Tag: naruto

byelawliet:

this is a great question!!! also let me just say this at the beginning, i don’t HATE these characters for having these traits by any means, and i think these “worst” traits are what actually make these characters interesting, and drive the plot. so here we go

• hashirama. hashirama has, um, a lot of these (surprisingly?) because like madara, he has fundamentally good intentions but things just get complicated over time and you can never predict exactly how the future is going to turn out (it’s easy to blame people in the past for their actions but they were working with the limited information they had at the time, you know what i mean?). anyway i think hashirama’s worst trait is his idealism. this sounds weird, i know, but idealism (the way hashirama implemented it especially) is…..DANGEROUS and hashirama was literally ready to KILL HIMSELF because he had “”””faith”””” in madara and tobirama to just magically work things out after his death. and then again when he reassures sasuke that madara is a kind man, and sasuke might be able to sway his heart without using violence……..and then sasuke gets stabbed and would have died if not for a big ol ass pull….nice. a secondary “bad” trait of hashirama’s is his uhhh…..inability to see his own self worth, his self-sacrificing nature, his self-loathing. (put a pin in that one bc we’ll come back to it with madara.) also, side note: all of these “bad” traits seem to manifest in hashirama’s overly bombastic personality, which i love. kishi gives us real visual cues for this stuff!! beautiful!! anyway yeah, i love hashirama BECAUSE he has this collection of flaws. kishi takes this mythical godlike figure we’ve heard about throughout the series and then reveals all these things about him. it’s great!!!
• madara. oh, madara. where do we start with madara. well first of all let me just draw the many parallels to hashirama: good intentions, self loathing, over-the-top personality, messiah figure (BUT the important distinction with madara is that madara names HIMSELF the savior of the world while OTHER people say that about hashi). madara takes the personality thing to the other extreme, though, and i think the real underlying problem with madara, and his “worst” trait, is that he Cannot Forgive Anyone (ESPECIALLY himself…which then makes him project his guilt onto other people, leading to self-isolation, frustration, anger, etc). the sharingan, and its tendency to store emotionally damaging information in intricate detail, certainly doesn’t help matters. madara, like hashirama, is a real stubborn bastard, only unlike idealist hashi (cave-dweller post-tablet post-vote madara in particular), madara is such a stubborn cynic that he’s convinced himself to stop seeing the good in ANYONE.
• tobirama. tobirama has seen the unfolding of the catastrophe that is madara and hashirama’s conflicting worldviews and, as a result, resolves to stick to the middle of the path. which then ends up creating more problems forever and ever, apparently, since we’re now on hokage no. 7 and nothing is actually getting fixed. see now i can’t find the words to frame this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like i’m saying “tobirama’s worst quality is his strict adherence to his own beliefs” because….it is…..but that is also a good quality in tobirama, where it manifests in his devotion to scientific and technological advancement. the most difficult thing about tobirama is that he was raised in conditions where distrusting the uchiha clan was basically a survival skill, and he struggled to unlearn all of this fear and distrust after the truce became a reality. was he completely successful?? no. but i do think, just like hashirama and madara, His Intentions Were Good.

naruto is…….appallingly bad a lot of the time. but boy howdy, when naruto is good, it’s REALLY good. hands down one of the best things about naruto is the ambiguity of its characters, and the founders are no different. you could probably look at any one of these “bad” traits and make the argument to frame it in a good light, which is the mark of good writing!!! thank you for your question :>