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Episode Review: Naruto Shippuden

This [episode] features a few genuinely touching moments, which would have been even more emotionally resonant if I weren't sick to death of this character. ... The proceedings became so meandering and repetitive that I was actively hoping for Obito to just shut up and die already. But he's not even gone yet! Judging by the preview, another needless rehash of Obito's past awaits us next week.

I've only caught a few episodes of Shippuden this year because I don't have much interest in filler and, well, it's more-or-less all been filler, and of the few, canon episodes I watched, most were really quite terrible. It felt as if they'd fired all their artists and replaced them with at best moderately trained, brush-wielding pigeons; the show I loved so much during the Pain arc seems a distant, mocking memory. And let's not get started on the pacing, or how little I care about Kagura as a villain (good God do I ever wish this story had culminated with Madara)...

But this most recent episode was surprisingly engaging. I don't feel much sympathy for Obito as a character and I don't find Rin's endlessly forgiving attitude of his multitude of dark sins all that plausible or interesting (and I dislike that she's been painted as a one-dimensionally all-forgiving lady-object instead of some kind of person), but the execution was finally on point, the art was passable, Naruto's connection with the dying Obito was believable and even the tiniest bit emotionally evocative, and thank the forty-two lords of anime that, as Gina says, they finally hurt Kagura so this show can actually conclude (after another 10 years of 99% filler and chopping one limb off of Kagura every 25 canon episodes on average, I presume, but conclude nonetheless).

Even though this episode is technically set mere hours after Obito's initial defeat, Naruto has already moved past the thousands of deaths this villain caused (including Naruto's own parents) and became all-too-willing to regard him as a comrade, going so far as to proclaim that Obito was “awesome” seconds after his passing.

So, the filler episodes that served to answer people´s questions about Kaguya in the manga, and why she appeared as the final boss outta nowhere, as well as fill some plot holes, were all but nothing? I don´t understand people. They want answers, when they get them, they say that are awful

Skerlly Fc wrote:

So, the filler episodes that served to answer people´s questions about Kaguya in the manga, and why she appeared as the final boss outta nowhere, as well as fill some plot holes, were all but nothing? I don´t understand people. They want answers, when they get them, they say that are awful

If we assume that Kagura needs to be the story's final antagonist, then I agree that the semi-filler Kagura-backstory episodes you reference here needed to be done. My complaint is that I don't think her introduction was narratively wise or necessary on any level; we had already had hundreds upon hundreds of episodes in which Madara was well-developed as a part of this world and a natural, nigh-unstoppable threat to the MC and his friends' way of life. I simply don't see any way confrontation with a last-second insert of a barely hinted at villain could be nearly as satisfying as confrontation with a character the show's spent countless hours gradually building up for us as a terrifying and complex foe.

To me, it seems as if the mangaka felt an incomprehensible need to 'up the stakes' by introducing a more-nearly-literal alien/god-like villain, as if every story has to end with the highest possible stakes and the most narratively peerless, incomprehensibly inhuman enemies. I don't see the point in doing that if it shunts aside antagonists (primarily Madara) that've been properly built up throughout the show's history, and I think it came at the cost of replacing a complicated, emotionally and narratively well-developed villain with a bland, underdeveloped and unnecessary evil-god-figure.

I think I'm all the more frustrated by the Madara-Kagura switch because I think one of Shippuden's greatest strengths as a show is its sheer length. The quality of its execution, dialogue, plot, and so on have varied dramatically throughout its run, but it's very difficult not to get the viewer to invest emotionally on some level in your characters when they've spent countless hundreds of episodes hearing about and/or interacting with them. Thus, in my view, replacing Madara (about whom we've heard and/or interacted with constantly, even if often unbeknownst-to-us through his proxy, Obito) with Kagura (about whom we've received a few hints, but those generally less than concrete and few-and-far-between) radically undercuts one of this show's primary emotional strengths.