YMMV / Naruto

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The following have their own pages:

• Alternative Character Interpretation
• Complete Monster
• Draco In Leather Pants
• Ensemble Darkhorse
• Fan Nickname
• Fanon
• Magnificent Bastard
• Memetic Mutation
• Narm
• Never Live It Down
• They Wasted A Perfectly Good Character
• The Woobie

Other examples:

A

• Accidental Aesop: As one rereads or rewatches the whole series, many of the problems are caused by easily manipulated adolescents with a serious lack of emotional restraint. This can be taken as one giant Take That! against places and traditions with low age limits along with people who don't follow established age limits if it was high enough.
• Adorkable: Naruto's socially awkward, and early on, most of his boasts came off more as cute/laughable than intimidating. Gets an extra dose in The Last when Naruto realizes he's in love with Hinata; he becomes bashful and nervous around her, giving her cheesy grins whenever she looks his way.
  • Sai has a few shades of this after he starts genuinely showing interest in emotions and human interaction. The sixth Shippuden film took this and ran away with it.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Obito was a notorious case of Unintentionally Unsympathetic, but by the time of his sendoff, many had grown to at least not celebrate his death, something that would have been unheard of when Sasuke attempted to finish him off earlier. That said, Naruto calling him "nothing but awesome" after everything he's done was generally viewed as extremely silly.
• Alternate Self Shipping: The title character is able to create a clone of himself—of the opposite gender to boot—and the fans haven't ignored its potential. It's called the Harem Jutsu for a reason.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • Sasuke Uchiha is much more divisive in America and Europe than in Japan, and was hated by large segments of the American fanbase long before his Face–Heel Turn. This is because he's seen as a one-note 'brooding', overly edgy, and whiny character whose motivations are not as sympathetic as they're supposed to be or simply baffling. As a result, American and Europeans fans were absolutely not surprised by the Face–Heel Turn. Tellingly, Japanese fans were baffled by the "Sasuke gets choked" meme.
  • Sakura Haruno is also a Base-Breaking Character in the west, due to her being reviled by much of the western fandom, with common complaints including her often violent behavior toward Naruto and conversely overly passive behavior toward the aforementioned Sasuke (which some saw as a very unhealthy relationship), and is the butt of many jokes regarding her perceived usefulness (or lack thereof) compared to her two teammates. In Japan, she does decently well in popularity polls (albeit nowhere near Naruto and Sasuke), but Kishimoto also acknowledged frequent criticism toward her character, to the point that she became a bit of a Creator's Pest when he couldn’t quell their negativity.
  • Reactions to Kaguya in her home country mostly range from distaste to ambivalence, but she's absolutely loathed by Western fans, who view her as a walking plot device created solely to get rid of Obito and Madara because Kishimoto had written himself into a corner that he couldn't figure out how to resolve in any way that made sense, so he made one up. It really doesn't help that she's based on a Japanese myth that Western viewers are unlikely to be familiar with and had not been sufficiently referenced in the story before her appearance, which makes her presence in the story seem even more inexplicable. Not to mention that she kills Obito and Madara, angering both 1) the people who liked those two and were disappointed to see them dispatched so pathetically by someone who barely lasted a fraction of their page time, and 2) the people who didn't like them and saw her as yet another cheap Retcon thrown in at the last minute so that the Uchihas escaped culpability and weren't actually punished by the main characters at all. Her being the main franchise villain rep in Jump Force was met with negative reception in Japan, too, but it didn't hold a candle to the absolute fury that greeted her arrival in the Western fanbase.
• Angst? What Angst?: Madara learns that he had been played by the Black Zetsu to revive Kaguya and his attempts to save the world would have lead to everyone he was trying to save being turned into White Zetsus. For a man who learned he devoted his entire life to plot that unintentionally caused the end of the world, Madara is amazingly calm about the realization.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Several times.
  • Orochimaru was the main villain of the entire series and Part I ended on a note that he would still be the Big Bad of Part II, or at least a villain driving much of the storyline. Nope; Sasuke attacks him while he's bedridden and Orochimaru gets a pretty quick defeat, not appearing again for ages.
  • Kabuto tried very hard to take his master's place, using some incredibly extreme methods. He commanded an army comprised entirely of resurrected, nigh-unstoppable shinobi whose names alone are still enough to drive the Shinobi Alliance's forces into a panic, yet somehow ends up losing almost all of them in a single day. At the end of all, personally he was defeated relatively easily by one of his own pawns and was mostly forgotten by the story for a few years.
  • Madara Uchiha, hyped as an Invincible Villain and apparently the Big Bad of Naruto, was defeated literally by means of one hit in the back from Black Zetsu who is later revealed to contain the will of Kaguya, aka the first being to ever wield chakra on Earth. He isn't even dignified with a final face-off against Naruto and Sasuke.
  • Kaguya Otsutsuki has officially qualified as this. Thanks to her inexperience in making decisions in the heat of battle, she gets sealed in her own dimension which few can access to revive her ever again. Ultimately this only took ten chapters after the character's official introduction for her to be sealed (again). It makes the above example of Madara even more humiliating, since he was supplanted by someone who did not even last a tenth of the page time he did.
• Applicability: The series puts significant emphasis on the powers granted by the tailed beasts and kekkei genkai (unique traits of particular ninja family lines), and in general portrays a very traditional aristocratic society. Even Naruto himself, the village outcast, can use the Nine-Tailed Fox as a battery to power his moves and is eventually revealed to be the orphaned son of the Fourth Hokage. Into this, during the Chuunin Exam arc, steps Rock Lee, who is completely incapable of anything but martial arts, making him functionally a person with a disability by ninja standards. This means he has to train all the harder just to be a competitive second-stringer next to the aforementioned superpowered ninja aristocrats who were handed far greater baseline levels of power by accidents of birth: Lee nearly kills himself fighting the Kazekage's son Gaara without ever landing a damaging hit on him, something the aristocratic Sasuke then does with relative ease. This can be read as a commentary on class privilege and the inherent advantages of generational wealth.
• Arc Fatigue: Naruto has usually been good with preventing arcs from lasting too long, but...
  • The final arc, taking a day and a half In-Universe, went on for about three years. The initial action mainly serves to give the side characters A Day in the Limelight, with the overall plot not really advancing until Naruto arrives. Then the fighting turns into a tug-of-war marathon, with each side endlessly churning out increasingly powerful techniques. During this, the actual main antagonist changed at least seven times, with some villains getting the focus multiple times each, and with several of them declaring that everything has gone All According to Plan for them. When the war finally ends, Sasuke declares he will take over the world to reform the shinobi system, triggering the long-awaited final battle between him and Naruto. While the author had already stated that the final battle would be between them and Naruto, it still felt like yet another extension to an already bloated arc.
  • The anime has the Three-Tails filler arc. It contains some ideas that would make for an interesting three or four episodes but instead goes on for an exasperating 23 episodes.
  • The original anime had the lengthy Filler-arc, which is technically dozens of small filler arcs and episodes right after each other. Now, a few filler episodes here and there doesn't hurt. But when the last 85 episodes in the series are all Filler... It starts to get a bit jarring. Even the final arc, which ends with Naruto and Jiraiya leaving to train isn't even Canon, but it does set things up for his return in the first episode of Shippuuden.
  • The manga had finished in November of 2014. The anime, despite being not far from the heels of the manga up to that point, ended in late March of 2017. Why? Because the anime studio added a metric ton of Filler after the Big Bad initiated their plan in the Fourth Shinobi World War mentioned above; what was only a couple pages of happy What If? scenarios in people's dream worlds in the manga was expanded tremendously into two season's worth (nearly sixty episodes) of random filler, dream sequences, flashbacks for exposition, and the aforementioned What If? taken to the extreme. While this helps explore backstory and the Myth Arc a little better than the manga's straightforward approach, this happened at a climactic moment in the series and puts everything on pause for the entire duration, unlike other filler arcs that at least progressed the timeline and pretended to have significance. All for the sake of continuing to milk the Cash-Cow Franchise (and probably to make the transition to the sequel a bit more seamless by ending shortly before it'd begin).
  • Naruto's Will They or Won't They? Love Triangle with Sakura and Hinata persists throughout the entire series, which can grow tiresome after awhile. Especially with how obvious it's made out to be that Naruto's feelings for Sakura are completely one-sided, which some just wanted Naruto to move on. Hinata's Love Confession during the Pain arc getting completely glossed over in favor of continuing the Ship-to-Ship Combat throughout the 4th Shinobi World War didn't help matters either.
  • Naruto's whole journey to bring Sasuke back to the Hidden Leaf Village spans from the Sasuke Retrieval arc all the way until the end of the series. From the moment that Sasuke officially departs from the village with the Sound Four, it takes around 500 chapters for Naruto to finally complete such an objective.
• Archive Panic: Although not as bad as One Piece, let's see. 72 Volumes for the manga, Around 10 novels, 220 episodes for Naruto and 500 episodes for Naruto Shippuden. And let's not even talk about the movies or the Sequel Series, Boruto. Yup, good luck to newcomers.
• Ass Pull: "Plot no Jutsu" (PNJ). This is an accusation often thrown when a character's abilities are suddenly more powerful, less powerful, function differently than you'd expect or just get made up on the spot as a justification for a character winning a fight the plot needed them to win.
  • Substitution Jutsu as a whole. It's a technique where the user replaces themselves with an object like a log to distract an attacker, but despite being used quite early in the series, it never really gets any explanation for how it truly works, meaning it gets to be used as a "Get out of a fatal attack" excuse.
  • The Gaara vs. Lee fight; Gaara managed to get away from Lee's Initial Lotus by slipping out of his sand armor, leaving an empty shell, and burying himself in the ground A) while rather high in midair, B) while he was getting the crap beat out of him, C) in the time it took the person hitting him to wince for a second.
  • Sasuke's egregious Great Snake Escape. He summoned a giant snake, hypnotized it, jumped in its mouth and teleported it and himself out of harm's way all to avoid a massive 10-kilometer-radius explosion. All of that was done after said explosion had already gone off a few feet away from him, and in spite of both techniques consuming massive amounts of chakra, after Sasuke was observed to be out of chakra.
  • The Hokage's three guards knowing Flying Thunder God. The only other known users are the second and fourth Hokage. While all three of the guards are named characters^note Genma, Raido, and Iwashi, they were also Living Props and were never depicted as knowing secret techniques or even being especially capable shinobi in the first place.
  • Itachi Uchiha suddenly revealing the existence of Izanami. Izanami is only useful against Izanagi users, Kabuto or those like him, whom the user happened to be fighting at that moment. The fact that Izanami was (in-universe) created solely for a very specialized purpose (countering Izanagi, an extremely rare technique that offers the user a few seconds of invulnerability at the cost of one eye, clearly meant to be a last resort) yet turned out to also be the perfect counter to a completely different threat seals the deal. It doesn't help that the technique is never discussed again at all, whereas Izanagi is developed much better during the fight Sasuke had with Danzo, and later fights as well.
  • Madara, after becoming the host of the Ten Tails, manages to grab Kakashi's Sharingan and uses it to perform Kaumi on himself despite Obito, the person the eye originally belonged to, saying he could not use Kamui as the Ten Tails host.
  • Minato suddenly reveals he can use Sage Mode during the fight with Ten-Tailed Jinchūriki Madara Uchiha, even though he had previously needed his son's help to provide senjutsu. He weakly tries to explain that he's not good at it, but this falls flat when you notice he is a perfect Sage like his son, instead of the imperfect form Jiraiya had to use in his fight with Pain. It seems to exist mainly because Minato without the Nine-Tails would have been absolutely useless fighting Madara, so to keep him relevant, he needed the form to even remotely harm him.
  • Everything about Kaguya is a concentrated storm of these for some people. In fact, some people think that her entire fight against Naruto and Sasuke should fit into this trope, given how unexplained and random things were. A notable example is the apparent appearance of Rin's spirit during the fight, who proceeded to seemly assist Obito and Kakashi in pulling a save against Kaguya's ash-killing bones, saving Naruto and Sasuke and subsequent ability of the eyes Obito to transfer his soul and chakra Kakashi which fully manifests a Susanoo in its stabilised perfect form in the first try. Her relationship to Black Zetsu also retcons him from being a creation of Madara Uchiha to being an entity that has been working under her orders for the past few hundred or thousand years, which includes tricking the Uchihas into turning evil and pretty much everything else that's ever gone wrong in the Naruto universe. Many fans felt her only real purpose was to make the Uchihas look good, and as a solution to have Madara lose due to her being a case of Unskilled, but Strong.
• Awesome Animation: The anime is well known for some of its fight scenes being incredibly well animated and highly choreographed. Examples include Rock Lee vs. Gaara, Sasuke vs. Killer Bee, Kakashi vs. Obito, and Naruto vs. Sasuke (both the original and Shippuden).
• Awesome Ego: Madara Uchiha was clearly an attempt at this. How successful it was depends on the reader.

