My first girlfriend turned into the moon @anotheratlablog - Tumblr Blog

About Me

Name: Jess or Jessi

Age: 22

Pronouns: she/her

Blog Content: Largely Atla, Lok and Tmnt (2003, 2012, rottmnt and i'm currently reading the idw comics) headcanons, fic ideas, ravings etc.

DNI: t-cesters (or anybody who's ok with tcest), racists/homophobes/transphobes or any kind of bigot etc.

#first post #looking for mutuals #atla #legend of korra #teenage mutant ninja turtles

nxctern

I’m so happy for you and your ugly fucking rival im serious

chinnuri

Obito in The Middle!

swagglessmoth

I seriously need you guys to see this. Sound on. I’ve been crying laughing at this for like half an hour

a-ard

naruto x bleach au

ultfreakme

I can't believe I'm saying this. It burns me to say this. But holy fuck the people were right Sakura is annoying. It takes very little to convince me to like a female character and far too much to make me get anywhere near dislike. I don't think I've ever.....actively hated a female character. Ever. I've watched a lot of shonen anime and often, the female characters are not treated well but I've never once looked at a character and gone "you're hopeless". (I watched Fairy Tail for a solid 3 years and read the manga, and all my faves were the girls).

Every one of them had something.

I thought I'd walk away from Naruto liking Sakura and seeing her potential but she just. Sucks. This is not the first time I've engaged with a story with badly written female characters. I used to watch Supernatural and Teen Wolf for god's sake.

Usually, sexist writing leads to underdeveloped female characters for whom obvious plots go unaddressed. This frustration and general lack of involvement in plot + audience misogyny often leads to female characters being hated. But personally, none of these have ever made me hate them because when writers write them, regardless of future exploration, they are written to be likeable.

They don't WANT you to hate the character, so they are given base-level compelling motives and personality traits, shallow as they may be.

Sakura through and through is written like we're supposed to hate her. Naruto as a show is so focused on empathy. Talk No Jutsu might be boring and often misses the point, but it exists to emphasize Naruto's ability to reach out. The show's all about friendship, camaraderie, and loyalty to one another. Sakura is none of those things.

I truly began hating her when Five Kage Summit happened because of two things:

Her confession to Naruto

The way she talks about her feelings towards Sasuke

In both these cases, she seems to think she has both of them all figured out and centers herself, start to finish. She makes that fake confession to Naruto because she took Sai's word for why Naruto was doing it. Shizune said Naruto was doing it for Sasuke and not because of her, Sai doesn't KNOW any of them on a deeper level, and Naruto's her teammate who she's known for a while.

Yet she went with "oh he's just doing it for me". And okay fine I can sorta forgive it. But the confession itself was so shallow. She sounded like she was trying to be sincere but all she could talk about was how Naruto was a hero worthy of acknowledgement now that he had proven himself through achieving an impossible feat. She's confirming all of Naruto's worst fears and the source of his anger while thinking she understands him. She was spinning her actual thoughts regarding him into a love confession- and her actual thoughts are she thought he was a fool who knew nothing but is cool now because he's gained status.

Then with Sasuke, she gets a whole episode dedicated to thinking about him as she chased him down. I thought we might finally know why she was so dedicated to him.

The answer, in canon, as Sakura herself says is because she thought he was hot and cool. When she looked past it, all she saw was "darkness" that disgusted her. She thinks Naruto is trying to beat the darkness out of him. The only thing she sees in Sasuke is his physical appearance, which she likes, and this nebulous "darkness" which does not even want to try to understand.

She doesn't remember his kindness, his smile, his empathy, his willingness to put his life on the line for those he treasures. None of it, even though she was there to witness most of this.

She so hilariously and embarrassingly misunderstands both of her teammates who she apparently cherishes with such blind confidence it's hilarious. She's WRITTEN, INTENTIONALLY, to be shallow as fuck and uncaring for either of her teammates true feelings. She makes an assumption and runs with it, with zero urges to examine it.

She doesn't ask about Itachi when Naruto said the name in front of her during the bridge scene, she's not curious about him, she never initiates in trying to discern the situation. The person she evolves into in the future is also disgusting to me. Like she's such a nothing-burger of a character who exists to highlight Naruto & Sasuke's bond by showing how distant she is to either of them.

And this is not because of combat strength. Sasuke has openly expressed his dislike towards her because she has no spine. She says she'll kill whoever as a 12 year old on Sasuke's request. And she's exactly the fucking same when she hits 16. He hates liars and people with no conviction. Sasuke values strength but he also values integrity, intellect and tenacity. Karin is objectively far weaker than Sakura and he respects her. Same for Cat Baa-Chan and a lot of other characters. It genuinely doesn't take much to gain, at the very least, Sasuke's fundamental respect. Just believe in something and don't fucking breach his boundaries.

Sakura is so dismissive of his trauma and is wet noodle of a person with no ideology or goal beyond him, of fucking course he's annoyed by her.

idk her character is so fucking annoying after a point

kindatiredtho

Kids interact with other shinobi go!!

