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23 | she/her | naruto sideblog

[teamsasukes]

i know i post perhaps controversial things for a naruto enjoyer on tumblr but i appreciate that i literally never get hate anons here. i think there have been a couple of posts people disagree with which is obviously totally fine and always expressed respectfully. thank you!

[teamsasukes]

it is incredibly irritating how in every moment after like chapter 5 where sakura seriously ponders sasuke, it is in appreciation of his kindness, his selflessness, his friendship... only for swathes of the naruto audience to claim that sakura has feelings for sasuke because he fulfills the "bad boy" fantasy. nothing has ever been more made up. there is precisely one time sasuke behaves in a nature that could be ascribed to this trope -- during the chunin exams, where he brutalizes zaku after asking sakura who harmed her -- and sakura reacts with distress, fear, and immense concern for him. she recognizes that the violence is at odds with who sasuke truly is. this plays out yet again during their encounter in the land of iron arc. fandom has a tendency to project homogeneous archetypes on to all characters in all media -- see most fanfiction -- but it is worse in relation to sakura, sasuke, and their relationship, because it is these projections that are then criticized even though they are totally divorced from what is presented in the text

[teamsasukes]

May i ask your opinion on this?

One thing I find fascinating and hypocritical is that many people hate Sakura for loving and marrying sasuke but don't have that same reaction with karin. People go on and on how two characters that attempted murder on each other shouldn't be together, but at the SAME time, ship him with karin. By all accounts, they shouldn't be shipping them together. But for some reason, it make sense to them? And they mostly state that karin had a reason to like him? But he almost killed her. And was almost successful. Why is murder okay or even justified with sasukarin and not sasusaku?

to be honest with you, i don't really know... i try to avoid the business of puzzling over why people in the naruto fandom do anything... but there are some textual reasons that may make sasukarin a less "problematic" option than sasusaku (not that i have ever in my life cared about that)

i will say that sakura's attachment to sasuke is perhaps a more subtle thing than karin's. karin straightforwardly trusts him first and foremost because he intervened to save her life, risking great harm to himself, when they were competitors during the chunin exams. no one would have faulted him for standing idly by. of course, sakura has also been saved by sasuke, and encouraged, and supported, but it's complicated by her initial crush, which was as profound as most 12-year-olds' crushes get (which is to say, not very). there's also not a clean break between sakura's childlike infatuation and sakura's genuine love and care for sasuke -- the latter emerges before she's evolved past the former. in karin's case, her interactions with sasuke prior to the land of iron are completely recontextualized by the chunin exams flashback. i sort of see why people would view karin's affections more charitably, even though i think this is a misread of what sakura's got going on in part 1. (speaking mostly to the fandom here on tumblr -- the dudebros are pretty obtuse about both karin and sakura)

another distinction is that once the war arc sees both taka and 7 reunited, sasuke falls back into old patterns very quickly with all members of the former (karin included -- she even receives an apology!) as well as naruto. kakashi and sakura, meanwhile, get the cold shoulder. kakashi is also hardened enough that it doesn't, like, visibly get to him so it does come off a little bit like sasuke hurling shit at sakura in at least two separate instances for no apparent reason while she is too saddened by the state of things to respond. the persistence of karin's feelings seems reasonable to many simply by comparison.

that's my answer to your ask but i do want to elaborate on that last point to address the sasuke and sakura(/kakashi) dynamic during the war arc, because someone must.

i've seen people cite 1. sasuke just loving naruto more, and differently and 2. his myopic focus on saving the world as explanatory factors but i don't think either accounts for his harshness.

i suppose i could see why it would be difficult to stomach a sasuke and sakura reconciliation if sasuke's attitude towards sakura is so much more frigid than towards naruto despite his emotional neutrality... except, of course that there is no emotional neutrality here. like, ever. the sasuke fandom on tumblr is perplexingly averse to admitting that he has a bad habit of emotional repression/concealment/compartmentalization, to the point where i've seen the notion ridiculed multiple times by fandom-acclaimed sasuke understanders, even though it's one of the most textually concrete facets of his character. it's fundamental. (from what i've gauged this is a response to the most annoying contingents of the ss fandom claiming sasuke hides everything ever and thus has had a crush on sakura since he was 5 years old... nonetheless an overcorrection. and demonstrably incorrect.) anyway, he's repressed a great deal of emotion by this stage with relation to team 7 and what occurred at the land of iron. i feel pretty confident making this assertion because it's evidenced later following his battle with naruto, where sasuke's greatest source of gratitude towards naruto heartbreakingly, is that naruto never tried to kill him. even though, as he seems to believe, "everyone would always want to kill me"

sasuke speaks of everyone but there are like 7 people he holds in any regard over the course of parts 1 and 2. which murder attempts, aside from the obvious (itachi), do we think are the source of his distress here...

