For those who dislike Naruto

[Super_Boom]

hershel_layton said:

People say the ending is bad, but they're vague. By the ending, do they mean the last 1/3? Or ending as in the last several chapters(or 20ish episodes in terms of anime)?

I dropped the manga around chapter 600, but was getting sick of it for a while before. I watched the anime up until the flashback with Nardo's mom, and just got bored since I was seeing the same content twice, and the anime-original content was consistently terrible.

I was actually a big fan for a long time, starting watching the anime back in 2004 or something. The underdog MC was appealing to me, and the core team of friends was fun to watch. The problem for me though, was that it seemed like the author lost focus over time. Instead of focusing on the core team, he introduced hordes of new characters...which isn't bad on its own...but with Naruto, it seemed like the entire cast became irrelevant with every new character that came up. Compare it with something like One Piece, where the author juggles hundreds of new characters, but always keeps the focus on the Strawhats, and you can see the problem I had.

And then, to make it worse, instead of focusing on Naruto being an underdog, the author took the easy way out and made him the prophecy child, that was just fated to be awesome...and then revealed that he was from a clan of Super Saiyans all along. It was stupid, I remember earlier in the series, one of the rival characters even gave a speech on how hard work could never best a powerful lineage...and yet later the author decides it makes sense to give the main character a powerful lineage anyway. It was nonsense...and just felt like stupidly lazy writing to me.

It wasn't until the Big Ol War arc that I couldn't turn a blind eye towards the plot holes and convenient exposition done just to advance to the next chapter. Characters would break rules established early in the series just to use a convenient move, or bring a dead character back for random exposition. Final straw for me was Neji's stupidly rushed death that was done with zero foreshadowing, just to give Hinata a good moment. To me, that pretty much defined the author's ability as a writer, and why I'll never touch anything else he decides to poop out in the future.

Of course, this is subjective...and I honestly don't begrudge anyone that doesn't care about these issues...but for me, it really soured my opinion on the franchise as a whole.