Well, there’s a difference between knowing what Transformers are and thinking they’re cool, and actually following the absurdly elaborate mythos associated with the premise with any regularity. And just as great a difference between that last thing I said and being a hardcore fan. It’s a sliding scale.
I’m sure most people can tell you who Megatron and Optimus Prime and a handful other notables are, even if they (like myself) didn’t even know Transformers were alien life forms until the previews for the movie came out, and generally have difficulty wrapping their mind around the idea that a series originally invented to sell toys that a not insignificant percentage of kids would’ve wanted even if there weren’t a cartoon has such an absurdly elaborate mythos in the first place.
Knuf Wons
Sounds a bit like a sliding logarithmic scale.
A slide rule.
Must be why so many transformer fans are Computers.
OK, that was pretty weak. I’ll see myself out.
Liliet
I’d say the difference between Walkyverse Joe and Dumbiverse Joe is the sliding time scale. Transformers were probably a much bigger thing back then, and met the niche of ‘Joe’s nerdy secret’. In this ‘verse, his nerdy secret is probably something else.
Considering Willis’ buffer, I wonder if he didn’t know what was going to happen with Tailgate when he wrote this, or if this was in reaction to that happening, or if he’s so one with the Transformers franchise by this point that his soul is part of the Allspark and he just sensed it somehow.
I don’t follow Transformers fandom, but now I’m curious: what happened with Tailgate?
Tacos
Had to be buried underground for like 6 months with radiation to cure him of something but some asshole came along and murdered the doctor overseeing the treatment and set the timer to 6 million years.
That is the logical conclusion of the pressing-all-the-numbers-in-the-elevator prank, and it’s super petty but also super intriguing and now I might have to get into transformers.
Doctor_Who
It’s also extremely tragic in context. Massive spoilers!
When we first met Tailgate, he had spent 6 million years underground, drifting in and out of a coma, not realizing how much time was passing as he slowly made his escape.
At first he claims to have been a badass bomb disposal expert before his accidental burial, but it eventually is revealed he was responsible for WASTE disposal…and he only came online 2 weeks before he was buried, and no one even noticed he was gone. He’s basically a child.
He grows closer and closer to his roommate Cyclonus, but then it turns out that all the time he spent underground was wreaking havoc on his body, and he had developed was was basically robot cancer and was going to die soon, despite having barely lived. 6 million years old, and his happiest moment was just having a movie night with some friends.
Even though he’s dying, he performs a heroic act that saves half the Cybertronian race, and Cyclonus manages to cure him. But despite the fact that they clearly have feelings for each other, Cyclonus is so emotionally crippled that he can’t spit it out, and Tailgate starts seeing another bot named Getaway who is much more affectionate.
But it turns out Getaway is just using him, hoping to get him to attempt to assassinate Megatron (a good guy at this point), and get killed in the process. Cyclonus realizes this and prevents it from going down at the last moment, but is nearly killed himself, and the grief of seeing him gunned down unlocks some sort of mutation Tailgate had undergone in his millions of years underground, which gives him super strength.
He uses these abilities to help save the day once more, and it seems him and Cyclonus are finally able to admit their feelings for each other, but there’s a problem; Cyclonus keeps turning up beaten all to hell for some reason. Turns out Tailgate’s powers are causing him to have some sort of fits in his sleep, and he keeps nearly killing himself. Cyclonus keeps having to subdue him, and getting the crap knocked out of him in the process. He hasn’t told Tailgate this is happening. His frenemy Whirl does tell Tailgate in secret, however.
Realizing he’s been hurting the bot he loves, Tailgate pretends he no longer has feelings for Cyclonus so he’ll leave on a mission. Cyclonus believes him and departs. But Tailgate is so desperate to be with him that he has a doctor formulate a way to remove his powers; 6 months in an underground chamber flooded with radiation. Tailgate agrees to this, but a Decepticon with a grudge against him named Fangry kills the doctor and resets the timer to 6 million years.
We last saw poor Tailgate where we first met him. Buried alive.
This is amazing.
Thank you so much for the stunning story of this character.
acher4
w…t….f…..?
