[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... )
The only pairing I'm into nowadays is Hashimada so I'm pretty indifferent to all the pairings and none of the offspring made me want to see the next generation in their own manga though I'm glad that ChouChou seems to have better self esteem regarding her body than her father did. I'm more interested in the geopolitics, law enforcement and economics of this brave new world. How many ninjas are working these days? How are the smaller villages like Ame doing? Are ninja still forbidden from leaving the village on pain of death? Were the elders prosecuted? What do people know about Obito, Itachi and Madara? How do the daimyos figure into this? It seems like skipping 20 years into the future and focusing on marriage and kids neatly avoids how the promised child brought and maintains peace in the world beyond TnJ and being well liked. I'm actually glad we don't see Taka because now I can imagine them chilling somewhere and sending the occasitional postcard to a Sasuke who considers them friends. What's jarring to me about Konoha's tech level actually is that 70 years ago they were in the warring states period which in Japan went from 1457 to 1603 and really the skyscrapers seemed like a cheep way to say "look how neat and progressive the village is now that Naruto's in charge".
I've said before about Sasuke's arc that my problems are with the journey rather than the destination and this applies to the manga as a whole. Perhaps Kishimorto should've stuck with a simple adventure story and stayed away moral issues like redemption and world peace
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It's quite obvious that this is some kind of magic peace, brought about either by a) everyone's love for Naruto or b) the reconciliation between Sasuke and Naruto. It's got nothing to do with real world peace - the manga does not offer any solution that has any relevance for the real world. Now this is not chuunin, so 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. Actually no story for children comes to my mind, though there might be some utopian stories for grown-ups (the world government in Star Trek). But I think that's not the real problem. The real problem is that the author does not seem to think much of real world attempts at world peace, which for all their failures are more than nothing. For example, establishing peace within a country's border and seeing that the state has the monopoly of legitimate violence was a huge achievement. Creating a functional judicial system was a huge improvement. Establishing democracies that work was a huge achievement. We take all this for granted, because some of it is hundreds or thousands of years old, but we don't find any of it in the ninja world.
Instead we get world peace because everyone loves Naruto, which is a kind of peace that's actually quite creepy.
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"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."
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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 building up, but that it could have been avoided if Germany had not attacked the rest of Europe. Now Germans focus on WWI and Christopher Clark's book "the Sleepwalkers" (don't worry if you never heard of it) becomes a bestseller because it states that at least WWI did not start with Austria's aggression against Serbia and Germany's assault against Belgium, but that at least this war broke out after a lot of tensions.
Kishimoto listens to his grandparents instead of some serious historians when he wants to learn about WWII, but German or Japanese grandparents are the least reliable source you can imagine (I'd never dream of invoking my grandparents as authorities on WWII). They have an interest to hide their own responsibility. They tell you something vague about people's grudges and a build-up to war instead of the Japanese government of the time wanting to be a colonial power just like the Western nations (not understanding that their empires were already in decline) and thought that attacking China, the Philippines, Indonesia, South East Asia etc. was the right way to gain a higher status in the international community. And it's nice to think that he has understood that "war is not the answer", but the real point is that no one had threatened Japan or Germany. They were not answering to anything. The countries that were attacked were answering, and of course they answered by defending themselves.
Ah, well, I don't think I ever read any serious interview with Kishimoto. This one confirms my suspicions: that his political ideas are rather naive and reflect popular ways of dealing with WWII.
As long as you believe that wars develop more or less naturally or mechanically, building up from growing grudges among human beings, it's not possible to prevent them, and everything we get is a mystical solution.
Finding ways to solve conflicts peacefully by listening and finding compromises is certainly a good idea, and also it's necessary to develop rules that bind strong and powerful states as well as small ones. I am not certain whether I would call this opposing forces. I think that Kishimoto might have done something with his idea of opposing forces - I have now read a text by sasukeapologist at tumblr, sasuke uchiha and the end of naruto
naruto and sasukes plots both brought them to the point where each held one half of the solution to the problem of hatred (naruto, holding the popular support of basically every person in the world, and sasuke, knowing the flaws of the oppressive system most intimately out of everyone in the world because hes the one person in all of history who has suffered most because of it) and kishimoto didnt let them work together as equals to solve it, despite inequality between rivals causing every major political conflict in the series
Maybe there's other ideas of what those "opposing forces" actually might mean. To me it's justice as some kind of middle ground between "love" and "revenge"...
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thirdmetaphor https://www.fanfiction.net/u/5355127/thirdmetaphor
makkoska https://www.fanfiction.net/u/3147020/Makkoska aka psychokillersneedlovetoo http://psychokillersneedlovetoo.tumblr.com/ on tumblr
Nerva al'Thor https://www.fanfiction.net/u/311543/Nerva-al-Thor aka flammabellum http://flammabellum.tumblr.com/ on tumblr.
Chimuwaku https://www.fanfiction.net/u/4663686/Chimuwaku aka godofsenju http://godofsenju.tumblr.com/ on tumblr
The latter two do some rpg on their blogs that are as good or better than any fanfiction.
pikacheeka has already been mentioned but I recommend checking her on tumblr http://pikacheeka.tumblr.com/ and spend a few days going over her meta. She also recs fics and in the past has hosted fanwork events. psychokillersneedlovetoo and sasukeapologist http://sasukeuchiha.god.jp/post/94800248586 also offer some meta you might enjoy. I recommend checking out tumblr in general for fanworks though joining was very frustrating for about the first month so you might just want to stick with browsing.
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So far I have avoided tumblr, but I have heard of it of course. Seems that internet fandom is moving, but also I was happy to see that there's till bulletpoint message boards as Narutoforums. I myself am mostly active at Twitter these days and sometimes I blog at Wordpress, but in German.
I have found pikacheeka at tumblr, but I must admit that I find tumblr rather chaotic, or is it just her wallpaper? I guess I will first read some texts by sasukeapologist, even though they remind me of what I might have written around 2008 or 2009, that is between chapters 400 and 500. Well, actually I had two last fierce discussions at chuunin after we got Itachi's revelations on the massacre, trying to explain that murdering people is evil.
It's hard to leave and to accept that with time we will dissemble... I still hope for a comment from subieko She hasn't yet turned up to comment on the last two chapters. I know that hymnia is extremely busy, and she's already said good-bye, but I still hope for subieko turning up.
Okay, back to work, and then back to my essay on the manga as a whole and to my good-bye-post.
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