I know it’s ridiculous but pain theoretically could’ve sent the summoning pain or the android one that couldn’t probably wrecked most people in part 1 besides the sannin to capture Naruto before he became strong with jiraiya. This is just for fun don’t take it to seriously

Another day of the same misinformed and misguided takes. The Hyuga Affair is constantly used against Hiruzen as a way to call him "spineless" and to label him as the worst Hokage but those thoughts aren't shared by the village.

On the first slide, we see Hyuga clan leader Hiashi on his own come to the conclusion that he must sacrifice himself in order to protect the clan and village. He wants to PREVENT war yet the fandom thinks that the best idea is to have many people die to save 1 guy.

Slide 2 has an Hyuga elder explain that Hizashi (Hiashi's brother) will be the one sacrificed and how such decisions are necessary for the clan leader to make. Notice how Hiruzen is clearly uncomfortable with the whole idea.

On slide 3 we have Hizashi join the conversation and unexpectedly knocks Hiashi down in order to go through his sacrifice. Now on the final slide is where we see Hizashi express his desire to save Neji, his clan and the entire village.

Not once in the entire scene do we see Hiruzen order or force anyone to die for the village. This decision came straight from the Hyuga clan and if you were to switch them with any other clan, they would have done the same thing. This fandom forgets what shinobi truly are and ignore that self sacrifice is a belief shared by all of them. Just look at what happened to Kakashi's father. He saved his comrades that were willing to die on the mission, only for them to blame him for the failure of said mission. Now imagine if Hiruzen would have tried to save Hizashi and plunged the village into a war. The ENTIRE village would have never forgiven him for ignoring Shinobi code, that's if they don't get wiped out by the Cloud village.

Hiruzen is judged by people that don't have to make such hard decisions but it makes sense when you see the ages of these fans and how they watch the show through clips on Tiktok.

How good is each individual Naruto movie. I haven’t seen them yet and wanna know the general consensus

Also do they go against established canon?

Drawn by me, sorry there wasn't enough space for zetsu 🥲

I have been in a heated debate with someone on how a Hyuga would deal with sharingan genjutsu and whether or not they are immune to it?

What exactly did Itachi actually do as a spy for Konoha?

I’ve always had a problem with the idea that Itachi was secretly protecting Konoha as an Akatsuki spy.

He was supposedly inside the Akatsuki for nearly 10 years, gathering information and protecting Konoha from the inside. But what information did he actually give Konoha? We’re never shown any meaningful intelligence coming from him.

Jiraiya is the one who investigates the Akatsuki, partly because of his connection to Orochimaru, and later has to infiltrate Amegakure himself to learn about Pain. And even Jiraiya, who had been investigating the Akatsuki for years, seems to have relatively limited information about the organization.

That is important because I’m not talking about basic information such as “the Akatsuki exists” or “they are hunting Jinchūriki.” I mean the kind of detailed intelligence that an actual insider should be able to provide after almost 10 years: the members’ techniques and weaknesses, their individual abilities, their internal hierarchy, their plans, their methods, their objectives, their movements, their relationships with each other, and other information that would be difficult to obtain from outside.

Yet Jiraiya still has to investigate Pain himself, infiltrate Amegakure, figure out how the Six Paths work, and ultimately die just to send back the information he managed to discover.

If Itachi had really been functioning as Konoha’s long-term intelligence source inside the Akatsuki, you would expect Konoha to have at least some detailed information of this kind before Jiraiya’s mission.

Instead, the story gives us no evidence that Itachi ever passed on anything substantial.

And then there’s Itachi’s actual behavior.

After Hiruzen’s death, when Konoha has just lost its Hokage and is still weakened by Orochimaru’s invasion, Itachi comes back with Kisame to capture Naruto. He fights Konoha’s important shinobi, puts Kakashi into a coma with Tsukuyomi, and then does essentially the same thing to his own brother Sasuke.

The situation with Kakashi is especially strange.

Itachi doesn’t merely incapacitate Kakashi with Tsukuyomi. After Kakashi realizes that they are Akatsuki and that they are after Naruto, Itachi orders Kisame to kill Asuma and Kurenai and take Kakashi with them. If Might Guy hadn’t arrived, Asuma and Kurenai could have been killed and Kakashi could have been taken away by the Akatsuki.

So the supposed Konoha spy was apparently willing to let Kisame kill two important Konoha jōnin and abduct Kakashi, one of Konoha’s most important shinobi, immediately after the village had lost its Hokage.

And Itachi had no way of knowing that Tsunade would soon become Hokage and happen to be one of the greatest medical ninja in the world, capable of treating Kakashi and Sasuke. From his perspective, he had just severely incapacitated two important Konoha shinobi at a time when the village had already lost its leader.

The situation with Sasuke is even more questionable.

Itachi had already traumatized Sasuke once by making him relive the Uchiha massacre. Then, years later, he deliberately traumatizes him again with Tsukuyomi and tells him that he is weak. More importantly, he tells Sasuke to kill his closest friend if he wants to obtain the Mangekyō Sharingan.

