Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-34194151-20180107091407

Kakashi i think is one of the more overrated characters in the series. He is a great ninja, reasonably powerful, skilled experienced, but he isn't as quite as smart as people like to let on.

For one, let's talk about his battle with Pain. Pain was stronger yes, but Pain was also simply smarter at the end of the day. Why? Because Kakashi makes a lot of foolish mistakes even while at the same time making ALMOST brilliant plans. The fight starts, and all he pretty much does is force Pain into close quarters by summoning a earth wall and immediately going for lightning blade. He didn't think of a strategy other than just blitz and charge the guy who took down sage jiriaiya. OF course, the lightning blade is easily countered by PAin because kakashi didn't think about the rod's chakra disturbance when he should know about it from the frog's intel.

Exhibit 2: He already confirmed that the Pain he is facing can push all ninjutsu away since he pushed away his lighting blade and earth style wall. But what does kakashi do not two seconds later? fires a chakra expensive lightning dog at pain who casually pushes it away. Kakashi doesn't even try to use as it as a diversion or anything. All he does is waste time confirming something he already saw that was demonstrated. Mind you, I still respect kakashi for information gathering to the best of his ability but that wasn't very bright. Pain takes this time to bring in PAin number 2 right. And what does kakashi do right off the back? He forgets about the shared vision and wastes yet ANOTHER raikiri on the missle Pain who casually dodges. Jiriaya died so that the frogs could make it back and tell kakashi about the shared vision, and he can't even remember it until after the fact.

Exhibit three. Reinforcements come, and kakashi makes up for his mind farts by using real diversions to try and understand the almighty push and figures out the time limit. Then he makes a pretty good plan to counter the push. Except he for whatever reason forgets that there are 6 pains in the village. He tunnel visions into the one he is fighting when he knows that the pains can come back to life, including the one that Choji and his father already killed. Because he has these huge gaps in situational awareness sometimes, he just overexends yet again as Pain manages to stop kakashi's plan with intervention from his ally, inevitably resulting in kakashi's death.

My point here is that even people like naruto and itachi have better grasps on situations, and i can share other examples of kakashi's intellectual mishaps. Imo, he is definitely not smarter than shikamaru, because while shikamaru is less experienced and has a weaker arsenal/stats, when he makes a plan he takes everything into consideration and perfectly execute his strategy. 