Alright then, I don't normally post in this section, I hang out in the battlegrounds where I belong, usually surrounded by people who can form thoughts. So its exceedingly rare for me to enter any section for any length of time, the debates rage on and I am always needed on the front lines. I have never made a thread in this section and have seldom made threads outside of those hallowed halls of rhetoric and fury. But I find myself compelled to do so, motivated perhaps by the closing of a chapter of the lives of many of you forumers, a close in my "life" as well. Something I guess we can all share? After all, is not the entire moral of this vast and illustrious comic book that we have all come to enjoy that everyone should understand everyone else's pain? How Tolerance and understanding of ones pain? Has not Naruto been twelve plus year long festering ulcer for us all? Are we not here to rejoice that it has finally been lanced? Does this finally mean we can move on to greater things?
No, no it doesn't in fact it's the exact opposite..Naruto is the start of the decline of Shounen manga (pretentious as it is to suggest that comics about people beating the crap out of each other have some standard by which they can fall below I suppose) and its every single Nardo fans fault..what is coming is part of an over all decline in anime that will turn the entire massive genre from something interesting and brave, intense and ground breaking, visually stunning and thematically powerful, into a stunted, repetitive, derivative, "safe" emotionally arrested, morally backwards snooze fest of bland carbon copies, two dimensional characters and boring, generic, amateurish art. Where risks aren't taken and stories meant to inspire teens, to make them gape and shout "DUDE THAT WAS AWESOME!" while also provoking them to think..stories meant to shake the antisocial, resentful oblivious among us into moving beyond their retardation into something more. Stories that were to the well adjusted, a fun and amusing way of blowing five minutes or half an hour while watching something awesome and loving the manly message were to the malformed, misshapen and unwanted a doorway to a world where they could escape, face their own problems and failures and overcome..Now seek to enable those same failings, where Shounen once looked at a character as self absorbed, narcissistic and cruel as Sasuke and responded with loud mocking laughter followed by a violent series of beating until that character came face to face with the horrors of their own flaws and overcame them, stepping into the light and taking personal responsibility..now seek to cast these same selfish cretins as these victims who need love and hugs and who bare no personal responsibility for their actions due to their perceived horrible childhoods. This is a reflection of the vast majority of the fandom, the perception they possess and their attitudes. It shapes how they view fiction and with the advent of the internet, and a global market..it has allowed these fans a platform in numbers far greater..than before to influence how editors and writers move their stories.
Naruto is the used syringe, Fairy Tale the HIV virus, and the new generation of fiction writers, who were the deranged Otaku nutbags who fapped to Sasuke-sama and gave kishimoto the means of making an easy buck are the fully realized form of the disease. The Aids virus that will inside of two decades completely destroy any originality, or quality to shounen (and with the proliferation of self publishing sites, and the thriving Web comic industry..yes this is even more likely).
This has happened before..fifty years ago marvel and DC writers allowed their fans to interact with the writers in Q and A sessions and editorials in all their comics that came out every month. The fanboys and girls clammored and within a decade those same stories began to take heed and change. by the seventies the Bronze age of comics came..and the quality collapsed almost utterly..the eighties and nineties the so called comics dark age saw a brief revival of quality but by the 2000's the fandoms ascended to writers and well..the Western comic industry is now a joke, the stories are terrible, bland, full of fanservice and petty knee jerking writers who join forums to yell at and fight with fans who dare to object. Spiderman briefly dating a girl that was based off the senior editors daughter being one of the most brazen examples of "self insert" like fanfiction..
the same will occur to Shounen and the Naruto fandom has opened the door to that..the crimes of the future lie squarely at your feet. And lie squarely at ours, the old school manly fighting manga guys for not being able to stop it..but enough about the crimes of the fans for now..let us look back at the series itself.
