#interesting point!

[artfightdramaconfessions]

sooo many ppl are bitching heavy on the themes but i thought they work wonderfully! the point of theatre is that there's a sense of wonder and mystery about it :)

hope everyone has a fantastic AF!

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[acanthawrites]

I'm not sure if we're only supposed to speak about your fanfics here but I really wanted to know your thoughts on something.

Sasuke and Orochimaru.

So, I work with children and have studied psychology.

As a child, I always felt very disturbed by Orochimaru and when I watched Naruto again and reread the Manga, I finally understood why.

I view Orochimaru as a predator. And I don't understand how adults watch this show and dont see Sasuke as the victim he clearly is. People think when you say someone is a predator, it immediately means something sexual. I don't think Orochimaru sexually abused Sasuke at all. But he was a predator. And not only towards Sasuke. He has so many victims. Its why I felt so heartbroken for the sound ninja. Especially Kimimaro and Kabuto. He would purposely prey on children with broken childhoods and manipulative them to do what he wanted. A lot of people try to say Sasuke was in control because he knew what Orochimaru wanted. I don't understand how again, any adult, could think this.

I've seen cases where children as old as sixteen are manipulated into relationships with men or women either because they're groomed OR there's a certain leverage they hold. (Orochimaru making Sasuke feel only he can help him achieve revenge).

If you just look at WHEN he approaches Sasuke as well. It's why I always claim Kakashi did not deal with that situation well. Sasuke did not need to be tied up to tree.

I think many people don't understand how vulnerable children truly are and easily manipulated which is why, especially in Naruto, I could never truly hate many characters even when they made "wrong" decisions.

At the end of the day, Orochimaru was a grown man and Sasuke was 12-13. The power imbalance and life experience should immediately tell anyone that this is not an "equal" exchange. It is not a "they're both using" each other dynamic. Sasuke is not old enough to make such choices. A child's brain is not fully developed. (This does not absolve them from the consequences of maliciously doing something wrong but thats another discussion).

I went off on a tangent but I just never understood people's lack of empathy for this situation. I understand when they're younger but even grown adults, blame Sasuke. To me, its the equivalent of blaming a child meeting up with a grown man or woman because they promised them something (emotional or any other form of leverage).

I suppose, I was just curious on your perspective on this because this opinion I have seems uncommon. It's always Sasuke "chose" to go and not that he was twelve. And killing Orochimaru does not make him less of a victim. And this isn't even touching on Sasuke’s fragile mental state.

People also use the argument that its shonen and they don't think Kishimoto intended this dynamic, but to me, Kishimoto clearly portrays Orochimaru as a predator if you just look at certain imagery. (Which is why Boruto confuses me so much). And I also find that sometimes writers unknowingly write certain themes or storylines, probably because them themselves are not educated on the topic enough.

This is why while Orochimaru is an excellent villain. Unlike other villains, he is not sympathetic or understandable. I would argue even Danzou is more understandable and Danzou is a character I really dislike.

I continued my tangent.😅

I understand if your Tumblr page is not for this type of discussions but I thought there was no harm in asking.

What an interesting question anon! I think this is one of those “Kishimoto starts a thing and doesn’t handle it properly” scenarios. Orochimaru is a pdfile (I’m using shortenings because Tumblr will hide this under a “mature” post otherwise). The visuals Kishimoto gives him are deliberately predatory: the long tongue, Sasuke wearing revealing clothing around him, the way Orochimaru openly talks about desiring Sasuke’s body. And then he literally violates Sasuke’s body with the cursed seal. When Sasuke gets kidnapped by the Sound Five and put in that vat, I often think of it as a kind of rape—it’s really dark. A lot of fanworks and discussions just straight-up treat it as Sasuke having been sexually abused by Orochimaru, because the subtext is so heavy.