B-D

• Badass Decay:
  • Sakura Haruno starts off the Time Skip as the first member of Team 7 to go up against a Akatsuki, Sasori. She was hailed as the second coming of Tsunade, who'd she'd eventually surpass with her talent. Come next arc... she's knocked out at the starting bell after Four-Tailed Naruto smacks her hard enough that he almost kills her. Come next arc... she does nothing, she doesn't even get to fight. Come next arc... she still isn't able to land a blow on Tobi (though an overlooked scene has her deduce the mechanics behind Tobi's intangibility, which is proven right during the climax of the War arc). Subverted in the Invasion of Pain arc, where she knocks out one of Pain's summons with one blow and organizes the survivors while Naruto fights Pain one on one. THEN in the next arc she hits her lowest low: First she's treated as a ragdoll by Karui and Omoi, getting knocked out. Then she delivers a painfully fake love confession to Naruto to get him off Sasuke's trail, and it does not work at all. Then she decides to kill Sasuke on her own... and at the very last second, she can't bring herself to do it because she still loves him. Then she gets strangled by a weakened Sasuke despite having Super-Strength and needs Naruto to save her from the stab of her own kunai... but because of that, he ends up getting cut by that very same kunai.
  • Sasuke Uchiha is strangely another contender for this trope. At the start of Part II, he was on another level than Naruto, Sakura, and Sai together, and he took over Orochimaru's consciousness when he tried to transfer his mind into his, battles the powerful Akatsuki member Deidara one on one and wins (Ass Pull escape notwithstanding) and then fights Itachi and manages to impress him and force him to use his trump card, Susano'o to survive his Kirin. Then he faces the awesome Killer Bee and...gets owned even with his full team AND is humiliated when he takes a tentacle of Killer Bee back to Akatsuki. Then he faces the Kages, and puts up an impressive but futile fight against the Raikage, A before Gaara needed to save him. He fights Gaara who blocks all of his Amaterasu strikes without even moving while simultaneously protecting his siblings and Darui. He is then nearly killed by Mei Terumi despite having a higher level of Susano'o available, needing White Zetsu to save him. And then Obito while playing Madara had to save him from being atomized by Onoki. He managed to get some badass credentials back when he fought and beat Danzo Shimura despite Danzo holding back, the very fact he could hold out against Izanagi spam even Itachi complimented on. Then come Kakashi...he loses his sight fighting him when he gets Susano'o's final armor. And is nearly stabbed by Sakura in the back. Then in the Fourth Shinobi World War Arc he takes down all Zetsus alone but is limited from fighting Kabuto with all power by Itachi.
  • Naruto briefly became inflicted with this during the Five Kage Summit arc. He had just defeated Pain, but much like the aforementioned Sakura loses a lot of badass credentials in this arc due to spending most of the arc's duration angsting over Sasuke. Not helping matters were his embarrassing performances during the arc such as grovelling and sobbing in front of the Raikage, and hyperventilating upon hearing Sasuke's further descent into villainy.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • The Uchihas in general. Either they're the epitome of Evil Is Cool with badass skills and are well-characterized or they're the epitome of Spotlight-Stealing Squad who were treated as merely misunderstood in spite of all the unforgivable things they have done and always having a random power out of nowhere. Fans actually seem to splinter into four groups instead of just two: fans of the Uchiha, Itachi fans who don't like Sasuke, Sasuke fans who don't like Itachi, and Uchiha haters.
    • Sasuke is a massive one, especially in the west. Some fans adore Sasuke as a cool character with genuinely sympathetic motives, especially those who consider Sasuke (alongside every other victim of the Uchiha Massacre except for Itachi and Obito) to be a Genocide Survivor suffering from a bad case of Unintentionally Sympathetic and/or Informed Wrongness as a result of systemic Fantastic Racism on the part of Konoha. These fans generally see his quest for revenge as him being rightfully furious at a system where people like Danzo can and do get off scot-free despite being genocide perpetrators and where people like the Third Hokage don't seem to care enough to stop it, especially if you consider the Fridge Horror that in a clan as large and well-established as the Uchiha there would have been plenty of noncombatants (civilians, children, and even babies) who couldn't possibly have participated in the coup but were slaughtered anyway just for being Uchiha. Others, however, consider Sasuke to be a painfully bland asshole who steals away too much attention from the rest of the cast and becomes too cruel to feel remotely sympathetic. Even after his Heel–Face Turn, people are divided as to whether his redemption was earned or if he was Easily Forgiven and should have died at the end of the manga.
    • Itachi was insanely popular at the start of the manga, and still is in many circles, but he's also become a much more divisive character as his true nature's been revealed. Fans are now divided over whether Itachi is a cool, stoic badass with an interesting character arc or an insufferably preachy and insanely overpowered character who exists purely to make everyone else look bad in comparison. A huge part of the reaction to Itachi is whether people view his character as a Deconstruction of The Ace, where his overwhelming power and near-invincibilty in battle highlights his many shortcomings as a human being, or The Ace played depressingly straight and absorbing a disproportionate amount of praise from others despite the many terrible things he did, only admitting his failings to look humbler and even more praiseworthy. Opinions on him, like opinions on Sasuke, also tend to be very dependent on whether or not you see the Uchiha Massacre as a genocide; if it's not, Itachi is a hero or at worst a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but if it is, then he was (at best) a brainwashed and exploited thirteen-year-old with no real good options, or (at worst) a brainwashed enforcer of an oppressive system who suffers under extreme Internalized Categorism.
    • Madara is either seen as a complex Well-Intentioned Extremist and the embodiment of Evil Is Cool who managed to become one of the heroes' greatest threats, or a boring Invincible Villain with rather petty motives, and broke too many rules of established Canon. Or, to a certain degree, both.
    • Obito Uchiha. Initially an Ensemble Dark Horse due to his kindness and loyalty to his friends in Kakashi Gaiden, the revelation that he was Tobi all along turned him into a more divisive character. One camp either sees him as a Tragic Villain who was a victim of war and Madara's manipulations, while others see him as a Psychopathic Manchild due to his motivations being summed to the death of a girl he loved in his childhood, which hardly justifies the sheer scale of the atrocities he had committed.
  • For a non-Uchiha example, there's Sakura Haruno. For the longest time, Sakura was The Scrappy of the series for being useless in most fights, regularly assaulting Naruto, and having little purpose beyond worrying about Naruto and Sasuke. However, in recent years, there have been a growing number of fans who argue that her negative traits are exaggerated and that she actually has her fair share of cool moments. And while most agree that Sakura was given hardly anything to do in the narrative, there are some who at least believe she had the potential to be interesting. Even after her portrayal in Boruto gained her more fans for becoming kinder and a good mother to Sarada, there are those who still feel that Sakura is largely uninteresting and continues to be largely defined by her relationship with Sasuke and not much else (which in itself is hotly debated).
• Better on DVD: Or better on Crunchyroll, being able to binge this show improves the experience a whole lot, especially considering that the show is heavily reliant on Webcomic Time, the events of part 1 happen in about a couple months, Part 2 last for a 13 to 18 months in universe, the whole 4th ninja war is just 2 or 3 days in universe. Watching it at a pace comparable to in universe makes thing like character development, the lack of it, some characters that never appear again, etc. Less exasperating and make more sense.
  • One big example is Sakura, if you list everything she does in a span of 14 years of publication it is not that impressive for such a main character, if you notice that it's been only a year, it makes more sense and it's easier to see how useful she is and why her feelings for Sasuke do not change, there's literally not enough time, if you take in account how much she did in the last leg of the war, which is a matter of hours it's not surprising she's considered a sannin.
  • Sasuke Heel–Face Revolving Door after Itachi's death is much more understandable if we know that's he's being constantly bombarded with new information that completely change his outlook of life in the span of some months and trying to deal with it.
  • A lot of secondary characters have their fights showcased leading to the war and never appear again, considering that's a week at most, they should be grateful of having A Day in the Limelight.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Episode 101 of the original series. The village idiots conspire to exact revenge upon Kakashi by means of hiccuping, laughing and crying powder^*(granted, it was celebrating the 100th episode).
  • Anime filler in general does a lot of weird stuff, but the weirdest, most out-of-nowhere moment might be when a Shippuden villain was revealed to be a floating, talking, body-snatching wig, with zero explanation for how that came to be. She's killed almost immediately after this reveal, and is never mentioned again.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • Episode 101. Apparently they were trying to figure out what Kakashi looked like without his mask, but that didn't make sense.
  • The "prison escape" arc during the Part 1 filler also qualifies. Two of the main villains are giant men shaped like giant Russian dolls (tiny at the top and wide at the bottom) and equally bottomless; their battle cry is "Food! Food! Food!", and Naruto plays hide-and-seek with them (?). Meanwhile, it turns out that the Big Bad of the day is none other than Mizuki, who is now fully Ax-Crazy and has an old grudge against Iruka. For some reason he has grown giant muscles over the previous year, so the previous Bishōnen now looks like one of those scary bodybuilders with a serious case of Testosterone Poisoning. And Orochimaru supplied him with a potion that turns him into a sort of tiger-thing. Pass the mind bleach, please.
  • Many of the one-episode fillers qualify. The first of these was the Hot Springs Episode 97, which is so different from Naruto in animation, story and style, it makes you wonder if you're watching the right show.
• Broken Base: Being such a big and popular Long Runner, the series is bound to have lots of these.
  • The truth of Itachi Uchiha and the Uchiha Clan Massacre is a notable point of contention. Did it redeem his character and effectively portray him as a tragic character, or was it a shoehorned twist that undermined his complexity as an Anti-Villain and instead portrayed him as an Unintentionally Unsympathetic character given the crap he did to Sasuke?
  • The ending and the subsequent spin-offs are very hot topics among those in the fandom. And we shall leave it at that.
  • The entire concept of "Talk-no-Jutsu" from none other than Naruto. While some believe that it signifies a message that people can be redeemed even after what they've done, others downright hate it because of how cheap it is for Naruto to just defeat villains with just words, while believing that the villains are already irredeemable in the first place. Not to mention how it feels like a massive Ass Pull when they have a big Heel Realization (Don't get us started on Obito...).
  • Sasuke and Sakura's relationship, especially after they officially get together in the ending. Not so much in the sense of them getting together (albeit that's another big point of controversy too) but rather whether or not they're an actual functional couple. Some people think that the problems they face are justified, and that the fact that they stay together is a testament to how much they truly love each other. Others think that the pair is together just out of sheer delusion (specially on Sakura's part), and that it should be bound to fall apart sooner rather than later.
  • Whether Naruto is a good family man after he becomes Hokage. Again, some people find it justified, and a testament of how much that family loves each other. Others think he is being completely neglectful, and that is bound to bring some serious problems.
  • The Power-scaling escalation of the series over time can provoke this reaction. There are those who prefer the smaller scale, more tactic and martial arts focused combat of Part I and early shippuden over the latter stages focus on excessively more powerful ninjutsu, which many deride for abandoning concepts such as stealth and hand signs for the sake of DBZ level spectacle and fight scenes. There is also the feeling that the increase and concentration of power in main characters, resulted in many supporting characters being left behind in the dust due to an inability to maintain pace. However there are those who welcome the changes and consider them a natural extension of the characters growth in power and for bringing a higher dimension to the combat and excitement, and while they agree that hand signs and certain characters were abandoned in the process, they believe that complaints of strategy and tactics being abandoned are overblown.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Many fans consider Megumi Han's performance as young Obito to be a lot more memorable than that of his original voice actor, Sosuke Komori.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • The identity of Naruto's father. Didn't see THAT one coming.
  • Tobi is Obito. After it was confirmed Tobi wasn't Madara, he was the most obvious choice. So obvious, that many were pushing other Uchiha (most notably Izuna) as an alternative identity. This eventually died down when the chapters leading up to The Reveal made it so blatantly obvious that it was him that it literally could not have been anyone else. Not like anyone was surprised because his true name is literally an anagram of his fake name plus one letter. It's worse when written in kanji — it's the same two characters, but in reverse.
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • Hiruzen Sarutobi was once highly regarded by the fanbase for being a Cool Old Guy who was a Reasonable Authority Figure when dealing with Naruto's antics, and his Heroic Sacrifice was regarded as one of the saddest moments in the franchise's history. However, Sarutobi's reputation took a massive hit in Part II, where many of his failings during his second tenure as Hokage were revealed. Examples include enabling the Uchiha Clan Massacre as well as the village's ostracization of Naruto, the latter of which is a major sticking point among the fanbase as his inaction contributed to Naruto's troubled childhood. The anime doesn't help matters by revealing that Hiruzen promised to Naruto's parents while their bodies were not even in their graves that he would take care of Naruto, which paints him in a more negative light.
  • The entire Uchiha Clan underwent this twice over: During the manga's early run, many viewed them as sympathetic and badass. This provoked an enormous backlash as the story began to revolve around them more and they became widely viewed in The New '10s as everything wrong with "edgelord" characters alongside receiving common criticism for taking over the manga, particularly in the realm of villains. In the late 2010s and The New '20s, however, fans expressed that they were at least complex and interesting alongside giving the story direction; while debate still rages about how sympathetic they are and how well they're executed, many fans came to praise the Uchiha for being comparatively much more varied and interesting than the Otsutsuki Clan that followed them in the antagonist role.
  • Sasuke Uchiha was overwhelmingly considered an Unintentionally Unsympathetic wimp by fans as the series went on. After the second part wrapped and especially after the sequel's own controversial handling of the character (Particularly him being a Nice Guy in the New Era but receiving a Redemption Demotion), many fans have admitted they feel they were unfair to him, and the division around the character now centers around whether he was handled well rather than a sense that he was a terrible character unto himself.
  • In the 2000s and The New '10s, Itachi Uchiha was viewed as the badass of the Uchiha Clan and the franchise on the whole and a Well-Intentioned Extremist. In The New '20s, however, many fans (particularly those who began to sympathize with Sasuke more) came to feel that Itachi was a messy character who received too much Character Shilling and who had done more harm than good, particularly with his actions toward his own family. Whether this makes him more likable or less so is still debated.
  • Tobi was viewed, at the time of The Reveal surrounding him being Obito Uchiha, as a monstrous Unintentionally Unsympathetic character whose motives boiled down to being Driven by Envy and whose many, many atrocities aren't remotely explained by his backstory. Toward the start of the The New '20s, however, it became much more common to see fans arguing that when you look at his entire backstory, Tobi was a genuine Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who was more a victim of inconsistent writing and too much Character Shilling than anything else.
  • Sakura Haruno was widely considered The Scrappy during the series' run due to being seen as useless and annoying. While many still don't like her character, now that the series has long concluded along with the Ship-to-Ship Combat, many have come to see Sakura less as the scrappy and more as the biggest victim of Kishimoto's poor handling of female characters as many of the complaints fans raised about her were largely due to his inability to give her a compelling narrative or expand her characterization beyond being a satellite character to Naruto's and Sasuke's stories. Even her reputation for being useless is now largely discredited as she is acknowledged as one of the most powerful members of Konaha 12, but simply suffers from being constantly compared to Naruto, Sasuke, and Kakashi who received much more attention and development. This combined with her much more positive reception in Boruto, has lead many to reevaluate her character.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Obito/Tobi is absolutely not the mastermind of Mist's policy to exterminate bloodline users, largely because no such policy actually existed. While bloodline users were persecuted in the Water country, that was by ordinary people, not the Mist village; the only clan the Mist wiped out was the Kaguya clan, and that was only in self-defence. Nowhere in the manga is it stated that the Mist conspired to annihilate bloodlines or that he had any problem in particular with non-Uchiha bloodlines.
  • No, the Rinnegan isn't produced by mixing Uchiha and Senju DNA, but by mixing Asura and Indra's chakra. The fact that Madara's plan to acquire it was successful despite his initial assumption being wrong was pure luck.
  • Iwa is claimed to hate Minato and will kill anyone even related to him despite the fact that he's dead. It's usually the reason why Naruto's parentage is hidden. The Fourth Hokage has never even been mentioned by any Iwa Shinobi. What Iwa had was a "flee on sight" order regarding Minato during the last Shinobi War (when Iwa and Konoha were on opposing sides), because Minato was too powerful for any of them to stand a chance against, with the possible exception of the Tsuchikage. This doesn't indicate any grudge against him, just a tactical judgement that it's never wise to fight the One-Man Army on his own terms.
  • Kurenai has been claimed to have been in Hinata's life since she was a child. However multiple (anime-only) flashbacks say otherwise.
  • Naruto doesn't take place in the past, but in a Retro Universe. They have modern technologies like cellphones and video games but lack automobiles and guns. Boruto, which takes place less than two decades later, is straight-up modern in most respects.
  • The idea that you need to be twelve to become a genin is incorrect. There is no known minimum age to be a ninja. Kakashi, for example, is indicated to have become a chunin at the age of 6, meaning he was that old at the most when he became a genin.
  • Many people think that genin are all beginner ninja. That is not true. A ninja could theoretically never become a chunin. The chunin exams even showed a lot of adults taking the exam. Might Guy's father, however, showed that while adults can be permanent genin, it's seen as very embarrassing (similar to, say, never graduating high school or college).
  • No, Naruto is not immune to Genjutsu, even after getting into good terms with Kurama (It was even shown that he was vulnerable to the Infinite Tsukuyomi, which is why he, Kakashi and Sakura had to be shielded from it by Sasuke's Susanoo). What was actually said was that when a Jinchuriki who has control over their Biju and is in good terms with it, falls under a Genjutsu, its Biju could act as a partner and snap them out of it. So there could be cases when the Biju is either unable or, for any number of reasons, unwilling to snap them out of it (as it probably happened during The Last: Naruto the Movie); plus it was shown with Killer Bee that the Jinchuriki does experience the Genjutsu for a few seconds before being snapped back by the Biju, which with cases like the Tsukuyomi would be more than enough to take the Jinchuriki out (this is even remarked by Naruto during his and Killer Bee's encounter with a resurrected Itachi), and if the opponent uses genjutsu simultaneously on the Biju and Jinchuriki it will work as normal.
  • Due the fact that Danzo is a staunch adherent of Tobirama's teachings (though he misinterpreted them pretty badly) and his relationship with Hiruzen was a big part of his character, a lot of people are under the impression that Danzo was Tobirama's student and Hiruzen's teammate. He wasn't; Tobirama's students besides Hiruzen were Koharu and Homura. A flashback implied that Danzo's teammates were Kagami Uchiha and Torifu Akimichi, while the identity of his sensei was never revealed.
  • There's a widespread rumour that Kaguya was introduced as the True Final Boss of the story because Kishimoto had written himself into a corner by making the current Big Bad Madara Uchiha too powerful. While Kishimoto has admitted in an interview that he indeed made Madara too powerful, there were already instances of foreshadowing that there was a Greater-Scope Villain pulling the strings before the War arc even began, already hinting that Madara won't be the Final Boss.
  • A lot of people wrongly believe that the Flying Thundergod/Hiraishin Jutsu produces a golden flash of light upon being used, which is where Minato Namikaze's moniker "The Yellow Flash" comes from. Both the manga and anime shows not to be the case, with the users simply instantly vanishing and reappearing somewhere else without any special effect involved. Minato's nickname of the Yellow Flash came from the fact that he could move so fast (even without the Hiraishin) that most people only saw a yellow blur.
  • Izanagi, which retcons every negative outcome te user sustained throughout the jutsu's activation, works on a time-limit; it does not deactivate when the caster is injuried or dies, meaning the caster may die or get injured multiple times during the time-limit, the negative outcomes will be retconned. And the jutsu has different time-limits for different people; Danzo's was around one minute per eye and for Obito it was speculated to be around five minutes.
• Contested Sequel: Naruto Shippuden has become this over time due to the focus put on Sasuke and the Uchiha Clan, who happen to be highly divisive characters, which means that those who like them see this as a good thing, while the opposite goes for those who don't. Ironically, early on it was same because it took so long to put Sasuke on the screen at all, and his conflict with Naruto is, after all, the central conflict of the story. Another common complaint is the Serial Escalation of jutsu to near-Dragon Ball levels that left many ninja who weren't part of the most important bloodlines in the dust.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • Rock Lee and Might Guy. They may be eccentric fitness junkies obsessed with the power of youth, but damn can they kick ass at the same time. This is especially so with Might Guy with his epic beatdown on Madara.
  • The entire Hidden Cloud Village, from a Jinchuriki of the Hachibi who prefers rapping over fighting, the Raikage who uses wrestling moves and being able to play Sasuke like a fool, to his bodyguard who seems lazy but is actually a strong and capable bodyguard who is next in line for the Raikage.
• Creator Worship: Masashi Kishimoto gets a bit of this, but in particular gets a lot of it from the video game company CyberConnect2, who makes a lot of good licensed games based on the Naruto that even Kishimoto himself loves and approves of.
• Crossover Ship: Along with almost everyone in the series, Naruto is shipped with countless characters from other franchises. Korra is one of the most popular thanks to fans who dislike Naruto's Love Triangle with Sakura and Sasuke and for those who dislike Korra's love interests from the early seasons. But to name a few other characters Naruto is shipped with; Nanoha Takamichi, Evangeline A.K. MacDowell and Asuna, Orihime Inoue and Yoruichi Shihoin and Moka Akashiya. Or All of them at the same time.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • Gaara seems like an uncontrollable sociopathic monster during the Chuunin Exams, until we learn his backstory and discover he is the For Want Of A Nakama counterpart of Naruto. He mellows out afterwards.
  • Pain was driven by these lengths by three main incidents in his youth which shattered his early idealism and dreams of peace.
  • Kabuto gets one of these too. Forced to kill the woman who raised and loved him as a son in self defense who didn't even recognize him as she had been brainwashed to not recongnize him by Danzo.
  • To say nothing of Obito Uchiha, aka Tobi. Found by the madman known as Madara and forced to watch as the love of his life killed herself by stepping in front of his best friend's jutsu, all to save their village, and then there's the Uchiha Clan's Curse of Hatred... you really can't blame the guy for going insane.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Fans speculate that Kaguya Ōtsutsuki has some form of disorder due to her aloof nature and not normally showing emotions, appearing near-emotionless around the father of her sons, not even showing visible emotion around the servant she was attached to until the girl died trying to protect Kaguya. When other members of the clan appear in Boruto they act much more human, albeit as Smug Snake villains.