:____(
adjudicus
Oh, and this is just ONE character. Wait’ll you see what happens to the rest of the cast
Doctor_Who
@adjudicus
Yeah, I would explain exactly what Whirl’s deal is, but the history lesson alone would take like 20 posts.
adjudicus
@Doctor Who
Not to mention Megatron’s change of allegiance…
(Now that I think of it you’d probably need to explain most of the idwverse just to get a rough idea of why he did it)
And Tailgate is the sweetest, kindest, most adorable bot in the…well, in that entire universe (there are a few that come close, but nobody does cuteybot like Tailgate)…which makes it even more of a kick in the teeth.
StClair
Is there a point where Breaking the Cutie becomes just outright torture porn? ‘Cause I think that MTMTE passed it a while back.
nobilis
Thanks for explaining!
I guess I see now why Amber relates to him.
Chronos
So, this is a shaggy dog story for Transformers, then?
Black Bumblebee
There’s a reason why Transformers: MTMTE won comic of the year not too long ago. It’s basically Dr. Who / Red Dwarf in space with robots. If you’re not reading it, start with Death of Optimus Prime, then move on to MTMTE #1 and go forward from there.
Greyson
wait, have i misunderstood this? does transformers have gay robots? do i have to start reading this comic now? are they using the term “bury your gays” quite literally here?
Doctor_Who
Depends on who you ask. There’s a certain type of fanboy who will swear up and down that it doesn’t count, because they’re robots and so none of them are actually male. The fact some some of them also go by female pronouns and are clearly woman-shaped is ignored.
But yeah, gay robots. The most prominent couple is Chromedome and Rewind, who are just the sweetest damn thing ever. Seriously, their relationship is the best. Lost Light also just revealed that two of their new female characters are not only a couple, but also used to identify as male, before deciding that female made more sense to them. So they are transgendered lesbians.
There are many, many gay robots. Not all of them are healthy, and several end badly, but there’s a bunch.
Off the top of my head, for the guys, we have Tailgate/Cyclonus, Knockout/Breakdown, Rewind/Chromedome, and Blast Off/Onslaught.
On the girl side, there’s Anode/Lug, and Dustup/Jetstream who have major roles, and there are a couple couples who’ve had minor appearances (some of Nautica’s friends, a pair of guards on Carcer).
In this universe, Cybertron is all-male (save for a few like Anode and Lug who go offworld and discover that female fits them better, or Arcee, who…is complicated and was rather unfortunate until a few minor retcons), so any het pairings are going to be from the Colonies…but even among the colonials, the same-gender pairings outnumber the mixed gender ones, at least among the main cast.
ConfusedOwl
Wait … the robots fall in love and couple up? How? Why?
David M Willis
The same reason they can fight and hate each other for 4 million years: they’re people
Marisa Mockery
What happens to his boyfriend? And is anyone looking for him? There has to be records somewhere.
…….shit, you just made me sympathize with Transformers.
I feel like it would be both. It definitely would be very noisy
I can only imagine the paint scratches and dents they’d have afterwards, especially if they like it rough. I suspect the official lore may not have addressed such matters
Betty Anne
Depends on if they’re going for plug-n-play or not, and if so, how rough they like it. Might not need to be any banging or clanging involved at all. :3
Scubasteve0209
Almost certainly indistinguishable from a Michale Bay fight scene.
I’m really surprised that until now I haven’t really put much thought into the potential mechanical / structural problems that would need to be overcome in order for vehicle-sized robots to do sex to each other
Aren’t some transformers city or even planet-sized? Do they even HAVE genitals with which to smush someone? What do said genitals look like? Clearly they must be internal, since none of them seem to wear pants, and yet I’ve NEVER seem Optimus Prime’s dong.
…I may need to see one of Amber’s fanfics. I have too many questions now
One big pet peeve is that Kishimoto sometimes doesn’t know what to do with the interesting characters he has introduced because they all must be less powerful/interesting than the Main Protagonist™ and his boyfriend main rival, so he ends up throwing to the side characters that have been established to be more intelligent or more powerful than both. Neji’s death and Shikamaru’s small role in the final arc are prominent examples. Heck I think that by the final arc the only character that got showtime that he deserved was Killer Bee.
But my BIGGEST peeve is how Kishimoto’s sexism shows through his writing. All good women get married and have babies and STOP BEING NINJAS, and somehow this is their happy ending even though many of these women have worked their entire lives to be capable fighters. Literally the only one that escapes this fate is Tsunade and I think it’s only because her canon age is 50 so he decided she was too old to get married or something.
