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everynart · 2 months

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#everynaruto #naruto uzumaki #land of waves #volume 4 #chapter 32: the tool named shinobi #fave

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nakanospring · 7 months

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I put on my Naruto-scholar hat and am currently working on an essay about how Konoha tried to erase the Uchiha from collective memory.

So I was looking at the various memorials within the village and found it interesting that the anime changed the appearance of that one memorial stone:

The manga one is shaped more like an ordinary tombstone, which is rather meh in impact when compared to other memorials in Konoha (the Hokage stone faces/the Vote statues or even the Will of Fire flame in the graveyard).

The anime chose a stone resembling a broken Kunai, a standard ninja tool.

One of the central themes in early Naruto was the Shinobi = tool dilemma.

Chapter 32’s title was literally “A tool called Shinobi”.

[Becoming the country’s tool is most important…] [That’s the same for the leaf village]

Back then Naruto (both the character and the manga) criticized and rejected this idea very clearly. A couple panels before, it was hinted at that Kakashi, the role model shinobi, quarreled with this dehumanizing concept himself.

I honestly love that the anime changed the memorial’s appearance because now the metaphor couldn’t be more on the nose - it was a perfect choice to symbolize what’s wrong with the shinobi world. Konoha views her Shinobi as tools (the same way a Kunai is) and what is commemorated with the memorial are Ninjas killed in the line of duty, i.e broken tools.

Maybe that’s why Kakashi kept disassociating in front of the memorial. It’s a painful reminder of Konoha’s ideology, one that let the village use his loved one’s like worthless tools till they’ve served their purpose and died an agonizing death in the name of the Will of Fire.

It’s clear that for Konoha, a Shinobi is nothing more than a name on a cold stone after their death; their memory to be smelted down and forged anew into propaganda.

Despite that, one key theme has always stood steadfast till the end of Naruto - the importance of human connection and the transformational power of sentiments like love and grief. And it was always the connection human-human, not human-state, that was the most powerful force.

Yugao, Kakashi and Iruka. It was them who, through their grief, reclaimed their deceased loved ones and honored them as humans with dreams and feelings - not as the village’s tools.

#naruto meta #kakashi hatake #yugao uzuki #iruka umino #anti-konoha #offerings

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everynart · 2 months

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