Naruto's original run started around 99 or so but it didn't hit its stride until 2002 or so, but the characters first appearance originates back in the year 1997, a year when most of the userbase here was either a new born baby, not born yet for several years or if you're my age, months away from becoming a fifth grader. A young up and coming artist by the name of Masashi Kishimoto needing some money published a one shot featuring the titular character. Although he thought his writing was rushed and awful, his art quality terrible and that the characters were in his own words "Too Japanese"..the story somehow polled very high among the readers and he got his name out.
Naruto was a story in its beginning that had a great deal of depth compared to most other fighting mangas out there. It had politics, it had diversity of factions, different clans and high ranking warriors who vied for control, competing city states of child warriors who had very different cultures. At its center was the young orphan boy of someone unknown at the time, an ostracized, neglected and hated child who was scorned for a crime he knew nothing about. His only desire being for people to see him, he was a prankster, a loud mouth, a goof ball and an idiot who sought the attention and recognition denied to him for so long. After being duped into stealing a forbidden scroll and learning a technique only high ranking people knew, and only exceptionally strong people had the gas in the tank to pull off he gets roped into an adventure with a team.
That team, contained a young Sasuke Uchiha, the prince and last heir of a legendary clan of great warriors who possessed a powerful blood line that allowed them to wield magical eyeballs. Where Naruto was loud and adventurous, Sasuke was cold and vainglorious. While Naruto sought recognition as a means of human contact Sasuke sought it as a means to address his insecurity and his need for vengeance.
One of these characters, was given undue praise and love both by the fans and the characters of the universe. In a traditional fighting manga he'd be the prissy jerk who eventually gets humbled by the hero and becomes a loyal if a bit aloof team mate. Here he constantly placed high in the popularity polls.
Where his boring, one dimensional nature was a stark contrast to Naruto who laid it all on the line for a city who hated him, fighting a homicidal child possessed by his own grief and rage as well as a demon..and reached that kid. He was loved instead of hated and more air time was demanded of the crazy child.
The fight against Gaara will forever stand as the greatest moment of the Naruto manga, for it embodied everything the original story was all about. Two outcasts and orphans each one treated horribly, each one wielding immense power from inhuman source battled each other in a contest of wills. Naruto who was all about living with a smile and persevering, who never used his misery as an excuse vs the unhinged, vicious killer who hated all around him for his solitude and lack of love.
It embodied everything right about the series, there was personal accountability, Gaara who was a genuine victim still was made to come face to face with the reality that his life's path was the wrong one and that he had no excuse for his despotic antics and when he faced that reality and broke..it was pushed onto him with a solid blow to the face.
The tone of the series notably changed after that, with the appearance of more Uchihas the core of the story seemed to shift away from the main character and his quest for a family..his desire to help others, his belief in himself and the dream of a better life forged by right action into something else. Gone were the days hard work, of dedication, of compassion tempered by a sense of justice and morality...replaced by a warped moral that essentially amounted too "everyone is a victim of influences outside of their control, there is no personal accountability or atonement, no justice no self determination..a treasonous murderer like Itachi is morally comparable to a child who had a monster sealed inside him before he was even born one that threatened to eat his personality if he ever slept"
As this continued, the characters who should have been detested grew more and more popular, sold more and more merchandise and more and more were cries of "but he's just an avenger" or "he is so cool!!" "KAWAI SAWWWSKEEE-KWOOON!!!" filled the air, followed by support for Itachi...Kishi eager for money, eager for fame and likely pressured by the editors the way Toriyama was, much like Toriyama began to compromise his vision and soon the world of naruto was in total discord.
Gone was harmony in the heavens for the theme of the entire universe had begun to contradict itself and Kishimoto plowed ever onward, his story that originally was crafted, albeit rushed and perhaps even unwillingly, though still possessing of care and professionalism soon became a soulless machine designed to cater to the loudest of the loud, the shallowest of the shallow, the most disturbed of the bunch.
The art quality even began to reflect that, while the characters were never life like or very expressive they were drawn in an almost comical way that made them enjoyable. This was gone, replaced by repetition, laziness and blatant fanservice. The story itself degraded a long with the art until Sasuke and Akatsuki began to have more screen time than the main character himself.
