I'm not exactly sure where this fixation you have on the bijuu being man-eating city-stomping engines of destruction came from. Nowhere in canon does it even hint at the notion that the bijuu seek to willfully destroy mankind, or ninjas, or whatever. It's simply stated that they have immense power and from time to time have turned that power on humanity.

Naturally, when a ninja comes face to face with a Godzilla!creature with so much power he has no understanding of, his first reaction might be to try to destroy it. And when a bijuu just happens to pass through a populated area, the people living there might just be a bit wary of it, even to the point of instigating an attack against it. Or maybe a bijuu just doesn't give a shit if a village is between it and where it wants to go and simply wades through.

Of course when a bijuu gets sealed away inside a human it's going to try its hardest to get free. Wild animals do that when we lock them up. Ninja just haven't built the right cage for a bijuu yet.

My point is this: Just because the bijuu have attacked people doesn't mean that it's what they do. We saw quite plainly in the manga that the Sanbi was content to just chill in a lake after it was released. If characters in the manga want to make up stories about the Kyuubi descending to punish the wicked, that's their deal. The Kyuubi didn't just disappear into thin air after he smoked a village, waiting for evil to spread again. He just went off and did his own thing - something that had nothing to do with slaughtering people.

And don't quote old databook shit in here to back up your points. We all know it's just as much hyperbole as anything we used to know as truth from the manga. It's garbage.

 

Hmm, okay, you have a point. Looking at my earlier post, I think it comes across as too overzealous. I was mostly focusing on the Kyuubi being a "mass of hate", his negative emotion sensing and the rumoured reasons for why Kurama appears.

Thinking on it, it's likely that Kurama is similar to Sasuke. His hatred towards the humans that used him, like Madara, caused the nature of his chakra to change into something more malevolent. Being trapped inside various prisons over roughly a century would likely cause his anger to fester and grow.

 

Hn, I liked this chapter.


And I'll just say, to the "Bijuu argument"...

Say this manga was about a young genin in Iwa... how do you think the ninja god Minato would have been portrayed? As fucking evil incarnate, huh? Low and behold you find out he isn't all the way evil, just willing to do what needs to be done for his people. Same thing here. We had a window to see the Bijuu, and it was really small. Now, the window is bigger.

I don't remember this much bitching over the whole Itachi-good guy thing, which was stupider, imo.

 

What would of been ace, if Kishi revived Itachi and Itachi was a psyco and Tobi was lying. But alas. =/ It was still a good twist, anyhow.

 

I, for one, was a big fan of the good!Itachi twist. It's one of the few instances in the manga where we see a good guy do really bad things for the right reasons.

It adds a sense of grittiness to this kiddie manga.

 

It just seemed like a really bad plan. One destined to back fire.

 

There are people who didn't like the Itachi twist? Seriously?

 

I personally thought it was fine, but I've heard that some people were really bugged by the fact that the twist came out of nowhere, without any hints/foreshadowing beforehand.

That, or there are people who don't like it because that particular revelation was what pushed Sasuke over the edge from anti-hero/anti-villain to full-blown psychotic lunatic. Have to admit, I preferred the character when had sympathetic elements and complexity to the current "I kill things for the evulz!" version we have now.

 

This pretty much. Mindraping your brother and pretty much programming him so that he wants nothing but revenge while disregarding his friends(or kill them for power) and then being surprised when he goes over the edge is just dumb.

It should have been obvious that this way was not going to make Sasuke a loyal Konoha shinobi.

As to the turn itself, I didn't mind it much. I just would have preferred a better plan.

 

I just assumed that Itachi was insane. Highly talented and intelligent, but insane.

 

His plan relied on Sasuke becoming strong enough to a) kill Itachi himself and thus redeem the Uchiha clan, and b) protect himself from Tobi. Itachi knew that Sasuke wasn't a genius on the same level that he was, so he gave him this insane revenge obsession in order to drive him to achieve great things. If he only had some dull and suppressed sense of resentment toward Itachi, it wouldn't have been sufficient. Thoughts of revenge had to consume him completely, so that all he could think about was getting stronger so that one day he could kill Itachi.

It was a pretty uncertain plan, but considering the clusterfuck situation Itachi found himself in, it's somewhat understandable.

 

Well, that's a fairly silly reason to dislike the twist. I mean, at that point Sasuke was already a complete drain on the comic's quality. It's not like changing his motivations really made him that much more of a pain to read.

 

I have a feeling, with all this flashback to the Rikudou business, that Naruto has a third consciousness sealed in him (or one sealed in Kurama, with whom he's now basically 'merged'). I think it's possible that the Rikudou will speak to him sometime in the future, maybe teach him something, or resurrect him after he fights Sasuke and Sasuke kills him.

I just don't think Kishi would begin fleshing out the Rikudou Sennin's character so much if he wasn't going to be important.

 

What.

I'm down for the Rikudou Sennin popping up sometime, but this would just piss me off. Naruto now has the full might of the Kyuubi on his side, plus whatever mystical power up the other Bijuu just gave him, as well as Sage Mode and every rasengan variant under the sun. Sasuke can use the MS without going blind.

Unless Sasuke gets another really big power up, like the Rinnegan, I can't see him killing Naruto. Ever.

 

Cursed Seal Level 3 compliments of Kabuto shall allow Sasuke to defeat Naruto /straightface

 

I'm pretty sure EMS will do more than just allow him to use MS techniques without turning into Mr. Magoo.

Sasuke will probably get some game-changing space-time technique, since even Kakashi has one. Maybe he'll be able to slow down time so Naruto's speed won't be an advantage, or something like that. I'm definitely calling it that Sasuke will have a space-time technique, whatever that may be.

Naruto was dead-set certain that when he fought Sasuke, they would both die. I think that will happen, but I don't think they'll stay dead. Rikudou Sennin still has a role to play.

 

I know that Kishi is rather loose with power levels lately (like with Kakashi and Gai being able to fight with six of the tailed beasts at the same time), but seriously, Sasuke shouldn't have any chance to win with Naruto right now, even if EMS will give him some new powers. It's either the Rinnegan for him or depowering Naruto to make this fight even.

 

And yet it's quite obvious that the ultimate fight will be between Naruto and Sasuke, since their rivalry is the core of the story. Somehow they will be closely matched by the time of their final confrontation. I reckon Sasuke will get a powerful space-time technique that nullifies Naruto's speed advantage. He might even end up with the Rinnegan (by taking Senju DNA from Yamato who is presently being held captive), since it seems that Tobi is using Sasuke as a replacement for whatever function Nagato was originally supposed to perform (I'm guessing it's the resurrection of Uchiha Madara via Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique).

 

It about 100 or so chapters we will make sense of what Tobi's plan is. Hopefully

 

Really Naruto has been head and shoulders above Sasuke and everyone else, who isn't dead, since Sage Mode. Only Sasuke and Naruto have really grown stronger since then. Sasuke has the same problem he has had since the chunnin exam, Naruto is simply stronger/better, the one major exception to this is when they meet for the first time after the time skip.

I wanna see Itachi vs Kabuto, which should be a major blowout. Or Itachi vs Madara to find out who is the greatest Uchiha of them all.

Healthy, undead, not blind Itachi with the unlimited stamina of IWRJ is quite possibly the biggest badass of them all. Itachi was limited by 3 things in life: his illness, lack of extreme chakra levels, and his blindness; none of which are a problem as he currently is.

Madara vs Itachi sounds like a major asskicking for Itachi till you consider he is unstoppable in susanoo.