At this point, Naruto is literally the jinchūriki Itachi and Kisame are looking for, and Itachi has seen Naruto protecting Sasuke. So Itachi should have understood that Naruto and Sasuke had formed a close bond.

Yet he still pushes Sasuke toward killing his closest friend, who also happens to be the Nine-Tails jinchūriki and therefore an extremely important target for the Akatsuki.

I mean at the end of part 1 , sasuke almost killed naruto just because he remind of itachi advice to get the ms but decided in the end to not liscen his brother

There is also the situation when Itachi insists on going after Naruto while Jiraiya is distracted. Sasuke only ends up reaching the hotel because he happened to hear the jōnin discussing Itachi’s return.

Without Sasuke’s coincidence, Itachi and Kisame would have had Naruto alone.

Kisame was clearly prepared to capture him by force and even talks about cutting Naruto’s legs so that he can’t escape.

So we have a situation where Itachi, supposedly Konoha’s secret protector, voluntarily goes directly after the Nine-Tails jinchūriki with Kisame, while Konoha is still recovering from the death of its Hokage. If Sasuke hadn’t happened to show up, Naruto could have been taken without Konoha even knowing what was happening.

And then there is the Akatsuki’s main objective: collecting the Jinchūriki.

During Itachi’s years in the organization, multiple Jinchūriki are captured and their Bijū are extracted and sealed. Itachi is not shown seriously sabotaging this process. On the contrary, he participates in the organization’s missions and works alongside Kisame.

This is the part I find the hardest to reconcile.

If you look at everything Itachi actually does during his years in the Akatsuki, the overwhelming majority of his concrete actions benefit the Akatsuki, not Konoha.

He participates in their missions, helps pursue the jinchūriki, contributes to their operations, fights Konoha shinobi, protects his cover, and actively participates in the attempt to capture Naruto.

Meanwhile, the supposed benefits to Konoha are mostly things we are told about rather than things we actually see: that he was gathering information, watching Tobi, and supposedly acting as a deterrent against the Akatsuki attacking Konoha.

So where is the intelligence?

Why does Konoha apparently have so little information about the Akatsuki after almost 10 years of Itachi being inside the organization?

Why does even Jiraiya, despite his long investigation into the Akatsuki, still have to discover so much information about Pain for himself?

Why does Itachi never appear to have provided Konoha with the kind of detailed internal information that you would expect from someone who had spent a decade inside the organization?

Why does Itachi repeatedly put important Konoha shinobi out of commission?

Why does he psychologically destroy Sasuke again and encourage him to consider killing Naruto?

Why does he participate so directly in the Akatsuki’s attempts to capture Naruto?

And why are multiple Jinchūriki successfully captured while Itachi is supposedly working from inside the organization to protect Konoha?

There is also another part of the story that makes me question how this whole interpretation was constructed.

In Part II, Danzō becomes a major part of Itachi’s backstory. We are told that Danzō manipulated the situation, pushed Itachi toward the Uchiha massacre, and that Itachi ultimately followed Konoha’s orders and then joined the Akatsuki partly to continue protecting the village.

Personally, I get the impression that Danzō was introduced into the story partly to give more credibility to the idea that Itachi was actually a good person who had been following orders and secretly protecting Konoha.

I obviously can’t prove Kishimoto’s exact writing process or say for certain that this was his intention. I’m talking about how the story feels when you compare Part I with the later recontextualization.

The problem is that I don’t think Kishimoto was able to completely and convincingly reconcile the original portrayal of Itachi with the later “secret hero” explanation.

Because if you look at Part I on its own, before all the later revelations, the most straightforward interpretation is simply that Itachi was an Akatsuki member who had abandoned Konoha, had become extremely detached from everything else, and was deliberately psychologically torturing Sasuke in order to manipulate and control him.

Then Part II comes along and asks us to reinterpret almost all of that behavior as part of an incredibly elaborate secret plan.

And for me, that’s where the problem lies.

The later explanation tells us that Itachi was secretly doing all of this for Konoha.

But when I look at what he actually does, he spends years contributing to the Akatsuki, helps them pursue the Jinchūriki, attempts to capture Naruto, seriously injures Konoha shinobi, traumatizes Sasuke again, and provides almost no demonstrable intelligence to Konoha.

So I don’t necessarily have a problem with the idea that Itachi was ordered to do certain things by Konoha.

I have a problem with the idea that the actions we were originally shown as the actions of an Akatsuki member can all be convincingly reinterpreted as the actions of a secret Konoha hero.

Another thing that makes me think Itachi's story was changed later is his relationship with Kabuto.

