#the ending is a disaster; i wrote an entire screed about that when i finished the show/manga

[panharmonium]

one more... 13 for Sakura or Sasuke. or both!

13. Unpopular opinion about XXX character?

I’ll do Sasuke, because fandom opinions about Sakura are so utterly unhinged (in wildly non-textual, completely contradictory ways) that I don’t even know what would count as “unpopular.”  

Anyway, my most unpopular opinion about Sasuke is not an unpopular opinion, it’s an unpopular fact, but I’m just gonna let that one lie, because even in an ask meme designed for the sowing of salt, there are some things that I just don’t have the energy to complain about. X) 

In lieu of that, I’ll say instead that I guess my unpopular opinion is that both Sasuke’s diehard haters and his diehard fans are equally disconnected from the fundamental purpose of the story.  Which is totally fine - it’s fandom, so if people prefer playing with whatever pieces of a story appeal to them and not engaging with it as a comprehensive whole, that’s fine; have fun; we’re all just here to enjoy ourselves.  But when we’re talking about reading the story as it was written and as it was intended to be read, both extremes of the Sasuke debate are missing the point.  

When it comes to his haters - when people watch this show without caring about Sasuke, without rooting for him, without hoping for him to get the closure he needs and surmount his pain and free himself from his chains and find his way back to the people who truly love him, then they’re not watching the story as it was meant to be read.  That is literally the premise of the entire manga/show.  The whole “we’ve gotta save the world from all these evil guys” stuff is just a vehicle for the real storyline, which is and always has been “will Team 7 be able to help Sasuke find his way out of the darkness?”  Watching this show while hoping that the answer to that question will be “no” is like...well, I don’t know what you would get out of it, I guess.  Rooting for Sasuke to reunite with his friends and finally be loved and cared for and healed is the beating heart at the center of this story, and if you hate him and think he doesn’t deserve that kind of resolution, then you’re not reading the story as it was written to be read.

At the same time, takes that are like “Sasuke did nothing wrong to anyone ever and has nothing to apologize for and his ‘friends’ are evil and he never should have gone back to them” miss the mark just as widely.  I understand that this attitude is probably just a reaction to the fact that the ending missed its landing so badly (yes, it IS completely ridiculous to write an ending where justice is never done and the whole Uchiha massacre/government cover-up is literally dropped like a hot potato; that is NOT the conclusion we were promised by this story’s previously developed themes and I do not accept it as believable canon), but to watch the story of Naruto unfold and legitimately desire an outcome where Sasuke doesn’t someday come home to rejoin a loving community of friends/surrogate family is like complaining that an author who wrote a book about a particular story didn’t instead choose to write a completely different book about a completely different story.  We ALWAYS knew Sasuke would come back to Team 7 eventually, because that’s what we were promised in the very first chapters of Part 1, when Kakashi teaches his students the sacredness of teamwork and lays the foundation for their friendship.  It has literally never been a secret that this story is going to be about the sundering and subsequent mending of Team 7′s bonds; we KNOW this story is supposed to be about the re-forging of these relationships; that is literally the entire point.  Loving Sasuke to the exclusion of everyone who is written as genuinely loving and caring about him is just as nonsensical as hating him and thinking he doesn’t deserve that kind of love in his life.  That’s not the story we’re being told; it never was.