[Manga] Naruto Chapter 606 Discussion Thread

[HasuMasu]

^ You're right, he blew everything out of proportion and decided to become the ultimate ninja douchebag for such a reason.

How does that make sense? He's the crazy man, that's how.

Pretty crazy, I know.

[james0246]

Originally Posted by Hunter

I don't think that's the case, he doesn't want anyone to suffer particularly, he simply doesn't care because he believes everything he doesn't like will unhappen once he's successful.

Ah, so Obito isn't vengeful, he's simply a psychopath/sociopath (far more than most other character in the series). Is that supposed to be better?

Just because he is creating a dream world doesn't necessarily magically bring everyone he has killed (or caused to die) back to life. Rather they need to dream of others in such a world, or if they are already dead then they need to be dreamt of in such a world. Whatever the case, the dead are still dead and nothing we have seen of the various mega Uchiha genjutsus can bring the dead back to life.

Obito's delusions are quite sickening to me. I feel no pity for him, and definitely no sympathy, so I am unclear what Kishimoto hopes to accomplish with such a character. Especially considering how important Kishimoto has made Obito within the story (unlike, say, Hidan who was sickening, but transitory).

[Hunter]

That depends what you mean by better, I find the notion of a vilain so sick with the world and so delusional that he thinks reality is irrelevant because he intends to enforce his delusion on existence itself to be fitting with the larger theme of the story. The problem as often with the author is its execution, not the thought behind it.
I have no problem with Obito being insane and sickening, it explains his aloof behavior, his lack of empathy toward his friends and family and the fact he doesn't care about his own sense of self : he's so deluded that as far as he's concerned all of reality -including himself- is just a wrong fleeting serie of events that are going to be corrected soon enough. It doesn't matter if he's a monster, he will think of himself as younger Obito and so he shall be. Tobi and his actions will have unhappened.

A better transition between Obito and Tobi could have easily made the whole thing more palatable, a couple of pages with Obito feeling like a remote stranger into a foreign body instead of the pointless training pages, a few panels with emotional troubles, dissociative disorders and headaches instead of his happy-go lucky state to show that there was a problem with him that Madara could prey on and of course a better handle of the relationship between Rin and Obito to give his final snap real emotional value would be all it takes to make it good instead of risible.

@Essenar, I find disturbing that you can't see the difference between the lack of maturity that led you into driving your mom's SUV into a park and the plain madness of coldly planning murders, genocide and world war during two decades upon the death of your 7 grades crush.

[Dengar]

I'm not sure whether we are actually supposed to sympathize. I mean you don't sympathize with people in real life who do stupid things for stupid reasons, right? Not sympathizing with them doesn't stop those people from existing though.

[james0246]

Originally Posted by Hunter

That depends what you mean by better, I find the notion of a vilain so sick with the world and so delusional that he thinks reality is irrelevant because he intends to enforce his delusion on existence itself to be fitting with the larger theme of the story.

As I said in a previous post, I wouldn't mind if Obito intellectually came to the conclusion that the world is sick (or even false), and has gone about implementing his plan to change everything. Rather, it is his very reason for implementing the plan to begin with that I find unsatisfying, uninteresting, unbelievable and ultimately false. You are correct, a villain deciding to reshape the world fits well within the context of the overall story (Nagato, Sasuke and a few others also work within this thematic structure), Obito's rational, though, feels like lip service, like he was forced into a role Kishimoto already created but didn't properly explain or explore (as you've said).

That being said, what really ruins it all for me is the likely possibility that all of this emo crap will be thrust aside if Obito learns the truth of the day Rin died.

Originally Posted by Dengar

I'm not sure whether we are actually supposed to sympathize. I mean you don't sympathize with people in real life who do stupid things for stupid reasons, right? Not sympathizing with them doesn't stop those people from existing though.

Baring Hidan and Kakuzu (who were one-offs at best), and potentially Kisame (who really never did anything important), every single villain we've seen before has been sympathetic to an extent. It was sympathy, or at least pity, that allowed us to analysis and decipher (even discuss) their actions. Tobi is so far outside the norm, especially for a character who is supposed to be literally central to the entire story, that I am unclear what Kishimoto is doing.

