Part of me sees the appeal. It is definitely very tropey. I think the creator has an issue with women.
I had a friend in college who was into Naruto. Dude was super handsome, like model status. Girls would come up to him at parties to try and hit on him but he’d be so busy drunkenly talking to his friends about Naruto that he’d just shoo them away. Absolutely wild, but maybe a testament to the show being good?
I have a few friends like that. Funnily enough, one of them - before he got into anime - would essentially act the same way at parties in HS except it would be him raving about Batman being the best super hero. I used to love finding a seat across the room from him and wait until his drunk ass made eye contact with me, only to dead-pan “Spider-man would kick Batman’s ass in a fight, every day of the week” and watch him spill his beer all over himself & his girlfriend (who was a mutual friend) as he flipped the fuck out. Thanks for the memory lol.
God I wish I could watch Naruto again for the first time. I have a lot of love for the original series. Kishimoto definitely is a bit misogynistic but man, every time I watch the first opening I’m immediately sent back to a quiet summer night in 2006, sitting in front of my computer at 1am with my headphones on watching Haku kick Sasuke’s ass. I stopped being invested in the plot sometime around the Shippuden filler arc with the 6-tails, but by that time I’d begun my earnest journey into anime and had already finished Bleach, YYH, and whatnot. They should’ve used fuckin ROCKS in the last Shippuden episode goddamnit
Naruto is a bad anime. Fight me nerds. Like a lot of long running anime, it starts off fine, but gets worse over time with increasingly large amounts of each (non-filler) episode being spent on flashbacks and still images being panned over.
It’s not often I see people trying to get into any of the big 3 at this point in time. Godspeed. I used to really like Naruto when I was younger, I don’t see why people shouldn’t give it a go if they want to.
Search on Google for Filler/Cannon episode list and skip over the filler episodes. They add nothing to the overall story and are really boring.