E-F

• Ending Fatigue: The final arc, taking a day and a half In-Universe, went on for about three years. The initial action mainly serves to give the side characters A Day in the Limelight, with the overall plot not really advancing until Naruto arrives. Then the fighting turns into a tug-of-war marathon, with each side endlessly churning out increasingly powerful techniques. During this, the actual main antagonist changed at least seven times, with some villains getting the focus multiple times each, and with several of them declaring that everything has gone All According to Plan for them. When the war finally ends, Sasuke declares he will take over the world to reform the shinobi system, triggering the long-awaited final battle between him and Naruto. While the author had already stated that the final battle would be between them and Naruto, it still felt like yet another extension to an already bloated arc.
  • After the end of the war, the anime took a detour to adapt the Konoha Hiden novels, before finally ending the series on episode 500 with Naruto and Hinata's wedding.
• Epileptic Trees: Fans who dislike the ending like to theorize that Madara really did win and every event since Tsukuyomi's activation has been an illusion, with the heroes still imprisoned in the dream world. Never mind that this has continually been Jossed to hell and back.
• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • Sakura Haruno. Her ending sees her married to her longtime crush Sasuke Uchiha and having a daughter, Sarada. Great! Except for the fact that in the intervening years after Sasuke had pulled a Face–Heel Turn, he succumbed to the Curse of Hatred that plagued the Uchiha clan for generations, attacked Sakura both physically and psychologically on several occasions, and tried to murder her friends. But after turning Face again, he develops genuine affection for her and marries her in his travels around the world. At one point, Sakura becomes pregnant with their daughter, Sarada. After she gives birth at one of Orochimaru's hideouts, they return in Konoha to raise their daughter together. Unfortunately, he had to leave again to investigate Kaguya, while Sarada was very young. Sakura, has no other choice, but to raise Sarada alone. Years pass, which means that Sakura doesn't see Sasuke for many years, and he is away from seeing his daughter growing up. In time, Sarada grows being conflicted about Sasuke and distrustful of her own mother, after being kept in the dark for her own safety for too many years. Most fans believe that this was another unnecessary drama, and that Kishimoto could have just made Sasuke leave from time to time, as him being parted from his family for so long didn't affect the plot in the long run. The fact that Kishimoto created this storyline as a "Take That!" to troll the people who couldn't comprehend that Sarada was Sasuke and Sakura's daughter, didn't calmed the spirits, making Sasusaku divisive even among their shippers.
  • Many fans were also unsatisfied with the fates of the villains. Of the Big Bad Ensemble members, only Danzo, Kaguya and Zetsu receive severe punishments; the rest are either forgiven in death (Nagato, Obito, Madara), get a slap on the wrist (Orochimaru) or just plain aren't punished at all (Kabuto).
• Estrogen Brigade: The sheer amount of pretty boys definitely helped the series to have a fairly big female fanbase.
• Even Better Sequel: A variant example. The series itself has been continuous since the beginning, and thus has never had need of a true sequel. However, after the drought of Filler (over eighty continuous episodes, nearly two year's worth) after the animated episodes Overtook the Manga, there was a Retool to coincide with the series' Time Skip, leading into Naruto: Shippuuden. Much like the manga it derives from, it jumps in quality to become much more mature, relying far less on toilet humor and greatly emphasizing Character Development. The producers also learned their lesson from the Great Filler Drought, interjecting a filler arc in between every 1-2 Canon story arcs so that there's no chance of Overtaking the Manga. These filler arcs are worth mentioning, in that they are actual story arcs of fairly decent quality, unlike the pre-Time Skip episodes which were mostly stand-alone slapstick.
• Evil Is Cool: All members of the Akatsuki fall under this in varying degrees. Also Madara Uchiha though it depends on the reader.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With One Piece and Bleach, especially since it has a Dueling Shows dynamic with the former.
  • With Hunter × Hunter, with some fans even accusing it of ripping it off. Ironic, considering Kishimoto and Yoshihiro Togashi are friends in real life.
  • A point of contention with parts of the Cowboy Bebop fandom is a short snippet of the fight between Naruto and Neji in episode 60 of the anime, which has identical choreography to a part of a fight in the Cowboy Bebop movie[1]◊. The sticking point is whether the segment was intended as an Homage or not.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • In the Shipping Fandom, ALL sides (especially the Big Three NaruSaku, NaruHina, and SasuSaku, as well as NaruSasu) like to ignore some parts of the manga that support other couples. Some (extreme) NaruHina and SasuSaku fans refuse to believe/remember any chapters/pages that could hint at NaruSaku. Some (also extreme) NaruSaku fans downplay Hinata's actions (especially the Pain battle). Goes even further when the characters themselves suffer from discontinuity (particularly Sakura who suffers to the extreme) in that thoughts, feelings, words, and actions are ignored just because it could be used as support for the other pairing.
  • The fandom has gone into apoplectic fits trying to reconcile sudden plot twist after the battle between Sasuke and Itachi. The problem isn't so much the idea of him having been secretly loyal to Konoha all these years, but the fact that there was nothing whatsoever in the manga even suggesting such a thing, making the revelation seem like an Ass Pull out of left field.
    • After said revelation, Sasuke haters tended to forget that Itachi pretty much destroyed his sanity. The fan discontinuity from both ends of the Itachi-reaction spectrum was pretty astounding.
    • Some fans are just disgusted by the notion of genocide as a peace-keeping measure (he killed every single Uchiha but Sasuke, including civilians, children, etc).
  • After Chapter 449, some fans seem to just tell themselves that Pain never invaded Konoha. Konoha's a crater now because of a sinkhole that appeared offscreen.
    • Those that did enjoy the Invasion arc usually don't have good things to say about the anime's rendition of it. Of special note is Shippuden episode 167, which was massively criticized for its art style.
    • Due to how controversial the later arcs are that occur after, many consider Naruto returning to Konoha after dealing with Pain to be the true ending of the series. The anime successfully makes it feel like a series ending in episode 175 thanks to its use of "Departure to the Front Lines" over a series of flashbacks regarding what Naruto accomplished throughout the series until that point, as well as the villagers slowly warming up to Naruto along the way.
    • In general, a great number of fans (or haters) of any characters tend to reject pieces of Canon that show the characters in a negative (or positive) light.
  • The Fourth Shinobi World War Arc as a whole cuts this. Partly due to its sheer length and because the plot takes increasingly bizarre turns with the main villain constantly changing. (You think it's Madara? Nope, it's this Kaguya woman who was only just introduced 40 chapters ago!) Characters pulling out new abilities through asspulls to keep the story moving. The whole arc is widely regarded by fans as a mess.
  • With Chapter 700, some fans (mostly Die For Our Ships, although non-shippers are also pretty vocal) are denying the existence of the epilogue. This is mostly due to the lack of resolution to political issues, the number of Ship Sinking and what appears to be an Esoteric Happy Ending.
  • The continuation manga Boruto, not only for bringing the series into Franchise Zombie territory, but also for apparently killing off Naruto.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation:
  • The revelation that chakra came from a literal Forbidden Fruit rubbed some people the wrong way. The story feels out of place, with a sudden Biblical Forbidden Fruit background amidst all the Japanese mythology and Buddhism, as well as adding a Plot Hole regarding how people can die from the loss of chakra that they never had in the first place.
  • The Revelation that Naruto and Sasuke were the reincarnations of the sons of the Sage of Six Paths and that the entire conflict between them was preordained to happen. Many dislike this twist since it devalues their rivalry and relationship by having it not be the result of their own distinct conflicting characterizations and backgrounds, but rather having it simply be another occurrence of a long line of rivals in a conflict that only exists because Destiny says so. It's not uncommon for fans to use this revelation as proof that Neiji was correct in his belief that the Ninja world is governed by destiny.
  • In tandem with the previous explanations, many did not like the explanation regarding what Black Zetsu was; essentially he is the third son of Kaguya who manipulated every conflict across Shinobi History for the sake of resurrecting his mother. Many found this twist a cheap way to remove Madara and Obito from the story and replace them with the far less popular Kaguya, and lend the entire story an element of artificially since none of it occurred naturally without Black Zetsu's involvement.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Madara's fixation with Hashirama was so big it led many fans to interpret it as Madara being in love with him.
• Franchise Original Sin: Even in early episodes you could already see that Sasuke was going to be really important and tips about how the Uchiha clan's Myth Arc is key were dropped. Then Sasuke became really important, and the Uchiha clan's Myth Arc swallowed the plot. It's a sore spot between fans whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or something in between.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With My Hero Academia, due to them covering similar themes, the fact that the manga started around the same time Naruto's ended, leading to some looking to it as something to fill the void, and the fact that Kōhei Horikoshi was a fan of Naruto and named it as one of his inspirations.
  • With The Legend of Korra, heavily because the two series ended in the same year.
  • With Queen's Blade of all things, despite the two series having little in common besides being action oriented. That said, some of Naruto's female characters wouldn't be out place in Queen's Blade, like Ino Yamanaka, Tsunade and Hinata Hyuga.