[Hunter]

Originally Posted by james0246

That being said, what really ruins it all for me is the likely possibility that all of this emo crap will be thrust aside if Obito learns the truth of the day Rin died.

True, the worse thing being that what really happened shouldn't have any bearing on Obito's madness because ultimately the hows and whys don't matter in face of his current ideology but there is a smell of magical personality U-turn induced book in the air.

[ronin myael]

Originally Posted by Dengar

I'm not sure whether we are actually supposed to sympathize. I mean you don't sympathize with people in real life who do stupid things for stupid reasons, right? Not sympathizing with them doesn't stop those people from existing though.

hmmm, actually when writers focus on certain characters, give them backgrounds and build them up, they want their readers to somewhat empathize with them whether they are protagonists or antagonists. take chris nolan's the joker, nolan didn't really give the character enough history, we didn't even know what really made the joker tick. he was simply psychotic. he had no real motivations except for his desire to "see the world burn". he claimed to be an agent of chaos and we, the viewers, simply accepted that. since nolan didn't really give us much info about the character, we couldn't really relate or empathize with him. and yet we were still drawn to him because he was well-written and heath ledger's performance made the character all the more memorable. it didn't matter that he was sadistic, twisted and ruthless, we still felt that there was more to the character even though there really wasn't. we are not meant to understand that character because there is nothing to understand. obito, on the other hand, is a key figure in the story. we know his history (though i think we still don't know enough), his personality, his desires and frustrations. kishi took the effort to give us flashbacks to explain why obito turned out the way he did. why would he do that if he didn't want us to understand the character and sympathize with him? if we weren't meant to understand him, then as james said, he could simply be another hidan, a sick and screwed up character who reeks of destruction. no need for backgrounds, flashbacks or sob stories.

[Sasukemaru]

This is becoming very, what's the word?................Stupid.

First off Obito is lame, what a waste tobi has proven to be by being revealed to be obito, but i have a different complaint...which is the plan they are so eager to carry out..the infinite tsukiyomi...

The infinite tsukiyomi makes absolutely no sense...when i first heard the concept, i expected something similar to lelouch's geass, or shisui's ms. But to find out, the ppl aren't actually going to have their minds controlled...the plan is to pull their minds into a imaginary world...

All of this is fine i suppose...until you realize this lil dream world will only last about a month or so, till everyone dies of dehydration and starvation that is....so even if the plan was to succeed the end result would be everyone on earth dead, and edo madara day dreaming for all eternity...yeah that's pretty stupid..

[itachi-san314]

Originally Posted by james0246

No, it is just over a crush. Obito didn't independently arrive at the conclusion that the world sucks, if he did I might like him more. Rather, like an emo teen, one bad thing happens to him (okay, having a boulder fall on you isn't nice, but considering the jokes he made immediatly after, it's hard to say how badly the rock hurt ), and he decides the world should suffer. It's pathetic and completely unsympathetic (it's also somewhat uninteresting).

I agree to an extent, but I still see more to it. we know that obito suffered his whole life with an insecurity of not being good enough to live up to his family name. he then made peace with death having not accomplished any of his dreams aside from making a brief yet substantial friendship and acknowledgement from kakashi. then he got a second chance at life and underwent a very difficult rehabilitation to try to get his old life back and pursue his dreams again. all this he dealt with by means of humor and laughing off the pain. then when he finally broke free from madara's prison, he was instantly crushed and all his dreams were rendered impossible in an instant.

I'm a pretty laid back person so I can't identify with obito's conclusions at all, but we know that he isn't laid back. he's impulsive and childish and delusional. that's what his crush on rin always was. not only did they not even have a single romantic moment, but she wasn't even interested in him. it was entirely delusional on his part. that's the type of character obito is, like it or not. he's silly, unrealistic and selfish. he only wanted to go back to rin and kakashi because he still harbored a hope of dating her at some point. his body being crushed and combined with zetsu can be seen as symbolic of him never growing up. he's kind of like peter pan in that he wants to exist in neverland and not face reality as an adult would.

Originally Posted by ronin myael

i would've understood it if kishi showed us obito's childhood, that he was shunned by his clan because he was a disappointment and that rin was all he had so losing her would be crippling and devastating.

