Shônen Roundup: Naruto

So anybody blessed enough to be inflicted with my presence on social media already knows this from my dozens of delirious, bile-filled posts, but I made the great decision recently to re-read every chapter of the manga Naruto in the past few days.

It was like a faster, more condensed version of what happened to me when I read Naruto the way god intended at the rate of one chapter a week, every week, for like ten years: initial curiosity, then joy and intense interest, and then a white hot, burning hatred that slowly cooled from red into a dull, numb grey.  But in the end, the whole ordeal has been a net positive, because it forced me to find some way to justify throwing away like thirty hours of my life.  And that way is this new series of blog posts! Because I hate myself, I'm going to re-read every released chapter of the three shônen (meaning "for boys") manga that I loved the most growing up (and, to the extent that they gave me the necessary cultural grounding to fully appreciate JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, still love now) and write posts talking about what the series are about, what they did well, what they didn't do well, and how they inevitably changed over the course of running for years and years on end.  In general, I'm going to assume a basic familiarity with the shônen genre when writing these, so if you're confused what I mean when I talk about power levels being out of control or some arcs being more filler than others, then come back after you read Dragon Ball Z, which at this point is required reading if you want to understand hypermasculine garbage anyway.  So, without further ado: Naruto.

The Setup

Of each of the three series that I'll be talking about, Naruto's setting is by far the most enigmatic and difficult to explain.  Naruto takes place in a world ruled by Daimyo, assorted feudal lords, and aloof samurai, with a focus on the hidden villages of ninja that serve as soldiers and mercenaries for all of the assorted players.  This sounds simple, except the hidden ninja villages look like this:

Them's some shabby walls

So the time period is weirdly ambiguous--everyone uses throwing stars and daggers in service of feudal lords, but there's electricity, telephone wires, TV, computers, instant ramen, etc.  It's real weird.  Author Masashi Kishimoto seems to be trying to take the aesthetic trappings of ninja and combine them with a more modern setting and a sense of humor close to Dragon Ball.  It's a strange world, but really unique as well, and especially in the series early days very, very interesting.

Anyway, in addition to Macbook Pros and radio, the world of Naruto also has giant, tailed demons based on creatures in Japanese folklore.  One of these, the Nine-Tailed Fox, attacks Konoha, the ninja village hidden in the leaves, and is stopped only when the leader of Konoha, the Hokage (literally "fire-shadow," because Konoha is located in the country called the Land of Fire, because who needs things to be simple? Not Naruto) sacrifices his life to seal the fox in an infant, named Naruto Uzumaki.  Naruto, and the children of his generation, don't know that the fox that killed so many of their people, but all of the adults do, and pass their resentment of the child down to their children.  Naruto grows up isolated and alone, and is only able to get attention by pulling pranks and being a little shitlord.  At the age of 12, after failing the genin (read: scrub-level ninja) test for the third time, he learns that everyone hates him because the Nine-Tailed Fox is sealed inside of him, but with hard work, ingenuity, and the love of his stern teacher Iruka, he overcomes his self-doubt, stops a scheme to steal forbidden techniques, and becomes a ninja.  After this, he's placed under the tutelage of secret badass ninja Kakashi, alongside his genius crush Sakura and mopey, emo pretty-boy rival Sasuke.  Together with the other ninja of the village, Naruto and his team must use chakra (mana, basically) to use taijutsu (punching real good), genjutsu (illusions) and ninjutsu (magic) to beat up badguys with giant explosions and fireballs.  Eventually, Sasuke gives in to the emo within and leaves the village to train with Orochimaru, who is for all intents and purposes ninja Voldemort, so he can get strong enough to kill his brother Itachi, who in turn killed his entire family.  This leads to a timeskip of three years, where a now teenaged Naruto returns after years of training to get Sasuke back, beat up Orochimaru, and beat up Itachi's organization Akatsuki.

Top, clockwise: Kakashi, Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke.
Bottom, left to right: Sakura, Naruto, and Sasuke, post-timeskip

Believe it or not, I am dramatically, dramatically simplifying the plot, especially with regards to the large cast of supporting characters and the quasi-theological origins of the tailed beasts.  Despite throwing around the word "ninja" like crazy, fighting in Naruto is largely loud, explosive, and drawn out, with a decent amount of trickery and strategy thrown in.  And those are the basics.

What Works

Put simply, what works best in Naruto is this:

Lookit all the ninjas!

