Hope (aka the most important thing to understanding the Naruto story)
There’s a lot that I like about the world, characters, and story of Naruto and I’ll be the first to admit that most of them are completely accidental on Kishimoto’s part. The fact that even bad people fall into a gray area, the idea that a country will prioritize its own survival over the health of its people, the different ways that characters are shown to cope with disillusionment and trauma, the humanity and dignity given to the majority of its cast, and that, even though most of its characters aren’t that deep, the story has the illusion that any member of its cast—if the camera lingered on them for long enough—has a-whole-nother 700 chapters worth of story to tell are all just the unintentional result of how he explored (what I interpret to be) the main idea of Naruto.
I’m not trying to say he’s an incompetent writer, quite the opposite. I think the fact that so many of the things I like are left mostly unexplored is evidence that they were accidental additions. The reason I think this is because of how Kishimoto handled the idea at the core of all this: maintaining hope and inspiring it in others.
It’s pretty difficult to fully explain my thought process here in just a few snappy sentences (I promise I would’ve written a shorter post if I could), but this idea is infused in so many aspects of the series that going over all of them here would be ridiculous to both read and write. Especially since this is just a tumblr post. So, with the understanding that there is much more to talk about here, we’re just gonna focus on the largest parts of this. Namely: talk-no-jutsu, the curse of hatred, and the ending.
Talk-No-Jutsu
Talk-no-jutsu (TNJ) is fundamental to the Naruto series, but I’m not confident that too many people know why it’s so fundamental. To refresh, TNJ is whenever Naruto wins a battle simply by talking to his opponent, usually after beating them up enough to get them to listen (this is still a shounen action). It seems like a writing cop-out at first glance, mostly because Naruto isn’t actually consistent in disproving his opponents ideology. This is because TNJ is not about proving his opponents wrong, it’s about restoring the hope that they’d lost.
As an example, let’s look at my favorite TNJ scene: the Neji vs Naruto fight.
First, some context. The Chunin Exams arc is about rejecting the labels other people try to place and enforce on you. Both Shikamaru and Ino prove themselves to be smarter than people assume based on their lazy and superficial exteriors, Hinata tries to prove that she is more than the failure she was a dubbed, Rock Lee is out to prove that he can become a great ninja despite what he’s been told his whole life, Sakura cuts off the symbol of her conformity to the opinions of others to protect her teammates, and Sasuke fights to be more than Itachi said he was against Orochimaru then only wins his preliminary fight after rejecting what Orochimaru tries to turn him into.
Neji is the most obvious example of this; being branded with the label placed on him that can be enforced through physical pain. He was told it was his destiny to be labeled this way and, unlike the characters listed above, he believed it. I won’t say that looking at this as a fight about Hard Work vs Natural Talent or if great people are born or raised is an invalid reading, but I do think it’s a surface level one. After all, the Hyuga believe in destiny, not just Neji. Destiny is used as a weapon of suppression. Neji going on about destiny isn’t him expressing a life philosophy, it’s him taking what his abusers said to heart—that his abuse was a force of nature that he could only futilely fight—and using that to abuse others. He attempts to shame Hinata and Naruto into submission just as he was.
Because Neji gave up. He gave up on proving the clan wrong and he gave up on himself.
But Naruto didn’t.
In their fight, Naruto doesn’t buy Neji’s bullshit. He hears Neji’s sob story and essentially says that Neji wasn’t a victim of a force of nature, he was a victim of people. People that could be fought. Naruto didn’t offer Neji a solution, but he did offer Neji the hope that he had other options. And if Naruto, the supposed ostracized failure, was able to beat Neji in a fight and get the crowd to cheer for him, maybe he had a point.
As I’ve said, Naruto doesn’t really give people solutions to their problems nor does he have a perfect counter to their ideology (you can decide if that’s a good or a bad thing); all he really tells them is that despite everything they’ve gone through, they still have the option to hope that things could be different. Inari doesn’t have to reject the very concept of heroism, Zabuza doesn’t have to view himself or others a tools to be used and thrown away, Gaara doesn't have to believe that no one will ever love him, and Tsunade doesn't have to look at hope and dreams as things only the naive partake in before they either die or become as jaded as her (etc.). That might seem like cold comfort, but to people who were repeatedly beaten down by life then told cynicism and acceptance were their only options, maybe it’s enough to try again.
The Curse of Hatred
Where hopelessness was explored and countered in classic Naruto, shippuden takes a look at what hatred can do to people and the world and asks what can be done about it.
