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House of 1000 Manga - Naruto Part II

Okay, so I quit after Uchiha Itachi turned out to be really not a bad guy after all, which felt like such a lame copout on a good villain. I'd expected him to have had a driven-insane-by-a-tortured-childhood-as-a-prodigy backstory, which might have been predictable but it would have left him a villain. I like villains, damnit!

Not a cop out, but planned all along, and foreshadowed. This was telegraphed early on for me. By the second time we met Itachi I realized what was going on. It made no sense for Sasuke to be left alive so I sat there and puzzled it out. It was the most reasonable explanation.

vashfanatic wrote:

Okay, so I quit after Uchiha Itachi turned out to be really not a bad guy after all, which felt like such a lame copout on a good villain. I'd expected him to have had a driven-insane-by-a-tortured-childhood-as-a-prodigy backstory, which might have been predictable but it would have left him a villain. I like villains, damnit!

Not a cop out, but planned all along, and foreshadowed. This was telegraphed early on for me. By the second time we met Itachi I realized what was going on. It made no sense for Sasuke to be left alive so I sat there and puzzled it out. It was the most reasonable explanation.

Or, you know, villains can be complicated. Being a villain necessarily doesn't mean "Mwahaha I'll kill you all I care for no one totally horrible in every way person." My theory was that Itachi had been brutally abused in his upbringing as a prodigy, killed everyone he blamed for it, resented Sasuke, but couldn't, ultimately, bring himself to kill his little brother who wasn't responsible for anything. To paraphrase 3:10 to Yuma, "Even bad men love their little brothers." Maybe he has some twisted idea that his beloved little brother should be the one to kill him and bring the whole cycle of "justice" full circle. Maybe he just wanted to drive Sasuke as insane as he was. Anything other than "I was made to do it and I didn't want to, which makes me totally a good guy!"

He reminds me a tiny bit of the villain in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, the scariest hypnotist imaginable.

Yamato's wood ninjutsu lets him build a full two-story wooden house out of nothing. Whenever there's a fictional universe like this one where ninjutsu, or say magic, is so powerful, I always wonder why anyone ever bothers learning any other skills. It must suck to spend years learning carpentry and days in the forest chopping wood and then you gather a crew of apprentice carpenters and day laborers to help build the house and then some ninja jerk comes along and build it in seconds.

I'm so glad Naruto (and Kishimoto) know how to use doppelgangers to their full tactical potential. (Unfortunately, this must mean that somewhere in Japan, there's onanistic mass orgy Naruto doppelganger dojinshi.)

There's one rather important one in the latest flashback that I completely missed during the first read through until someone else explicitly pointed it out to me.

In my world, evil villians who have committed countless evil acts, who then profess their redemption, would be congratulated on finally seeing the light and then would be promptly impaled on the biggest pointed stick that could be found.

"Good morning, I am the dreadful Ankaria, the Great Annihilator. Yes, I was the one who destroyed several cities, killing tens of thousands in massive fireballs of destruction, and indeed, I planned world domination by destroying everyone who opposed me. Of course that was before I found the love of a good woman and redeemed myself. I am your new neighbor and we are inviting you over for a potluck. My blood golem warrior butler will bring over the physical invites."

Yes, Naruto style redemption makes so much sense now. I see the light now, as my eyes are carved out with a spoon.

I am not surprised at all that many people do not understand Pain to Tobi/Obito to Madara to Zetsu to Kaguya main villains progression.

This comes from superficial reading of the manga. If you track all of events in it for its fifteen years, you can easily see that without either of those characters being bigger-scale villain mastermind, crucial parts of the mythology and setting would not be explained.

As Jason wrote correctly, Kishimoto has thought this thing through and through. Every one of those villains is absolutely necessary, all of them are calculated and tied to the story from like decade ago or earlier. So it is not "repetitive last minute tricks that Kishimoto came up with out of desperation" or whatever inattentive readers might think.

There is no doubt that this level of multi-layered story and reasoning is outstanding work of intellect, unparalleled in any of big manga, which tend to be much more simplistic (though it is not necessary drawback at all; it is just different type of the story).

EDIT: this is not to say that this manga is anything perfect: complete numbered list of thirteen strong and weak points about Naruto manga.

For those wanting a Naruto villain that doesn't succumb to TnJ, Hidan is a prime example. He's a foul-mouthed (at least in the scanlations and fansubs) sadomasochistic religious nut (the first 2 points probably being something people wouldn't expect of a religious nut unless it was a dark religion).

For those wanting a Naruto villain that doesn't succumb to TnJ, Hidan is a prime example. He's a foul-mouthed (at least in the scanlations and fansubs) sadomasochistic religious nut (the first 2 points probably being something people wouldn't expect of a religious nut unless it was a dark religion).

Insulting people who found the story to be a mess is not an argument. If said criticisms against a work keep coming up then they are clearly legitimate; they did not just pop out of thin air nor do people hate something just to hate it.

Akira Toriyama basically broke down and collapsed after just 42 volumes of manga.

I think you're selling Toriyama a bit short. He broke down after doing both Dragon Ball AND Dr. Slump. Take into account the one shots, other work like Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, and he also had a heavy load.

But, really, anyone would collapse under all the work the average Japanese comic artist does.