If you are familiar with Masashi Kishimoto’s notorious manga series, Naruto, and you read the title, you probably have an idea of where this is going. Before any criticism I want to point out that I love Naruto. It was the first anime and manga I ever watched and read. It is also debately a masterpiece. However there is a general consensus that claims the series started to go downhill after the timeskip… and that is kinda true. If you ask my opinion there can be a lot of reasons for Naruto’s problems. However, there is one in particular that drove me into writing this. I consider this one problem as the main issue with the series. It is something that started with a positive, but overcame its welcome. This problem is: “The Final Twist”, or “The Real Big Bad”.
Naruto is a series that harnesses “The Final Twist” like no other I’ve seen. This “Twist Circle” was mainly introduced when the Akatsuki became the central antagonists of the series; and that happens exactly at the time-skip. Coincidence? Hell no. This was the starting point to the joke Naruto became. So what do I mean by “The Final Twist” and “The Real Big Bad”? These ideas are names I gave to this scenario you might find in a story. It’s pretty simple actually:
“The heroes finally have their final battle against the villainous antagonist. It is a difficult and dangerous fight, but the good guys win in the end. As they look to the sky with relief and feelings of closure, the scene is cut and you’re taken to another location. There, a character you have never seen before, hidden in the shadows or not, proclaims that everything is going as planned” A really complicated plan…
There you go. That is one of the ways to tell your reader that the war is not actually over, a new threat is born, and those you thought were the final villains are actually pawns to a greater purpose. This scenario is Naruto’s trademark as much as its worst own enemy.
Orochimaru? No. Pain? No. Tobi? No. Tobi is Madara? No he is not. So Obito? Kinda, but no as well. Kabuto? No. The Real Madara? No, not him. Orochimaru again? No. Kaguya, the inter-dimensional alien? Kinda, again. Black Zetsu then? Yes. What about Sasuke? Nope. Who is the final villain in the Naruto series? Well, you can say it’s Black Zetsu, since he was the actual creator of the Akatsuki and formed maybe the most intricate plan of all time to get his final plan to work. Naruto establishes a villain, they reveal their plan and in the end that was not actually the final plan. There’s another one. You can say this phenomenon is common in a lot of stories, specially shounen. That’s true. It’s not inherently a bad thing, unless you don’t know when to stop, or you do it for the sake of a cliffhanger. In Naruto’s case, it’s the former.
Kishimoto always knew how to reveal a new threat. Like I said, it is almost a trademark for the series. But why did it turn into a complete stupid mess? I can pinpoint the moment. The precise moment that Naruto jumped the shark really hard. When Madara, not regular form, but sage of six paths mode, which already seemed like the highest you could possibly get to a Big Bad, turned into a demon from another dimension. A character that no one could see coming, really. It was impossible to predict. A new character no one could care less just takes the place of the legendary Madara Uchiha, a villain foreshadowed for goddamn years; and Madara never comes back, he is gone. Take this new reveal with the fact all these years you have been tricked into believing “that one guy was the final boss, but no he wasn’t” time and time again, even though the execution was not necessarily bad, and you have the catalyst for the definitive realisation that Naruto just became a meme. The dramatic reveals just keep on coming. Next it will be revealed that Kaguya is not actually the mastermind behind it all, and… and there’s another villain… Yes, that’s Black Zetsu. The reveals keep on coming. But why, Kishimoto? Why didn’t you stop at Madara? He had the build up, the character, the foreshadowing. Yes you tricked the readers time and time again about who was the final bad guy, but at this point it was still just an intricate plot. You could compare it to a glass of water so close to the top, that if one more drop is added, it will overflow.
No one needed another twist. Love him, or hate him. Madara was it. The final boss. There was no time for anything else, no space. Kishimoto wrote himself into a corner, where only Madara was to be found. Enough with the complicated plans, just deliver it. A lot of the fanbase was already pretty pissed with the Obito situation; if you lived those days, you know how it went. But old habits don’t die, do they? He spilled the water from the glass. And nowadays if you read or watch something that just seems to not know when to stop with the villain reveals, and you’re also familiar with Naruto, you get an inside joke.
This concept of never-ending reveals also reflects on other aspects of the series. Like the classic “You didn’t hit me, that was a clone, or an illusion” No one ever gets a clean hit. This is also characteristic of shounen battle paradigm, but as always, when used the wrong way, it can be a bad thing.
You think character “S” is the final bad guy. Well he is not. At the end of part one you find out there’s an organisation with a very mysterious and complicated origin. A character “P” is the boss of this organisation. You think he is the villain. Well, he is not. A “T” character is actually manipulating him from the inside of this said organisation. “T” wears a mask, you don’t know who he is. Some say he is “M”. Well, he is not. He is actually that one guy from the past (character “O”), and this can only be explained through another complicated plan. “T”, now revealed as the character “O”, just might be the villain. But he is not. It’s actually “M”, who everybody thought “T” was. And best, “O” and ”M ” are working together. Their plan for the future is as complicated as the one that explains how they actually joined forces. And there is also this “K” and “U” character who you thought were gonna be the final villain, maybe, but forget them, one is done for and the other is a good guy now. Now “O” actually is also not a bad guy anymore, and “M” seems to be the Big Bad. But “M” suddenly becomes “A”, a new character. And this happened because a “Z” character from the organisation from the beginning is actually the real villain, and he is the one that planned everything to get to this point, so “A” could be summoned, and follow their own evil plan.
This paragraph above is the Naruto villain situation in a nutshell. The biggest problem with the series ended up being the thing that drove it to begin with. “Die as a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” The Batman routine that has been overused on the internet is perfect to describe what happened to Naruto. Kishimoto could have continued with endless twists for ever if he could, one day a bad twist would come… and it did. This one bad twist would end up exposing him and today, if you wanna make fun of dramatic villain reveals with complicated plans, you go to Naruto. The easiest targets being Obito, Kaguya and Black Zetsu. At the end of the day, Naruto is the cover boy for asspulls of dramatic villain revelations and the complicated plans that follow consequently… and honestly, that’s why I love it.
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