And that’s exactly the problem. Much like Itachi genociding his own family, Kishimoto hits things with a really heavy hand and then later sweeps them under the rug. Orochimaru casually experimented on kids? That’s okay folks, he learned the error of his ways! Itachi commits a massive human rights violation? That’s okay, he was confused and sorry! The narrative just forgives or forgets.

Same with Naruto. He was pretty much abandoned by Hiruzen after Minato sacrificed his and Kushina’s lives and made his infant son a jinchūriki. At no point does Naruto turn around and say, “Excuse me, what the actual fuck. You did this to me?” It’s like Sai—a guy who’s been emotionally abused his entire life—the story brings in that trauma and then just kind of drops it halfway through. Kishimoto keeps introducing these horrifying, adult-scale violations into a world of child soldiers and then refuses to treat them with the weight they demand.

It’s a pattern that goes all the way down. The series sets up a horrifying world where children are soldiers, orphans are weaponised, and genocide is a routine counterinsurgency tool. But every time one of these institutional horrors gets personal, Kishimoto resolves it by making the victim forgive, the perpetrator feel bad, and the system remains untouched. Orochimaru walks free. The elders who ordered the Uchiha massacre keep their positions. The Root program is never publicly acknowledged. Naruto’s childhood of neglect never once prompts him to question the leader who allowed it. The darker themes aren’t just swept under the rug—they’re retroactively reframed as misunderstandings between well-meaning people, which is a genuinely damaging message when you stop to think about it.

For me, it’s out of character that Sasuke would go back, and honestly it’s almost out of character that Naruto would insist he go back. Sasuke is a survivor of genocide; the order came from the very leadership Naruto now serves. It’s not forgivable, and the narrative never actually refutes his position—it just emotionally exhausts him into accepting the status quo. Was it necessary for Sasuke to be punished the way he was? To me, it should have been the other way around: the village should have been forced to confront what it did, and Sasuke should have been the one to walk away with his head held high.

Naruto suffers here from Kishimoto trying to force an unnatural ending onto a story that had outgrown its original premise. Resolving everything he’d set in motion—the institutional abuse, the child soldiers, the state-sanctioned massacres—required far more storytelling than a final valley fight and a “welcome home.” A more natural ending would have seen Sasuke and Naruto leaving together, turning their backs on a system that broke them both in different ways. And an even better ending would have had Naruto not wanting to be Hokage. His drive for the hat came from a deep-rooted need to be acknowledged after a childhood of neglect. It was emotional, not administrative.

Asking Naruto to become head of state that totally violated his other half (Kishimoto’s own words for Sasuke’s character) is a little like asking Goku to become supreme ruler of the Saiyans—it's a complete category error that sacrifices his actual personality at the altar of a title the series could never convincingly earn. That's where Kishimoto's greatest failure really shows: he couldn't or wouldn't adapt to the themes he himself introduced, and the result is the gestures vaguely narrative mess we're all still unpacking. It's exactly why Naruto, to this day, is so fiercely critiqued.

People try to wave this away by saying it's not that deep, it's a shōnen. But that excuse falls apart the moment you look at other manga that engaged with equally dark themes and actually followed them to their logical, thematic conclusions. Fullmetal Alchemist takes on genocide, war crimes, and systemic exploitation and never once drops the ball—it sees every thread through to the end. Death Note explores justice and corruption without flinching from the rot it sets up. Even Hunter × Hunter, which Kishimoto has openly cited as an influence, lets its darkness breathe and refuses to offer cheap absolution. These stories prove that "shōnen" isn't the problem—the writer is.

Kishimoto, by contrast, drops these themes like hot potatoes. I genuinely suspect he realised he couldn't close the loop on them, so he just... didn't. And that's not a genre limitation—it's a writing failure. If you can't pull off those themes, don't introduce them. You don't get to invoke genocide, child soldiers, state-sanctioned abuse, and coded sexual violation and then hide behind "it's for kids" when the audience holds you to the weight of what you wrote.