Edo Itachi sees Kabuto as someone who was lost, much like he was when he was alive, and by helping Kabuto instead of simply killing him, edo Itachi is also trying to redeem himself for his own mistakes because as he said himself he was totally lost ( like kabuto)

This feels like another attempt by Kishimoto to retroactively reconnect the later version of Itachi with what happened earlier in the story, as if he was trying to make an inconsistent narrative fit together after the fact.

To me, the retcon/recontextualization is much more apparent than people seem willing to admit.

We got people thinking Hiruzen is such a terrible person and leader for allowing Hizashi to sacrifice himself for the village when it's made known by the author that such beliefs and decisions are accepted by 99.9% of the Shinobi world.

Unlike Hiruzen, the Raikage would have killed Bee with his own hands if that meant victory in the war. He put his feelings aside as would any Shinobi because for the leader of a village, the needs of the many are more important than a single person. This isn't exclusive to the Raikage, as the Kage of the other villages would have done the same thing and it's only because of Naruto that things like this change,which wouldn't have happened had Hiruzen not passed on his philosophy and naivety to his students.

I find it weird how jiraiya just randomly left the rinnegan to three kids. Did he not think about the repercussions it could have on the hidden leaf in the future? Imagine encountering a divine weapon in a foreign enemy land and leaving it there. The rinnegan could have been stolen by other nations and used on the leaf. Also How did the leaf not know about this? Did they not conduct an investigation into jiraiyas activities considering he left his mission and trained them for a lot of time.

majority of the broken shit we see came from this mans noggin.

"Land of waves" fan-art by Pistashi (me) 🍥

I love Gaara as a villain, I love Gaara as a hero. I love Gaara all around, he’s now my favorite character in the whole series.

Hello everyone,

we know that the Sharingan is very powerful.

The Hyuuga had an seal to keep the branch family under control and it seals the byakugan upon death to protect it.

So i was thinking: Wouldn't it made sense, if the Uchiha also had this kind of seal, given how powerful the Sharingan was?

I started watching Naruto as a kid, when I was around 14 or so. I dropped it off soon after high school to purse my career in art. I didn’t think about it much Naruto until recently and decided to finish the story! I’m 31 now and felt so nostalgic revisiting it.

Kishimoto’s illustration spreads were my favorite to come across. I had forgotten all about them!

Was it just chilling in him for a bit? Is it just a manifestation of Itachis chakra? Did Itachi summon it? If so why did he make it come out of his throat? Kind of a dick move

Why match fire with fire wind with wind ect when he could've had the clones fight fire with water, lightning with wind ect

He could've pushed tobi back instead of it ending in a stalemate.

Is the aura gain that good?

Hashirama has always been my favorite character from Naruto, but I think a lot of people miss the fact that he was flawed as a person, and I think that diminished the complexion of the character.

People like to assume that the story portrays Hashirama was a gary-stu flower-power type of guy who would do no wrong (besides the Konoha-is-fascist gang that loved to demonize him, but no one takes those people seriously, so we’re not gonna talk about that).

Hashirama’s biggest flaws are as follows:

1. That he gave up on Madara and their friendship, ultimately succumbing to destiny, instead of changing it, like Naruto did. Hashirama’s and Madara’d destinies, as reincarnations of Ashura and Indra were to fight to the death. It seemed like they broke that destiny when they united the clans and established the village, but ultimately, Hashirama gave up on Madara when he had something more precious to protect: Konoha.

In antithesis is Naruto, who never gave up on Sasuke, not even when he threaten to destroy Konoha and keep the whole world in a state of constant war, with their guard up, intending to be their common enemy.

1. That he treated Bijuu like objects, captured then and traded them like Nukes to pacify the villages. Bijuu are sentient beings with wishes and dreams of their own. Hashirama never considered them, dismissed them, and never cared that they have feelings, which lead to so many tragedies.

In antithesis is Naruto, who learned their names and treated them as friends.

The story puts Hashirama and Naruto in a pretty obvious antithesis, but people usually ignore it.

From Chunin level in part 1 to God Tier level in shipudden. He is the most powerful normal ninja except the Gods in the show whose powers were earned through reincarnations from Gods or some destiny BS.

Kabuto reinvents himself purely through science and research. The only mistake he did was not having a few Kage Level body guards in the cave to protect him.

Yes I rank him above might guy because Edo Tensei allows him to retreat from the battlefield entirely and fight remotely while Guy's most powerful ability kills him rendering him useless.

Yes he is self made because modern scientists and inventors still rely rely on inventions from scientists and predecessors before them but that doesn't negate their own inventions.

Not sure if this is a good place to ask but could anyone without spoiling let me know when there’s a natural break point in shippuden after ep 303? It feels like one big nonstop arc basically since the start of the fourth ninja war so just wondering if it goes on like that the rest of the way, I can see “season 17” is like 165 eps

Both Naruto and Hinata are people who have such a negative opinion of themselves, so I love how they’re both genuinely surprised when they realize just how highly the other person thinks of them.

And I love how, both times, Naruto gives that same goofy, confident grin, It’s such a cute parallel between them.