Kushina and an unrealistic dream
I was thinking about Kushina as Hokage the other day and idly planning a fic where she has to deal with the Uchiha clan in the form of Fugaku complete with rampant UST when I realised something important: there was never any chance of her becoming hokage at all. There are two major reasons for this:
1. She was a foreigner.
2. She was a jinchuuriki.
I'm not sure which reason would have been more important when it came to her perceived unsuitability as a future hokage but they were probably intertwined in people's minds. It isn't clear how many people knew about her jinchuuriki status though almost certainly Danzo would have figured it out (if he wasn't told outright) in addition to Hiruzen and his wife who were shown to know in canon. I guess Jiraiya and Tsunade were likely to have known (or guessed).
The foreigner aspect would have definitely been significant. She was a refugee from a destroyed village, claiming the name of a clan that didn't exist any more. (I wonder if Whirlpool was destroyed after Kushina came to Konoha or before, which is why they got hold of her so easily.) I know the US only allows people born in it to become president and no doubt other countries have similar laws. The hidden villages would probably have rules to that effect even if they were only unwritten.
Put them together and you have an outsider given access to immense destructive power who must have seemed like a potential agent of chaos, ready to change everything they knew.
Was there pressure on Kushina to abandon her dream as a child? Almost certainly, but I think that it was her growing up and realising just what her differences meant was the real reason she gave it up.
...This turned into a mini-essay somehow. Any thoughts? Am I interpreting this wrong?
1. She was a foreigner.
2. She was a jinchuuriki.
I'm not sure which reason would have been more important when it came to her perceived unsuitability as a future hokage but they were probably intertwined in people's minds. It isn't clear how many people knew about her jinchuuriki status though almost certainly Danzo would have figured it out (if he wasn't told outright) in addition to Hiruzen and his wife who were shown to know in canon. I guess Jiraiya and Tsunade were likely to have known (or guessed).
The foreigner aspect would have definitely been significant. She was a refugee from a destroyed village, claiming the name of a clan that didn't exist any more. (I wonder if Whirlpool was destroyed after Kushina came to Konoha or before, which is why they got hold of her so easily.) I know the US only allows people born in it to become president and no doubt other countries have similar laws. The hidden villages would probably have rules to that effect even if they were only unwritten.
Put them together and you have an outsider given access to immense destructive power who must have seemed like a potential agent of chaos, ready to change everything they knew.
Was there pressure on Kushina to abandon her dream as a child? Almost certainly, but I think that it was her growing up and realising just what her differences meant was the real reason she gave it up.
...This turned into a mini-essay somehow. Any thoughts? Am I interpreting this wrong?