G-L

• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • While the anime is popular in Japan, it's even bigger in America and Europe (and the manga is comparatively more popular, though as with all manga sales they are much lower in foreign markets).
    • Special note for the anime is it became quite the crazy Cash-Cow Franchise not seen in America since the Sailor Moon/Dragon Ball Z/Pokémon craze of the 90's.
  • Orochimaru is met with better reception in the West than in Japan, with many fans seeing him as a far more interesting and entertaining villain than the Uchihas.
  • A lot of American fans love Might Guy for being both completely loopy and also a hardcore, skull-cracking badass who spends most of his screentime beating the shit out of people with his bare hands.
• Glurge: The central lesson is that The Power of Friendship can overcome anything, as long as enough people support. But it's delivered so ridiculously that it's impossible to apply it to real-life; by the end, the story believes so strongly in Defeat Means Friendship that it works on villains who were previously trying to wipe out humanity and did nothing to deserve such redemption. The show tried to mitigate this by bringing us Kaguya, a Physical God, who comes out of nowhere to retroactively excuse the other villains' crimes.
• Gotta Ship 'Em All: Every character in this series is shipped with somebody, EVERYONE.
• Growing the Beard: Any moment in Part I that serves the methodical advancement from crass jokes/filler to epic sacrifices can qualify, but the introduction of Orochimaru and his ambitious plot are probably the turning point.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When Rock Lee was left crippled by Gaara during the Chuunin preliminaries, he was thought to be left with a Career-Ending Injury until he's healed by Tsunade. Years later, his sensei Might Gai would also end up with Career-Ending Injury when he used all Eight Gates. Unlike Lee, however, his injury was permanent and can't be healed. Fortunately, spin-offs would show that it does not make him any less badass for it.
  • When Naruto first defeated Neji in the chuunin exam, he convinced him that he isn't bound by fate, just as Naruto is able to defeat him even though he is a failure, while Neji is born with a pedigree that makes him strong. Later we learn that Naruto's father was the Fourth Hokage and his mother came from a clan that was related to the first two Hokages, making his pedigree even better than Neji's, and meaning that if fate existed, it was fated for Neji to be defeated by Naruto. What makes this worse is that Naruto is The Chosen One of a prophecy, destined to either save the world or destroy it. No matter which way you spin it, Neji turned out to be right in the end.
  • Nagato/Pain's plan involved using the combined power of all nine Tailed Beasts within the Gedo Mazou statue, so that he can use a kinjutsu powerful enough to wipe out a nation, pressuring people to peace, for prolonged periods of time. Already it sounds disturbing, so that could possibly be worse than that? Well, later Tobi revealed that the Gedo Mazou is a vessel for the Ten-Tailed Beast! And now let's think about how Nagato could use a demon whose chakra is so evil and which according to Kurama, can create entire continents and swallowed whole oceans? How he planned to use it as a weapon to use to wipe out a nation and leave it until war broke out again and one side got to it first, would have reintroduced the world to unspeakable horrors, all in the name of world peace? When Minato told Naruto that Nagato was probably an Unwitting Pawn to Tobi, he wasn't wrong.
  • In Chapter 244, after Kakashi passes out while fighting the Rock ninjas, and having to leave Obito behind under a pile of rubble, two sentences come up, "Have I died?" and "Where am I?" The first happened on a black screen after Kakashi passed out. The second appears right after that on the next page on a star filled sky, we see Kakashi wake up, and assume he thought those words. In Chapter 601 (YEARS later in-story and in the real world) those words are repeated as Tobi flashes back to when he awoke half-dead, and missing his right half of his body, Madara having saved him.
  • In his heart-to-heart talk with Nagato, Naruto promises to him and Konan that he will make Amegakure into a better place once he becomes Hokage. Come Boruto, it's revealed that Amegakure fell into a far worse state following Nagato and Konan's deaths, making Naruto's promise come off as hollow and only reinforces their views of how smaller countries like Amegakure kept getting stepped on by their more powerful neighbors.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Although it's a Filler episode, in episode 159 of the original anime, Naruto and Hinata have a cute moment together when he eats one of her riceballs and compliments her by telling her she's going to make a good wife someday. Nine years after that episode aired, the manga ended with an epilogue revealing that the two did get Happily Married and started a family. Then, a month after the manga ended, a canonical movie was released, and it showed how Naruto realized his love for Hinata and how they finally became an Official Couple.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Fans of Jiraiya deny that he died, despite the fact that he was impaled through the chest repeatedly, lost copious amounts of blood, had emotional flashbacks reflecting on his failures and accomplishments in life, transferred his knowledge of the enemy to a frog messenger for Naruto, and sunk to the bottom of a lake while his vision faded to blackness. The fan rationale? It was just one of his shadow clones (even though those would disappear after even one of those things happened).
  • Itachi's death was questioned, despite Tobi implicitly stating that his body is lying around somewhere by saying Sasuke could have taken his eyes. Made even worse during the winter break of 2009/2010, when he made a "reappearance" which readers could tell was just genjutsu from a mile away. And then completely finished off when Kabuto used Impure World Resurrection, which only works on the dead, to briefly bring back zombie-Itachi.
  • Many fans believed that Obito Uchiha was just hiding, as Tobi of all people. They were right.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the Shippuden dub, Chiyo is voiced by Barbara Goodson. Her grandson, Sasori is voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch. That's right, Rita Repulsa and Adam are doing role reversal (Goodson as one of the heroes, and Bosch as a villain).
  • The joke when Choji sees Naruto's Rasenshuriken and assumes, based on the name, that it was a projectile attack (it isn't). Nearly one hundred chapters later, it shows up again and now it is.
  • Naruto the Movie: Road to Ninja is a Shippuden movie set in an alternate universe. The difference? Naruto's parents are alive and Sakura's are dead. Now remember that comment Sakura made in Episode 3 of the original anime about Naruto and his behavior because of a lack of parents and it turns into Gallows Humor.
  • Back in the first chapter/episode, Naruto is doing graffiti all over the Hokage Monument. One of them is his dad.
  • Chapter 599 revealed that Obito is the Big Bad Tobi, while in the English dub Obito was voiced by Vic Mignogna who also voiced "serious Tobi" in one of the video games. Consequently, Tobi might not be a good boy now, but he once was one.
  • In the preview for episode 25 attached to the end of episode 24, Naruto is freaking out over Part I of the Chuunin Exams, worried that he'll be "the oldest living Genin". As of The Last, Naruto's still a Genin and it looks like he's gonna stay that way. Not that it really matters.
  • In one Omake, Sakura calls out the staff because the current ending only features Hinata. The omake ends with her angrily demanding her own ending - which she got for the very next ending.
  • Naruto's fight with Gaara has him and Gamabunta do a joint transformation into an image of the kyuubi, though just to use its tails and claws for gripping. During the Fourth Shinobi World War Arc, Naruto gains the ability to turn into the real thing.
  • Akira Ishida (Gaara of the Desert's Japanese VA) is the defacto voice actor in Japan for Luke Skywalker. Luke was raised in Tatooine, a desert planet. Hiroshi Iwasaki (Shukaku's Japanese VA and Gaara's Tailed Beast) is also the defacto Japanese VA for C-3PO in the same franchise. Extra hilarity both Shukaku and C-3PO are the opposite of each other. Even more hilarious is the fact Gaara's life is basically what could happened if Luke was raised by his father Anakin aka Darth Vader, rather by his uncles and killing (a resurrected) Vader by himself, rather than Emperor Palpatine.
  • Tesshō Genda's role as the Kurama The Nine-tailed Fox is pretty hilarious if you take into account he voiced some roles with some odd relation with him voicing a giant-sized fox.
    • As Kratos in Japanese: Kratos' main speciality is killing creatures like Kurama for breakfast, and that's before going against gods.
    • As Foghorn Leghorn in Japanese: You know, foxes eats poultry.
    • As Stacker Pentecost in Japanese: Stacker's job is stopping apocalypses in a Humongous Mecha against the Kaiju. Kurama is a Kaiju-sized fox who causes them.
    • As Younger Toguro: Well, Kurama has his name because of that series.
  • There are a number of dramatic scenes where Naruto proudly proclaims◊ he's going to become hokage no matter what◊. Which kinda gives the impression that being the Hokage is awesome. Well, Naruto eventually becomes hokage and it turns out the job isn't all it's cracked up to be in the slightest◊.
  • One FOX "Animation Domination" short had the idea that Naruto and Sasuke's final battle would just be them screaming each other's names and literally kissing and making up. The final battle is pretty much this, but the "kiss and make up" part is metaphorical.
  • In the English dub, Sasuke was voiced by Yuri Lowenthal, who would later voice Spider-Man. In other words, Sasuke finally became an Avenger.
  • Guy's long-winded Big "OMG!" after realizing that he amounted to an Unknown Rival for Kakashi is more hilarious years after its airing now that his Japanese VA became the go-to replacement of a certain VA made famous in the 2010's for a role that requires tons of "OH MY GOD!!"s.
• Hype Backlash: This is probably the most popular ninja-based anything ever and also one of the most looked-down upon in terms of how much of a "generic shonen manga" it is, and the backlash from both directions is proportionate.
• I Knew It!:
  • It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Naruto is the son of the Fourth Hokage, which is something that's a common fact for the entire audience. How people in-universe haven't realized this when it's so obvious is still left unanswered.
  • Tobi being Obito had been a fan theory circulating for years, until it was proven right in Chapter 599.
    • Zetsu being involved in Obito's survival had also been guessed several years before due to this.
    • Almost somewhat of a subversion though. Tobi being Obito was considered by many fans to be so obvious they disregarded the idea outright as way too obvious for the author to do.
    • It's also a Double Subversion, as Tobi seemingly Jossed it by claiming to be Madara Uchiha, only for them to be revealed to be two separate people later on. With Tobi being confirmed to be Obito after all.
  • Another theory that had been pretty popular for quite a while and also confirmed to be true was Naruto and Hashirama being reincarnations of the Younger Son while Sasuke and Madara being reincarnations of the Elder Son.
  • With the epilogue and the Canon movie The Last: Naruto the Movie, Naruto/Hinata shippers were proven correct.
• Informed Wrongness: Kishimoto remarked in an interview that his reason for why Sakura still ended up with Sasuke, despite him being an antagonist for the majority of the series, repeatedly trying to kill her and her friends, and even telling her to her face that she was an idiot to have feelings for him, is that she would've been a bad person if she'd given up on her feelings. Shipping wars aside, this really doesn't hold water: her feelings for him even when they were on the same team largely consisted of a schoolgirl crush on the neighborhood hottie, a boy whom she barely knew and shared essentially no meaningful interactions with before he left the team. Not to mention the fact that it reeks of an abused girlfriend convinced she can change the man she's with if she just tries hard enough. Other characters give up on relationships throughout the manga without being portrayed as wrong: Naruto abandoning his own crush on Sakura herself was portrayed as a sign of maturity on his part.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Before the anime's release in the West, Naruto was hotly anticipated, beloved by the anime/manga fandom, and heavily requested for import, second only to One Piece. After its release in the West and subsequent evolution to Cash-Cow Franchise, Naruto started to suffer large amounts of Hype Backlash with detractors deeming it a "generic shonen series" and bashing popular characters such as the Uchihas and the Akatsuki at every possible opportunity, essentially turning Naruto into the anime equivalent of Call of Duty. However, this has subsided as the franchise's heyday has come and gone.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Sasuke abandons Konoha right before the Time Skip, and the mission to bring him back ends in failure. Sasuke actually spends most of the story away from the village, and one of the overarching plot points in Part 2 is Naruto's struggle to bring him back, so few people are going to be surprised by this.
  • Itachi was actually a Well-Intentioned Extremist who slaughtered his own clan to protect Konoha from their coup d'état.
  • Tobi not only isn't the real Madara Uchiha, he's also Obito. Both were huge spoilers when first revealed, but by the time they were animated, both facts had become almost impossible to hide. The fact that "Tobi is Obito" is a very popular fan theory ever since Tobi's introduction is just icing on the cake.
  • Naruto's father is the Fourth Hokage. This was regarded as common knowledge long before it was officially confirmed.
  • The final Official Couples: Naruto/Hinata, Sasuke/Sakura, Shikamaru/Temari, Sai/Ino and Chouji/Karui.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
  • Naruto. While most commonly shipped with him have varied from Sakura (whom he had a one-sided crush on up until Chapter 469), Sasuke (due to the massive Ho Yay between them), and Hinata (due to her having genuine feelings for him and then the Unresolved Sexual Tension they developed in the Fourth Shinobi World War Arc), it doesn't stop there. He's shipped with almost everyone in the cast; from Tsunade (whom is old enough to be his mother) to Temari, Tenten and Ino (all of whom he rarely spoke to on-screen), and almost any other character you could name.
  • Hinata, surprisingly. She used to provide the trope image in fact. Shipping her with Naruto is the most common, but she's also been shipped with Kiba and Shino, Neji, Gaara, and Sasuke, among others. For the record, Hinata barely has any interaction with Sasuke in the series.

