I don't know if you've ever talked about this, but what would have been your ideal resolution to Kakashi and Sasuke's relationship in canon? What would you have wanted their post-canon life to look like? (I love love love your meta btw!)
Hi, and thank you! You’re right; I haven’t talked about this, and the reason for that is because I’m in the planning stages of a project related to this topic, and for me, sharing all my thoughts before I start the nitty-gritty work of making something is basically the kiss of death for the creative process. I have to keep quiet about stuff I’m working on, or it does weird things to my productivity. X)
So, while I do have very clear ideas about what the most natural progression for their relationship would be and what their post-canon life would look like, I’m not going to answer this with specifics for now. I am, however, in a general sense, going to say this:
Naruto canon basically stops for me at the beginning of 479 (and if you’re interested in a longer explanation for that, I wrote up some thoughts in this old post). Kakashi and Sasuke’s relationship is just one of many things that the conclusion failed to deliver on, and it’s not even the most important one - I would have been totally fine if the story had ended pre-timeskip and left us with just a tiny indication of a future resolution for them, whereas things like the Uchiha massacre/government cover-up never being mentioned again make me want to scream (I still can’t believe it...never before have I seen a more dramatic departure from a story’s original intent/previously established themes; never before has a more egregious crime against storytelling been committed) - the finale abandoned most of what it had spent the last 700 chapters telling us to wait for, and even though Kakashi and Sasuke’s relationship matters so much to me, it’s not remotely close to the sole or most significant place where the conclusion fell down.
But since we’re talking about these two specifically here - let’s put the other stuff aside. When it comes to Kakashi and Sasuke, it is completely laughable that this story expects me to buy a conclusion where their relationship isn’t important, the same way it would be laughable for it to expect me to buy a conclusion where Sasuke’s relationship with Sakura or Naruto didn’t matter. Kakashi is explicitly set up by the story as a parallel/precursor to Sasuke, the same way Obito is set up as a parallel/precursor to Naruto, and while this doesn’t mean that Kakashi and Sasuke are the exact same person or have equivalent personalities, it does mean that Kakashi can understand certain things about Sasuke that other people can’t necessarily relate to quite so easily.
It’s not just about losing family at a young age (plenty of people in the Leaf can understand that, unfortunately). It’s the particular experience of discovering your parent/parents’ dead bodies in your own home. It’s the betrayal/confusion/pain of your family being taken from you not by war or accident or illness, but by the person you most loved and trusted. It’s the subsequent self-isolation and cutting yourself off from other relationships, throwing yourself into your training and concealing your pain behind the ‘i’m wildly advanced for my age treat me like an adult’ facade. It’s looking down on your teammates as “less than” and acting like you don’t need them for anything (“you thought the others were so far beneath you that they were worthless....arrogance”). It’s being dragged inch by inch out of your isolation armor by friends who admire you and care about you despite your efforts to push them away.
It’s about Kakashi’s unique ties to the Uchiha clan, and specifically to Itachi. It’s about Sasuke and Kakashi being the last bearers of the sharingan, and both of them being targeted for it (by Danzo, to boot, if you like the anime ANBU arc, but the sharingan still matters even just considering the manga). It’s about Kakashi’s father being persecuted into a premature grave by the traditional shinobi system, for the crime of defying the traditional shinobi system, the same system that said it was acceptable for the Uchiha clan to be sacrificed in order to accomplish the “mission” of protecting Konoha. It’s about Kakashi and Sasuke being the children of so-called traitors (aka people who bucked the system and were mercilessly punished for it) and about the complicated social position they’re thus forced to occupy, as people who are deeply proud of where they come from even though they themselves sometimes have conflicted feelings about what their families did to them.
It’s about Kakashi spending his post-Kannabi life trying to reconcile a desire to protect his home and his community with the knowledge that his home and his community did irrevocable harm to his family, the same way a post-canon Sasuke will have to wrestle with these same questions. It’s about both of them being used as a weapon to kill the person they cared about most, BY the person they cared about most. It’s about both of them being willed new eyes by people who were the foundations for their entire existences/philosophies/personal missions for years and years, about whom they now have confusing and complicated feelings, because Obito and Itachi did unspeakable things, but Kakashi and Sasuke love them even when they can’t excuse them, and how do you figure out how to feel about someone who cared about you that much but also hurt you that badly, someone who’s a reviled figure to the rest of the world and whom you aren’t completely sure you’ve fully forgiven, or that it’s even okay for you to forgive?
It’s about post-canon Sasuke choosing to always keep his left eye covered, an eye he can’t deactivate or otherwise conceal, an eye that makes him (in)famous, an eye that makes him a target to enemies and a danger to the people around him - an eye that comes with baggage, that reminds him of a period in his life that he considers shameful, of a moment where he was lost.
The idea that Sasuke would ever come home to a scenario where Kakashi was not a significant figure in his return/recovery is not remotely believable, particularly when you consider that while all three of Team 7′s kids trained with a member of the Sannin, Naruto and Sakura are the only ones who had actual mentors. Jiraiya and Tsunade both took on pupils who were reflections of themselves, passing on to them their personal powers and techniques (toad and slug summons, Sage Mode, the Hundred Healings, etc), because they truly believed in their students and cared about their development. Orochimaru, by contrast, was using Sasuke for his own twisted purposes - he was the witch from Hansel and Gretel, fattening up a child until it could be devoured. Sasuke was nothing more than a future skinsuit to him, not a student, and there was never any loyalty or respect felt on either side of that mentorship, just a cold craving for the power that each party could obtain by using the other.
In a universe where the master/student relationship is such a fundamental social structure, canon-period Sasuke is totally adrift, unanchored in an aberrant and uncomfortable limbo, because Orochimaru was never supposed to be his teacher. Kakashi was.
I think that’s probably the most fundamental principle I apply to Kakashi and Sasuke’s relationship, no matter what era we’re looking at. Kakashi is sensei to all the kids, in very meaningful ways, but when it comes to the master-student apprenticeships, the truth is that where Naruto had Jiraiya, and Sakura has Tsunade, Sasuke has - was always supposed to have - Kakashi. The natural progression of their relationship was interrupted the day the Sound Four showed up in Konoha, and it’s been on hold ever since, but the war is over now, even if the work isn’t. Things are going to change for them, inch by painstakingly-fought-for inch.
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