But it’s so infuriating! The first one to fall into this was Kurenai, who out of nowhere was married to Asuma and pregnant with his child. Like, ok, that’s believable because we don’t see her or her relationships that often. But after this is announced we NEVER see her fight as a ninja again, she essentially retires at age 30 to be a stay-at-home mom even though she’s a widow!
And the trend continues at the end of the series: literally every single female character from the main cast becomes a mother and we see in Boruto that they’re all housewifes. Fudcking SAKURA becomes a houswife, the girl that trained to be both a tank fighter and a healer; arguably one of the most dangerous ninjas in the army. But nuts to that, she needs to make dinner for a husband that might or might not come home. She lost all her self esteem when she gave birth I guess.
Oh yeah and she got married to a man that she had a crush on when she was 12, she apparently loved all the years even though he clearly became a villain and an abusive jerkhole and tried to murder her more than once. But she liked him when they were kids so happy ending I guess!
the final pam
Tenten also was the only one who was still shown to still be involved with the ninja lifestyle as an adult, but she was also shown to be alone??? Because otherwise she probably would’ve been married off to Neji
BBCC
I thought Sakura ran a clinic? That’s not being a housewife.
Inahc
it’s not very ninja either. but what really annoys me is she still acts like sasuke is her “husband”, even though they hadn’t seen each other since she gave birth. 😛 he’s more of a sperm donor than a father.
Sunny
Well, sounds like I didn’t miss anything then. I watched two and a half episodes and figured it was not for me.
and aNOTHER THING
why did Orochimaru become a good guy?? how can anybody trust him?? did they all collectively forget he did illegal human experimentation and he’s a WAR CRIMINAL?
I personally think Part One was kinda rushed, like: you introduce all these interesting characters, build a skeletal structure of a ‘friendship’ between Naruto and Sasuke and then just timeskip three years and I’m supposed to believe they had a deep abiding connection, and care about all this development the other characters had offscreen?
I would have liked a few more arcs between the Zabuza Arc and the Chunin Exam Arc. Really fleshed out the characters and developed Naruto and Sasuke’s relationship beyond unbalanced antagonistic rivalry with underlying hints of a deeper friendship.
I liked the designs of Shippuden but I wasn’t invested in the characters. After a couple of arcs it devolved into flashy fight scenes with characters pulling NEW POWERFUL POWER TM trump cards every other move.
I really like the concept of Naruto but I would’ve preferred more character/world building, and more intelligent fights, winning not because of ultimate attacks but because they used abilities we already know about in new and interesting ways. It escalated too fast.
I did like the callback of the Harem no Jutsu though.
AgentKeen
And then Shippuden felt like it had to add a bunch of ‘Naruto and Saskue as Kids’ flashbacks to justify all the stuff Naruto and Sasuke would say about how they were friends and rivals and ect. I kept feeling like I must’ve missed several chapters of Part 1. Why didn’t Naruto bring up this memory before if it’s So Important to understanding his relationship with Sasuke?
Emily
That’s pretty much why Shikamaru’s fights were the most interesting ones: they were about tactical application of the resources he had at his disposal not just pulling a new super move out of his ass.
Derek
all of this! The first part was the strongest, but they rushed to end it for the sake of the weaker second part
269 thoughts on “Nerd”
Ana Chronistic
is that a glazed-over look or “I have met my match” look
Inahc
well, I thought joe *liked* transformers… right?
Reltzik
That was Walkyverse Joe. This Joe, I don’t think we’ve seen him show any interest.
…. maybe this is how he GETS interested.
Leorale
But he’s interested in a toy-building, engineer way. I think handing him a toy would be a far far better bet.
Screwball
We Cybertronians have yet to infect his mind, but give us time, he is ready for the conversion…
TachyonCode
I foresee this resulting in him discovering there’s an ironic, negative end to his rating scale that has nothing to do with a person’s equipment.
Because, of course there is.
BrokenEye, the True False Prophet
Well, there’s a difference between knowing what Transformers are and thinking they’re cool, and actually following the absurdly elaborate mythos associated with the premise with any regularity. And just as great a difference between that last thing I said and being a hardcore fan. It’s a sliding scale.