And а little bonus:

#naruto

cloudabserk

naruto has such an interesting inner journey

#naruto #sns #narusasu

yutori-do

The four things I notice and hate the most in Gai's (bad) characterization:

Intelligence: In some fics they make him completely stupid, with no ability to conform to social labels or understand what they say to him without rethinking it, and that makes my blood boil because this guy is anything but stupid; He is an avid learner and always seeks improvement (genin at 7, chuunin at 11. He may not be Kakashi but he is still quite a lot, right?), able to predict, if I remember correctly, up to a hundred movements of his enemy before to be executed, someone who thinks quickly in battle and very adaptable.

My God, he drives NUNCHAKUS and you think he's incapable of concentrating? I understand that it is one thing to sit down and study and another to train, but I don't think GAI, of all people, wouldn't take on such a challenge. Appearing empty-minded is his facade, his mask. The only way I can accept that he's pretty stupid is if it's because of the trauma of losing his father, he clings to the attitude of a child as a way to feel like he's back in his childhood. AND YET-

Okay, next point.

Darkness: This man was literally beaten by chuunin because when he was a child just for being the son of a outcast of Konoha, they made fun of him and probably isolated him from the rest as a child, and he has also been under a strict exercise regimen since he was 5 years old. An exercise that made him fall from fatigue and pain, and he, despite everything, continued to get up, continued to force himself to overcome the pain. Gai's darkness is not easily detected because he is not visibly cruel to anyone but himself; The only way he is easily seen is with his relationship with Lee, his dedication to put him through everything he put Lee through even though he is the person Gai loves the most (possibly after his father). The way he pushed his (Lee's) limits to the point of telling Lee that he should face death to hold onto some hope for a better future (to be a shinobi again) is very dark. The relationship he has with Rock Lee ironically brings out the worst parts of Gai, and there we enter the next point.

Cruelty: Gai is a character who has been shown to have an extremely strong code of values, in which benevolence always comes first; He is empathetic in a world where that is condemning, he is kind to people who at best only make fun of him for how he looks. In short, a great person. But that does not mean that he is not cruel, that he hesitates when killing; he is still a soldier, a child soldier who participated in a war based more on ego than anything else. His moral code does not prevent him from killing, but rather makes him limit himself, to limit himself to what is absolutely necessary. If he has defeated his opponents and thus achieved his mission, then he will not kill, because the rest are shinobi like him and also had a mission.

We've only seen traces of Gai's cruelty throughout Naruto, small flashes of what he truly is in battle. Do you seriously think that the title of Beast is achieved only by defeating enemies? It is not even a specific animal, but literally: Konoha's Beast of Prey.

And what is a beast but an animal that kills cruelly? One kick of his was capable of breaking rocks when he was just a child. What prevents him from punching through his opponent's chest? Breaking skulls using just his fingers? You're not going to tell me that someone like him, with his strength, is not capable of ripping off your arm in a single movement.

Gai is capable of great, great cruelty cultivated by years of being humiliated by the village he now protects with his life, by the Village for which he destroys his body day by day. Still, his morals prevail, but it does not mean that cruelty is inappropriate for him.

And possibly the root of all his problems...

Death Wish: Dying for the Village is something that is as ingrained in how Gai thinks as any Konoha child, but this takes a drastic turn when his father sacrifices himself to save him. His father was, despite being ashamed of him, his World. The only person who loved him with everything, who showed him sweetness and tenderness in everything, he who took care of him as the most precious thing he had. In a place where everyone hated him and slowly began to change because Gai was useful to them, only his father loved him unconditionally, no matter what.

It is not specified how old Gai was when his father dies, but he can be placed after 11 and before 14, and that is possibly the source of what he is like; totally adhered to what his father was in an attempt to demonstrate that Maito Dai was a great man and shinobi through his legacy of the Eight Gates, his greatest and only technique. It is known that before he was 20 he had already acquired his title of the Blue Beast of Konoha, so it is accurate to say that he already knew how to open the Seventh Gate, at LESS THAN TWENTY YEARS OLD, the time it took his father to master the technique.

Gai's desire for death and his perspective of it is shown by his speech about Lee's highly risky surgery; If he can't live fully as a ninja, then he doesn't want to live. For him, Death is a price, the most precious coin that he is able to throw to prove something, to prove that he is worth something in a world where Death is common, where he was expected not to survive, much less prosper.

He lives life to the fullest, being his best person, enduring whatever it takes because he knows that his end, his death, when it happens, will show everyone that he was never weak, that he was incredibly powerful, and for someone who grew up being treated as the lowest scum except by his father, who ended up dying in a blaze of glory as an outcast, a death like that is the highest he can aspire to. For him, the only destiny is death, and the only way to prove his worth. And that's not fucked?

(And if you want to add another tragedy, possibly the Eighth Gate was a relief during the war because Gai's death cannot go unnoticed, hidden. Being someone who had so many limitations, being at a significant disadvantage, and being sent to war so young, where the majority are children or other young people who die anonymously, the Eight Gates were his way of establishing that no, he would not be killed, because he would kill himself first. Oh, now i know why he respected Kisame so much at the end.)

#maito gai #character analysis #character study #naruto

kindatiredtho

Teenage crushes are weird. Especially those ones where your friend suddenly thinks that the local stoner is cool.

spinneryesteryear

#I think it would've been really funny if the girls (and boys) had those child crushes on adult ninjas bc they're 'cool af' #Kakashi gets tired of Sakura chanting SASUKE-KUN and suddenly he hears 'well Izumo-san is pretty cool////' and blue-screens (via @kindatiredtho)

#naruto #maito gai #genma shiranui