just wondering aloud here but what do you think about the many negative feelings towards itachi? i mean obviously he did very bad things but i think about my siblings (and family, and friends, and loved ones) and maybe i wouldn’t go so far as to annihilate my entire clan like he did, but… i would go very far for them, i think. once someone recognizes how his betrayal and actions thereafter are out of love and duty the theme/story becomes very, very different, just mostly sad.
which is not to mention that he was a child soldier and was straight up murdering ppl before he turned ten!! at ten i was still making mud pies with dirt outside !!!!
also it’s not that deep but idk i think about the two brothers and get sad sometimes.
okay this is a really complicated because as much as i like itachi as a character i understand very well why people hate him or are critical of him.
the thing about itachi people hate is how he’s portrayed in the narrative itself. kishimoto wants the audience to view itachi massacring his family as a good and honorable thing and not as something horrific. his crime is glorified as the peak of a great shinobi and will of fire, which in the text, are put as the good side. so ofc anyone that actually stops and thinks what they are reading will go HUH?
its true that itachi was a child soldier and was groomed at 13 to do what he did but itachi dies as a grown person and STILL he never thinks of the course action he took as the wrong one. it certainly brought guilt to him killing his clan if he wanted to be killed so bad by sasuke’s hands to “right” things but until the very end he saw his clan as if they had been in the wrong for standing against konoha. and yes we can just say that’s because how deep the brainwashing went but it still doesn’t absolve him because as any grown person you have to do retrospection in your life. (sorry for using my dumb phd in star wars here as an example but take anakin. he was groomed to become evil since he was a child yet still you can’t say he’s not a villain because at the end of the day it’s him who is killing children and the movie doesn’t tell you this is good thing because he’s doing it to “save” his wife. it’s a selfish horrific act and the narrative paints it as such)
it doesn’t help that itachi as a character is a big mess in certain areas that came with him being a straight up villain in part 1 then “broken hero” in part 2. it’s true itachi chooses danzo’s way to kill their entire clan to spare his little brother’s life but the elders did not tell him to make sasuke watch that and psychologically ruin sasuke for life, and then coming back to the village and doing it again. he did that in his own accord because he selfishly wants to dictate sasuke’s actions. he was very controlling of sasuke’s life but the funniest thing is that he couldn’t see it until after he dies but people still paint these actions as good (even though in his rarest moment where he gained self awareness, he says himself he was wrong).
i don’t doubt he loves sasuke more than anything but for 99% of his arc it was a very obsessive and controlling and ruthless kind of love in which he was the one to hurt sasuke the most with the actions he committed to protect him.
i personally love and hate itachi as a character, he’s fascinating because of how fucked up he really is. i enjoy characters like that overall. and i love fucked up siblings relationships and itachi and sasuke are one that drives me crazy because the love is really there despite everything! but still i’m not blind to kishimoto’s propaganda i can see the faults in his writing and why people (me included) hate the narrative he tried to push
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