abandoned the village and is now an enemy. That doesn't mean go after him, but he should grow up and be fully willing to kill Sasuke if necessary.

Don't bring up that cycle of hatred crap either! Sasuke is a legitimate threat to Konoha through his betrayal, abandonment and now by putting Konoha in the crosshairs of his revenge. Killing Sasuke is more of a duty thing than a personal matter now.

In fact, I believe that Naruto could've easily beaten Sasuke if he'd entered that fight with the intention to kill. (That and shaving off a couple of miles and skirmishes from the marathon he ran to catch up to Sasuke) See...when you enter a fight and you know that you're fighting a friend, your brain subconsciously sends a message to your body to not perform as well as you should. If you have apprehensions about the situation, then that subconscious message becomes stronger.

But if your mind is steeled and resolved to do what is necessary, then you may be able to overcome that subconscious message and do what you need to do.

That's how Traviss was able to kill Old Yeller.

Or how Brutis was able to hack up poor Caesar.

Or how the Sons of Feanor massacred entire Elven cities because they wouldn't give them a piece of jewelry.

Or how the Kazekage ordered his wife's brother to murder his son as a test.

You could also:

2) Not have Sasuke leave the village.

Maybe Sakura talks him down, he changes his mind and turns in the Sound Four or he gives up to Kakashi after the battle in the Valley of the End. Or maybe he flatly refuses the Sound Four because he wants to murder his brother on his own terms.

Then his rivalry with Naruto will intensify and drive them both to become stronger while making them close friends. They have a common enemy in Akatsuki since Itachi is a member of Akatsuki and Akatsuki wants to kill Naruto. You could even give him that Curse of Hatred stuff only he finds a way to use that hatred to never lose anything else again. At the same time, events in the story unfold and will continually test Sasuke's resolve.

I don't know...it just sounds more interesting...and speaking of which...

3) Make Sasuke's resolve a little more interesting

Instead of generically murdering people or wanting to destroy the village, how about having him make the truth public and then sit down and really think about whose to blame for the massacre?

The answer would be Tobi because he summoned the Kyubi and the Uchiha Clan themselves.

True, not all of them deserved to die. But the rebellion and the threat of a war that would destroy Konoha aren't small accusations friends. Sasuke needs to sit and realize that his clan wasn't innocent...even if Itachi was the one who murdered them on Danzo's orders.

Let's have him sit down and really think about what he's doing or who he's avenging. That's something that we really never see in the series. Sasuke just bum-rushes into places and situations for revenge and never stands still to think about rather or not it's the right thing to do.

It's not necessarily bad...it's just boring. Why halve the main character's screentime if you're just going to show boring stuff?

Problem 8) Cheaply or Poorly Handled Antagonist Development

I did say that this series has really good antagonists and I stand by that.

I just don't like how they're handled.

For instance, I don't like Akatsuki's ultimate end goal is to create an imaginary world by having the Ten tailed beast cast Tsukuyomi on the Moon. It's not a bad plan, I just feel like it was a waste of build-up. This just seems like a pretentious and needlessly complicated way of running away from reality.

Which is what Madara and Tobi are doing...and I'll get to that later.

I kind of preferred Pain's plan which was a good reflection on his character and his personality.

But then the story has to humanize Nagato so that we'll feel sorry for his circumstances and so that it'll be easier for us to swallow when Naruto persuades him from being evil through Talk no Jutsu.

There's so much that I could say about Talk no Jutsu...but it wouldn't be anything that hasn't already been said...

Oh yeah, then there's how the story tries to saintify Itachi for murdering the Uchiha clan. Granted, he did do a great service to Konoha by averting a potentially devastating civil war and his hands aren't the only ones that are stained with blood. But weren't there children in the clan? Non-shinobi?

In fact, I believe that only 1 in 8 Uchiha actually develop a sharingan and there were probably a lot of non-combatants who were shop keepers, craftsmen, merchants and traders. Not to mention that there were a lot of families with children and there likely a few pregnant wives young and middle-aged.

Yet Itachi killed them all.

Then he mind rapes his brother for the sheer purpose of making Sasuke want to kill Itachi so that Sasuke can "heroically" avenge the clan and be seen by Konoha as a hero. Fine...but did he have to mind rape Sasuke? Did he have to murder every member of the clan? Did he have to kill the children? Did he have to kill the non-combatants?

Why didn't he just kill the people who were involved? And don't tell me that as an ANBU captain and as the son of the Police Force's Captain that Itachi wouldn't be able to single out his father's collaberators with the innocent.

Don't tell me that Danzo would've punished him either. Danzo didn't have the sharingan arm yet and probably hadn't figured out Shisui's sharingan, so Danzo wouldn't have anything on him.

How about the notion that Tobi is Kakashi's long-lost comrade Obito? I could make a whole essay on how that one doesn't make any sense at all, but it's just another example of a great villain ruined by "supposed humanization."

See, there's been an increase of awareness of both sides of a conflict in fiction. That's why you see so many shows with likable and sympathetic characters on both sides because that's how conflicts work in real life. There's good people and bad people in any faction, it's really a matter of perspective on whose the good guy and whose the bad guy.

Anyone who accuses the Nazis of racism, injustice and genocide can easily find the same aspects in Russia and the USA. North Korea's possession of nukes doesn't seem as bad when you realize that the USA is the only to actually use them on another country. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is so complex because neither side is completely right or wrong.

In the fictional verse, Gundam pulled this off perfectly by making everyone imperfect in some key way. Amuro was a whiny and inconsiderate protagonist who didn't want the responsibility of being a gundam pilot while Char was an honorable yet jaded warrior who schemed against the leadership of his own faction. This was also done well in other Gundam Series like Wing, 8th MS Team, Stardust Memory, Seed, and especially 0080 War in a Pocket.

The reason that it doesn't work here is because it's too forced and because the reasons presented don't make any sense. Ultimately, Obito became Tobi because Rin was killed by Kakashi. But rather than do the healthy thing and move on with his life or do the pratical reaction and kill Kakashi, Tobi becomes the primary villain of the series so that he can make an imaginary world where people don't die.

There's also the fact that Obito survived getting the right half of his body crushed by a rock.  The half of his body that has half of his major organs including his heart. How did Madara find anything that was salvagable and this before considering that Obito was further buried by another avalanche and was suffering blood loss due to losing his eye...not to mention from how half of his body is crushed under a giant rock. This one's so bad that it collapses the whole plot: thaeonblade.deviantart.com/art…

Problem 9) There's Nothing Else To Say

Really...I've got nothing else to say.

This a great series that's held back by minor problems that build and become worst over time. But these problems aren't things that will keep you from enjoying it.

The good stuff is really good while the bad stuff is more annoying than it is bad.

It's a series that you can like for what it is while noting how it can be better rather than be disappointed by how bad it is and how it keeps getting worst.

And in all fairness, Kishimoto has been addressing some of these issues as he goes along.

Anyone else surprised by how much fuel that he's been giving the NaruHina crowd? Not that I mind because Hinata talking sense into a BSOD Naruto was a quick favorite of mine and I appreciate how Sakura has been relocated more and more to the background as he himself realizes that he made a mistake in making her a main character. Sasuke is actually going through a self-exploration period too through talking with the Edo Hokages.

I think that I'll enjoy Naruto's wrap-up Arc and I'll remain a fan for the time being.

Will I stay a fan if Naruto persuades Tobi and Madara to stop being evil through Talk no Jutsu? It'll be annoying as hell...

But yes.

The End

PS: Thanks for reading