Originally Posted by Hunter

A better transition between Obito and Tobi could have easily made the whole thing more palatable, a couple of pages with Obito feeling like a remote stranger into a foreign body instead of the pointless training pages, a few panels with emotional troubles, dissociative disorders and headaches instead of his happy-go lucky state to show that there was a problem with him that Madara could prey on and of course a better handle of the relationship between Rin and Obito to give his final snap real emotional value would be all it takes to make it good instead of risible.

I totally agree that the transition could have been better written (although I do like it) and i like these ideas a lot, but there's also a sense i get that a lot of this did happen. there's something to be said for the reader filling in the blanks as well. during those training scenes, we did see obito struggle with the new zetsu body. since kishi didn't exactly explain his mentality there, we can fill in for ourselves just how much that impacted him mentally to have to use a prosthetic foreign body from then on for his life. and his past with the uchiha is mostly unknown but we can fill in the blanks there too with him being bullied and whatnot. Perhaps that's why he doesn't have any love or care for them and only for Rin and kakashi to an extent. I would have really liked to see what you both mentioned, but it's not like most of it couldn't have happened. it just wasn't explicitly told to us like it probably should have been, especially a moment like hunter said where obito had a bad headache, questioned his identity and purpose and lost control of his new body or something like that and then madara had to intervene and set him back up on his path towards wanting to protect rin and kakashi

[Ero-Senn1n]

Originally Posted by Essenar

Of course now, I'm in my late 20's, I'm a lot more mature and I know how stupid it was but does it change that it happened? Not at all. I get worried when I hear about kids having relationships because I know it's a lot of emotional weight for them to try to deal with: jealousy, intimacy, yearning, depression, confidence.

Well Obito didn't mature like you, his goal didn't change at all
Trying to kill Minato and the whole village 2 years later, at age of 15 is still possible if we think by your explanation. However there was one big problem for me there: Obito did fight Minato as if he was a complete stranger, if someone is 15 and driven by hormones or whatever, and because of that he is full of hate and very strong feelings he won't fight Minato as a 100% cold blooded killer who does not say even one sentence, or one word, about their past. I understand that their plan required that he does not reveal that they are Obito and Madara, however the powers that Obito used already had given away a LOT of information (only Madara could control the kyuubi, only someone from konoha could know how to bypass the defenses and kill anbu, to know when and where to attack Kushina in her weakest state, etc.) and therefore having an angry rant against Minato and Konoha (the way Sasuke did, when he speaks to the rest of team7) would not reveal much more than what Minato would already guess. For example he could have said to Minato during their fight: "Now you are here to save konoha, but you failed to be there for your own team twice and both times one of them died because of you! Only a fool like Kakashi would not hate you for this, now you will feel the pain of losing the woman you love!!!".

BTW the assumption from 2 months ago that during the fight against Minato Obito was mind controlled can be true: we see that black Zetsu is Madara's will, so it could be that Obito fused with black Zetsu and let black Zetsu take control. That would explain the personality, the ability of controlling the kyuubi, the kyuubi recognizing Tobi as Madara, and in the anime the old adult voice of Tobi. And also Tobi's reaction to Minato asking if he was Madara, he did neither deny nor confirm, which makes sense if it's Madara's will but not Madara himself.

[Midnight Commander]

Originally Posted by Kafriel

Gaara was possessed, so setting him aside, the other two actually held up pretty well. Nagato witnessed the death of his parents and experienced war at a very young age but still pulled through until the Danzou incident and Naruto went through a lot of stuff before his ultimate fight against Pain. Obito just cracked at the first obstacle, and while it's something plausible, it definitely lacks the impact we've already seen in others.

I wasn't discussing Obito. I was pointing out your false statement about Naruto's experiences supposedly being “far worse” than any other character's in the story, and you seemed to imply that Naruto had no breaking point; the facts say otherwise.

[Kafriel]

My point was that Naruto's troubled childhood started at birth. Definitely better than Gaara's, who went through continued aggression ever since, but the latter turned the earliest out of them. Nagato's was arguably better, because he had a family and friends, as well as a caring mentor to watch his back and help him develop his power in order to stand up to the harsh reality at hand (war).

