#hes my blorbo ! cna you tell ithink about him a lot.

[bansenshukai]

Oh man Tobirama is just so interesting to me because in my head; he is someone who is so deeply affected by emotion; who loves without abandon, desperately; who is equally terrified by that and spends most of his life trying to repress it into oblivion and chop it up into tiny little manageable pieces. And fails, of course. Characters are interesting when they fail.

It's rarely pointed out that the maxim of "the perfect shinobi is emotionless", so often picked apart in Naruto and touted as one of the tenets of shinobi-hood in Konoha, very likely came from Tobirama himself. It's a philosophy he expresses even as a child (oof).

Which honestly, might have been the best coping strategy they had to deal with the insane pressure cooker of tragedy they were thrown into from a very young age. It's certainly not helped by Butsuma, who practically encourages that philosophy.

But despite saying this... well, it's not like Tobirama can throw away his own bonds either. He can't help himself: he tries to protect the people he loves, as we see when he gets in between Butsuma and Hashirama when Butsuma is about to hit Hashirama. (Fuck Butsuma, btw. I highly encourage patricide in this case.)

But it's not like Tobirama having totally misguided ideas about how to manage mental health and wellbeing changed the fact that he did institute good in-universe as well.

Hashirama's vision was so insane, but in that time Tobirama supported it full-heartedly and arguablely was responsible for much of the actual execution. He's responsible for the creation of institutions like the Academy, the ANBU, Chunin Exams.

He, unlike both Madara and Hashirama, argues for democracy and an election of the leader by the will of the people, which is definitely an unusual thing for a shinobi to suggest.

Anyway, back to the emotional repression thing. Shinobi sure do love forgetting that anger is an emotion (hi Kishimoto this one's definitely on you as a dude), and Tobirama absolutely gets angry, and doesn't seem to recognize that it is an emotion. Classic toxic masculinity at work, thank you very much Senju Butsuma.

This isn't to say that he's a perfect character, or an evil character either. I like him because I think he's imperfect. He has so many flaws, but he's always trying to do (what he thinks is) the right thing, which is a great setup for a very interesting character. Absolutism in a character tends to be much less interesting than struggle, contradiction, and desire.

Anyways I think my thoughts can be summed up as:

#.txt #hes my blorbo ! cna you tell ithink about him a lot. #he kks obt (and sometimes mdr n hsrm) occupy a big fat chunk of real estate in my brain #this is NOT a proper analysis or laid out argument or anything #ya girl b thinkin out loud. it's an incoherent rambling on one of my fav characters. #not even gonna touch on the u chiha thing i think that would take a whole separate and much longer post #I won't get into the argument about whether xyz is a ''good'' person or not #first of all that's tiring; second I think that by the standards of modern reality no one in Naruto-verse is a good person #it's important to identify what moral standard you're judging the characters with #and often people switch rapidly between canon-verse n reality OR two people argue from separate standards which obviously leads to conflict #tobirama