listen i’m just saying. i’m just saying.
if you (“you” being kishimoto from here on out) create a series where at a certain point it becomes clear who the endgame couples will be, long before they’re established in canon…
• and you pair two of them up from a young age (perhaps even put them on the same genin team), implying they spend a lot of offscreen time together, and you give those two characters the same theme music
• and they fit the grump x sunshine dynamic
• and the grump was a notoriously Difficult Person To Be Around, Much Less Be Friends With and the sunshine was one of grump’s few friends (if not grump’s only friend)
• and the little onscreen time they did get was almost always with each other (and, notably, involved saving the other’s life or protecting them)
• and you make one of them obsessed with the sky, using birds as an allegory of personal freedom for this character, and you give the other one a name that translates to “heaven” twice (knowing that most people associate the concept of heaven with the sky)
• and then you give these characters a storyline in which they’re supposed to get one scroll labeled “earth” and one scroll labeled “heaven,” and a crucial (and unexplained?) plot point of this storyline is one of them winding up with two “heaven” scrolls and being explicitly asked “why didn’t you say anything about us having two heaven scrolls” followed by a dramatic shot of said character holding the two heaven scrolls side by side, staring at the way it spells out “heaven” twice
• and then you kill off one of them and subsequently make it canon that the other believes in ghosts
• and THEN you show us the manifestation of the other’s perfect reality in a dream and it has the departed directly saying “i’m alive and everyone is safe because of you”
• and THEN, years later, you release official art of these two as yin and yang, alongside similar art of other characters, but all of the other characters are canon couples
…congratulations, you’ve just written what could have been an epic friends to lovers slow burn that spanned hundreds of episodes.