The concepts of resentment, anger, and vengeance—all referred to as “hatred”—are explored primarily through Sasuke. He’s, of course, not the only one—Deidara, Nagato, and Obito all also come to mind. Deidara resented Itachi for forcing him to join the Akatsuki just as Sasuke resented Itachi for getting all their father’s attention and Naruto for progressing faster than him. Nagato was angry at the five great nations for all that they’d done just as Sasuke was angry at Itachi and Konoha for all that they didn’t. Obito swore vengeance against the world for taking Rin from him and Sasuke swore vengeance against anyone he deemed responsible for his pain.
That’s not even talking about how Black Zetsu and Danzo sowed hatred between people to make them more vulnerable to manipulation and maintain power respectively. Or how Orochimaru fed into people’s—primarily vulnerable children’s—anger for personal gain.
Throughout the series, hatred is framed as a very human but very corrosive emotion. Literally in the case of it eating away at the seal holding the nine tails (I know it’s technically the nine tails chakra being released that’s eating at the seal, but save for the Neji vs Naruto fight, that only happens when he’s intensely angry). Naruto giving himself over to hatred and the nine tails burns through his skin, Deidara blows himself up out of pride and hatred, Kaguya, Madara, Obito, and Nagato all try to destroy the world out of their hatred, and the mangekyou sharingan—often directly tied to the memory that brought the Uchiha great hatred—makes its user go blind. The warring states era isn't a part of the series to add to the world building, it’s a demonstration that a world led by hatred only results in an endless cycle of violence.
The corrosive nature of hatred is very much shown through Sasuke’s development throughout shippuden. He gets progressively more hateful and more mentally unstable. His target goes from one person to a group of people to the whole of Konoha and at the same time he goes from putting his life on the line to protect his teammates to completely disregarding their wellbeing to actively attacking them, practically on a whim. At the start of shippuden, Sasuke only fights people he deems it necessary to and by the five kage summit arc, he’s actively picking fights just for the hell of it. His hatred makes him a shell of who he once was.
His hatred is tempered somewhat by his conversations with Itachi and the Hokage, and he’s distracted from it during the fights against Obito, Madara, and Kaguya, but it isn’t until his fight against Naruto that it’s truly resolved.
By the time of their final fight, Sasuke embodies all that Naruto has been fighting against. Sasuke has given up both on connecting with the world and the world willingly coming together, and he fully hates all the people who’ve caused him pain and all the people who didn’t protect him from it. But Sasuke’s not the only one who’s changed. Naruto’s felt the hopelessness of his sensei dying, of his home being destroyed, of his friend dying in his arms. Naruto’s faced his hatred for the father that abandoned him with the consequences of his actions, his hatred for the village that ostracized him then did a 180 like it never happened, the history of hatred passed down through both the Ashura reincarnations and the nine tails jinchuuriki. He’s fully prepared to fight all of Sasuke’s demons and win. And he does.
Not because Naruto gives him a solution or has an ironclad counter to his ideology, just because, despite everything that happened, Naruto never gave up hope that Sasuke would come home and he never gave up hope that the world could come together. And that unshaking belief was enough to give Sasuke the hope to try again.
The Ending
Apparently Kishimoto said in an interview at one point that he’s had the ending of Naruto planned from the beginning. I’m always skeptical of quotes like this when it comes to long running series, but I do think there is some amount of truth to this. I’m perfectly ready and willing to believe that two parts of the ending were set in stone earlier in the writing process: the final fight between Naruto and Sasuke and the final exchange between Naruto and Sasuke in 699.
The final exchange is of Naruto handing Sasuke back his headband to keep until they get a chance to properly see who’s stronger with future Sasuke reminiscing on their relationship and how he’s changed thanks to Naruto as the narration. The final line is what I really wanted to talk about though:
“To keep enduring until it comes to be, no matter what. And to those whom that task falls on… perhaps that’s what it means… to be a ninja.”
The word that’s used is “enduring” but I still fully believe this to be a quote about the theme of hope in Naruto. After all, hope is shown to be the greatest force of resistance. More than that though, this scene leaves the story off on a vague but hopeful note. It leaves the audience with the implication that Sasuke spends the foreseeable future exploring the world and finding himself in his own image after so many people spent the series trying to mold him to fit theirs while Naruto continues working to become Hokage, with the promise that Naruto and Sasuke, despite diverting paths, will reunite again, and with the statement that the true purpose of ninja is to cultivate and maintain hope.
I personally like this ending—so much so that I kind of wish we never got an epilogue or sequel—but I know that’s not the most popular opinion. An opinion that seems much more popular is that people wanted the series to end with Naruto and/or Sasuke and/or Team 7 changing the shinobi system in one way or another. But I don’t personally see it that way. As I think I’ve made pretty clear, this series wasn’t ever really about giving solutions. It was about endurance, resilience, and hope. It wasn’t necessarily about fixing problems, it was about facing them.
