I'm not a SNS shipper because I'm just not someone who is into shipping in general but I find it strange how most people can't see that Naruto was deliberately written to have romantic feelings for Sasuke. Although I didn't see it when I was a kid, now that I'm an adult his feelings are so clear to me. To be fair I've seen some straight male fans admit that Naruto is likely in love with Sasuke and is in denial about it because of their society but the most popular fan opinion recently is that Kishimoto made a mistake by not making Naruto and Sakura a couple. And I wonder if people are so superficial that they take words as granted and don't look deeper into the actions of the characters. Because Naruto himself may ask Sakura for dates and people around him like Sai may claim that he's in love with her but Naruto's own actions constantly prove the opposite. If he felt something for her, it was at most a puppy love type thing you feel when you're in middle school.
Naruto's motivation to get stronger before the timeskip wasn't to impress Sakura but to gain the respect of Sasuke. He laughed when Rock Lee tried to flirt with Sakura but was jealous when Neji noticed Sasuke. After the timeskip, he never tries to "upgrade" his relationship with Sakura to something more than friendship despite them being often alone together. Instead all he thinks about is Sasuke. When seeing Sakura again after their puberty, he could've called her womanly and beautiful but he said she hadn't changed at all. Yet when Sakura compared Sasuke's looks to Sai's, Naruto betrayed himself by disagreeing with her, which proves he finds Sasuke attractive and that his feelings are therefore not platonic. When Sakura made her false confession and gave him the opportunity to give up on his search for Sasuke, Naruto brushed her off and admitted that he's not after Sasuke because of his promise to her but because he himself cares about Sasuke. If Sakura was his great love, why would he be so willing to die alongside Sasuke after this ? He'd be heartbroken and sad that the girl of his dreams was lying to him, not making a crazily romantic declaration to another boy. Honestly I believe that people hate this arc because it so clearly shows the difference in depth and passion between Naruto's feelings for Sasuke and his feelings for Sakura and this makes them uncomfortable.
Anyway, it's really just weird how Kishimoto went out of his way to consistently portray Sasuke as someone who is dearer to Naruto's heart than Sakura (let alone Hinata but that's another can of worms) and yet people still think that Naruto was totally in love with her and should have married her. Naruto wouldn't have been happier marrying Sakura because the one that he actually loves would still be Sasuke.
Yes to all except that Naruto's crush on Sakura was a cover for his feelings for Sasuke, it's a self preservation tactic for his closeted self where he overcompensates for his taboo feelings for Sasuke. Comphet behaviour.
Anyway. Even if you looked at how classical literature defines romantic love, you would most often find that it's defined as a combination of respect, admiration and passion. And these components can be found in how Naruto and Sasuke treat each other, think of each other and react accordingly towards each other and other characters connected with them. Naruto admires Sasuke's skills, singular minded drive and his humanity. He puts Sasuke on a pedestal because Sasuke (and Iruka) understood and supported Naruto when everyone else was busy branding him as a reject, including Sakura. Hinata never let out a peep to support Naruto, she was just an ineffectual bystander when Naruto was put through physical and emotional hoops, she didn't even go to visit him at the hospital after Sasuke retrieval arc even though she knew he was battered and heartbroken, all because she was too "shy". Love demands voluntary action, which you clearly saw in both Sasuke and Naruto's case. Sasuke lost his shit after he heard Itachi was out there hunting Naruto, a jinchuuriki and despite knowing he was nowhere near as strong as Itachi, he went to confront him and got bashed up as a result. That was voluntary action. Naruto set out to confront Raikage and others and begged them and then threatened them to not hurt Sasuke after he heard how Sasuke was being hunted, that was also voluntary action. Neither of them only dealt in ornamental words when it came to the other, they ACTED out of their love for each other. Their relationship is defined by their respect, admiration and passion for each other. The way Naruto simply lost it after Oro staked a claim to Sasuke meant for his heinous ulterior motives and let the kyuubi chakra out. That's passion. The way he trained and trained and trained uncountable hours, going through all sorts of pain and misery, just to get closer to Sasuke, that was passion. His training for rasenshuriken as a tribute to Sasuke, passion. Him rejecting the entire world especially after gaining the hero status as he always wanted (for the sake of acknowledgement) after the pain arc, passion. What it means is that everything he stands for takes a backseat when it comes to Sasuke, be it his own goals, life, hokageship, everything. That's passion and commitment. Sasuke throwing away the opportunity to train as a shinobi during the bell test, sacrificing his life at the hands of Haku and hence going against his own objectives just so Naruto could eat and live, they were selfless voluntary actions borne of his passion for Naruto. They consistently and openly show love (respect admiration and passion) for each other in the most classical sense, from start to end, the way they don't show for anyone else, be it Hinata or Sakura. They both really admire each other for their strength, durability, resilience, belief systems, inner moral compass, skills, looks, everything. They saw each other grow and wanted to be a part of each other's journey, well until Sasuke was lured away by Oro, because of their respect for each other, and the desire to be together. Kishimoto literally wrote this story where he majorly referred to and gave tribute to Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the Japanese playwright that redefined romance literature in Japan with the concept of shinjuu, the highest political action lovers can committ for the sake of their 'love', and injected the concept into his own story. The whole story revolves around Sasuke and Naruto's relationship with each other, and yet people not only unsee it but reject and trivialise it when explained by other fans. They willingly erase not only the entire core of the narrative of this story, but sweep multiple scenes, dialogues, visual elements, interview bytes, notes and plenty other elements under the carpet. Why? Unconscious bias.
