I sometimes scroll trough Anti tags, mainly anti-Sakura. I do this to figure out WHY people devote such time and effort to hate fictional characters. I haven’t been able to watch the whole of Naruto, but I get the basics. I was hoping you could devote some time to explain the mindset behind hating characters like Sakura, Hinata, Or Tenten. Because they seem to get the most of hate in the Naruto Fandom. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out WHY.
“Let love be their common will; let them hate with a single heart. Much wrong in the world is thereby healed.” - Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 458 BC
Hatred is unifying, in many ways more easily unifying than love, and this has been apparent to human thinkers since ancient ties. Peace and alliance, without a common enemy, is hard.
So. Fictional characters may seem really mundane thing to unite around hating, but is that necessarily a bad thing? In some ways, I’d much rather that people get out their emotional need to collectively hate something around something that doesn’t ultimately matter like Manchester United or Kylo Ren or Hinata Hyuuga or putting pineapple on pizza.
Popular culture holds up a mirror to deeper tensions and anxieties of course, and so the wars we fight by proxy around fictional characters do touch on things that really matter (class or ethnic tensions between rival sports club supporters, misogyny/rape culture behind fictional women hatred, etc); and of course, a few whackjobs take anything too far (football riots, SWATting people over video games, doxxing fan artist, etc).
But per se, I don’t necessarily see hating fictional characters and venting about it as inherently bad. I think it can be cathartic. And then too, it can also be a way to touch upon the same issues as above indirectly with lower stakes. Talking about misogyny with regard to the female characters in Bor//uto is less painful than talking about misogyny in real, current societies, for example.
So that’s regarding “why spend time and energy hating fictional characters”. Regarding why Sakura, Hinata, and Tenten in particular. I have to say I haven’t seen very much about Tenten, except one dude who made a video where he mentioned how much he hated Tenten because all she did was kiss Neji’s butt in part one. (Kishimoto was using Tenten as one way of informing the audience of Neji’s strength, and because Tenten had almost no other panel time, that did basically sum up her role in part one. Do we hate Tenten for this or do we criticize Kishimoto?)
A lot has been written about how fandoms will strain mightily to explain away all bad actions and personality traits of male characters and invent depth for those who are as flat as cardboard in canon, while female characters who aren’t perfect get condemned and those who have no depth are dismissed. That’s part of it.
Sakura and Hinata get hatred from several different directions. “Sakura is useless” is a meme, I think, and among the largest swathe of fandom, especially casual male fandom, it became just something “everybody knows”. Contemporary humour is very meme/reference influenced, people connect by referring to these cultural touchstones. A lot of the time when someone makes a “Sakura is useless” joke and you point out that she’s not, and they take a moment to think, they’ll admit she’s not useless, yet the meme persists.
A lot of Sakura and Hinata hatred comes down to the Smurfette Principle: there can be Only One Heroine, therefore if this female character is the Heroine, this other female character cannot be. It’s a zero sum game. Kishimoto himself glibly plays into this in the latter interviews where he dismissed Sakura and put her on a tertiary level with characters like Kiba.
Let me make it quite clear, self-proclaimed Hinata-defenders who laughed and applauded Kishimoto’s dismissal of Sakura’s narrative importance in that awful interview are being disgusting. Kishimoto is the same dude who asked an interviewer who named Hinata his favourite character if it was because of her large breasts.
Likewise, belittling Hinata is often motivated by protecting Sakura. Sakura fans are rightly frustrated that “Sakura is useless” is a meme when Hinata has far less on-panel accomplishments. But that does not really excuse attempting to make “Hinata is useless” the new meme.
Lastly of course there is anti-female hostility motivated by m/m ships instead. To some people, rather than there being Only One Heroine Allowed, they would seemingly much rather there be no women at all, or perhaps two (paired off with each other and ignored), or a suitably desexualized maternal female character. Sakura tends to get the worst of this, probably because she was a possibility for both Sasuke and Naruto whereas Hinata was only for Naruto.
I’ve run out of time so I’m gonna have to cut it off there. I’m sorry I’m so behind on asks, as you can see, I get such good asks that they require a lot of time to answer.
