Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-13821374-20141105162812

I hope this topic doesn't exist yet but I couldn't spot it on the first few pages. Also, I'm not at all a naruto reader / watcher, I only follow the story over the summaries of the wiki.

Besides some other (trope based) stuff that bothers me, there's just one little thing that I really can't understand: Did any of the major villains in naruto ever read a book? What I mean is, how is it possible that so many people follow the same / similar target (or at least, say they do), are "highly intelligent" and at the same time are as savvy as a rock?

Nagato, Obito, Madara, Kaguya and now even Sasuke are not looking for peace, they want a dictatorship. As mentioned above, I only read the summaries, so I don't have every single line spoken present in my mind - but one thing that I've read a lot lately is their motivation: "Bring peace to the world" / "End pain" / etc. Well, killing everyone, making everyone braindead or generally oppressing people is not the same thing as peace and a person with higher intellect (as they are depicted) should easily realize that. So, either they are all lying to themselves or others to justify their means of gaining more power, or they clearly are not quite right in their head.

And yes, I realize that this is quite a common trope to make the villains seem more "three dimensional" and to allow some sympathy towards them, but in most stories that happens with one or two villains, but here it seems like the same plot / motivation repeats over and over, with slight variations in scale and opposition. Almost as if there is no other way to make a villain interesting whitout making his motivation "world peace by force" + "Someone died in my past".

I have to say that in this case, Orochimaru almost seems like the refreshing kind of major villain since he sticks out like a sore thumb with his egocentric and powerhungry ambitions (of course that's the basic motivation of most villains, so "refreshing" has to be taken with a grain of salt).

I don't know, that was just my immediate thought as I read about Sasuke planing to go along with that path as well in the end, just after fighting against 3 entities that wanted exactly the same but failed.

I'm just tired of villains with a massive messiah complex and it seems quite a lazy way to write villains, to me. By the way, I find the triggers for that to be extreamly weak as well - I mean, a close/loved one dies, and you have to change the world? That's it? How about therapy and meds instead? Having too much chakra really seems to weaken the mind/spirit.

(And yes, it's a bit overgeneralized at this point, since I don't have every single detail about every single character in mind, but that's my overall impression: 3 People. The first dies, the second becomes evil, the thid either supports or fights the second. Rinse and repeat.)

Kakuzu - How much more honest can you get? Money rules the world! (Of course that's a bad motivation... but one of the more realistic ones ;D ) 