I’m sure most people can tell you who Megatron and Optimus Prime and a handful other notables are, even if they (like myself) didn’t even know Transformers were alien life forms until the previews for the movie came out, and generally have difficulty wrapping their mind around the idea that a series originally invented to sell toys that a not insignificant percentage of kids would’ve wanted even if there weren’t a cartoon has such an absurdly elaborate mythos in the first place.
Knuf Wons
Sounds a bit like a sliding logarithmic scale.
A slide rule.
Must be why so many transformer fans are Computers.
OK, that was pretty weak. I’ll see myself out.
Liliet
I’d say the difference between Walkyverse Joe and Dumbiverse Joe is the sliding time scale. Transformers were probably a much bigger thing back then, and met the niche of ‘Joe’s nerdy secret’. In this ‘verse, his nerdy secret is probably something else.
Proto
He probably likes a cartoon or movies or something without much depth to the Transformers, not deep paragraphs of Cybertronian lore.
JessWitt
It’s an “I’ve made a huge mistake” look.
Khyrin
It could also be a “why is this actually arousing (hurhurhur) my interest? this is non-optimal.”
Roborat
-Prime
Gojira
It looks like Dina’s sensory overload face.
Doctor_Who
Considering Willis’ buffer, I wonder if he didn’t know what was going to happen with Tailgate when he wrote this, or if this was in reaction to that happening, or if he’s so one with the Transformers franchise by this point that his soul is part of the Allspark and he just sensed it somehow.
David M Willis
It had recently happened.
JetstreamGW
Is there a transformer named Tailgate? IS THERE!? ARE WE SURE!?
FractalDawn
I don’t follow Transformers fandom, but now I’m curious: what happened with Tailgate?
Tacos
Had to be buried underground for like 6 months with radiation to cure him of something but some asshole came along and murdered the doctor overseeing the treatment and set the timer to 6 million years.
Pablo360
That is the logical conclusion of the pressing-all-the-numbers-in-the-elevator prank, and it’s super petty but also super intriguing and now I might have to get into transformers.
Doctor_Who
It’s also extremely tragic in context. Massive spoilers!
When we first met Tailgate, he had spent 6 million years underground, drifting in and out of a coma, not realizing how much time was passing as he slowly made his escape.
At first he claims to have been a badass bomb disposal expert before his accidental burial, but it eventually is revealed he was responsible for WASTE disposal…and he only came online 2 weeks before he was buried, and no one even noticed he was gone. He’s basically a child.
He grows closer and closer to his roommate Cyclonus, but then it turns out that all the time he spent underground was wreaking havoc on his body, and he had developed was was basically robot cancer and was going to die soon, despite having barely lived. 6 million years old, and his happiest moment was just having a movie night with some friends.
Even though he’s dying, he performs a heroic act that saves half the Cybertronian race, and Cyclonus manages to cure him. But despite the fact that they clearly have feelings for each other, Cyclonus is so emotionally crippled that he can’t spit it out, and Tailgate starts seeing another bot named Getaway who is much more affectionate.
But it turns out Getaway is just using him, hoping to get him to attempt to assassinate Megatron (a good guy at this point), and get killed in the process. Cyclonus realizes this and prevents it from going down at the last moment, but is nearly killed himself, and the grief of seeing him gunned down unlocks some sort of mutation Tailgate had undergone in his millions of years underground, which gives him super strength.
He uses these abilities to help save the day once more, and it seems him and Cyclonus are finally able to admit their feelings for each other, but there’s a problem; Cyclonus keeps turning up beaten all to hell for some reason. Turns out Tailgate’s powers are causing him to have some sort of fits in his sleep, and he keeps nearly killing himself. Cyclonus keeps having to subdue him, and getting the crap knocked out of him in the process. He hasn’t told Tailgate this is happening. His frenemy Whirl does tell Tailgate in secret, however.
Realizing he’s been hurting the bot he loves, Tailgate pretends he no longer has feelings for Cyclonus so he’ll leave on a mission. Cyclonus believes him and departs. But Tailgate is so desperate to be with him that he has a doctor formulate a way to remove his powers; 6 months in an underground chamber flooded with radiation. Tailgate agrees to this, but a Decepticon with a grudge against him named Fangry kills the doctor and resets the timer to 6 million years.
We last saw poor Tailgate where we first met him. Buried alive.
