#she is a hypocrite to her core and it's why she experiences so much dissonence even years later | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

evartandadam · 5 years

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Hi! I have a question for you. this is what i find particularly confusing abt your character analysis of sasori: if sasori wants to abandon human emotions altogether, why would choose puppets to receive love, then? What's with his cognitive dissonance(i don't recall you elaborating on this that much) that occurs on both conscious and subconscious levels? pls be specific.

I think every single scene Kishimoto included in Sasori’s backstory is very important in understanding who he is, and why he is what he is. No scene is wasted. Sasori’s story is the perfect example on how to make a psychopathic killing machine. Sasori’s struggle with his relationship with emotion is the core of his character.

Ok, let’s dig into this chronologically.

As a Small Child:

The earliest flashback we get of Sasori is when he is about 5. He seems to be a normal, sweet kid, despite his quiet disposition. He loves his family very much. His parents seem to give him the proper amount of affection for his age.

(It is well known that small children who do not receive physical and emotional love end up emotionally stunted. Keep this in mind.)

Then, his parents never return from a mission. His grandmother takes him in, knowing they are dead. But she doesn’t want to hurt her grandson.

Chiyo managed to raise what looked like a kind young man (her son), but she did not raise Sasori the same way. I believe life has been harsh to her since having her son, and she feels unable to give Sasori what he needs. She is emotionally distant, and appears to lie to Sasori about his parents.

We don’t know how long she hid his parents’ deaths from him, but it would be long enough for him to feel betrayed by her because she didn’t tell him. I believe his later hatred of his grandmother stems from this incident.

Does Chiyo try? Of course she does. But it is obvious she didn’t know how to reach out to him in a proper way. Her solution is to teach him puppetry at a very young age. This seems to make him happy. What she doesn’t realize is that this is the beginning of a disaster. The creation of a monster.

The next thing we see is Sasori making puppets of his parents, and manipulating them into hugging him. This is pretty straightforward. Sasori is using puppets as people. He wants to gain affection from non living things, because he is desperate to recreate what he once had. Little Sasori has a hole in his heart, and he tries to fill it with a false reality. This is a very important “first” for him.

As a Chuunin (from a filler, but it fits him very well):

We skip ahead to when Sasori is a young teen, maybe 12? He is not emotional whatsoever, and he has a teammate, Komushi, who always tries to reach out to him. Komushi loses an arm during a mission, and Sasori makes him a puppet arm with gadgets inside. This is Sasori trying to help. But Komushi accidentally ingests some poison kept in the arm, and dies. Komushi’s parents beg for Sasori to help. So what does Sasori do?

Well, he makes him into his first human puppet! But why? This is a very strange thing to do to your teammate. Chiyo is certainly horrified by it. But to Sasori, this makes perfect sense. Because, to Sasori, puppets are as good as human beings.

Sasori thinks this is making Komushi live forever. Now he will never decay. Isn’t that what everyone wanted?

Sasori at this stage in his life is really messed up and confused. It is not shown why exactly, but it doesn’t really need to be shown. Suna is known for its horrific training methods and lack of care for its ninja. They put kids into training at a very young age. This is the standard for military villages. The Leaf Village is the kindest of them, which is why the main characters still think for themselves and show empathy. These other villages literally brainwash children and make them into killing machines. That is their goal.

And that is what they get.

Sasori as a Jounin:

Sasori, by the time he is 15, is such a notorious killer, he receives the title of “Sasori of the Red Sand” during the Third Great War. What we know about him is that he is a brilliant genius, the inventor of the standard puppets used in the Puppet Core, and a scientist/medic. He is probably the pride and joy of his village. But Sasori is unhappy. The main reason is likely that no one understands his genius human puppet technique. He wants to experiment freely, and without judgement. So he leaves.

Sasori’s Human Puppets:

What is Sasori’s fascination with human puppets? Well, as we can see from his past, it stems from his desire to feel human connection when he didn’t have any. He spends all of his time with puppets, fighting with puppets, making puppets, bonding with his creations. This was probably his way of trying to connect with his grandmother as well, for a time, before coming to hate her. He eventually leaves over his desire to create human puppets.

It is important to address that he genuinely does not understand why everyone else thinks the concept of human puppets is repulsive. He has been raised to kill effectively, using puppets. Human puppets are definitely superior to normal puppets. Sasori sees his discovery as the next step forward for puppeteers. It is an effective weapon- nothing more.

