every female character in naruto got the shaft to such an insane degree, the show was going out of its goddamn way to not pay a single one of the girls any real attention. this has been talked about before at length, i know, but as a latecomer i'm just continually surprised at how horrible the show treats its women bleach is just as shitty but at least a couple of its girls got to have actual character arcs that went somewhere
tfw the crowning moment of your fav is that time she got her fucking ass beat down and her future husband was like pissed
do you remember way back in the chuunin exams when they're in the murder forest or whatever naruto and sasuke are like dead, and the three sound guys show up to kill sasuke some more and sakura gets her "it's time for me to fight!" moment and her dramatic flashback, and she's literally like "I'm sick of being a side character in my own damn story, all of you shut up and watch me own" and she does like one cool ninja thing and then gets her ass handed to her like 2 seconds later if i wasn't watching the show to hang out and make fun of it with a friend I probably would've ragequit right there
sakura deserved better all the female characters did tbh Naruto is such a hot mess of a series and yet I love it a lot. I'm not even entirely sure why. It just has some sort of heart to it that I appreciate a lot even though it is by and large amazingly shit.
Like yeah it's shit that Hinata's one real big moment is that time she almost got fucking murdered by Neji, but there was something fucking compelling about it that made me really, truly want for her to win. Or at least make some sort of progress that acted as a fuck you to her family's bullshit. And in a weird way I'm satisfied with how that fight ended. What I'm not satisfied with is how we continually shafted most of the female cast. It's not that she didn't win. It's that this is seriously one of the only fucking moments she gets.
there's a humanity to it, I think? you end up caring about all the silly ninja kids and wanting the best for them even when what they're most in danger from is terrible writing honestly land of waves is unironically good, and I liked it so much I was hesitant to keep watching, because I didn't want the rest (which I knew was a disaster, it's impossible to not know naruto is a complete disaster when we live in the world of boruto) to ruin the good impression the first arc left on me. I only kept on because it's a pretext to hang out online with a good friend who's living a long way away, and because I wanted to meet gaara and his sibs, and the other konoha kids
Oh Land of Waves is lovely. It's really good and honestly the first episode/chapters was really great too. And there's still some good shit spread through it. Like some of the exam fights, the end, and so on. But there's just so much cruft in between these nice bits. Even if you're reading the manga and not dealing with the filler filled hell of an anime there's just so much crap.
(although now that I think of it poor sakura still gets sweet fuckall to do in land of waves except cry over sasuke's not-really-corpse. which is an utterly heartbreaking scene but...just goes to show you the problems are there even in the good moments ._. ) WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF NARUTO this isn't even really a criticism but...the world it's set in is actually really, really fucked up. This is a world where to graduate to the next level of ninja, twelve and thirteen year old kids do their level best to kill each other in front of spectators, pretty much so the different ninja villages can show off how powerful their latest mini-assassins are and get more patrons for the murder business. This is a world where young children are used as storage devices for demons, abused and mistreated for being demon storage devices which they literally did not choose, and expected to still become living weapons with total loyalty to the villages that treated them like garbage. This is a world where a villain performs heinously unethical human experimentation (again, largely on children! a fair few of whom were already abused and neglected and thus easy pickings for manipulation and further abuse!) and essentially is allowed to get away with it by story end because he could still be an asset to the village. This is a world where a teenager murders his entire extended family and tortures his little brother essentially on a lark... Spoiler except no, this teenager kills his whole family on official orders, as a ninja mission to protect the uneasy peace that this world lives in The only reason the story isn't pitch fucking black is that it's trying really, really hard to be a shonen manga. Actually...it kind of really pisses me off that the system is allowed to perpetuate itself, that despite the harm it's done all the main characters they're just like "well that's how things are", and that by the end of the series, essentially nothing has actually changed.
Is there even like... anything that isn't run by the Ninja Villages? And it's not like the main characters aren't Basically God by the end of it, so they *could* change things if they wanted...
There's like samurai in the universe or some shit. And non-ninja heavy nations hire out the ninja nations. I forget honestly but there are non-ninja.
Yeah there's civilians who mostly exist to patronize the murder business. Land of Waves is iirc the only arc to feature civilians as actual characters? Which isn't necessarily a flaw, because this is still a shonen and the plot and worldbuilding are still really an excuse for cool fights - I find it hard to get too terribly mad at Naruto because you essentially get what you paid for. But it does, at points, skim close to the horror and tragedy that underlies the world it builds (often to surprisingly poignant effect, for a silly fight anime), and in and around the cool ninja fights, if one is so inclined, it's easy to see the underneath and start asking questions the story doesn't really want you to. ...Naruto is basically Missed Potential: The Manga: The Anime
Hidden Mist Village during that one guy's reign is still my favorite fucking worldbuilding point because of that potential. It's up there with people stealing the eyes of clans with the weird eye techniques and "wow actually it's kind of fucked that we're using 13 year olds as soldiers and we trained them from birth to be this way?" in terms of fucked up potential. But it just slightly edges out past the other bits. I think it's because I just like Zabuza that much.
You could have an entire other anime just with the Hidden Mist's whole deal honestly? Sometimes shows not addressing cool random worldbuilding actually doesn't annoy me because it almost feels like a gift - here, fandom, you can tell this story how you like. But this one actually does piss me off. Mist's whole thing is that they killed everyone with a bloodline ability. Skip forward a little, and now their leader is a lady who has two. How did she get there, what changed? Did Zabuza have anything to do with it, since it's established he wanted to lead the Mist because it was a hellhole and he wanted it to be slightly less that? But no, Zab dies a sad, brutal death and his dream is never addressed ever again, and Mei, the woman who does get to lead and make the Hidden Mist slightly less of a hellhole, is a one-note joke about how she's past marrying age and can never get a man because Masashi Kishimoto is allergic to writing complex female characters. rrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhh
tl;dr I have very good reasons for latching onto a relatively minor not-really-villain who died early on and is never relevant again (so that the plot couldn't ruin his character like it did to everyone else interesting) and essentially declaring My City Now
Hah, that sounds like so many conversations I've had about the Bay Transformers films. A mix between "noooo they killed this character whom I love and had so much potential" and "thank goodness they killed that character before they squandered their potential any further, really dodged a bullet there... so to speak".
For me the One Character is L from Death Note. Death Note isn't actually bad, (except the American Netflix thing please spare yourself I watched 15 mins it was a mistake) I just didn't like it on personal taste, except for L. L is amazing and I bought the spinoff movie that was just about him.
There is no second season of Darker Than Black, but if there was, that would be where Mina Hazuki was introduced. The concept of a Yakuza princess who ditched her terrible family, came out as gay, and left to become a magic laser sword assassin because becoming a Contractor made her no longer care about their stupid opinions would be fantastic if handled by someone who wasn't going, "hurr durr, lesbians are hot, make her creep on every girl all the time, but we can't have her be too gay so make her remuneration be kissing a man." Also paging @KarrinBlue re: Prisma Ilya Shirou.
seconding the darker than black commentary man, you know what show is both super entertaining and a miserable failure with female characters? katekyo hitman reborn fucking katekyo hitman reborn so ridiculous and fun. it's about fucking magical boy mafia basically, how can it not be fun but like the girls, they do nothing. okay, chrome and lal mirch did stuff??? but not much compared to like. most of the dudes. and it's frustrating.
