#that image translates obito's line as ''they will know despair... thoroughly''

[evilkitten3]

@senjufound @obitoslover gonna respond to all three of you together (sorry for the delay but. i either did not notice your reblogs or noticed and forgot. impossible to say. i am the king of being oblivious. whoopsie)

first, concerning the backstabbing thing. very often, when characters are extremely untrusting, they tend to constantly be on guard for betrayal (which amusingly can manifest in them getting betrayed specifically because of that). madara is an odd subversion of that. his trust issues seem to have more to do with a lack of faith in others' abilities. in the cases he worries about safety, it's never his own. he worries that the senju will betray the uchiha, but he doesn't worry that hashirama will betray him, which. uh. whoops.

when madara offers sasuke the opportunity to join him, i think that may have been some kind of twisted kindness. i think he felt that, since he and sasuke were the only uchiha left (unless you count obito who was. basically on black zetsu life support at the time iirc), he owed sasuke an out. i don't think it had anything to do with any resemblance sasuke had to izuna, personally, i think he would've made that offer regardless. they're family, and he very much understands not wanting to feel isolated from your family. ofc sasuke doesn't give two fucks about him, so that's that. he tried, sasuke said nah, that's all he owed him. oh well. bye kid.

i was reading something about a week or so ago (don't remember if it was like an article or a fanfic or something lmao just that it was in japanese) and the author commented that madara seems to be a character with high pride, but low self-esteem. i think that was referring to pre-edoten madara, but i think it's an interesting take. he's very, very aware of how strong he was; he's not remotely insecure about his fighting capabilities. he's so confident in those that he walks around with his back completely unshielded even after dying bc someone stabbed him through the back. but at the same time, in spite of his power, his life has been one failure after another. he was never strong enough to protect his siblings, never strong enough to secure the uchiha clan's safety, never strong enough to truly put an end to the bloodshed. he was the most powerful man alive.... save the one person he really needed to be stronger than. the senju and the uchiha had been fighting for who even knows how long, but it's under madara's leadership that they effectively surrendered (hashirama can pretend it's a truce all he wants but. well. honey), and when he realized where konoha was heading and tried to pull them out, they had no more faith left in him. and i.... can't really blame them for that, unfortunately.

the reality is that madara's communication skills are g-dawful (unless, apparently, he's communicating doomsday prophecies to the teenager trapped in his post-divorce misery cave, and even then he needs to coordinate a different teenager's death to get the message across), and he seems to be the sort of person who assumes that trying to clear things up is entirely pointless. i guess it's like he,,,,, doesn't believe in rhetoric? only overly complicated gambits. gorgias would eat him for breakfast lmao.

anyway, i don't think it's fair to fully blame the uchiha clan for making assumptions when it's very likely that madara just,,,,, didn't tell them a lot. he went to that last pre-konoha battle with hashirama seemingly all by himself (at least in the manga idk about the anime) and no one knows what happened there but him. sure, they might've guessed that izuna gave up his eyes, but we don't know what state izuna was in prior to his death, or if there were any witnesses. it's very possible that it really did look like madara stole them, fucked off to kill the senju, got his ass kicked and surrendered instead, and then tried to pull out of a peace treaty that, as far as they could see, was working out pretty well. we the audience know he want to protect his family (note however that we know this thanks to hashirama who was both biased to begin with and also very intentionally framing his story to be more sympathetic to madara than, say, tobirama's version would've been), but unless he made those feelings clear to his clan (he almost certainly didn't), then they wouldn't necessarily have a reason to believe in him.

moving onto the image, madara doesn't obito unfriendzoning him as betrayal bc he has this extremely weird,,,,, kinda double view of him? not really sure how to phrase that. to madara, obito is both another him (therefore trustworthy, therefore unnecessary to consider a comrade bc. that's just him) and also like. the closest thing to a friend he actually has. which is seven billion different levels of pathetic. ofc obito rejects first the latter and later the former bc. he does not particularly like madara all that much (can't imagine why. kids these days just don't appreciate getting new bits grafted onto them while their worldview crumbles to ash around them like they used to smh). however, madara mostly seems amused by obito's declaration i think bc as far as he's concerned it's nonsense. madara has never for a second considered that he won't personally be gobbling up that tasty tasty ten tails and getting that sweet sweet six paths power. he believes in it so absolutely that the suggestion that it won't be what happens is just. like a joke. of course it will. it's his. what are you talking about.

hell, after he says he'll let obito decide what's next, he.... kinda sticks to the background for the rest of the volume. i'm not kidding; that scene is pretty much smack in the middle of the volume and madara only has a handful lines that aren't "...." or "....!" for the rest of the whole damn thing. most of what he does say is internal or seems to just be him talking aloud to himself. out of what little dialogue he has for the rest of the book, he only has one line that's clearly him talking to obito, and it's this:

・・・！！焦るな・・・！それでは十尾が傷つく上お前も・・・ "...!! don't be impatient...! then not only will the ten tails be wounded, but you also..."

in his own extremely fucked up way, madara does care about obito. i don't think it's like. healthy for either of them, but he cares.

one pet peeve of mine in founders-era fanfics is when madara's whole,,,, everything is solved by izuna just being there

like maybe this is just me, but i don't think izuna surviving or even coming around to the idea of a truce with the senju would've been enough to keep madara from the path he ended up on.

izuna wasn't the reason he left - he was definitely part of madara's issues, but he wasn't the why. even if izuna had stuck around, and even if that had been enough to keep the uchiha clan from losing their faith in madara, i think he would've still come to realize konoha wasn't what he'd hoped it would be.

best case scenario, i think izuna's survival might've caused madara to stick around a bit longer, but i don't think it would've lasted. honestly, even then, that might've just made the inevitable break-up between madara and hashirama even more agonizing (particularly for izuna)

it's a fun idea to play around with for sure, but frankly i don't think canon!madara could've ever been 'saved' from that path. certainly not if the hidden village system ended up getting set up in the same way.