Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-26636534-20171019193715/@comment-34194151-20180107093705

Ay isn't a dimwit at all, unless you consider anyone who acts emotionally to an event is dumb for life. Never been angry and did something you regret? Ay, when he is level headed, has shown good situational awareness, such as immediately grasping a counter measure to minato's flying rajin. Minato may have still outsmarted him in the end, but it was with a near impossible to read sleight of hand trick. Ayy didn't even do too bad in his fight versus sasuke even though he was emotionally charged in the fight. he casually tanked chidori then body slammed sasuke, who was saved by plot ( sasuke was still slammed into his own susanoo with tremendous force, how does a replacing a hard object (the ground) with an even harder object (susanoo) cushion the massive amount of force Ay applied to sasuke?). Never mind that. After he sees sasuke activate mangeyko, Ayy taps into his experience and decides that he needs to up his power level too. then while he absolutely didn't need to touch the amaterasu to defeat sasuke, at the end of the day he still would have accomplished his goal. The best sasuke could hope for was a draw if Gaara didn't intervene.

@Ninja of War:

Itachi is smarter than the kage by intellectual feats. That isn't to say that the other kage aren't smart too. Intelligence is on a spectrum. Itachi is always playing a sleight of hand card and aggressively planning multiple moves head as he fights. A Perfect example is his part one fight with kakashi. In under like 2 minutes, itachi threw like 3 different diversions as lethal attacks and even kakashi admitted that that was all just a warmup. ITachi used shuriken as a distraction for a water sneak attack which then would release his shadow clone ambush in case his opponent survived. In the event the opponent even survived for that, he had his other clone rigged to explode... All of that was just his warmup! that kind of aggressive and clever attack combos is why itachi is always set aside from the rest. His wisdom, resourcefuleness, processing speed, insight, and creativity are all top nouch. Every fight he takes initiative and is always playing mind games right at the start, literally- the plot point of all his fights is that his opponents were under genjutsu the whole time. He meticulously and agressively analyzes his opponent and then executes his traps almost without a trace of telegraphing.