Sasuke continued down his reprehensible, immoral path and the story kept attempting to justify it, to swim in money? Or perhaps just because it was the easiest way to publish a series without doing much work..pandering the way he did.
The plot and story line lost all meaning of semblance and thought when brother killed brother and a masked man weaved a fantastic story that strained all credulity. Your brother, a baby killing psychopathic traitor..was really a kind hearted person...A retcon so insulting and distasteful many, many an old time reader quit the series at that point.
That was the deathnell of rhyme and reason in the series. When personal responsibility vanished and in its place was a boring, emo and utterly dishonest message of justification. The world is mean, therefor you have nothing to answer for! Do as you like so long as you know a fraction of that pain!
Pain..the main theme of the third quarter to the finale of this story, pain..conflict, characters uttered the phrase "understanding *insert persons name and pain here*" on and on droned..to the point where the readers of the manga stopped thinking and merely repeat it endlessly without giving thought to what it actually means?
What does it mean? Does understanding somebodies suffering undue the sins they committed? Does knowing what a person went through excuse their horrible conduct or justify the miserable, utterly wrong lives they live?
Part 1 Naruto says HELL NO..and he says that with a titanic fist to your face. Suffering and pain..do not excuse ones actions, a circle of hatred does not give you the right to be a monster..to plunge the world into war, or to attempt to strike down your best friend..then perpetrate an eternity of violence from the shadows so that living souls will turn their hatred towards you (in fact one think understanding pain would provoke the absolute opposite of this line of thinking?) Just because you were abused, hurt or neglected doesn't give you the right to hate others, or to act self destructive or hateful and actions aren't undone by having someone understand your pain either.
This would be why other characters died for their actions, or repented at great personal cost..part 1 taught us that you will always have to answer for what you have done..because the type sob story you have doesn't matter nearly as much as the decisions you make and the actions you take. You can feel anger and hurt all you want but if you choose to do the wrong thing than you become no better than those who caused you pain..while actively seeking to do the opposite..to never give in and never in resentment will not only allow you to heal and move on but to build a life of meaning.
But part 2? Part began and ended on the premise that any type of conduct and behavior can be excused. It completely chanted the rules of the universe, even created new nations and convoluted histories to justify atrocity after atrocity under the auspices that victims can be nothing but victims. It is an absurdly patronizing, morally reprehensible and insulting..stagnating moral that only someone deeply warped and twisted can love. And love they sure as hell did..because the entire second half of the series, seven years has been one long scramble of forced retcons, convoluted insertions and boring fights to stall for time while the author desperately tries to figure out what his next move is.
And as many had predicted, seven years to the day the series ends..and as it ends there is no meaningful resolution. Sasuke apologizes and gets a slap on the wrist, but isn't forced to actually pay for his crimes. Sasuke himself learns nothing and doesn't grow as it seems he immediately walks off alone..away from the bonds that had given his rival everything he needed to change the world while Sasuke spent fifteen years of story time..stagnating.
That is perhaps Naruto's greatest sin..it is a manga that is superficial as hell, it panders and it placates but it doesn't actually answer any questions or resolve any conflicts in a way that actually has any value. It's incoherent, immature, self indulgent and downright warped morality is matched only by the blind, slavish devotion of its fandom..that inspired the man and his editors to walk down a path of artistic and literary prostitution matched only by the creator of Dragon Ball Z and a certain infamous Superman writer and creator of the TV Show Heroes (which itself shared many of its flaws with Nardo) Joeph Leob. In its laziness it encourages other authors to do the same, it inspires the anti social and the emotionally immature in the wrong ways and it catered to the most unhinged group.
It sent a message(and to be fair bleach shares blame here ) that it was okay to write a disjointed, rushed and incredibly lazy story so long as it said the right words to the right group of desperate shut ins..and sold enough merchandise. It said "don't actually bother drawing, the art can be generic as hell with its humans barely looking like anything real because our target audience doesn't even want to interact with real people any more! its okay they'll shill out money" "Slap a pair of tits on a poorly drawn outline of a barbie doll and they'll say its pure quality!" (okay maybe this is something bleach is entirely to blame for) make your men as brooding, emo and androgynous as possible..
