Aiddon said:
Queen Michael said:
Notice how Naruto hits his son in the epilogue? And how he tells the son "It's your duty to accept that I neglect you, because you're a ninja and I have my duties as a hokage," even though Naruto could quit the hokage job if he wanted to? Naruto's basically guilt-tripping Bolt for not approving of being neglected by his physically abusive father.
Not surprised that Kishimoto didn't think that through. Whenever Kishimoto tries to do a moral lesson it just falls apart, sometimes immediately. It really shows how emotion has to be balanced with logic and reason in fiction. You have to back up the themes with consistent action.
The idea in that scene was supposed to be: "Hey, stop doing this to get my attention - after all, the whole village is your family, not just me."
But this scene alone ruins the entire series for me.
The whole point of the early series was how Naruto tried to deal with his loneliness - they even made that quite explicit later on in shippuden. For Naruto, it was clearly *not* the case that the entire village could be thought of as family for him. His entire motivation for becoming Hokage in the first place was to be acknowledged by the village, so that he could be accepted and maybe eventually not feel alone anymore. This is also the entire basis for his relationships with Sasuke and Sakura.
But in this epilogue scene, when Naruto's son acts out in exactly the same way Naruto did as a child, implying that he feels the same loneliness and that his relationships with others in the village aren't proper substitutes for the love of his father, Naruto just coldly chastizes him and just says "you'll understand someday" - as if that was going to address the problem. Obviously, simply having a village of neighbors isn't enough to ensure that Naruto's son is going to make meaningful connections - it's not that simple. Naruto should know this better than anyone.
Honestly, the ending should have been that Naruto was elected as Hokage but turned down the position, realizing that it was only going to get in the way of cultivating the sorts of relationships with his friends and family that might help overcome the loneliness he had felt all his life.
Why does he need to be Hokage anyway? Just so there would be a reason for him to hang out with characters from other villages for a scene? Just so he could 'carry on tradition'? If war is over, why is society still organized into ninja-states that are fueled by military action? Why is there even still a Hokage position?
That brings me to another gripe; I've never understood Kishimoto's fetishism of posterity and tradition. "The next generation will fix everything our generation couldn't fix" seems to be the sentiment. Except clearly that hasn't happened with any generation touched on in the series, including Naruto's apparently. The scene with Naruto chastising his son shows exactly why this is the case. Naruto's son finds himself suffering from the same loneliness Naruto himself once did, and Naruto's duties to convention, to 'tradition', to institutions, only pull him away from his son and ensure that that loneliness remains in the world.
So basically, the entire series thematically annihilated itself in the epilogue - unless it only meant to convey a harsh message that loneliness is here to stay as long as people continue to delude themselves into thinking things like social duties and traditions are equally or more important than interpersonal relationships (in which case, it is both ingenious and at once probably the most mean-spirited piece of fiction I've ever seen). Probably though, it just became monumentally dumb by losing sight of what the original series was supposed to be about. Disappointing.
