Ah, yes. Everyone’s favorite shounen hero: Boruto’s Dad.
On the surface, Naruto is a fairly generic shounen hero. Kid is dumb as bricks, a genius of combat, and he’s got a heart of gold. Friendship gives him strength and he has a grand, seemingly unachievable goal: to become the king of the ninjas Hokage. While he isn’t a monstrous glutton like his contemporaries, his love for ramen is certainly more dedicated than the average person. All the boxes are checked off.
But to write him off as a simple Goku clone is a great disservice to his character. Everyone’s favorite knuckle-headed ninja had much more going for him than he sometimes gets credit for. Without it, I doubt he’d have captured the hearts of so many all those years ago.
Naruto’s childhood was not a happy one. After a maniac released the deadly Nine-Tailed Fox into the village on the day of his birth, he immediately lost both of his parents. In order to protect the village, said fox was sealed away inside of him. Not even a day old and the kid is made an orphan and a prison for evil incarnate.
Are the villagers grateful to him for it? No. Just the opposite. For fear or hatred of the Nine-Tails, Naruto was ostracized by the villagers. No family, no friends, no one to look out for him. He had to turn to petty pranks and mischief just for someone to acknowledge his existence.
This is the primary reason why I and so many others fell in love with Naruto almost immediately. Being a socially awkward kid, I had a difficult time making or keeping friends. His lonely upbringing is something a lot of kids and young teenagers can relate to.
Having grown up alone, Naruto learned the value of friendship. He protects his pals with as much ferocity as a lioness protects her cubs. Yet he never loses sight of his core values. Namely his ninja way: never giving up.
More often than not, Naruto would defeat his villains not by kicking their ass, but by talking to them and befriending them. So much so that it’s become a joke in and out of the community. His Talk-no-Jutsu truly is his most powerful weapon.
That’s including his metric fuckton of transformations. Which is where the cracks really start to appear. In the Fourth Great Ninja War arc alone, Naruto gets four separate transformations. Six, if you count his giant fox form and the fox form + Susano combo. As the series goes on, his creative combat genius gradually bleeds away, replaced by bigger and bigger energy balls and explosives.
Besides that, the Talk-no-Jutsu gets kinda old. Especially when it’s just the same thing over and over again. Pretty much all the villains he faces are just evil Naruto clones after the Pain saga.
Naruto is a character that gets less and less interesting as the series goes on. Toward the beginning, he’s a wonderfully relatable and inspiring character to lonely people all around the world. But those qualities become so overused they grow stale by the end.
Oh yeah, and unlike Goku, Naruto is a bad dad. Like, genuinely. They made a whole movie and a sequel anime about it. He tries, bless him, but he’s just not very good at it.
By the way, are we just gonna ignore the fact that Hinata confessed her feelings to him and he didn’t even acknowledge it until the Last movie? You know, THREE YEARS LATER?!?! There’s no real significance to that, it’s just a detail that always bothered me.
Naruto had a strong start, but by the end, I got a bit tired of everyone’s favorite knuckle-headed ninja. Don’t get me wrong, I still love him! But it’s more of a distant nostalgia than a lifelong affection. So Naruto is going to #2 on the Icons of Shounen.
Relax. He’ll stay near the top of the list for a good long while.
- Son Goku (Dragon Ball)
- Naruto Uzumaki (Naruto)
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