Forget the awful plot, the fact that Naruto's probably one of the most sexist mangas out there what with Sakura being the stereotypical battered wife who stands by her roaring douche bag of a husband no matter what..out of some awful and twisted sense of childish lust that long ago was confused for love. Forget how the only other strong female character was a neglectful drunken coward who spent decades in hiding when she could have been saving lives by the tens of thousands. Never mind the insulting dialog that at times was genuinely inferior to friggen porn...forget the fact that kishimoto tries so god damn hard to paint the precious Uchihas as victims and force this..horrifically poor "new moral theme" of the story on us that it comes off as half patronizing, half the crazed efforts of someone desperate...Forget how disturbingly Freudian and sexual (in the wrong ways) some of the fights were, or how truly horribly simplistic and one dimensional the characters were (sorry Crair..Madara wasn't even a character he was a god damn caricature of the Shounen "ancient power" and "braggart" archetypes). Forget the pointless retcons..and blatantly transparent asspulls done simply because the author had painted himself into a corner
Nardo's greatest sin is that it didn't even resolve itself or fulfill either of its main themes! The original? hah screw that..that ship sailed ages ago..we weren't getting anything intelligent, or positive out of this..no vindication or hell even a Call out on the Sauce's BS...but the second? That everyone is a poor thing who needs a shoulder to cry on? That we're all victims of a vicious cycle? Yeah that wasn't even resolved. Sasuke is still a criminal, one whose demise in a just and noble fashion would have finally broken the cycle of hatred. Obito? died forgiven for crimes he never should have been pardoned for, leaving entire villages devastated by his machinations without closure..or justice for the lost. widows, and widowers, dead kings and murdered children, blood line limits annihilated and two generations of ruined lives..now calling out to a world that can offer them no balm for their rage...
Madara? molested to death by his grandmother and died in the arms of his gay lover, given a free pass..and again leaving generations and entire cultures, whole battlefields of grieving people asking "why, why were we used like this! Where is our justice!"
Kaguya?...actually she doesn't fit into either of those themes..I have no idea what the hell she was supposed to be about..half of a rough draft for a potential manga Kishi was probably working on got accidentally sent to the publishers instead of the actual plot and they figured "ehh eff it! Lets just run with it" Cementing Kaguya as the greatest big lipped Alligator moment in the history of the trope..
And moving back to that..Orochimaru? Committed murder so many times its beyond counting, killed babies, adults, kids...assassinated the leader of a village and soul raped and killed the leader of another...created a rogue army and sided with terrorists....he..ran off? Again leaving thousands of enraged souls looking for vengeance.
Sasuke? Again..and to make matters worse, in a blatantly corrupt display of a favoritism Konoha pardons its favorite son, thus openly slighting all of its allies and heaping mockery and fostering malice of all of the Sauces victims..the sheer clueless, pretentiousness of this..both from the characters and the author who I'm convinced thinks his entire fandom is made up of idiots who can't think for themselves...and thus wont object.
There is now a legion, several generations, a quarter of a million souls who forget about justice, they don't even have closure..and worse..on top of such an indignity they are forced to endure watching the sources of their pain become martyred saints...seen in a sympathetic light..a legion of grieving souls bitter, angry and possibly even demanding vengeance
The cycle isn't broken it's back in full force, and worse...its been vindicated.
Over a hundred million copies of Nardo have been sold..fifteen years of the lives of millions wasted on a story with one of the most bleak and tragic endings ever..obliviously conceived and nodded along with a smile by the blind and the biased...all the while sending the message, that that is, okay..And because of that..others will follow his example and quality will die replaced by utter garbage and its all our fault...Kishimoto's and the fans and those of us who weren't loud enough to drown out all the stupidity...
That's Naruto's greatest sin..
What a despicable, pathetic end to a terrible story what a waste. What an utter, waste...
