[FINAL CHAPTER] 700: Uzumaki Naruto!!!
Naruto manga
1999 - 2014
Fifteen years. And what a run it's been. I will be the first to admit that this manga has plenty of flaws. Once or twice in the past, I've actually stopped and asked myself why I was still reading it. And the answer to that question is that I'm attached to this manga. I've grown attached enough to these characters that I ( Read more... )
Comments 40
Reply
Reply
"The Taming of the Land of Big Comfy Beds" is a good humorous one. PikaCheeka has written several excellent serious HashiMada stories (warning that some of them are M-rated). I've written two: "Swallowed by the Sky" and "The Eighteenth Charm".
I don't expect anyone to tell me why I would want a manga to give us some realistic ideas about world peace, and whether I could think of any story that makes such suggestions.
I think Hagoromo's original writing on the tablet was a pretty good idea: when opposing forces work together, peace can be achieved. If people who disagree actually take the time to listen to each other and work out a compromise, they can make something better than either of them would have been able to come up with on their own. The problem is that Kishi didn't do a very good job of having this actually implemented in his story--instead Sasuke eventually tells Naruto, "Yep, you were right and I was wrong."
Reply
Personally I think that this is the rubbish I grew up with. It's the way the average German or Japanese person talks about war, a way that's completely incomprehensible to English, French, American, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Korean, Russian and a lot of other people. There's a text by Hannah Arendt report from Germany after a visit to Germany a short time after the war, where she states (at the left top of page 343) that Germans tend to ask "why does mankind always wage war?" as if that was an unanswerable question, instead of focusing on the rather obvious reasons of the most recent war, namely that the Nazi regime, supported by the great majority of the German people, attacked first Poland and then the rest of Europe. Now at least with WWII people in Germany have understood that it did not simply "break out" because of tensions ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Longer answer tomorrow.
Reply
Basically, the ending isn't that satisfying to me, because this story brought up a lot of issues that it tried to discuss...and then ultimately never did anything with. The injustices of the ninja system, the problems of violence, what is a just peace, etc...the ending doesn't really address any of that.
Personally I feel that the manga started out really well, and Kishimoto created a lot of interesting characters and a cool setting, and there were some very intriguing storylines...but things went downhill over time.Last Friday, when we were still discussing chapter 699, I wondered when things started to go downhill, and I think that it must have been somewhere between chapters 400 and 500. Chapter 400 is neither the first nor the only chapter that criticizes Konoha and the ninja system, but in chapter 400 we get the worst accusations: Konoha orchestrated the murder of the Uchiha clan. Chapter 500 (from 497 to 503 I think) are about Naruto accepting, "forgiving" or rather condoning the fact that he was ( ... )
Reply
Having the manga end in such a similar state to the beginning undermines a lot of the central themes for me. There was so much plot focus on how Naruto was going to change things, he was the destined child or whatever, finding their own ninja way and etc...and then none of it really paid off in the end.I think that's a result of the change of plan that happened between chapters 400 and 500. If I had to give you an exact chapter number it would be chapter 481, the chapter when Danzou dies, but all in all it's a gradual, not a sudden change. Until then, we get the impression that the ninja system is badly in need of change, but then we learn that it is ( ... )
Reply
Leave a comment