everyone knows that naruto takes shortcuts to characterization through copy-pasting the team 7 dynamic onto other 3-man groups. this is naruto analysis 101. it's a handy symbolic tool that allows the narrative to establish a character's role in relation to the people close to them while also giving them purpose in naruto's story by connecting them to him. but what happens when this shortcut fails?
team gai is meant to fall in the same categories that team 7 is, perhaps even more directly than any other team. neji is sasuke, lee is naruto, and... and tenten should be sakura. there is very little connecting them, however. tenten's role in her team is completely different from the one that sakura and sakura-foils play due to her general lack of interest in neji and lee.
i find this non-foil relationship sakura and tenten share interesting, because i believe that tenten was originally set up to be someone sakura would look up to. however, because of the way tenten was set up as being "better" than sakura and the direction that kishimoto wanted to take sakura's character arc, tenten's characterization lead to her becoming an unobtainable goal, and therefore disconnected from the typical echo of team 7.
tenten's first appearance is in chapter 36: sakura's depression. this is a chapter focusing on sakura's choice to either attend or not attend the chunin exams- an explicitly sakura-focussed chapter. tenten is introduced alongside the rest of team gai at the beginning of the chapter to establish them as rivals and foils for team 7.
within this introduction, tenten is the focus. she is the only member of her team actively training, and she is obviously skilled. this sets her up as a kind of ideal sakura: one who is strong, and an equal member of her team.
however, there is another aspect of tenten's character that sakura is meant to emulate. just as neji was meant to be a sasuke who was stopped before he could meaningfully challenge his systematic oppression follow a path of darkness and lee was meant to be a naruto who put in the hard work to become someone strong despite his circumstances of birth, tenten was meant to be a sakura who was free from what the narrative believes is her most problematic, most annoying trait:
tenten's relationship with romance has been discussed on this blog before. she is unique in naruto in that her complete lack of interest in a relationship has been a consistent marker of her characterization, even into the boruto era, and that this lack of interest has been acknowledged and explicitly approved of, likely because of her "replacement interest" in weapons. tenten cares about being a shinobi in a way that no other character is capable of, and is therefore allowed to not participate in the institution of heterosexual marriage and romance.
by posing tenten as a sakura-foil, the narrative established a goal for sakura: to let go of her emotional connection to sasuke and naruto. become less "annoying," become more like tenten, who is strong and equal to her teammates.
this did not work. sakura, as a character, is defined by her relationship with sasuke and naruto. this is not to say that this could not have worked- if naruto was a different, less misogynistic story, sakura could have had a character arc outside of sasuke and naruto. but naruto is what it is, and within the confines of the story, sakura was required to be feminine, and to surrender to the confines of a traditional heterosexual attraction and eventually marriage. she cannot be tenten. she is not allowed to not be in love.
this meant that tenten had to stop being a sakura-foil. this happens extremely early on: during the chunin exams, naruto's connection to lee and sasuke's connection to neji are emphasized. sakura's connection to tenten is discarded very early on, however, and she is given a new foil in the form of ino- one focused on romance.
failing to act as sakura's foil further frees tenten from the conventions of the narrative. tenten is she has no assigned role in her team. she has no role to be confined by. for this and prior discussed reasons, tenten is startlingly unaffected by the structural hatred the narrative holds for women.