Sure, some do it deliberately because homophobia and personal insecurity. But a lot of the fans see Naruto as a kids show, meant only for entertainment with no extra value or meaning. I mean imagine, the story Kishi very clearly wrote as a critique of the system, imbued with existentialist themes, is interpreted by fans as a nationalistic piece of work where they see and praise Naruto as a classic nation's hero and Sasuke as the terrorist who didn't deserve a pardon at the end. They really don't see anything else. Because of unconscious bias. Like for eg, the director of the 2026 adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights' was asked why she cast a white actor to play the role of Heathcliff, a coloured character, to which she replied that she could only cast actors as she imagined the characters to look like when she read the book. Now the book itself is pretty literal about the physical appearance of Heathcliff, where his character was described as 'dark skinned', lascar (Indian sailor or artilleryman), Romani (people from Indo-aryan ethnic nomadic tribe) and DESPITE ALL OF THIS, the director (a super white woman) "imagined" him to be white. Why? What informed this 'imagination' of hers when the words in the book itself told a different story? Unconscious bias. Same with Naruto. When Naruto specifically says that he doesn't consider Sasuke as a brother to Hagoromo, when Sasuke specifically says to Sai that he doesn't consider Naruto as his brother, where Naruto thinks Sasuke looks hot, where they both call each other their 'one and only', when they both consistently commit actions that a hero and heroine commit for each other in a classic love saga, when they are ready to commit shinjuu aka lovers' suicide for each other in the face of an unjust world, when there is SO MUCH DAMN CONTENT THAT SPECIFICALLY points at a romantic bond and not platonic, what makes these readers reject the romance of it? Of course, SNS often say this but this completely fits in this context that if Sasuke was a woman, fans would one hundred percent agree that it was romantic. But because they are both boys in a shounen media, that negates everything else, including the story, the plot, the narrative, the themes, the character building, the scene building, the impact, the visual elements, the dialogues, everything.
And this isn't any singular, rare thing to happen, it's very common in how media, especially layered and complex media is perceived, most prominently when it comes to a popular story about a topic that discusses things different from the norm, like homosexuality, stories about coloured people and other oppressed people, their dark history, etc. People can only understand something, whether other people, stories, characters etc, from the same depth (intellectual /emotional/psychological) that they have reached in themselves. When the system is built so as to keep the consumer relegated to only the ideas they were fed since birth, and where any deviation to the norm is punished or decentivized, and conformity is rewarded, what will happen? People will stop thinking, questioning, wondering, introspecting, the idea of thinking differently would be made a threat to their stability or social capital/credibility. It's how the system is set up. Look at Naruto forums on x and reddit, even in this day and age, people will get abusive and dismissive the moment you talk about SNS, trolling you and branding you as fujoshis and lesbian fetishizers, no matter the bulk of evidence against it.
Well, that's why I say SNS fans should saturate the forums and bring evidence to supplement their points. Initially, there will be a lot of resistance, but gradually the intensity of resistance will weaken. Change the narrative of the subject matter. Make it so that when SNS talk about this love story, multiple fans should call out any reactionary/prejudiced opposition as homophobic and unintelligent. Flip the narrative.
In the past few years, I have seen this personally. Many fans told me they changed their minds about the intentionality of Kishimoto when they read analysis, that they understood none of it could be coincidental or accidental because it goes against instinct, logic and common sense. Like I said, understanding is never linear, that's why repetition and diverse communication helps.
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