For some reason this art is the first time I’ve really considered Jiraya’s trauma in losing Minato.
Here’s this kid, who he essentially avoided for the last 12 years, who is the spitting image of his father, who undoubtedly takes after Kushina’s spirit, that he is at last formally introduced to.
This kid, who is an insane ball of energy, who postures because of his trauma and self consciousness, who just experienced his first sense of real loss in losing his best friend, the person he finally felt like he had formed bonds with. And he’s now in Jiraya’s care, who has made excuses his entire life and ran away from all of his own connections because of fear and sadness and likely deeply innate sense of inferiority, who likely has not properly processed a single one of his own losses. And they’re stuck together. Staring at each other in hotels and on the road and on the mountain.
And I fucking bet in that time, even with Naruto’s posturing and energy, he had so many instances of being deeply insightful, of calling out Jiraya’s coping mechanisms, of understanding in some sense what Jiraya had gone through, even though he was so young. And I’m sure the only thing Jiraya thought about was that ‘this is Minato, Minato is here right now with me’ and he was probably so destroyed by that, that his beloved student had died so young and tragically that he never got to see his son grow up, never got to grow old with his wife. And yet here Jiraya was, with his son, this sunshine boy with so much pain, that he had to leave under his guise of peeping so that he could fucking breathe.
Just, yanno, some thoughts I guess.
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