Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-31278419-20170331010234/@comment-27089028-20170413163017

I can definitely forgive Kishimoto for falling under the curse of Shounen genre in that the field of plot relevance diminishes in size to only encompass a few characters which hurt the world-building as well as robbing interesting characters of any real development. But what I find harder to forgive is that nowadays it has been proven that over time a writer of Shounen can look back on this curse and undo it e.g. Dragon Ball Super is Toriyama's way of giving back relevance to characters other than Goku and Vegeta.

Also, while I think people who accuse Kishimoto of sexism are complete morons devoid of any cognitive processes to the point vegetables can be seen as more intelligent life forms there is no denying that Kishimoto as he himself puts it has no understanding on how to write a good strong female character.

Sakura was a character I eventually warmed up to but I think many will agree with me when I say none of us could quite sense she had really changed that much from part 1. Sure she became immensely powerful and skilled as well as given some genuinely great interactions with other characters but her Sasuke-kun syndrome from Part 1 greatly held back the potential of a character I think would have soared past her male teammates had a little more strength been added to her personality.

Anko's character arc was abandoned, Kurenai was dropped out of her profession before we got to see her do anything really cool (although this is more Kishi's higher ups to blame as Kishi had originally intended for some more character developing plots instead of one big Ninja exam for an arc) and these kind of fates aren't even gender exclusive as every character who doesn't have a bit of Hashirama's wood in them (read that how you like because seriously his DNA is all over the place), isn't a transmigrant of someone's chakra or doesn't have some OP Kekkai Genkai or Six Paths plot armour gets literally kicked out of the plot.

If Toriyama can make up for his mishaps through the sequel of his series then Kishimoto can undo the damage done by the shrinking field of plot relevance in Boruto although that may be difficult as that story is focused more on the New Generation but nothing is impossible for a writer.