M-N

• Macekre: The German dub, to the extreme. No visible wounds, erased weaponry, Bloodless Carnage (which becomes especially grating when for example Neji gets shot through with two gigantic arrows), Never Say "Die", and blood changed into sweat, tears and spit. Additionally, the dialogue is atrocious.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Teuchi, the owner of Ichiraku Ramen, has gathered a massive following amongst fans, considering to be the most powerful character in the series. Fans like to joke that Naruto gets his Next Tier Power Ups from eating his ramen, or that he is Tobi's true identity. For a while his name was thrown out there for contender of the 6th Edo Tensei coffin, because Tobi had every right to be scared of his lethal godliness. Then when Tobi's identity was questioned, Ramen Guy was another contender because who else could orchestrate the series' events like this? No body would have seen the sharingan because he always squints. But that was thrown down because the fans got over their joke and agreed that Tobi couldn't be Ramen Guy. If he was, Tobi would have taken over the world LOOONNG ago.
  • Madara Uchiha is a more serious case. While he is legitimately an extremely powerful shinobi, his Plot Armor and ability to access new powers takes things up a notch. It escalated to the point that Kishimoto even commented that he had written himself into a corner by making Madara too powerful. Repeat, Madara was so powerful that not even the author could find a plausible way to defeat him. Not only that, his entry into the series proper was considered to be the point where the ninjutsu transitioned to Dragon Ball-esque levels of destruction. As a result, fans began comparing Madara to Chuck Norris, listing off many random feats that Madara could be able to pull off.
  • Due in large part to him starting a chain of events that ultimately caused Sasuke to defect from Konoha by letting it slip that Itachi came by, thus bringing the story to where it is now, Aoba Yamashiro has been hailed as a badass Spanner in the Works or Chess Master by the fans. His legend grew when he showed up again with a team of reinforcements after two major villains succeeded in killing a major secondary character. The villains were ordered to retreat shortly thereafter, but that didn't stop the fans from claiming that they had, in reality, ran in terror at the sight of Aoba and his Murder of Crows no Jutsu. It's worth noting that the databooks state his favorite phrase is in fact "Just as planned". He's also stated to be the "door master", generally with shoops showing him killing people by opening a door.
  • For a time on GameFAQs, a running joke on the Naruto boards claimed that the strongest person in the manga was Iruka Umino. The man who did little more than get hit in the spine with a giant shuriken. Ironically, this is one of the reasons fans cite as him being near immortal, as well as claiming that he possesses the Rinnegan and can dual-wield two BF Zabuza swords, which are memetically mutated into insanely powerful weapons of mass destruction which "cannot be beat" (based on an ad for a toy of one which accomplished the feat of tearing rice paper).
  • Einstein's original theory of relativity said: If Might Guy kicks you, your relatives will feel it. Humorously, near the end of the manga, Might Guy unleashes a technique that bends space and time.
  • It is all part of Shikamaru's plan. ALL of it; no matter how strange or farfetched. Its All According to Plan. An excerpt from this thesis that meticulously details exactly why Shikamaru is hot shit:
    "8. Number Eight, He fucking moves shadows. Do you even understand that. Moves...Shadows. THEY ARE FUCKING SHADOWS. IF HE WANTED TO HE WOULD FUCKING TAKE THAT SHADOW ON THE MOON AND PULL THE EARTH AND MAKE A FUCKING EPIC COLLISION."
  • And then there's GARuto... His latest form, Tailed Beast Mode◊, has a longrobe. Made of chakra. So far, no character has managed to look that awesome (and open a skyscraper-sized can of whoopass while doing so!).
  • The Raikage was badass from the word "Go", and it now seems Kishimoto is trying to outdo himself each week. So far he's broken a table by accident, broken through a wall instead of taking the door, tanking a Chidori with little more than a scratch, nearly killed Sasuke, survived Jugo's Beam Spam, punched through Amaterasu to get to Sasuke (nearly killed him again!) and chopped his own burning arm off with his hand. BAD. ASS. Dude doesn't even have a name yet His name is A. It's now generally accepted that his punches are nearing Falcon-level, and can solve pretty much anything. ANYTHING. He also broke the "Zabuza sword", and then he decapitated Kisame, WITH HIS ARM! And not even his good arm (because he didn't have it anymore)!
  • A gets it from his Badass father who faced 10000 shinobi BY HIMSELF for three days!!!
  • The entire Hidden Cloud Village can be considered memetically badass, due to spawning a lot of badass ninjas (Word of God has actually stated they're tied for having the biggest army, and have the best economic strength), and everybody claims that their ninjas can destroy a village with one pebble, due to a joke that happened in Chapter 450 when someone from the Cloud Village thought they accidentally did exactly that.
  • A more specific form of this is how some joke that Karin has "Kage level dodging skills" for how she was able to stand in middle of a battle against multiple Kage without getting injured in the crossfire. It may also be called "Kage level survival skills" and also refer to how she was set on fire once (and by Amaterasu fire to boot) and later getting kicked across a bridge and hitting both the ground and a wall from about 50m in the air, again with minimal visible injury, and then surviving being impaled by a sword made of electricity.
  • The Fanon said that, Tora the cat was said to be a descendant of Nibi the Demon Cat.
  • Paperwork can defeat even the mightiest Kage.
  • Drunken Rock Lee is unstoppable; not even Madara can No-Sell him.
  • The real reason Kisame committed suicide is because he knew he could not stand a chance against Yamato's Headgear. Yamato's headgear is so badass, it is the only non-human/demon to receive any votes in the latest popularity contest.
  • Hashirama is this in-universe for very, VERY, VEEERRRRRYYYY good reason.
  • Some people joke that Tenten will be the hero of story, because she's THE minor character among the Konoha 11. Other claims that she has infinite screentime but that the normal eye can't see it. She's helping out the heroes in the shadows. That being said, she overlaps with Memetic Loser.
  • Itachi has entered your mind the minute you start fighting him. He's called the Solo King for a reason. He can defeat anyone, be it Minato, Kaguya, Madara, etc...
• Memetic Loser:
  • Sakura is considered to be the biggest and most prominent example in the series. Aside from being a victim of a case of Can't Catch Up with the rest of Team 7, she's also mocked for being The Load whose uselessness ends up causing more problems for the story and forced many characters to save her instead. The biggest example is her failure to destroy Madara's Rinnegan in Obito's possession in time, despite her expertise as a medical ninja, which snowballs into Madara being able to cast the Infinite Tsukuyomi and Kaguya's revival. Combined with jokes at her expense in anime filler and Kishimoto viewing her as a Creator's Pest, Sakura has become the whipping girl of the series.
  • Kurenai gets some of this for trying to use genjutsu on Itachi, with predictable results.
  • While Sakura still had her highlights, barely anything could be said for Tenten. She has the least amount of screentime out of the Konoha 12, with her first major battle being on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle against Temari (which in the manga was completely offscreen). The climax of the war arc rubs salt to the wound by having her gain possession of the Six Paths Treasure Tools which could be used against Madara, only for Madara's headband to destroy the scroll by accident. Her primary characterisation amongst fans is to be the Only Sane Man and Straight Man to her more eccentric teammates. Unlike Sakura, however, Tenten's status actually makes her more popular amongst the fans due to seeing her as The Woobie.
  • Surprisingly, Sasuke has developed this reputation lately (at least in the West), and is viewed by many people as everything wrong with characters who appeal primarily to 12-year old Hot Topic customers. This interpretation became especially popular in early 2019 with the "choking Sasuke" meme, where the scene of Itachi performing a Neck Lift on Sasuke was edited to feature dozens◊ of◊ unrelated◊ characters◊ (who would logically be far below his power level) strangling him instead of Itachi.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Orochimaru, for his tendency to lust over the bodies of teenage boys.
  • The 5th Mizukage, for her tendency to cuddle her teenage bodyguard and the rather interesting comments she makes about Gaara and Sasuke.
  • Itachi. While his interactions with Naruto and Sasuke gave off this vibe, a certain event in Chapter 386 cemented his status as this.
  • Hinata of all people has fans who don't let her stalking habits go. Never mind that she's actually a Downplayed version of Stalker with a Crush and nowhere near as bad as Karin is to Sasuke.
  • The Raikage has recently become one, due to the Cloud being responsible for abducting Hinata and Kushina while they were children, resulting in fans jokingly depicting the Raikage as having a thing for little girls.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Due to being a Base-Breaking Character, Sasuke is often painted as being purely evil, ungrateful and a toxic character, who commits crimes for fun instead of being seen him as a Tragic Hero/Tragic Villain who was traumatized by the Uchiha massacres. Most fans forget there are three characters who are responsible for messing up his mind by manipulating and mind raping him, which resulted in him becoming a mentally unstable dangerous criminal ninja.
  • This often happens to Sakura, who tends to be painted as a psycho girl whose temper goes completely out of control when it comes to Sasuke. This is largely the result of the anime flanderizing her Tsundere traits. However, depending on how fans see her, she can also be portrayed as a Memetic Loser when it comes to shipping.
• Mind Game Ship: Naruto is practically brimming with this sort of thing. It doesn't help that most of the characters show signs of having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of exceptional note is Orochimaru with many people, especially Sasuke. Later on, Pain and Naruto have traces of this, to an extent. As do Itachi and Sasuke. Additionally, any Kabuto pairing is bound to have some of this- he usually presents himself as this harmless, bumbling oaf with Nerd Glasses, but is in fact in league with this villain, and...well...poor Naruto's look of betrayal when he realizes this is almost too much.
  • Naruto also gets this with Obito. The latter tries to pull a We Can Rule Together on him and is determined to break his ideals down since he used to be a lot like him. The Naruto wiki even refers to it as a "fixation".
    • Naruto's whole innocence, gullibility and inspiring-Messiah-like outlook are a lot of reasons why a lot of fanfics either a) mind-screw him over, or b) pair [insert name here]xNaruto ... and not the other way around... It's probably why the author likes to break him so much too.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Many fans wanted to see Naruto kill Pain/Nagato just for the sake of revenge. The entire point of the arc (and most of the series) is that revenge is a form of cheap satisfaction that never solves anything, which just leads to more revenge, and that some problems are best solved without violence (and if Naruto killed him he would have proved his belief that people are incapable of overcoming their hatred or showing mercy to those that have hurt them to be completely right). Oddly enough, these fans also seem surprised by his tragic backstory, even though it had already been mentioned, and even though Naruto never accepted Freudian Excuses as justifications for misdeeds, often criticizing the logic behind them.
  • Whilst many Naruto fans see Sasuke as a Smug Snake who eats babies and enjoys kicking puppies, others see him as a badass with absolutely no flaws, who is not emotionally unstable in the least and who simply does bad things because he's "cool" and "badass" and "evil". Both sets of fans are wrong, as it's pretty clear that while he's supposed to be sympathetic, or to have been sympathetic once before he crossed the Moral Event Horizon, most of his life choices are shown in quite a negative light. In an interview, Kishimoto finally weighed in on what he thinks of Sasuke's Misaimed Fandom; while he denies Sasuke being an actual villain, he also slammed anyone who tried to rationalize his actions and said they were not justifiable.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Most complaints about Naruto's English voice being "so annoying" ignore that the character is a Bratty Half-Pint and state that it just doesn't show up as much when listening to his voice in another language. Instead of sounding like he has a sore throat in English... he sounds like he has a perma-screech in Japanese.
  • The dub supposedly replaced a swastika on Neji's head with an X. Except the anime did that originally.
  • The dub even got blamed for some art changes made for the Japanese DVDs!
  • Upset shipping fans have accused Studio Pierrot of Executive Meddling for the final Official Couple; when in reality, Masashi Kishimoto has stated in several post-series interviews that Naruto ending up with Hinata was entirely his idea, and he had planned on Naruto/Hinata being the main Official Couple since the early stages of the manga.
• Moe: Hinata is one of the most popular examples of this.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Orochimaru probably crossed it in his fight with the Third Hokage for the viewers. In-universe, that's peanuts compared to the extremely perverse things he had been up to long before that. In fact, nearly everything that he does, but the kidnapping and experimenting on multiple people, callously discarding them when they became unnessary and taking over their bodies, takes the cake.
  • Black Zetsu with his manipulating Indra and other Uchihas, being at least partially responsible for their Curse of Hatred, instigating wars and conflicts all to free Kaguya Ootsutsuki, also deserves mention.
• Narm Charm:
  • Episode 28 of Shippuden. Team Guy, who has been fighting a hopeless battle against their own, never-tiring clones so far, turns the tide after a speech from Lee. What he tells them is.....to be stronger than they were yesterday, which is apparently the Team's motto. Essentially, he is telling the team just to punch harder. Corny as hell? Sure. But given the heartwarming speeches everyone gives, the epic soundtrack playing, and the ensuing asskicking, it's awesome nonetheless.
  • Episode 167 of Naruto Shippuden. Full stop. It goes from full-on Looney Tunes action at various points, including the "hammer person into the ground with huge boulder without killing them" and "Road Runner legs" effects, to being absolutely awesome with incredibly high-speed and experimental animation techiques put on full display. The fight between the Kyubi and Pain in the forest and Pain's ensuing Chibaku Tensei is almost a mood whiplash after the previously mentioned Looney Tunes segment.
  • Sasuke's Evil Laugh in Chapter 483 and Shippuden episode 214 is Narm Charm. It's hilarious mainly because it's Sasuke but it also shows how far gone he is.
  • Itachi's epic freak out may be ridiculous in the manga though since it was an act, this may have been the point; it's also seemingly the terrifying instant when a normally emotionless, albeit already evil, character reveals his true nature as a complete and utter psychopath. In the anime, both Hideo Ishikawa and Crispin Freeman's respective performances are so utterly bone-chilling that the scene becomes much less ridiculous than it was in the manga.
  • Gaara screaming "BLOOD! IT'S MY BLOOD!" in the dub is so over the top it's almost laughable... But how genuinely terrified he sounds due to Liam O'Brien's brilliant voice acting makes it pants wettingly terrifying!
  • Naruto screaming "Obito was the coolest guy!" after said character's death is ridiculous since Obito was mainly a horrible person... But to some people, it's also heartwarming and a Tear Jerker.
• Never Live It Down: Has its own page.
  • Naruto is forever connected to his narmworthy catchphrase "Believe it!" for English fans.
  • Sasuke's "Great Snake Escape" was what really started turning fans away about characters surviving death by Plot no Jutsu.
  • The supposed rape that Karin planned, which was actually the result of a mistranslation. Nonetheless, the allegations are still being brought up years afterwards.
  • Certain fans like to accuse Hinata of being a stalker. In reality, she's a Downplayed version of the actual trope: we only saw her remotely act like one in Part I because she was too much of a Shrinking Violet to talk to Naruto face to face in her early appearances. Apart from being nervous about seeing him for the first time post-Time Skip, she completely dropped this behavior in Part II.
  • Sakura's painfully fake love confession to Naruto in Chapter 469. Fans who already didn't like her really hated her after that, while the more neutral fans joined in on the hate.
  • If there's ever any talk about Kurenai, it will be about that one time she tried to put Itachi under a genjutsu. It's mainly used as a joke to poke fun at how Out of Focus she became over the course of the series since the only other thing that the casual fanbase knows about Kurenai is that she had a baby with Asuma.
  • Fans will never let Tobirama, the Second Hokage, live down his prejudices towards the Uchiha. Despite having legitimate reasons to be wary of the Uchiha and being able to let go of his prejudices towards certain Uchiha who overcome the Curse of Hatred, it's common for some to Flanderize Tobirama into an outright bigot.
  • Many people consider the adult Naruto to be a terrible father, based almost entirely on the scene where he sends a shadow clone to Himawari's birthday party instead of going himself. He's shown to be competent but busy the rest of the time, but those scenes aren't as dramatic or memorable.
  • On the anime side of things:
    • The original series will always be known for the "Filler Hell" saga which was basically 84 episodes of back-to-back Filler that capped off the show leading up to Shippuden.
    • Episode 167 of Naruto Shippuden has the dubious honor of having such bonkers animation so out-of-place to what's usually seen with this series that you could swear the producers took inspiration from moments straight out of Looney Tunes.
  • The series' treatment of female characters has and continues to be a sore point among many fans, not helped by Kishimoto's own admission that he's not great at writing female characters. While its sequel Boruto does try to steer away from this trend with characters like Sarada, it's unlikely that the original series could really shake off its reputation.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Orochimaru is introduced as a thoroughly creepy character: eating people's faces off and taking on the role of an already creepy woman (?) and first making himself known by picking up a kunai knife with his tongue and talking about bloodlust because he lost some hair... which all comes into perspective after the Internet "outed" him as gay. His otherwise creepy Body Transfer Technique loses its scary appeal entirely when inside it. That tongue. His expression.
  • Pain also to get hit with this fairly often. There's his Motive Rants, which combined with excessive body piercings makes him sound like an Emo Teen...
    • Pain is very hard to take seriously ever since his true form has been revealed: an emaciated guy in a wheelchair with bright red hair that would make Carrot Top proud. Others can see his appearance as even more scary and disturbing with the Fridge Horror attached.
    • Chapter 427, where he gets knocked across the room by twelve-year-old comic relief character Konohamaru. Of course, he later recovers from the hit and doesn't even need to repair that body but still.
    • The terrible, terrible animation quality during the Pain arc did not help, of course.
    • The tropers who insist on spelling his name "Pein", which never stops looking like "Peen". And/or "Pain", which just fully underscores how emo he is.
  • The Ten-Tailed Beast has a habit of getting more goofy-looking with each transformation. Its first form was intimidating enough...up until you notice it has no hind legs and thus has to drag its bloated body around. Then matures into its second form, which is missing an arm, has chubby baby-hands on the ends of its tails and a head that has an eye on one side, a human mouth on the other and a human ear on the back of its head. When it does grow back its missing arm and put on some mass, it goes back to being chunky and its weird-looking head is now too small for its body.
• Not Badass Enough for Fans: Aside from a small pool of elites, a lot of sympathetic characters (especially girls) constantly get the short end of the stick in their fights and appear to be physically incapable of accomplishing anything that matters. This generates resentment from fans who every once in a long while find themselves subjected to the hopeless, pointless, doomed antics of these characters failing at life until the Big Damn Heroes show up to save the day. "Character X is too weak/useless to deserve screentime" is a common sentiment in forums.
• Not-So-Cheap Imitation: Naruto has some notable similarities to Hunter × Hunter, mostly due to Masashi Kishimoto being friends with Yoshihiro Togashi. However, Naruto ended up being the more popular work (particularly in America) for a multitude of reasons. One was that Naruto didn't suffer from the same frequent Schedule Slip that plagued Hunter x Hunter. Another was because the first Hunter x Hunter anime from 1999 didn't reach American shores until nine years later, which was at the height of Naruto's popularity by then. The third possible reason was that the 1999 anime was Cut Short due to overtaking the manga rather quickly, and it didn't get a more proper adaptation until 2011. This has been subverted as the 2011 Hunter x Hunter adaptation gained a lot of attention in the latter portion of The New '10s and one of the most well known and highly praised Shonen out there.
• No Yay:
  • There is much suspicion among fans that Orochimaru wants Sasuke's body for reasons more... personal than simply having a powerful new vessel. The Chapter 345 manga cover that featured a smiling Orochimaru literally wrapping his tongue and arms around Sasuke with the caption to the side reading "Within these arms. At the end of this tongue. The future that I raised," or the anime intro with a nude Sasuke wrapped in Orochimaru's pet snakes◊ with Orochimaru's eyes watching the image, make it so much worse.
    • Orochimaru's apparent fondness for randomly caressing the faces of little kids (such as Kimimaro), or trying to wrap his ridiculously long phallic-looking tongue around people's bodies, or referring to Naruto and Sasuke as "cute" and "beautiful", or thinking "Your body will be mine soon, Sasuke-kun". Then there's his final fight with Sasuke, in which Orochimaru sweats and struggles against being pinned against the wall before reverting to his true form, a giant snake comprised of a bunch of tinier snakes, and trying to wrap his snakes and curl himself around/smother a half-naked Sasuke while screaming "Give me your body, Sasuke-kun!"
  • In episode 53 Jiraiya briefly pervs on Naruto.
  (Japanese) "You! You're quite sexy when you're naked."
  (English) "You know... you have quite a tight sexy little body."
  • Kabuto/Orochimaru is nowhere near wholesome. It gets worse: Kabuto has absorbed Orochimaru's remains so Orochimaru is literally inside of Kabuto.
  • Hidan and Shikamaru. Just watch Hidan's reactions when he got Shikamaru alone in the woods. It almost felt like an Attempted Rape was about to go down. And Hidan looked to be almost orgasming after stabbing Shikamaru.
  • Naruto and Filler Villain Fuka. She makes quite a few suggestive comments to him and tries to kiss him while ignoring his personal space but we mustn't forget that she's actually just a living head of hair and that when she tries to kiss Naruto she's trying to suck his soul out.
  • Kabuto/Sasuke. He attempted to get Sasuke to join him and said he'll be like a big brother to him and never leave his side after just attempting to eat him nonetheless. Lord, No Yay.

