this is something that i'm like...genuinely surprised is controversial or unrealized. especially with current events as they are now it's not hard to see how the entirety of the series has not coherent political stance despite being a heavily political manga with many many real life events/concepts/situations thrown in. that alone tells you kishimoto's leanings (neocon centrism). he's implicitly aware that various people can have various opinions, but because the central premise is "most of the status quo is actually okay because it just is" their feelings never amount to anything.
like you have naruto, who is deeply profoundly against pretty much everything happening throughout the entire manga for good reason (and no i don't consider taking sasuke back to "konoha" as him bootlicking for many obvious reasons) who is exactly poised to do those things, but never actually vocalizes things he would obviously need to change aside from "cooperation" and "peace". hes an abuse victim who never gets to shed the trauma of his abuse because that would be inconvenient for everyone else.
you have sasuke, who is a victim in every sense of the word who eventually comes to the very sound conclusion that "everything about this institution needs to be razed down" but somehow cannot pinpoint what exactly about the institution is wrong and how he would fix it. instead he comes up with a scheme that would cause more harm by mandating strife and power vacuums as a cover for his suicide...he turns a genocide survivor into a caricature of a radical with no real ideas who wants to destroy the world, like all right-wingers do. actually all the villains are like this -> human backstories with nonsensical revolutionary ideas.
even characters like tsunade who are disillusioned are convinced to come back to fight for change then are made unable to, and then when they are able to they just don't.
they live in a backwards hypocritical world where characters like tobirama are praised as heroes for inventing the shinobi system like the chunin exams, the anbu, closed off cities, the ninja academy, propagation of WMDs but then in boruto these are the few but exact things that are totally reformed/abolished. where kakashi is all about "never turning your back on a comrade" (aka humanity is not conditional) and then repeatedly turns his weapons on his student while convincing his other student of doing the same, and minato finally tells him to knock that shit off but only because obito came to the "good side"?!!!? the narrative also doesn't address the fact that "curse of hatred" is hypocritical propaganda which inherently makes madara a nonsensical character. i'm not even going to touch danzo and the 3rd hokage .
it's a very politically bleak manga which by the end forces you to accept things like "it's heroic to be willing to die for an idea at the hands of people who want your idea to fail" and "war is bad but necessary" (?????). not through the main characters, but through the fact that these ideas are just espoused throughout the manga and never really corrected by anyone. and if they are called out, nothing ever comes out of that call out.
dailybridgerton
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