Naruto Feminism Rant Cuz WHY NOT.
There’s something about the women in Naruto that has always bothered me, and the older I get, the more frustrating it becomes because the series keeps pretending these female characters are “deep” when most of the time they’re just emotionally trapped around men.
Like with Sakura Haruno and Sasuke Uchiha, I genuinely cannot see that relationship as love. People romanticize it because she “never gave up on him,” but at some point not giving up stops being loyalty and starts becoming obsession. Sasuke tried to kill her. More than once. He emotionally discarded her constantly. He harmed innocent people, spiraled deeper and deeper into violence, and Sakura still kept centering her entire emotional existence around him like her identity depended on saving him.
And honestly? That’s not romantic to me. It’s sad.
Love is supposed to involve seeing someone clearly. Sakura never really sees Sasuke for who he actually is, she clings to this idealized version of him from Team 7 and refuses to let it die even when reality is screaming in her face. That’s why her feelings feel less like love and more like attachment mixed with denial. The series frames it as devotion, but it feels closer to emotional self-destruction.
What annoys me most is that the story rewards it.
That’s the part that genuinely bothers me.
The narrative basically says: if you emotionally endure enough pain from a man, if you wait long enough, forgive enough, sacrifice enough self-respect, eventually your feelings will be validated. And that message is honestly terrible. Sakura could have had one of the strongest arcs in the series if she learned to separate her self-worth from Sasuke entirely, but instead the story keeps dragging her back into orbit around him.
And the crazy thing is… the REAL emotional relationship in Naruto isn’t even Sakura and Sasuke.
The story spends infinitely more time building emotional intimacy between Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke than it does with almost any canon romance. Naruto understands Sasuke in a way Sakura never really does because Naruto actually confronts the ugliness inside him instead of ignoring it. Their relationship is built on pain, loneliness, anger, rivalry, envy, admiration, it’s raw and ugly and complicated. They genuinely shape each other as people.
Meanwhile Sakura mostly exists reacting to Sasuke.
That’s why Naruto and Sasuke’s final fight feels emotionally massive while Sasuke and Sakura together often feels emotionally hollow. The series accidentally writes Naruto and Sasuke with more emotional depth than most of its romantic relationships. Their bond feels existential, like they represent two completely different answers to suffering and loneliness. Everything in the story bends around them.
And honestly, that’s where the bigger problem with Naruto women starts showing up.
So many female characters feel like they were written to emotionally support male narratives instead of having narratives of their own.
Hinata Hyuga had SO much potential. Her clan issues, her lack of confidence, the pressure placed on her, there was actual material there. But almost all of her development loops back to Naruto. Even her biggest moments emotionally revolve around him. It’s like the series never fully allows her to become a person outside of loving Naruto.
And before people say “but she was inspired by him,”inspiration is fine. The issue is when a character’s entire emotional identity starts depending on another character existing. Remove Naruto from Hinata’s story and what’s left? The series barely explores her independently enough for us to know.
Then there’s Konan who honestly feels like proof Kishimoto COULD write compelling women if he wanted to. She has ideology, grief, purpose, presence, visual symbolism, and one of the coolest abilities in the series. But what happens? Barely any screen time. Barely any exploration. She gets sidelined despite feeling more quietly mature than half the cast.
Tsunade is probably one of the few women who actually feels like a fully formed adult. She has trauma, flaws, leadership, rage, fear, history, her existence doesn’t revolve around romance. But even she gets reduced to repetitive jokes sometimes because Naruto constantly pulls focus back toward the male emotional core of the story.
And that’s really the issue.
Naruto treats male pain like philosophy and female pain like decoration.
The men get existential crises. Ideologies. Moral collapses. Political influence. Their suffering reshapes the world itself.
The women mostly get emotional suffering tied to love.
That imbalance becomes impossible to ignore after a while. The female characters are strong physically, sure, but emotional depth is not the same thing as narrative importance. A character can punch hard and still feel underwritten.
And I think that’s why so many Naruto women end up frustrating instead of inspiring people. Not because they’re weak, but because the story rarely allows them to exist outside the emotional gravity of men. They’re constantly written as supporters, healers, admirers, lovers, or emotional anchors while the men are allowed to become symbols, ideologies, and forces that shape the narrative itself.
That’s why, even after all these years, the female cast in Naruto still feels incomplete to me. Not because they lacked potential, honestly, many of them had incredible potential, but because the story never fully believed their inner worlds mattered as much as the men’s.
This is a rewritten version of an old post of mine and no hate or criticism pls, we all have our own opinions.
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jacobvanloon
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