O-R

• Older Than They Think:
  • Jiraiya, Tsunade and Orochimaru were characters in Japanese mythology long before they showed up in this manga. They show up in the story Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari (literally "The Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya"), a Japanese folktale. In it, Jiraiya is a ninja who has the ability to transform into a giant toad. He falls in love with and later marries Tsunade, a beautiful young princess (in contrast to the manga, where she is Older Than She Looks) who is a master of snail magic, and battles his arch-enemy, Orochimaru, a master of snake magic who used to be his follower.
  • Many elements of this series are actually drawn from old Japanese folklore or other fiction. Some of these include: Bunshin, Kagebunshin (including the distinction between the two), using these kagebunshin in a combo, Windmill-Shuriken, Kusanagi, XYZ-Release-techniques (XYZ-ton in Japanese), ninja called Sasuke, Sarutobi, the Element-Kage as ninja leaders, ninjas being able pin shadows to the ground or otherwise manipulate their or other shadows, Ninja Log, etc.
• One True Threesome:
  • Sakura/Naruto/Sasuke was around since Chapter 3. Also Ino/Shikamaru/Choji, Kiba/Hinata/Shino, etc. All the teams could be seen as ready made threesomes. There are also people who avoid the pairing wars and ship Sakura/Naruto/Hinata or Ino/Shikamaru/Temari.
  • Obito/Rin/Kakashi was mildly popular after the team's history was given focus in Kakashi Gaiden. Later revelations such as Tobi's true identity as Obito and the Moon's Eye Plan largely stemming from Obito seeing Rin die at Kakashi's hands (long story there, but it was actually Rin impaling herself on Kakashi's Lightning Cutter) only seem to have bolstered the threesome's standing among the fandom.
• Padding:
  • Anime does this when it doesn't just decide to fill out episodes with nothing at all. For example, when Suigetsu joined Sasuke in the manga they went to the Land of Waves to get Zabuza's BFS which was right where they expected it to be and it only took up a few pages. But in the anime someone else took it, and the two spend the episode retrieving it, eventually making a game out of it (as well as spending a rather amusing scene in a restaurant). This also serves the purpose of demonstrating Suigetsu's abilities much earlier than in the manga (where he doesn't get to properly demonstrate his power for nearly fifty chapters). The same thing happened with the other two members of their team, but with flashbacks. Earlier in the anime series, during the attempted rescue of Gaara, there were flashbacks to things that had been covered in flashbacks, as well as flashbacks to things that had happened five real-time minutes earlier. While this is done in an attempt to not outpace the manga, it gets painful during fight scenes.
  • The early episodes of Shippuden tended to drag out scenes with repeated footage and still-image reaction shots.
  • The Fourth Shinobi World War Arc has taken Padding through so many turns of the dial that listing all the examples would take up several times as much space as this entire page. The most notable example is the rampant Obito flashbacks that are extremely repetitive and pad out several panels to several episodes, and the reveal's flashback padding actually derailed to show an entire arc of Kakashi's and Yamato's post-Rin-death history.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Zetsu can fuse with any natural surface and emerge from anywhere, completely untraceable, which means any place outdoors is dangerous. Later it turns out he can release a bunch of undetectable spores which grow into freakish duplicates of himself by clinging to people's bodies and leeching off their Life Energy and transform himself or one of his copies into an almost perfect copy of anyone he touches.
  • Shisui Uchiha's hypnotic abilities were so overpowered that he could guide your thoughts and actions without eye contact or even having the eye open, and you would never even notice you were being manipulated. The only way to tell anything was happening was to be a sensor type that could feel the chakra trying to affect you, and even then it wasn't a given thing. But he was a Leaf Loyalist and didn't abuse his power for his own gain.... and then Danzo ripped his eye out while he was still alive and then Itachi killed him. They never go into detail what all Danzo actually DID with the eye beyond what we saw in the present, and there is a long list of things that COULD have been done with the eye. Why wasn't Sasuke given an adult guardian and just left on his own after his clan was killed, which doing to an emotionally unstable child and making him not have proper guidance could only lead to problems later on, and DID? Was the Third Hokage's delay in picking a successor really his own choice? Did the council and Hokage really make the hard choice of killing the Uchiha clan on their own volition? Was it really Shisui's idea to go to Itachi to commit Suicide by Cop so that Itachi could get the Mangekyo Sharingan, specially since the chances of him escaping someone as thorough as Danzo are incredibly low and Shisui was never said to be immune to his own power, when he could have gone public to the Hokage and put a stop to Danzo? And the last thing Shisui planned to do before Danzo took his eye was to use his powers against the warmongers in his own family to pacify them and prevent the coup. Did Danzo know this? And if he did, did he do what he did so that nothing would stop him from getting rid of the Uchiha clan?
• Popularity Polynomial: During its initial English manga release in Shonen Jump, Naruto was beloved by the anime/manga fandom and its anime was heavily requested for import, but it was very obscure outside of it with Yu-Gi-Oh! being the predominant force in anime at the time. When its anime was finally dubbed and imported, Naruto's popularity exploded, causing it to become very popular with the mainstream but also for it to suffer heavy Hype Backlash with the anime fandom, and its general perception with older core anime fans became less unanimously positive. Naruto finally ended in The New '10s, and with that, its mainstream popularity also faded; however, it also had a cyclic resurgence of sorts with core anime fans, due to the Hype Backlash not being as prominent and many fans having grown up with the series as kids or younger teens during The Noughties.
• Popular with Furries: Not as much as one of its inspirations (or its follow-up) but many furry fans were drawn in because of the giant tailed beasts and talking Ninken such as Pakkun.
• The Producer Thinks of Everything: While Kishimoto said he didn't plan everything in the series, there were several key elements that were planned beforehand:
  • He has stated ever since the series' beginning the final fight will be between Naruto and Sasuke. Not only it is based on the plot but also due to the fact Sasuke's last name is a reference to the hand fan Uchiwa originally used to blow Foxes. Though it is notable that while he clearly had that decided far in advance, he didn't really have any specifics around it planned, so the actual circumstances of their final fight can still feel contrived after everything else that just happened.
  • Itachi's backstory was planned ever since his introduction but was not reveal until almost 20 volumes later. Same with Naruto's heritage.
  • The final Official Couple of Naruto/Hinata was planned since the early stages of the manga according to several interviews Kishimoto has provided.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • The main characters (at first) hated Sai for replacing Sasuke on Team 7. Some fans too. Since among a sizable segment of American fans Sasuke is considered a Scrappy himself (in stark contrast to his overwhelming popularity in Japan), this gave Sai a slight fan following in America.
  • Kaguya gets hit with a lot of this for abruptly yanking the plot off course in the very last part of the story with no build-up whatsoever and killing off the much better-received Obito and Madara (the latter being killed by her lieutenant Black Zetsu in literally one hit despite his having been built up as practically invincible up until that point), and ultimately not lasting a tenth of the page time or character development that they had. A lot of fans believe that the only reason she was even included in the story is because Kishimoto had no real way to get rid of the other two so he made one up on the spot.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • A rather odd example: Sasuke has been considered The Scrappy for the longest time in America. But once he'd been pitted against Danzo, American fans have actually started rooting for him. Though this may be more because it's his Moment of Awesome than him just being the lesser of two evils. Others root for Danzo instead, as they think he is making pretty good points and agree with his way to lead the village.
    • Sasuke gets even more of this in the Fourth Shinobi World War arc, when he finally decides to follow Itachi's intentions and lets go of his irrational rampage against the Leaf Village. From this point, many of his actions that are supposed to be seen as cold and cynical compared to Naruto were often viewed as completely rational by the audience, such as trying to finish off Obito once he loses his powers (which would have prevented most of the problems from that point if he hadn't still been alive to resurrect Madara).
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Characters like Sakura and Hinata could've had plenty of potential but their character arcs chose to revolve around Naruto and Sasuke. And while those two had plenty of the spotlight, the girls barely got any character development in favor of the story displaying how deeply in love they are with the boys. When Sakura did get some character development and was able to show off how strong she was, she ended up getting screwed over all because of her crush on Sasuke, thanks Kishimoto!
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Danzo has the recurring habit of being Flanderized in Fan Fics. Yeah, he's horribly ruthless and has crossed the Moral Event Horizon, but he's far too complex for the label. It didn't help that the anime expands on his already long-list of crimes to include manipulating Hanzo into betraying the original Akatsuki and attempting to assassinate Hiruzen.
  • Hiashi isn't "Father of the Year" material, but isn't exactly a total Jerkass either considering that he is given a lot of sympathetic moments in Canon and by the time of Boruto is a mellow and loving grandfather, but fanfic writers very often ignore this and have him raping and abusing either Hinata, Hanabi, Neji or even Hizashi For the Evulz.
  • Being the Base-Breaking Character he is, Sasuke gets this from the opposite side of the fandom he gets the Draco in Leather Pants treatment from. Many fanfics have him as an irredeemable evil bastard even in the beginning of Part One, when the worst he could be called is rude. He's sometimes exaggerated to paint him as the evilest and most irredeemable Uchiha, or even one of or the evilest character and some of Itachi's DiLP fandom bash him for initially wanting to kill Itachi even though he saw him kill his family hundreds of times, or blame him for Itachi's death even though he didn't kill him, Itachi was already dying and planned precisely to die fighting him for what he saw as Sasuke's benefit. Even in post-series material, he also gets a lot of accusations of being an abusive husband who hates Sakura and never was redeemed, ignoring his Heel–Face Turn and the fact that the narrative makes it clear that for all of his many faults as a father, he does love his family.
  • While it could be argued that Kakashi could have been a better teacher, and he did teach very little to Naruto and Sakura in Part I, many Fan Fic writers love to turn him into an incredibly neglectful teacher who only cares about Sasuke and doesn't mind if Naruto and Sakura get killed on a mission due to not training them properly. This also ignores the fact that not only is he the best choice to train Sasuke given they both have Sharingans, but the majority of the "exclusive" training he gave Sasuke was to watch over him due to both Orochimaru's open desire to take him and keep an eye on the Cursed Seal, plus he needed the personal training to stand a chance against Gaara in the Chuunin Exams while Naruto had a much lower risk of getting murdered by his first opponent.
  • Thanks to later revelations in the series, even the Third Hokage became victim to this. While he did try and look out for Naruto, the fact that he still suffered bullying and alienation under his watch and the later reveal that the Hidden Cloud Village actually revered their tailed-beast hosts made him look worse by comparison. Add in everything about Orochimaru and it's not uncommon to hear people call him the worst of the Hokages.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • There are quite a few readers who root for the Akatsuki, and even for Sasuke during his stint as a bad guy. It doesn't help that the main character himself took his All-Loving Hero traits straight into Too Dumb to Live territory, with his doing so fueled by desperation. Though Naruto's gotten better, said fans still take Obito, Sasuke, or Madara over him.
  • The fans who hate Konoha and want to see it destroyed because of the Uchiha massacre being given the go-ahead, despite all the evidence pointing to the Uchiha not only bringing it upon themselves, but actually turning down the peace attempts that Hiruzen tried, especially with their It's All About Me attitude. While Konoha isn't the worst of the hidden villages when it comes to atrocities - especially given what Sunagakure did to Gaara - it's certainly not faultless either. Alternatively, some dislike it because of how Naruto was treated, even if he did ultimately end up better off than some of the other Jinchuuriki save Killer B and Yugito Nii, and if B is any indication, they were always treated with respect.