He has been brainwashed all his life to not value human life. This is a very dangerous thing to teach a child with the background that he has. Sunagakure expected Sasori to value certain human beings over others, but to Sasori, this is hypocritical. He thinks his fellow ninja are weak and hypocrites for rejecting his brilliant work.

This is the beginning of his struggle with two opposing thinking processes: (1) A lack of care for human life, and (2) the desire to feel love and connection, which has managed to manifest itself as associating people with puppets.

So Sasori kills hundreds(?), running amuck around the continent. He is gaining a collection, and developing a reputation as probably one of the most dangerous killers alive. And the more he collects, the hungrier he gets.

Sasori at this point believes the human puppet is the peak of humanity. He associates it with eternal life and power. He also feels loved by his human puppets.

To make it clear, Sasori is taking a live person (representing those unpredictable humans who rejected him, including his grandmother). and turning them into a puppet (something he can control, and feels safe with- something that can love him.)

Sasori Becoming a Puppet:

Sasori decides to make himself into a puppet for many reasons. The main one is that he wants to destroy every puppeteers weak point- themselves. By making himself into a literal machine, he is practically indestructible. This is very practical.

Another reason is that he wants to live forever. He is brilliant, and wants to learn until the end of time (like Orochimaru). He seeks to make his collection infinitely bigger. This means he never gets tired of his work. He is obsessed.

The last main reason is that he wants to become a puppet, emotionally.

This means that he is tortured. He has lived his life chasing perfection, but he feels empty. He is lonely, and no matter how many puppets he surrounds himself with, he can’t seem to get rid of this loneliness. (The loneliness that stems from his parents’ deaths and Chiyo’s lack of affection with him). Sasori himself says that by making himself a puppet, he is no longer human, and has no emotions.

This means he struggled with emotions. This is interesting, because externally, Sasori looks very deadpan. He was hurt and betrayed as a small child, and his response to this was to close himself off from others. But because of the particular career of puppeteering, he accidentally replaced people with puppets. Who knows if he is consciously aware of this.

So he tries to become what he idolizes- a perfect being with no regrets or flaws. Something better than a human being. But this doesn’t work out as expected.

His Contradictions (subconscious and conscious):

As I mentioned before, Sasori was raised to be a killer with no emotion. This is all he knows how to do. This is why he values having no connections or emotions. He wants to be strong. Strong = Apathetic.

But Sasori deep down wants human connection. This is what he cannot bear. He wants what other people want. This does not go with the previous point. How can he be a strong ninja when he has these feelings of loneliness? He must eradicate them!

He thinks becoming a puppet will somehow separate himself from his humanity. But he fails. We can see this when he essentially kills himself, saying that he is not a perfect puppet. This means he still feels these emotions, and he can not bear to live with them.

So to answer your question, Sasori does not purposefully attach himself emotionally to his puppets. This is not something he can control.

I said in another rant that Sasori is obsessed with control. He even wants to control death. I mentioned at the end of the “Sasori’s Human Puppets” section of this rant that the process of creating human puppets is to rid humans of their unpredictability.

The only thing he can’t control is himself.

This is his cognitive dissonance. (definition: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.) He knows he can’t eradicate his emotions, but goes to great lengths- irreversible lengths- to achieve the impossible.

But like I said in other rants, I think part of this is subconscious at this point, because he has buried the truth so deep. He lives his life lying to himself. He is essentially roleplaying what he wants to be. In his Shippuden battle, he puts on a good show, bragging that he is a complete puppet and he succeeded in his goals to destroy his connections/emotions. But by the end of the battle, he is finally admitting to the others, and to himself, that it was a failure. And this admittance causes him to no longer want to live.

Conclusion:

The sad thing about Sasori is that at this point in his life, he is probably too far gone to change his ways. He is a psychopathic killing machine. But even as an infamous serial killer, he wants something he can’t understand.

Chiyo blames herself for Sasori. She also said to Sakura “The Sand is responsible for making Sasori into what he has become.” She is referring to his training. The Sand made something they could not control. Sasori is trapped the mental box the Sand provided for him.

Sasori wants something that he is probably incapable of returning, due to how emotionally stunted he is. But people can want things they do not understand.

Hope this answered your questions! Thanks for asking!

#sasori #akatsuki #naruto #text post #asks #rambles #Akatsuki Headcanon Collection

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