Oh. Yes. Someone gets it.
Like, I am sorry, when I learned that Choji ended up with a girl that, compared to the others, had basically ZERO screentime, and came out of left-field when it comes to their romance… At this rate, you might as well have left it at, Choji remained a bachelor, but a big womanizer too.
But naturally, Ino isn’t meant to be understood as “shallow”, only in the earlier stages of the story, making her a product of her perfectionist and toxic environment. Choji could have easily shown her: You don’t need to be perfect in order to like yourself. And there is nothing wrong with eating some junk food every now and then, because he knows, she practically tortures herself to stay healthy.
Imagine him just finding her, during Part 1, at her absolute lowest, because she fell into that starvation phase again, because she was told, “she was getting fat again”, despite already being as thin as a carrot. And he finds her at a restaurant, stuffing her face, sitting right next to her, before she runs to the bathroom to throw up, because, you can already guess the gist of it.
And he asks her, the all-defining question: …Is it even worth it, trying to please someone, who doesn’t even care about you, even at your worst? Because, y'know, that is a theme in general that can be applied to all of Naruto.
“If they don’t accept you at your worst, then they don’t deserve you at your best.”
Their romance can be a golden life lesson too, in that, you shouldn’t set ultimatums to relationships, just let them happen. And if those weirdos find you “strange” for liking someone, that doesn’t exactly fit into the overarching mold of a pre-conceived societal notion, in the case of Naruto, that being, the “ideal shinobi / kunoichi”, then that is a THEY problem, not a YOU problem. When you think about it, Choji and Ino really are the biggest victims of their own environments:
Choji is overweight, pretty slow and too easy-going, not exactly attributes you would associate with the stereotypical male shinobi, who are usually fast, agile and always on-duty, and he got bullied for something he couldn’t help, because his genetics practically FORCE him to overeat, otherwise, he might become more vulnerable in battle.
Ino is obsessing over the most meaningless details, because she is a perfectionist, driven by the downright insulting and hypocritical standards of what the “ideal kunoichi” is supposed to be, feminine, submissive and always soft-spoken, and, oh, flowers and men are always the talking points, because girls be girls, I guess. Not fighters.
So yeah, these two truly deserve each other. Choji can help Ino lighten up, as he may even find her attractive all… plumpy. And well, Ino can teach Choji how to be more confident in himself, not allowing the negative comments about his weight to get to him. And well, once they are adults, well… he can impress her with his Super Expansion ability, in…
…different ways, KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING?
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