S

• The Scrappy:
  • Karin is hated for due to being characterized as only being obsessed with Sasuke, essentially being a rip-off of Part I Sakura. While initially Rescued from the Scrappy Heap after being stabbed by Sasuke just to kill Danzo despite healing him just now, after she reverts back to being obsessed and quickly forgave Sasuke, she becomes The Scrappy again to the point that fans hardly reacted when she was in tears over the fact that Sasuke is stabbed by Madara. And when Boruto kicked off, the hate ranked up when there was a discrepancy about who Sarada's true mother is, her or Sakura, with ended up going no where, and didn't do much to make Karin look better in the eyes of fans.
  • Kinkaku and Ginkaku are generally regarded as one of the weaker parts of the Fourth Shinobi World War. Their fight is rather dull, as the brothers aren't considered particularly interesting, and mostly fight against minor Cloud ninja. The story also abruptly shoves importance on them with a shallow connection to the Sage of Six Paths, allowing them to not only wield his Treasured Tools (which have no actual relevance to his backstory), but also survive on Kurama's flesh after being Swallowed Whole and become pseudo-Nine-Tails Jinchuuriki. Ultimately, they're not seen as much more than a transparent plot device to get Naruto to realize that there's a war going on, and revive the Ten-Tails without having to kill the main character (which is rendered moot when the real Madara manages to do it anyway).
  • Kaguya Otsutsuki. Immediately after she makes her debut she's already despised for hijacking the plot completely out of nowhere, stealing the main villain thunder from the better established Madara, and shifting the storyline unnecessarily to a new villain arc and making the already horrendously convoluted plot even more so. Add to the list, her resealing about only 30 chapters after her first mention, meaning she never gets any characterization beyond her lust for power and contributes essentially nothing to the story aside from extending its length and killing off Madara and Obito, meaning some will hate her due to her sheer pointlessness. Her existence is also a walking Retcon in regards to the origins of Black Zetsu and the nature of chakra itself, thus making her the scapegoat for many of the controversial changes in regards to the lore of the series.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • For the original series, literally everyone will say that it's a pain to sit through the 84 filler episodes that capped off the show. Though the 4-episode Bikochu Search Mission arc gets a lot of love for being a Hinata Took a Level in Badass moment, and the final 5-episode Sunagakure Support Mission has the welcomed return of the sand siblings, and for returning the story to the main plot in the final episode.
  • For Shippuden, the lengthy Three-tails filler arc was tiresome for some folk. However, the general consensus among fans is that quality began to dip after the Pain arc due to filler arcs that returned to episodic one-offs, and Canon material being filled to the brim with flashbacks.
  • The Fourth Shinobi World War Arc being a nadir for the series is a common complaint due to the arc's final stretch being a convoluted mess filled with The Big Bad Shuffle and twists galore. The anime being vastly extended with "war filler" only rubbed salt to the wound. The Infinite Tsukuyomi spell at the tail end of the war ended up with several dream fillers, and two filler arcs being shoved in it, which caused the year of 2015 to be almost entirely filler episodes. Hardly anyone was pleased. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that at that point, the manga had finally ended. There was really no excuse to keep doing filler, much less over a year worth of it.
• Self-Fanservice: Sakura is a slim girl who sometimes displays A-Cup Angst towards the endowed Hinata, and she retains this figure even in Boruto. A number of fan artists tend to ignore this and draw her to be just as voluptuous as Hinata herself.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Thanks to the prominent use of the Two Guys and a Girl trope in the multiple teams, Naruto became one of the first martial arts Shonen series to tend towards a more balanced male-to-female ratio in its cast compared to previous works in the genre, which tended to feature just a few token females. That created a recipe for fans to start shipping characters like there was no tomorrow. Straight ships or otherwise. As the series got longer and longer, these arguments got bigger and bigger.
  • By far, the biggest one were the ships involving Naruto himself. Especially with his two potential Love Interests, Sakura and Hinata. The on-and-off dynamics, and the sheer amount of Ship Tease that Kishimoto put all over the place during the run of the series seemed to be explicitly designed to make the fans go nuts: Naruto not having a talk with Hinata after she confessed her love to him (while trying to save his life at that!), Sakura's infamous fake love confession to Naruto—which he easily sees right through, calls her out on for lying, and then rejects outright by telling her that he hates people who lie to themselves—in comparison to Hinata's sincere Anguished Declaration of Love 30 chapters before hers, all the Hinata-centered Ship Tease in the anime adaptation and then the Unresolved Sexual Tension she and Naruto developed in the Fourth Shinobi World War Arc, the expectations the fans had out of the conventions in the shounen genre (which pointed to Sakura), etc, etc, etc. Something that went on, and on, and on... AND ON, for the 15 years the original manga ran, making this one of the longest, most intense shipping wars in manga and anime history.
    
    Finally, Hinata ended up being the one. The details about how she and Naruto ended up together were described in the seventh Shippuden movie (which is also the first Canon movie in the franchise), The Last: Naruto the Movie. Turns out the Ship Tease was indeed deliberately designed to mess with the shippers, since Kishimoto has stated in several post-series interviews that he made up his mind about Naruto/Hinata being the main Official Couple since the early stages of the manga, and the dynamics involving Sakura were a deliberate Red Herring because Sakura was never going to be Naruto's main Love Interest to begin with. Although this made the debate to cool down, there are still some remnants that treat it as Fanon Discontinuity, albeit they're a tiny minority at this point.
• The Ship's Motor: Some fanfics with the Neji×Hinata couple have the two arranged to marry in order to keep the Byakugan bloodline trait within the family, thus precluding any other ships.
• Ships That Pass in the Night:
  • Chouji and Karui. The two are from two different villages, never interacted with each other or even appeared on-screen together, yet for some reason, they married and have a daughter together at the end of the series.
  • There are lots of fanart featuring Hidan x Tayuya, on the sole basis that they are the most foul-mouthed people in this franchise.
• Shock Fatigue: The reveal of Tobi's true identity as Obito Uchiha was not well-received by a large portion of fans who felt that the reveal felt too on-the-nose thanks to "Tobi" being an anagram for "Obito" after years of fandom speculation regarding said identity and the reveal cheapening out Obito's supposed death scene which was generally seen as heartrending. Obito's motivations for his turn to villainy also caught criticism as it's yet another example of Love Makes You Evil, Cynicism Catalyst, Straw Nihilist, and War Is Hell that was already done with past villains like Orochimaru, Nagato, Itachi, and Sasuke, hence fans were less inclined to care about his fall to evil.
• Signature Scene:
  • Naruto discussing his aspirations over a bowl of ramen with Iruka. Notable for being the first time he states his intention of being Hokage.
  • The demon fox inside of Naruto awakening as Naruto furiously declares his intent to kill Haku at the climax of the Zabuza arc.
  • Gaara vs Rock Lee is undoubtedly the best remembered fight in Part 1, and probably the most well remembered fight in the series period when compared to its significance within the story (or rather, lack thereof, as Lee was Demoted to Extra and Gaara, while relevant, doesn't really do much in the grand scheme of things), in a similar vein to Piccolo vs 17.
• Squick:
  • Kisame's suggestion they cut Naruto's legs off so it would be harder for him to get away, and almost does this to Killer Bee before he grabs the pencil he threw at the start of the fight.
  • In Chapter 513, finding out that armadillo's gender was not necessary. Masashi Kishimoto evidently didn't agree, so he treated us to another panel full of it in the next chapter. Yes, we love biology.
  • Coupled with Nightmare Fuel.
    Sasori: Do you know how I add to my collection? First I tear out the organs. Once I've washed it clean, I drain out all of the blood. After I've made sure it won't decay, I fill it with weapons and traps, and add it to the collection. As grandma said, Hiruko is part of my collection. With you and Chiyo, I will have exactly 300 puppets in my collection! This is my art!
• Sliding Scale of Social Satisfaction: Categorized as "Outside is Burning, Inside is Safe". The Hidden Leaf village can be seen this way since it purports itself to be the least cruel and inhuman of the ninja village. Which it is, to an extent, scheming elders and incompetent leaders notwithstanding. Additionally, it's the richest and most powerful of them. However, given it's a militaristic state, its ninja get up to morally dubious means to ensure that — they sabotage other villages and the Hokage is just short of being a dictator who can sentence death penalty and even the genocide of one of the Clans. And that's not counting the "hired assassins and mercenaries" business that defines every ninja village.
• Spiritual Successor: The main character of Ninku, Fuusuke, is a wind ninja who wears orange and uses a move similar to the Rasengan. It's set in a universe where ninja are highly militarised and wear flak jackets, there are supernatural entities who can possess humans and bestow great but dangerous powers; it deals with themes of war and hate, often with interpersonal stories where even the villains may have faced tragedy. Sounds familiar? Word of God explains, indirectly, how the similarity came to be. Naruto was originally not supposed to be about ninjas at all; when the author made up his mind he was going to turn it into a story about ninjas, he recalls that
  [...] the samurai story didn't work out, so I figured I was gonna try ninjas. But in Jump, we had "Ninku" already. That wasn't really the best moment to create a ninja story. "Ninku" already created something quite original by fusing Ninja Arts and Karate. I had to find something else, something new to add on. That was quite the challenge. But that challenge is exactly was motivated me. I felt that, of the multiple japanese themes, ninjas was the right one to choose. I tried my luck with that.
• Strawman Has a Point: During his brief stint as acting Hokage, Danzou officially declared Sasuke a missing-nin, which is one of many policies he endorsed that are used to suggest he's up to no good. But he did have a point. Sasuke abandoned Konoha and the village was in bad enough shape already. Having a top-class ninja running around planning to further run it to the ground was not a good idea. And considering Sasuke immediately afterwards kidnapped the Raikage's brother (as far as anyone knew at the time), if he weren't a missing-nin and were still considered one of Konoha's ninjas it would have even worse.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Part of the melody for Orochimaru's theme is borrowed from Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and the opening to Sarutobi's battle music is an almost exact copy of Ozzy Osbourne's song "Bark at the Moon."