Naruto, on the other hand, held out all alone until the graduation day...as for his cracking point, it was explicitly forced on him for the sake of achieving that effect, not to mention it took ten full chapters for it to happen. In Obito's case, it was a chapter and 3 pages.

Anyway, this all bring me back to the starting point, Obito's experience lacks the impact it was meant to cause on his character, although the effects of that change are crucial to the plot.

[Sasukemaru]

You know...kishi will usually only give a character a flashback when they're about to die...R.I.P obito, it's long overdue..

[Lunarskylar]

there's still alot to be answered though, like what happened to the zetsu attached to obito, along with the supposed mokuton abilities he's so proficient in

this is how he adapted the madara persona, but as already hinted, there's been a gap in which he changes madara's plan to fit his own (i'm even wondering if he reprogrammed black zetsu along the way oo with his own youton will). I don't believe that obito didn't know of madara's involvement in rin's death, but the old man already killed himself, so the ulimate revenge would be not reviving him.

i'm hoping for a bit more development on what caused obito to become so completely closed off and evil, since he's supposed to be evil, not heartbroken (like shown in his fight with konan).

Also... madara teaches him the jutsu of the six path... one of those jutsu being bringing back the dead... then tells him to bring back himself... even though this crazy kid is helping him with his plan so he could bring back rin , and then willingly dies, expecting obito to do it. Madara should thank Kabuto, cuz i'm pretty sure Obito was planning to revive Rin instead and Tsukiyomi them all so they could live in a world happy together.

[itachi-san314]

Originally Posted by The Small One

There is one thing I don't really understand about this whole Moon's Eye Plan:
So they want to put everone into a big dream (Matrix-like) where everyone is happy, I don't see a problem with this.
But if everybody is dreaming, who is taking care of the bodies? They need food, and should be sheltered against bad weather or other physical influences.

well i do see a major problem with this, but that's aside from your point i think... my theory would be that a second would last infinitely, like how a human dream that seems to last a long time was only a few seconds in reality. so basically time in reality wouldn't matter anymore

[Bassoonicmayhem]

Originally Posted by BlackDove

If that was her real side, it puts Obito's real world perceptions in question, because all he ever really loved was an unrealistic cardboard cutout, and thus his designs on the world end up being ludicrous that much more as a direct result.

Even if the reason for Rin’s death turned out that she was a spy (or something of that nature) I don’t think it would matter to Obito. He would probably deny the accusation at first, or if he came to accept it, he would decide to just unmake that truth in his world. I would much rather see Obito handled as a tragic character—that just can’t come to terms with whatever the truth ends up being—rather than him being shoe-horned a hero’s U-turn. I feel that it would be out of place seeing how many years he has wasted to try to accomplish this goal. I think (even though this hypothetically hasn’t happened yet) it would feel forced. He should just be left a tragic character when that time comes.

[james0246]

^Realizing all your dreams are pointless, and that the one character you might trust (Madara) actually masterminded everything, would be just as tragic. Especially if, the second he realizes his feelings meant nothing and he was just a pawn, Madara or Sasuke smush him like the boulder should have done 17 years ago.

[Lunarskylar]

Originally Posted by james0246

^Realizing all your dreams are pointless, and that the one character you might trust (Madara) actually masterminded everything, would be just as tragic. Especially if, the second he realizes his feelings meant nothing and he was just a pawn, Madara or Sasuke smush him like the boulder should have done 17 years ago.

i'm in serious doubt that obito trusts madara, and was planning to go through madara's exact plan. Even when madara arrived on the scene, obito's response seemed more like "you're still here? meh"

unless the whole point of the black zetsu was to self hypnotize obito into keeping as madara, which could explain certain unnecessary acts, like attacking the leaf village, and killing the uchiha clan. this trauma doesn't explain why obito would go to the unnecessary trouble of these things when they never contributed to the eye of the moon plan at all

[SoloPanda]

I know it's far fetched and i know it's probably an ass pull but i'm almost willing to bet that Rin will be comeing back to life with the Rinnagan. It just feels like the whole flashback thing and everything that's happening now the purpose of the Rinnegan given to Nagato. Kinda feels like Obito is gonna use it to bring Rin back or mabey someone else will.... who knows if she comes back mabey she'll say "This world is rotten" and "Just as planned"

[Eragon]

^ You're reading too much Bleach man.