Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-4244051-20141120202849/@comment-8284722-20141129073223

Sorry for double posting, but here's my overall opinion on the villains. I really love each and every one of them. Having humane villains is a very great theme that I love to watch. After all, when you're up against a foe, there's always to question of "Why is he/she doing this?". If a hero, like Naruto, embraces this root and tries to purify it, something good will come out of it. That's why he was able to redeem so many people. But if a hero doesn't see it, then all that's gonna happen is death and destruction. Kishi portrayed this perfectly. As Ben Kingsley once said "An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind". Just blindly killing villains for what they do isn't going to get you anywhere. You have to approach these villains and make them more humane. Because they're human. We're human. And when they suffer, we suffer. So, Kishi's new kind of villain in Akatsuki and Sasuke is amazing to me.

I do have one comment, though. When Naruto first launched, the villains were intended to be the antithesis of the heroes. They were meant to show practically no humane qualities whatsoever. I love these villains also, since that conflicts the hero when trying to find the humanity. And that's also why Orochimaru is such a, as you call it, pedophile. But then came Akatsuki, who didn't exhibit any of those qualities. They were more of what is described in the first paragraph. And that leaves me wondering: why the sudden change in thematics? We'll never know, I guess.