Naruto was and to this day remains to me quite a queer action-driven story; what I appreciated about it was that the relationship between Sasuke and Naruto was integral to the plot and fleshed out. With current audiences I have this sinking feeling they will insert a lot more NaruHina scenes and SasuSaku scenes, diminish the relationship between Naruto and Sasuke to a “hey, brothers yo!” fist bump, and give us derivative het slop alongside a strangled bromance between two characters who had an extremely complicated and detailed relationship.
The original manga itself constantly blurs the line between rivalry and romance for Naruto and Sasuke in ways a Hollywood adaptation will almost certainly scrub clean. Their first real interaction is a literal accidental kiss; the story frames them as reincarnated souls destined to chase and collide with each other across lifetimes, uses the language of lovers torn apart (“I wanted to be with you,” “my heart aches”), and Kishimoto has openly said he wrote their separation like a breakup that he struggled to get the emotional weight right for. When your source material treats a same-sex bond as the axis the entire world spins on, reducing that to a sanitised brotherhood while padding the runtime with extra NaruHina stutter-bloom scenes and SasuSaku guilt-date montages isn’t just lazy — it’s a fundamental misreading of what made the story move people. And given the current climate where any deep same-sex intimacy gets pre-emptively defanged or twisted into queerbait without payoff to avoid “controversy,” it’s hard to imagine them doing anything else.
It’s difficult to adapt an anime to film, and honestly I wish they’d stop doing it in a way that tries to mimic anime’s visuals in live action; we end up in an uncanny valley. Naruto is filled with strange and queer characters — Haku’s fluid gender expression, Orochimaru’s entire body-horror genderfuck existence — and in our current age of zero nuance and persecuting trans people I have very little hope that this film will churn out anything decent. Those are exactly the kind of nuance that contemporary, focus-grouped blockbusters flatten out of fear. The uncanny valley isn’t just visual; it’s emotional, too, when a story’s queer, messy heart is replaced by something safely marketable and dead inside.
This hurts me to even think about.
