Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-31278419-20170331010234/@comment-734582-20170331173153

Ravenlot 27 wrote: Yeah, it'd be a quite exciting scenario. But anyway, I still think that Pain was the one being dwarfed as a villain, he stayed impressive up to the moment when the SPoP secret was revealed, then his flaws and imperfections became a way too sensible. And Minato also added he's been manipulated by Tobi pretty much from the very start. True. I do think it's an interesting contrast though, a man personally weak but with the persona of a god. I just think Nagato suffered from what i can only say is a running theme: Thematic Confusion.

Nagato was god-like but as we later learned, not quite the limit of godlike (which is weird, considering Nagato doubled down on the whole God persona whereas arguably true gods like Madara and Kaguya are just people with tons of power). The theme that they tried to portray -literally the pinnacle of humanity and truly godlike in the literal sense of the word- was largely lost and contradicted with someone like Madara who followed a Might Makes Right believe. This in direct contrast to Nagato who believed himself not physically but rather spiritually enlightened: A god because he "grew up".

I buy that Tobi could deceive him as the deception was mostly about the final goal and not so much about the methods. IE If Nagato was completely in on the plan he would still have done most of these things anyway.

AsianReaper wrote: Have Neji be the legend he was already starting out to be. I think Neji suffered from (perhaps ironically) Kishimoto being aware of at least some Thematic Confusion. Namely, by focusing on the Uchiha, he tried to avoid a dojutsu arms race with the Hyuga. After all, if every time we saw Sasuke pull some new Sharingan trick Neji did the same, it would quickly devolve into an arms race.

For Neji i see only two options: Either heavily restructure the series so it's not as much about the Dojutsu (which would mean stripping about half or more of Part II if not more, depending on what you do with the Rinnegan ) but that would change the show on a massive scale.

The other option and one that i quite like considering the actual outcome, is for Neji to die in the Sasuke rescue mission. I think that for a series that heavily focuses on loss and war, awfully few people actually died. Many characters' arcs pretty much died after the Chunin exams, and if the show had to go a similar route, i would simply kill off a few of them. AsianReaper wrote: Stop using Kakashi as a device to show Naruto's growth (Kakashi losing fights he could win just so Naruto can save the day). I think Kakashi suffered from being too popular. Basically at the start of part II he was at risk of eclipsing Naruto and so Kishimoto was more or less forced to backseat him to prevent it from becoming a Kakashi: shippuden. Especially since the actual planned content for Kakashi wasn't all that much.

I'm not saying it's right. But it is understandable. personally i think him overcoming his natural weakness is a good and cool story. In that sense the actual Manga made that full circle by giving him his eye back (and so he no longer relies on external power), but it wasn't really called out in any way as an actual theme beyond this.