(to expand, it's not the specificity of a murder attempt that stings so much as what it represents: that two people he held dear resolved he could only be addressed through violence. i do of course think this falls flat on some level because sasuke is lying there with his arm torn off but, alas)

i think this resentment over perceived intent to kill him colours his attitude towards kakashi and sakura (even though he would not even admit it to himself) and it's all the more upsetting because sakura never could have! anyway, a lot of sasusaku is uncharacteristically subtle by naruto standards (and people also have brainworms about them and both characters individually), and as a consequence this element of their part 2 relationship is overlooked by just about everyone.

[teamsasukes]

why was shikamaru moving like this

[teamsasukes]

i love team 7 and i think that naruto and sakura's quest to retrieve sasuke in part 2 should always be contextualized. i don't think either of them were ill-intentioned, and naruto in particular was battling his own traumas. that being said objectively it is just worse to exercise physical violence against sasuke and declare willingness to harm him out of obligation to state than it is to verbally request for him not to endanger himself and also like him for being pretty at age 13. i'm sorry to put it so crudely but one of these is more harmful to his personhood and it's why taking issue with sakura alone drives me nuts

[lacyramen]

[teamsasukes]

You don't consider post 699 canon but do you ever think about blank period SS and how it could have played out. Like do you agree with them travelling together and all that.

yes! i'm not particularly committed to it as a necessary step in their reconciliation -- i think most of the tough conversations would have taken place in konoha in the aftermath of the war -- but in a universe where they wind up "together" in some form, it makes a lot of sense. i don't believe that sasuke would ever want to permanently settle in konoha and sakura lacks the emotional or compulsive fidelity to state that seems to anchor the other members of team 7. so accompanying one another on travels elsewhere would be a nice kind of prelude to that life. i talked more about what i think that might look like here

i tend to be less interested in ss post-series... primarily i think about sakura learning of konoha's role in the massacre, which could be a direly needed moment of catharsis for sasuke. i feel like i constantly mourn how... almost cavalier the acknowledgement from naruto and kakashi was at the land of iron. to see someone profoundly affected by it, as i reckon sakura would be -- openly so, since she tends to be a crier lol -- would be enormously validating.

shameless self-promo but i did attempt a take on the blank period in fic form years ago, linked here. i hope to return to it someday... but if you will read only one thing, try catflorist on ao3. it's been ages since i read fanfic but i remember loving their blank period ss. and as a plus their fic is complete!

[teamsasukes]

Nobara is basically a worse version of Sakura. You can tell she was intentionally designed by the mangaka as a “fix-it” character, removing the love interest angle and giving her more badass moments and fights in a shounen setting. Yet, she ends up with far weaker writing. You can instantly tell she’s more of an afterthought, added to complete the typical “two guys, one girl” team formula. She’s also far less connected to the story and the rest of the cast, and most importantly, she lacks real depth. (Oh, and she only exists for about 40% of the story before fading into obscurity, then suddenly reappearing in the last three chapters to deliver the final blow to the main antagonist, lmao.)

To summarize, it’s like someone looked at the Sakura hate on a surface level and decided to just avoid getting that by checking boxes instead of doing the actual character work.

i have no knowledge of jujutsu kaisen unfortunately so thank you for the breakdown! very reminiscent of what i felt during my viewing of the first half of the first season of fullmetal alchemist; brotherhood, for which i was quite excited after having been reassured that the girls were soooo much better-written than sakura. i was really like... our standards are so low. and wrong. they were unfailingly supportive of the male protagonists, never flawed.

it's a really weird fandom phenomenon, to deem a female character well-written only if she meets a narrow set of criteria for strength. likely it's an expectation of the genre but some women in the series very much meet these criteria -- tsunade gambles and drinks and talks down to everyone and is monstrously strong, konan is cold and quiet and stunningly skilled. i guess people want sakura to be this way, too, but idk -- naruto and sasuke and sakura all subvert these expectations at various stages and i quite enjoy it! what i am trying to get at is that there is diversity in the personalities of naruto's women. i don't know if sakura's failure to be "strong", i.e., aloof and emotionally detached and hypercompetent precisely as people demand is resultant of authorial misogyny.