You may recognize that, of the above characters, only one of those characters is a Naruto.  This is as it should be.  More than almost any other piece of media I've ever consumed, Naruto has an absolutely incredible ensemble cast.  Part of this is due to how fighting and relative strength worked for most of the series.  There were characters that were stronger and weaker than others, and even characters like Orochimaru, Itachi, and the leaders of Konoha that were portrayed as near-godlike in their ability throw giant fireballs and summon animals to help them and whatnot, but never to a point that seemed completely insane.  The difference wasn't between 10 and 10,000,000,000,000, it was between maybe 10 and 100, and keeping things grounded like this is absolutely vital for a show with an ensemble.  It's especially vital when members of your ensemble are wildly varied in terms of capability.  The guy in the fishnet shirt on the far right, Shikamaru, has the power to stretch out his shadow and force people caught by it to mimic his body movements.  That's it.  That's all he can do.  But, because he's really smart, and the people he's fighting are still just humans with powers instead of god-monsters, he can still be an interesting part of stories he's in.  Same goes for Shino (overcoat on the far left) and his bug-controlling powers, Rock Lee (bowl cut in the back) and his ability to punch dudes real good, Kiba (kid in the furry jacket what Shikamaru's hair completely blocks) and his sense of smell, and so on.  All of these characters also had their own distinct, interesting (though rarely subtle) character traits and personalities, which lent a lot of individuality to their fights and struggles.  I can't stress enough how rare this kind of thing is in so many shônen manga, where story after story boils down to "main character, who is basically invincible, does everything."

The ensemble cast also fed into the themes of the story of Naruto, which up until the series was about 60% finished were pretty consistent and well-written, as far as such things go.  A lot of shônen clichés (like "friendship is important," "revenge is bad," "hard work will be rewarded") show up in Naruto, but they ring a lot less hollow in this story than in others because Naruto's friends actually matter.  "You can't beat us when we work together!" is a lot less inspiring when it's just one guy effortlessly killing everyone with his super bicep ultimate energy nutbuster climax beam, but when it comes after Naruto (who can make clones of himself, shoot a wind ball, and do basically nothing else) just barely beat the bad guy by cleverly using the more varied skills of his friends, it actually feels earned.  Plus, the series would alternate between these quasi-serious moments about what it means to be a strong ninja when you can't protect your friends blah blah blah and being silly and goofy, so you knew never to put more into the series than it was able to give back to you.

Lastly--and, for a shônen series, crucially--the fights in Naruto were great (up until we hit that 60% point, but we'll get to that later).  The art style hits a nice sweet spot between stylish and hyper-realistic, allowing for characters to do some crazy things like grow bat-wings or summon eight ninja dogs to hold a guy to the ground while you stab him in the chest with your lightning hand without it being too crazy to tell what's going on or so photorealistic that the whole scenario falls apart due to its inherent impossibility.  But the main thing with Naruto fights (at least, again, until 60% or so through the series) is that they're smart.  It's very rare that two characters fight and simply trade punches until somebody uses their super-punch and wins.  Almost every fight, even between characters that are stupid idiots like Naruto and Kiba, involves mind-games, trickery, sleight-of-hand, and other tricks along with the punching, which keeps things unpredictable and interesting.  When you have two clever characters fight, like Shikamaru and Temari, the series approaches JoJo level heights with how intricate and satisfying the encounters are.  Wow! What a great setup for interesting fights to go along with an interesting story! What could possibly go wrong?

What doesn't

For the most part, Naruto fails less because of massive faults and more because it just stopped doing all of that cool stuff we talked about earlier.  There is one exception, however: one problem that was with the series from the very beginning, and one that grew worse and more irksome until it became a life-draining tumor that took all the joy and fun I used to have with this series and turned it into ash.

UGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

In a series with such a large, expansive, interesting cast, it's completely mind-boggling to me that the emotional heart of the story revolves around the grumpy, never-satisfied, hateful piece of garbage known as Sasuke Uchiha.  From the first, Naruto and Sasuke are portrayed as rivals.  Not friendly rivals, either--Naruto resents Sasuke for his natural talent, and Sasuke is a whiny shit obsessed with murder and treats everyone around him, including Naruto, with nothing but contempt.  But when Sasuke decides to commit high treason and defect to Orochimaru--the man who killed the village's last leader along with a shitload of the village's other ninja, including Sasuke's so-called friends--the series acts as though this is a tragedy, destroying a deep, powerful friendship between Naruto and Sasuke that only ever expressed itself through them hating each other.  If that weren't bad enough, Sasuke after the timeskip is even worse.  He starts as simply annoying and arrogant, but gradually becomes an insane murderer that kills a shitload of innocent people, tries to kill every world leader simultaneously and start a war, repeatedly abandons his new "friends" to die, and makes it abundantly clear to Naruto and the other characters that he will not stop until he kills everything they love.  Based on the amount of fanart and fanfiction and Sasuke's continuously high presence in popularity polls, I guess a lot of audiences got invested in rehabilitating this crazy murderer that probably smells like snake turds, but not me.  The story of Sasuke's redemption is one of the most baffling, worst possible versions of  the"there's still good in him, we have to get him back" story arc that I've ever seen in my life, and there are plenty of otherwise-okay parts of the series that are completely ruined by his presence.  I am not exaggerating when I say that Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones did a better job of making me feel bad for Anakin after he killed, like, forty children, than Naruto does for making me sympathize with Sasuke.  And to add insult to injury, when Sasuke finally becomes a "good guy" (after trying to kill every world leader again) he apologizes once, to one person, and then leaves.  Oh, and in the epilogue he has a daughter that he left immediately after she was born.  What a cool friend you have, Naruto.

