Midnight Tease on Naruto

The pattern looks familar:

The other recent oddity is that, completely out of the blue, I decided to watch Naruto on Crunchyroll. I never, ever thought I would do this. I've never had anything against Naruto, per se... just against the kids that watched it on Cartoon Network. I had to give it some respect, of course... Naruto brought a whole new generation of Americans to anime; but I watched a couple of episodes and it just seemed; well, silly and more than a little stupid.

Anyway, I started watching two weeks ago and I'm just about 100 episodes in, now. I was surprised early on, after a few episodes, to discover that I was enjoying myself and wanted to know what happened next. Sixty or seventy episodes in I was completely floored to discover that I hadn't had as much fun watching an anime series in *years*. Yes, this series has it's problems; especially in pacing. [...]

Ah-ha! That's the spirit! 7-8 episodes a day (100/14) is what I would've done of Naruto too, if I were young and healthy and had the time to burn. To this day Naruto remains the series with which I stuck for the longest time (I rearched somewhere beyond ep.136). I will probably never repeat such excercise. Sorry, LoGH.

The two main supporting characters don't get quite as good treatment; genius student Sasuke is whipped around like a rag doll by the plot...early in the series you get the feeling Sasuke is actually the protagonist; later on he's a massive deus ex machina. The female lead Sakura is present, so far, just for Naruto to have a crush on. She doesn't do anything. Even when she does something, she doesn't do anything.

You mean aside ep.22 where she saved Sasuke's sorry ass from a life-threatening injury because be became disoriented due to a bruised ego? But I understand the nature of the complaint. She lost the power race early on. I think it would not be a big spoiler to observe that Kishimoto "fixed" the problem by rapidly powering her up for Shippuuden...

Anyway, good times.

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