I've seen you post stuff about what other people think, but I'm curious as to your personal reaction to chapters 699 and 700. Can I ask for your two cents please?
I mean, I honestly couldn't say it better or more thoroughly than some of those full-blown essays that have already written. And, I don't have the patience or energy to yell about what happened anyway. I don't really...see a point, almost? I feel like my feelings are getting wasted. I think this will be my last input on it if I can help it.
I'm kind of appalled at the volume of people who are getting bullied FOR forming negative opinions though. Those negative opinions are born from love where they see injustice in this series that's manage to capture us all for 15 years, come what may, right up until this final chapter. I've never seen devastation in a fandom quite like that, tbh. And for me personally, day by day I go through different emotional stages. Shock, anger, sadness, disbelieve, acceptance, and also all of those on behalf of others feeling the same. But, in a nutshell, my problems with the ending are:
The complete ooc-ness of it. Might as well get the whole ship thing over and done with. Regardless of whether it's set in the future or not, there was not even close to enough preparation in the previous 698 chapters to suggest that the route these characters took was anything close to the people we've grown to love. Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura were collectively butchered to me. SasuSaku has always left a bad taste in my mouth. I love Sasuke and it makes me uncomfortable to call him an abuser because he's entitled not to return her feelings, but as people have said, time and again he hasn't been particularly graceful about the way he made that clear. Calling her annoying, their violent encounters (that are just plain violent with no hidden meaning on his part other than to get rid of her), and reducing Sakura to nothing better than a shell of her proud, powerful, outspoken self every time they're in each other's presence. She can barely look him in the eye, barely raise her head, let alone take on the absolute baggage that would have to come with being in an intimate relationship with him. It has always hurt to see Sakura try so hard to please him, how her progress is always thrown away every time his name is mentioned. I don't find it cute that people can romanticize her feelings for him either. Sakura's affections for Sasuke are based on a crush she developed because of his looks as a child. Through the entire series she never understood Sasuke's feelings, his motives, or knew a damn thing about his history. Sasuke crushes her character. Shouldn't the person you love make you blossom, cherish you and give you happiness and understanding? Did we even get to see any of that in chapter 700? No, we did not. There's been lots of speculation on whether Sakura was a housewife or not in 700, but the label is irrelevant tbh. Being a housewife can be a noble calling, but I'm sure what a lot of us wanted was to see Sakura take over as the head of the hospital and the most skilled medical ninja in history as she was set up to be. The second part of this post is a good indicator as to why this probably isn't the case. So all I'm seeing is the meek girl settling into the position of baby maker while Sasuke is off gallivanting doing god knows what while their child wonders where he is. There was no development here. No development in them. Sasuke even explicitly stated that he didn't like Sakura and she had no reason to like him, not 5 chapters before. And we're supposed to just swallow chapter 700 as canon for no good reason?
I've said before that NaruHina could have been so much more. I'm an ex NaruHina shipper. It's not the IDEA of them that doesn't appeal to me, it's the lack of importance and development that they've had that makes this ship so mind-boggling. Again, this ship has been onesided from the very beginning. It's not unhealthy or harmful per se, but Kishimoto never had Naruto express his feelings for Hinata?? He never even replied to her confession. He's never done or said anything to her that he wouldn't do for any of his other comrades.
During part 1 Hinata was my favourite character because I saw limitless potential in her. But the more time that went on, the more one-dimensional her character became. The Hyuuga was pushed aside and no longer seemed relevant as a clan. But I was happy that at least Hinata was getting stronger, and if Naruto was her inspiration, then there wasn't really anything wrong with that. If there was more to her than Naruto as well. Similar to Sakura, there's nothing to suggest that she took up the Hyuuga mantle, and she was a secondary character in the manga right up to the end. Kishimoto could have made NaruHina wonderful and I would have supported it. But he had Naruto's deeper affections lay in other people, while almost having his interaction with Hinata so minimal it seemed INTENTIONAL. He had him bleeding and pining for Sasuke the entire time, and also actual, solid development between he and Sakura blooming right before our eyes. He and Sakura would do anything for each other. And they are a good, balanced, supportive pair. I don't outright ship it, but I'd accept it in the face of what we got as an alternative. If Kishimoto really found it detrimental to pair Sasuke with a woman, Karin also could have been a better choice. Karin was introduced as a woman that Sasuke recognized the power of right from the beginning. Together they were part of a team that could empathize with each other, and though they were rough around the edges, you could see the camaraderie and true teamwork developing between them.
