Naruto 694: Naruto and Sasuke (1)
I'm later than usual, and there's no pictures this week (unless I find a moment to put them in later) but I will try to make up for that with the discussion, even though I feel like I'm rehashing a lot of old issues with it. It also might interest you all to know that Shonen jump has confirmed Naruto will be ending in 5 chapters, so this is ( Read more... )
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Sasuke says he has no one left now, and that he's prepared to shoulder all that hatred. He will deal with all the problems of the shinobi world by himself.The way he says this is interesting to me, because I read it as him essentially offering to be the "common enemy" for everyone in the world. It sounded like he wasn't just offering to solve their problems, but to embody every problem in the entire world so that everyone else could direct their negative emotions and actions at him -- that's what I saw him meaning by "shoulder all their problems". By becoming the entire "dark side", he thinks he could allow Konoha and the other ninja villages to actually become the peaceful place he thought they were when he was a child. This is a horribly flawed and immature plan, of course, because the Konoha he thought he knew as a ( ... )
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I don't think he's even considered the implications of what's he's doing enough for those questions to occur to him. He's made a rash, stupid decision that I have every confidence Naruto will talk him down from.
I just thought that Sasuke's plan has a passing similarity to Pain/Nagato's (minus the economic element) in that he'll be cowing the whole world into behaving itself. Only from the sound of it his plan to "unify" the villages would be making a kind of ninja empire. But yeah, it really is a terrible plan, and I completely agree with your reasoning as to why.
Linguistically, what's fascinating to me about Sasuke's plan, though, is that he's essentially offering himself up as a living human sacrifice -- exactly the meaning of "jinchuuriki". Where Naruto, Gaara, Bee, and others were human sacrifices in the form of being physically forced to embody roiling hatred and the targeted mistrust/enmity of humankind in order to maintain a power balance, Sasuke has just offered to remove the physical form of Naruto's ( ... )
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I hope this comes up in Naruto's conversation with Sasuke! I really do.
And yes, I would be equally happy, if not more happy, if Tsunade simply stays on as Hokage (although it might be reasonable for Kakashi to start training under her guidance).
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Excellent point. I guess Sasuke isn't very optimistic about the alliance lasting though.
I'm not sure ninshuu would really be the answer because people had in ninshuu in the past, but then after the Sage died they went and turned it into ninjutsu and made everything worse. So it might work as long as Naruto's alive but not after that. But given there's only five chapters, I doubt we'll see anything to do with that anway.
"Those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it."
This quote was in my mind while I was reading this chapter.
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I'm agreeing with you and senior_witch that the characters seem to be plot driven rather than the plot being character driven. They act however Kishi needs to them to, regardless of going against established characterization or following logical cause and effect.
I think abolishing ninja has actually never occured to any of the characters because that would be an uncool story they're too close to the system to see another way.
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Two of my favorite childhood books ended with the end of all magic, meaning that human people had to cope without resorting to supernatural forces. And I liked them even when I was a child.
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The other thing with N&S is that whenever one of them seemed to get stronger than the other, the other got ragingly jealous. M&H were on more equal footing and even as an adult Madara doesn't mind that Hashirama was the stronger, and actually revels in it (though that is his masochistic bloodknighting tendencies shining through).
I wonder if Kishimoto regards the Uchiha massacre as a genocide or a ( ... )
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I just realized it now, but you know what this reminds me of? There's a tabletop role-playing game called Exalted, where you play a character who has a divine spark inside them. Thing is, mortal bodies (and more importantly, minds) weren't really designed to handle that kind of power, and so each character has a Flaw and a Limit Break. A Limit Break is a situation that causes the Exalted to lose control of themselves and give in to their Flaw. If a Limit Break happens, the character has to make a Willpower roll, and if they fail, they become temporarily controlled by their Flaw. A Flaw might be something like "Deliberate Cruelty" (exactly what it says on the tin) or "Red Rage of Compassion" (attacking the perceived cause of another's suffering without restraint). Flaws based on compassion tend to have Limit Break conditions that involve the Exalted witnessing someone else's suffering--so an Exalted really can turn evil (for a day) if they ( ... )
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