Sasuke is the flaw in Naruto that gets under my skin the most, but another problem that has been with the series from the beginning, and is probably a bigger problem in general, is the rampant sexism.  Almost every ninja team is composed of three people, with two boys and one girl, and without exception the girl is the weakest, shittiest member of the team.  The girls in Naruto are also the most underutilized members of the ensemble, especially in the second half of the series when Kishimoto decided to give Sasuke about a hundred chapters of development while still leaving perfectly good characters like, say, TenTen, without a single on-screen fight.  It's a massive waste of time and talent, it's insulting, and it makes me hate Sasuke even more than I already do, which is probably more than is healthy.  And that's not even getting into the gross "I'm going to peep on women in the bath without their consent" voyeurism in Naruto.  This is a problem with a lot of manga, but it's usually confined to one creepy character that eventually stops showing up.  But in Naruto, this creepy voyeur character, Jiraiya the Toad Hermit, is one of the most important people in the whole series.  He trains Naruto in being a sex offender, and considering that Naruto is the titular character it becomes difficult to completely avoid this kind of stuff.  Naruto goes on to train a kid named Konohamaru in being a creepy shit.  So the women can't fight or do stuff in the plot, but hey, at least you can look at them through a weird hole in the wall! Ninjas!

These major, inherent flaws aside, Naruto's primary problem is that, a few arcs into the second half of the story, it forgets all of its strengths.  Naruto goes from a powerful character that needs a lot of support from the people around him to being an all-powerful quasi-god-like being that is also a reincarnation of ninja St. Peter (no, really), and the resulting gulf between him and the other ninjas take Naruto's greatest strength--its ensemble cast and clever fights--completely out of the picture.  Instead, the most useful thing Naruto's once-diverse cast can do is do maybe one attack to temporarily occupy a single hand of a giant monster before Naruto delivers the killing blow.  Fights that used to be simple, clever, and relatively easy to understand turn into just another battle of energy beams against other energy beams in a ruined wasteland.

What is even happening.  I've read this like three times and I don't know.  Help.

Just as big of a problem as the sudden importance of giant plant monsters and ghost robots is the jarring tone shift in the story.  Part 1 of Naruto dealt with simple themes, but did so in a simple, heartfelt way, which left each story feeling logically and emotionally complete.  As Part 2 went on, the concepts and questions the story raised with characters like Pain (a walking metaphor for Cold War politics) far outstripped how smart the story actually was, as well as how able to keep up Kishimoto was, leaving most arcs a mess of confused monologues and an increasing obsession with the series eye techniques.  Some characters, like Sasuke or Neji, have special magic eyes that let them see or do special things, but as time went on these powers became so central and exaggerated that the series actually started to revolve around who could get to a corpse first to transplant its eyeballs.  Suffice to say, it's difficult to take a villain who talks himself up as the height of all philosophy and knowledge and power in the world seriously when he spends most of his time ripping eyes out of people and shoving them into his eyes.  Because on of his superpowers is that he can just do that.  Just put an eye in an eye and bam! New eye.  Also there's a guy with eyes on his arm, and that's the dumbest shit ever.

NO

Final Thoughts

Naruto is a tragic story about something full of talent and promise that loses itself in self importance and a thirst for power, and is also about ninjas named Naruto and Sasuke.  Terrible metaphor jokes that I'm not sorry for aside, re-reading Naruto made me more sad than anything else, and not because of any "sad" things that actually happened.  It made me sad because it reminded me of the amazing, fledgling series that was, and the bright future that could have been.  The good times didn't go on for long enough, but I'm glad that we had what we did.  No amount of eye-transplants can ever take that away.

Don't hold your breath for the sequel coming anytime soon (I'm pretty manga'd out right now), but rest assured that Shônen Roundup will return, with 10% more spiky hair and 200% more ghosts.