As a trio, taka came back to Sasuke, similarly to how Naruto did. Karin had anger in her that also could have been played out and worked with, but Kishi also chose to take the simple way out and write that rushed and comically. Were that given the time though, I couldn't see Karin shrinking under Sasuke like Sakura. Honestly, I hadn't expected Sasuke to be in any kind of romantic relationship, let alone have children. He might have agreed to come home, but there were still a lot of psychological issues for him to sort out. Ones he'd harbored since a child and had fester under his dream of revenge. It seemed fitting that Sasuke truly be the last Uchiha. Not that I couldn't see him eventually adopting or something similar(under the pretense that he be a good father and family come first), but for him to willingly continue the Uchiha bloodline and potential curse was a shocker.
The father thing. You can't get around the fact that Bolt wrote 'shitty dad' on the Hokage monument as a ploy for Naruto's attention? Naruto did that as a child because he was ostracized by the entire village and just wanted a slither of recognition, even if it was in the form of a scold. And that's clearly meant to be a parallel. How starved of affection would Bolt have to be to play that off? The child of Uzumaki Naruto, who should know better than anyone, who has always 'found a way' to shine a light on the dark in people, in the actual world, has a child who is starved of affection from his father. With such a peaceful world now, what exactly would stop Naruto from bringing Bolt along to his meetings with him? Or another valid point- why not just create a shadow clone to make time for him? The only reason I can think of for Naruto being portrayed as a bad father is so that there's some kind of conflict to be resolved in the upcoming spin-off. Which is commercialism. Why would you do that to Naruto's character for the sake of continuing something that we were all ready for to finish? I'd rather Naruto end now than live long enough to see it turn into such garbage.
Literally everyone paired off. Whether or not they'd even interacted in the series before or not. Here's hoping you've seen the post about the fact that Karui's name means 'light' so her and Chouji being paired together is just a fat joke. I don't need to explain where the offense lays in that. Moreover, besides all the unnecessarily paired up, married, baby-making heterosexual couples, there was not one queer one. Despite the years of queerbaiting we apparently suffered through with Naruto and Sasuke, queercoding for the sake of making an interesting villain, and all the homosexual jokes littered across the manga to make all the queer fans think that it was safe to identify with the Naruto characters, and to hope that maybe even we could get a piece of recognition in the end. We didn't.
People are shipping Salad and Bolt together. This is possibly one of the most offensive parts to me, because it's essentially heterosexual NaruSasu. People who denied NaruSasu every step of the way, suddenly making parodies of NaruSasu moments with their children because-well, it's a boy and a girl so it's suddenly okay! Even though we don't know much about them as people yet and certainly haven't had 699 prior chapters revolving around their relationship. If Salad was a boy you can guarantee there wouldn't have been an inch of that going on.
There was no message to this ending. Even 699 was a little tainted to me, but I was able to enjoy Sasuke's beautiful monologue. 700 said nothing to me. It was a weak, fanservice-laden ending, that was just there for the sake of being there. What we thought we'd get was some proper aftermath of the war and how everyone dealt with it. Those children that we watched graduate from ninja school finally seemed to be ready to live up to their full potential and not many of them seem to have. We wanted thoughts, actual feelings, loose ends being tied up, but we saw more of the children than the characters we did know. It was all just empty. And there's something macabre about the fact that chapter 700 was in full colour, because tbh, all it did was drain me of mine.
I'm happy for the people who were happy with this ending though. I mean, no one set out to feel this way obviously. But that doesn't mean people don't reserve the right to say how they feel? It's not childish. Any published work is subject to criticism and this is certainly no exception. It was one heck of a ride while it lasted, at least. And I'll never deny how important this series is to my heart or how it's helped me. But that's where the bitterness is coming from, because I thought it deserved more.
