I miss your writing! What do you think about the time sasuke spent away, alone? Do you think he thought frequently of Sakura or not much at all? I'm in a long distance relationship and just learning that just because my partner doesn't talk to me constantly or always give me a play by play of his life, that it doesn't mean he doesn't think about me and love me. To be honest, it's been a very hard lesson to learn.
i have…conflicted feelings about sasuke’s time away: i think kishimoto was correct in saying that he doesn’t know how to write romance. this might be because he can’t write female characters can’t write characters without retconning a terrible childhood for them writes the romance that might have been desirable for twelve-year-old sasuke and twelve-year-old sakura; but makes little sense for twenty-five-year-old sasuke, and absolutely no sense for twenty-five-year-old sakura.
kishimoto’s characters tend to be motivated by some terrible childhood trauma. the terribleness of such trauma is perhaps debatable; but i think we are meant to sympathize with a character because of that trauma, and – perhaps more tellingly – we are meant to understand that character through the vector of that trauma: so, the trauma becomes what defines the character. this broadly applies to the ensemble cast of naruto; but let us take sasuke and sakura in particular. sasuke’s trauma is obvious, of course, and even in our introduction to him, that trauma informs the entirety of his life aspirations (”i don’t like much; i want to restore my clan and kill a certain man”). sakura’s trauma is less nakedly horrific, but you could make an argument that childhood bullying exacerbated her desire to fit in, and so we get rule-abiding, long-haired sakura who sticks so closely to traditional gender roles (“what i like is … and my dream for the future is …” with a pretty clear implication of marriage; suppressing all unfeminine instincts into almost a separate personality).
this sasuke and this sakura: their stated desires fit very neatly into the future kishimoto writes for them. sasuke wants (1) a family and (2) a quest: but, at twelve, such a family must be a nebulous abstraction to him – a thing he has, but isn’t necessarily a part of. he wants to restore what has been taken from him, but he doesn’t want to replace his dead clan: that is, he said “i want to restore my clan” not as an admission of missing his family, but in defiance of what his brother has taken from him. but you cannot love something wielded in defiance; you cannot love something used as motivation for hatred. so the future kishimoto writes for sasuke is very convenient: the family is his, wearing his family crest; but conveniently left behind while he goes ~questing to slay a big evil~. he gets to be largely absent from his family; they are his, but he is not theirs. his brother has failed in taking family from sasuke; but sasuke does not have to risk his heart in loving again. that is precisely what twelve-year-old sasuke wants.
and twelve-year-old sakura, dreaming of marriage to a boy she barely knows: only that he is handsome, and cool, and competent. what does she know of what it means to live with a man? but she knows what society expects of her: a good marriage, becoming a good wife. now, here is sasuke: first in his class, a generational prodigy, descendant of an old and noble family. of course she likes him. she knows, in her twelve-year-old heart, when she is grown up and they are married, she will keep house for him, and wait patiently for him, and be true to him. her worth will be measured in relation to him: how good a woman she is, means how good a wife she will be to him. and that’s the future kishimoto writes for sakura: we see her dusting the house, hanging up the laundry, faithful to a husband her daughter has never seen. this is her marriage, patterned after her girlhood desires.
this is a very long-winded way of saying: i think, as kishimoto wrote them, sasuke both thinks of sakura a lot and not at all. of what she is to him: yes; of who she is to him: no. their love, as depicted, is a boy’s and a girl’s fantasy future, supposedly about a relationship but inherently self-centered. after all, in these imaginings, the other party barely features at all. the other party satisfies a role; the other party is a prop in their imaginings for the future; it is not love at all.