T-W

• Theme Pairing: Voldemort (from Harry Potter), Orochimaru, and Medusa (from Soul Eater) are a One True Threesome that share the Reptiles Are Abhorrent theme and are creepy Big Bads.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Hyuga Clan. They are introduced as one of (if not the) most powerful clans in Konoha with cool and coveted Magical Eye abilities, but are a Big, Screwed-Up Family who use seals to force branch family members into slavery to the main house members. A past affair with the Hidden Cloud village saw their Head Ninja try to kidnap Hinata, so the patriarch Hiashi kills him. Neji's father Hizashi was secretly sacrificed in his twin brother Hiashi's place to keep the peace with them. Then Neji grows up blaming and hating Hinata and the main branch for what happened, and Hiashi disowns Hinata in favor of Hanabi her sister. Yet after Naruto defeats Neji and Hiashi apologizes to Neji, almost none of this is ever relevant again. There's brief mention of the affair when the Hidden Cloud Village actually becomes prominent in the plot, and Hiashi also decides to be kinder, but nothing else. There also isn't any explanation as to why the Hidden Cloud tried to kidnap Hinata. Was it to learn the secrets of the Byakugan, blackmail the Hidden Leaf, or was it something against the Hyuga specifically? They surely had to have known kidnapping a child from a prominent family was a terrible idea, so why send the Head Ninja? Also, why did the Hyugas just decide to seemingly agree to the terms of giving them the corpse of Hizashi when they were the ones that started that mess? And why did the Hyuga clan adopt (and quickly drop) such abusive practices in the first place? There was a ton of story potential for the oppresive clan and the perfidious alliance with Cloud Village, but none came out of it.
  • Kiba's dream to become Hokage could have made for an interesting rivalry between him and Naruto had it been developed beyond their Chunin exam match. However, Kiba was pushed so far into the background following the Sasuke Retrieval Arc that it became a laughable joke whenever he brought up that he still one day wants to be Hokage.
  • Team Taka's battle with the Eight Tails implies that Sasuke is beginning to form bonds of frienship and comradery with his new teammates, as a shadow of his lost bonds with Team 7. We even see Sasuke gain the new ability to extinguish Amaterasu flames in response to his desire to save Karin's life when she gets lit on fire. However, the very next arc discards these developing bonds entirely, as Sasuke sinks into darkness and begins abandoning and sacrificing his new teammates without a thought.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • Minato Namikaze is a particularly notable example. He was hailed as one of the strongest shinobi ever, saved the Leaf village from the Nine-Tailed Fox's attack, was shown to be able to wipe out whole platoons of shinobi in the blink of an eye (to the point where enemies were ordered to flee on sight from him), and could teleport anything, even a Spirit Bomb level chakra blast miles away without breaking a sweat. Needless to say, a lot of potential threats to the Leaf would not be deemed so dangerous if he was still alive.
  • Jiraiya the Toad Sannin has become this over the course of Part II since his death. Possessing a high amount of badass skill, his own Super Mode, and being able to fight the Disc-One Final Boss and temporarily defeat him, as well as his own wisdom being used to redeem his fallen student through Naruto Uzumaki, it's easy to see why he's cool. Even Kabuto lamented his inability to use Edo Tensei on him.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • The Genin that attacks Kushina in the flashback to how she and Minato met. He did it because she beat up his younger brother. Yes, she beat him up because he was bullying her, but he didn't know that and from his point of view, he was just protecting his brother. It doesn't help that Kushina was frighteningly strong for a child compared to other genin.
  • Shikamaru's annoyance towards his mother is presented as him being wangsty, and him later marrying Temari, who is shown to be Like Parent, Like Spouse, is meant to be Character Development. However, it was implied that his mother was so overbearing, if not outright abusive, that it negatively affected his view on women, and Boruto shows that Temari is rather physically abusive towards both him and Shikadai.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The Uchiha Clan itself comes off as this. Despite being destroyed by Konoha, the manga repeatedly goes out of its way to show that they have been a violent, unstable clan since ancient times due to their Curse of Hatred mantra. The fact that the Uchiha also have warred amongst themselves with the reality abusing Izanagi, the way they gain power by killing their friends and siblings... and when responded by a good supposition that one of their own controlled Kurama—instead of helping in the investigation and enduring a bit of surveillance to catch the culprit they isolate themselves from the village and begin plotting a coup. The four main Uchiha members suffer from this the most:
    • Sasuke seems to be meant to be seen as a morally gray character being led down the wrong path by his obsession with revenge, but to a number of fans his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, descent into mass murder of Samurai he could have easily defeated non-lethally, and callous disregard for how many people have to suffer for his own emotional satisfaction has caused a number of fans to think he does not deserve Naruto's goodwill or his being treated as redeemed despite making no attempt at redemption besides an offhand apology. The anime tried to address this by having him accept going to prison for a year before being pardoned by Kakashi and declining on not getting a replacement arm, signifying he accepts the crimes he committed, but even then, many saw Sasuke's punishment as being too little too late and a slap on the wrist at. Things would only get worse come Boruto, as despite becoming The Atoner, many still found Sasuke difficult to sympathize with, due to his desire to make up for his crimes leading him to walk out on Sakura and leaving her to raise Sarada alone for an entire decade, resulting in some audiences feeling that he was unworthy of Sakura's patience and understanding.
    • Itachi, for his Mind Rape of Sasuke and Kakashi, which the former kicked him down the slippery slope and never gets punished despite his good intentions. All because he "loved" and wanted to "protect" his "precious" little brother. It got worse when he was turned into a Spotlight-Stealing Squad in the Fourth Shinobi World War arc.
    • Obito orchestrated the Nine-Tails attack on Konoha, which killed Naruto's parents and made him an orphan, turned the Mist Village into a brutal dictatorship that resulted in hundreds of deaths, many of them children who were forced to fight each other to the death as part of their schooling, and started the Fourth Shinobi World War, resulting in tens of thousands of more deaths. Basically, he's the worst. His only real motivation for any of this being because his love interest Rin died. Despite all of that, he's meant to be a sympathetic character who is deserving of Naruto's kindness because he was similar to Naruto as a child and simply strayed down the wrong path, and his death is meant to be seen as an Alas, Poor Villain moment, reuniting with Rin in the afterlife.
    • The real Madara is painted as a Well-Intentioned Extremist whose attempts for peace in the past are declined in favor of his rival Hashirama. So what does he do after this? He immediately challenges the first Hokage to the death in hopes to destroy their entire creation of Konoha along with it. Right before his death he ended up being Easily Forgiven by Hashirama in spite of everything that he had previously done before Black Zetsu betrays him. Also, Hashirama wanted HIM, not his brother, to succeed him as Hokage as a show of how much he trusted and believed in his rival, making Madara look like an ungrateful Jerkass due to his betrayal, preferring to destroy the Leaf Village out of spite instead of believing in his friend's faith in him.
  • Similarly, the backstory of the legendary "Salamander" Hanzo, the ninja against whom the Sannin won their titles by surviving a battle with him, sets Hanzo up as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who lost sight of his goals but is honored in defeat by his rival as a man who strove for peace. By starting a lot of wars and turning his homeland into an unlivable hellhole that produced the most psychologically broken, defeated human beings in the series, just because he was arrogant enough to think his strength could unite the world. Most fans still consider Hanzo an utterly unsympathetic character whose violent death at Pain's hands was richly deserved, as his claim of good intentions didn't make him any less of a paranoid warmongering dictator.
  • Karin's tearful reaction over Sasuke's near-death is supposed to be a Tear Jerker, but when her half-assed characterization (like how she easily forgave the same man who once try to kill her because she is just a burden despite healing him before) comes into play, her crying over Sasuke is instead met with complete apathy from the readers.
  • Sakura when she confessed her feelings for Sasuke at Chapter 693; we're supposed to sympathize with her when her confession got "coldly" rejected by Sasuke, except that the person that is listening to this is the same person who shows no feelings for Sakura at all and attempted to kill her multiple times without remorse, giving fans the impression that she doesn't really develops any character beyond loving Sasuke regardless of his crimes. It got to the point that not only Sasuke has an unintentionally valid point regarding her but also made fans root for Sasuke to kill her and became disappointed when it is just a genjutsu. Her easily forgiving Sasuke's weak apology and marrying the same person in the future does not help her case.
  • The way Utakata's master Harusame tries to extract the Tailed Beast from his disciple in an anime-only Filler is supposed to be seen as good intentions to the point that upon realizing this, Utakata eventually rebuilt the pedestal with him after accidentally killing him. The problem is, extracting the Bijuu from a Jinchuuriki will also directly kill the host, and with no indication of Utakata having trouble with his Bijuu, nor even knowing why his master does it in the first place against his will, it comes off as Harusame crossing the Moral Event Horizon with Utakata having every right to defy his master and killing him sounds more like a Karmic Death than what it should've been in theory.
• The Un-Twist: So many people instantly figured out that Tobi was Obito that many were convinced it was a deliberate Red Herring. Nope, it was exactly what everyone thought it was all along. Maybe the "twist" would have been less obvious if Tobi's real name wasn't an anagram plus an extra letter O.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Rock Lee and Guy-sensei (aka Thickbrows and Superbrows). Also Kisame's sword Samehada, especially when it's cuddling up to Killer bee.
  • White Zetsu and his brother Guruguru have this going for them. Despite being villains, both are quite childlike to the point of being Affably Evil. White Zetsu only has half a face, but likes to joke around while Guruguru is a humanoid mass of tendrils whose obsession with poo keeps him from seeming sinister even when he is being sinister.
  • Some of the Tailed Beasts fit this category during that brief flashback where we see them as babies.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The core reason why a substantial part of the Western fandom hates Sasuke moreso than the Japanese fandom. Many eastern cultures place greater emphasis on respect and honoring one's extended family. As Sasuke's revenge quest can be seen as piety to his clan, many Japanese fans are more willing to accept decisions as honorable or at the least understandable. While a point can be made about the author saying that he is self-centered in an interview, it doesn't change the fact that since it is not clearly said in the story his actions will look a lot more understandable for people in the Japanese fandom not aware of said interview, hence the different reception.
  • An early chapter had Naruto impersonate Sasuke so that he could attempt (and failed) to get a kiss from Sakura. It was seen as harmless comedy back when it was written in 1999, but by today's standards, trying to kiss a girl under false pretenses is seen as incredibly creepy.
  • An example that exists within the fandom. Back in the days of the show's popularity, it was quite common to mockingly call obsessed, toxic, and outright weird fans of the series "Narutards". For rather obvious reasons, this abruptly stopped around the late 2010s when people realized how offensive it was, with many now viewing it as an Old Shame.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Haku acts like a girl, looks like a girl, and even dresses like a girl, but states himself that he's a man. That doesn't stop some people from still getting confused.
  • Orchimaru’s Grass Ninja disguise is male in Japan but female in the English dub, presumably due to their looks. Orochimaru himself is something of a canon version since, due to his body-hopping tendencies, he can be both male AND female depending on who he is possessing at the time, not withstanding his natural effeminate appearance. This is even lampshaded in the Naruto Gaiden series and the Boruto movie.
  • If it weren't for the fact that names ending in -maru indicate that they're male, Gaara's uncle Yashamaru would have most people fooled as well. To the point that in some translated versions of the manga, the producers mistook him for a woman.
  • Deidara deserves a mention too. Seriously, he looks like Ino's evil older sister.
  • Sai was mistaken for a girl by some fans at his very beginnings. Admittedly, his midriff T-shirt isn't helping his manliness.
  • Kurotsuchi neither looks (and that flakjacket covers up her torso very well) or acts feminine and fans were uncertain about her gender for a while.
  • Fu was an ambiguous case for a time, as even after Kishimoto released artwork of her, he hadn’t decided what gender she had but eventually stuck with female.
• Viewers in Mourning: Jiraiya's death brought about this.
• Wangst:
  • Many readers found Nagato's backstory uninspiring and weak compared to those of several previous antagonists. Or simply poorly told.
  • Many consider Obito's reason for turning evil — the death of Rin, his childhood crush — to be poorly executed as a Freudian Excuse. To elaborate, this stems from two main issues: 1. Rin gets virtually no development as a character outside of being a Nice Girl so we get little insight into what she was like as a person, specifically what made her the kind of person whose death would prompt Obito to turn evil. 2. Obito's feelings for her are not explored in any depth either, meaning we're given nothing to indicate that those feelings are anything more than a simple crush; which is a problem when the narrative implies that his feelings for her were stronger than that. While the story tries to give Obito more reasons than just that, at his core Rin's death is treated as the main reason why, making some view it as a weak excuse.
• Woolseyism:
  • The Viz translation of "Sexy Jutsu" has it translated as "Ninja Centerfold". However most people like "Sexy Jutsu" better as it's something more people would get without realizing what "Centerfold" is a reference to.
  • In fact, almost EVERYTHING. One prime example is the term "Jutsu" (which is Japanese for art or technique) being left untouched in the more currently popular English dub of the anime to this day.
• Writer Cop Out: A common accusation hurled at the ending of the Pain arc, which basically undid nearly every shattering twist of plot that had happened during this huge Wham Arc, including several major character deaths.
  • Especially of note is Hinata NOT dying during this arc, instead being shown to only have been heavily wounded. It comes off as a cop-out because like the above says, major character deaths were overwritten en masse at the end anyway so from a writing standpoint the only reason Hinata didn't die was so fans wouldn't complain about her getting killed off for the two chapters worth of time before she'd just get revived anyway since the longterm is identical.
    • Speaking of Hinata during the Pain Arc, there's her confession to Naruto. Fans were hoping that, after everything calmed down, Naruto and Hinata will have a talk in which Naruto would either accept Hinata's feelings and become a couple, or reject them and stay just as friends, hopefully to put an end to the neverending Will They or Won't They? and Ship-to-Ship Combat. Except none of that happened. Not only the story progressed as if such moment never happened, future interactions between Naruto and Hinata also happen without taking into account this game-changing moment, save for a brief moment in Chapter 559. It isn't until The Last: Naruto the Movie, in which Naruto and Hinata finally become an Official Couple, that this moment is fully revisited.

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