Part of me sees the appeal. It is definitely very tropey. I think the creator has an issue with women.
Just gonna shill The Hyuga Master Plan because I think it’s the best meme to come out of Naruto
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.
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.
I really like the first series. Never watched Shippuden but from what I’ve seen it gets a little silly. But the original series was just a relatively contained (not a million bazillion episodes long) creative fantasy story about interesting magic powers. I really like how well thought out the magic is. Fights aren’t won because one guy has the bigger numbers. Fights are won because one person effectively countered the other person’s strategy, by identifying its weaknesses and playing to their own strengths.
It has flaws I remember, and I’m sure it has flaws I don’t remember. But overall I liked it.