i don't mean to give kishimoto too much credit. there are lots of larger critiques i think are totally fair and i've reblogged a few -- for instance, how fundamental men are to the arcs of like every woman while women are never allowed to drive the character trajectories of men in the same manner (shoutout to obito for being the outlier here, even if imperfectly), every woman reverting to the same blushing, stammering archetype in romantic scenes (in part 2 especially), and, most grating to me, the general lack of narrative and thematic investment in female characters and bonds featuring female characters where these would have enriched the text.

still, the manner in which these critiques apply to sakura is probably my point of contention with lots of fandom rhetoric. i've been a member of the "sakura should have been better-written" club from the moment i got into the series, but i can't help but think people overlook what should have been rectified (e.g., greater narrative focus, a fairer representation of her relationship with naruto, her learning major plot points like konoha's role in the massacre, following which there could have been better exploration of her relationship with sasuke, etc.) in favour of the same 3 boring takes like SAKURA LIKES SASUKE BECAUSE HE'S HOT and TO FIX HER WRITING SAKURA SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN OVER SASUKE. point 1 is patently false, point 2 is just terribly silly considering this would have changed a grand total of 5 panels in part 2 if we are generous.

what i am trying to say (and i am sorry for arriving here so circuitously!) is that it appears the naruto fandom has adopted an approach similar to gege's. and this approach is terribly boring. perhaps controversially, i appreciate a sincere attempt to write a human being -- even one informed by biases -- more than a lazy strong woman cut-out. i can't comment on nobara specifically but it sounds like she fits within the latter category. and lots of these characters, while dodging anti-feminist allegations, also evade any interesting characterization, so, trade-offs...

[takkyb1]

[teamsasukes]

the version of kakashi i find most compelling is one wherein he deliberately presents a very aloof, sort of silly image of himself to his genin team but he's fairly short with people otherwise (polite at best, abrasive at worst). and entirely detached until the members of team 7 (sasuke, and later naruto) painstakingly weasel their way in. it's sort of canon i guess but he's surprisingly emotionally open in much of part 2 with a lot of people, since the series as a whole veers towards sentimentality, and i'm not sure it totally jibes with how i see him. of course in part 2 canon shied away from much of the more brutal facets of serving as an active shinobi but i would have loved to see all members of team 7 contend with his reputation. yes is known across the land of fire for his skill but how did he acquire that renown and inspire that fear...

[teamsasukes]

and for the record i think there is truth to the silliness kakashi exhibits -- the chronic lateness, the bad erotica, etc., these are all organic parts of his personality -- but he definitely exaggerates it for team 7's benefit. years ago when i still tried naruto fanfic i remember one describing him reading all sorts of serious books but maintaining the icha icha cover so the kids wouldn't be intimidated by him. this also precludes others from looking too closely. this remains i think my favourite naruto headcanon ever

i love the idea of him teaching team 7 this central tenet: protecting comrades supersedes any fidelity to the state... but also very much falling short in other ways. in part 2 especially i like envisioning something of a different dynamic, partly as a result of of distance (it's implied he didn't see sakura at all during the boys' absence!) but also him abandoning the facade somewhat since naruto and sakura are, by konoha standards, adults who must engage in life-threatening combat (their impressive skillsets relative to others their age would only heighten this expectation). in part 1 i recall he'd also been absent from any dangerous work for quite a while and this is what caused substandard showings against zabuza and itachi; between parts 1 and 2 he is implied to have "worked" full-time (this explains his continued absence from the village also) and would probably be less practiced in modulating his harsher instincts. it would enrich his eventual confrontation with sasuke, too, for sasuke to be able to direct some ethical and political questions of his own towards one of konoha's most efficient assets...

[teamsasukes]

the version of kakashi i find most compelling is one wherein he deliberately presents a very aloof, sort of silly image of himself to his genin team but he's fairly short with people otherwise (polite at best, abrasive at worst). and entirely detached until the members of team 7 (sasuke, and later naruto) painstakingly weasel their way in. it's sort of canon i guess but he's surprisingly emotionally open in much of part 2 with a lot of people, since the series as a whole veers towards sentimentality, and i'm not sure it totally jibes with how i see him. of course in part 2 canon shied away from much of the more brutal facets of serving as an active shinobi but i would have loved to see all members of team 7 contend with his reputation. yes is known across the land of fire for his skill but how did he acquire that renown and inspire that fear...

[vestatsk]

[awoolf-arf]

he would sneak food under his robe i know it

[riavkz]

Uchiha Sasuke

[red-beets-soup-deactivated20200]

by torii

[reddoo-k]

his aura is insane

had some fun doing a couple sasuke sketch pages and trying new techniques hihi

[rowdymice]

uchiha sasuke