Pablo360
holy fuck
WT
This is amazing.
Thank you so much for the stunning story of this character.
acher4
w…t….f…..?
:____(
adjudicus
Oh, and this is just ONE character. Wait’ll you see what happens to the rest of the cast
Doctor_Who
@adjudicus
Yeah, I would explain exactly what Whirl’s deal is, but the history lesson alone would take like 20 posts.
adjudicus
@Doctor Who
Not to mention Megatron’s change of allegiance…
(Now that I think of it you’d probably need to explain most of the idwverse just to get a rough idea of why he did it)
Kamino Neko
And Tailgate is the sweetest, kindest, most adorable bot in the…well, in that entire universe (there are a few that come close, but nobody does cuteybot like Tailgate)…which makes it even more of a kick in the teeth.
StClair
Is there a point where Breaking the Cutie becomes just outright torture porn? ‘Cause I think that MTMTE passed it a while back.
nobilis
Thanks for explaining!
I guess I see now why Amber relates to him.
Chronos
So, this is a shaggy dog story for Transformers, then?
Black Bumblebee
There’s a reason why Transformers: MTMTE won comic of the year not too long ago. It’s basically Dr. Who / Red Dwarf in space with robots. If you’re not reading it, start with Death of Optimus Prime, then move on to MTMTE #1 and go forward from there.
Greyson
wait, have i misunderstood this? does transformers have gay robots? do i have to start reading this comic now? are they using the term “bury your gays” quite literally here?
Doctor_Who
Depends on who you ask. There’s a certain type of fanboy who will swear up and down that it doesn’t count, because they’re robots and so none of them are actually male. The fact some some of them also go by female pronouns and are clearly woman-shaped is ignored.
But yeah, gay robots. The most prominent couple is Chromedome and Rewind, who are just the sweetest damn thing ever. Seriously, their relationship is the best. Lost Light also just revealed that two of their new female characters are not only a couple, but also used to identify as male, before deciding that female made more sense to them. So they are transgendered lesbians.
Kamino Neko
There are many, many gay robots. Not all of them are healthy, and several end badly, but there’s a bunch.
Off the top of my head, for the guys, we have Tailgate/Cyclonus, Knockout/Breakdown, Rewind/Chromedome, and Blast Off/Onslaught.
On the girl side, there’s Anode/Lug, and Dustup/Jetstream who have major roles, and there are a couple couples who’ve had minor appearances (some of Nautica’s friends, a pair of guards on Carcer).
In this universe, Cybertron is all-male (save for a few like Anode and Lug who go offworld and discover that female fits them better, or Arcee, who…is complicated and was rather unfortunate until a few minor retcons), so any het pairings are going to be from the Colonies…but even among the colonials, the same-gender pairings outnumber the mixed gender ones, at least among the main cast.
ConfusedOwl
Wait … the robots fall in love and couple up? How? Why?
David M Willis
The same reason they can fight and hate each other for 4 million years: they’re people
Marisa Mockery
What happens to his boyfriend? And is anyone looking for him? There has to be records somewhere.
…….shit, you just made me sympathize with Transformers.
Triniking1234
Check his TF wiki page. It’s funny.
AnvilPro
If Joe survives this then him and Amber are officially friends for life, no matter if either of them want to be
MM
I’m betting Joe goes to look this all up and gets hooked in spite of himself.
gkheyf
and thereby completes his transformation into walkyverse joe!
Reltzik
Give in to your wiki, and your journey towards the dork side shall be complete!
Leorale
Come to the dork side. We have wookies.
Abel Undercity
I need this t-shirt.
Leorale
I just made it up but I’m a thousand percent certain it exists.
Pablo360
And then gets into an edit war with Mike while Ethan looks on in confusion.
MatthewTheLucky
And arousal. Don’t forget the arousal.
King Daniel
And thus begins Joe’s induction into Transformers.
otusasio451
Joe: I’ve made mistakes. So many mistakes.
Cheesy1
No no no, Amber. You need to talk Rule 34 Transformers if you want to keep Joe’s attention.
Dave Van Domelen
Well, Tailgate and Cyclonus get married….
Fart Captor
She’ll get there. First he has to be introduced to the characters. THEN he’ll be ready to hear about her fanfic where they all bang
Chris Phoenix
I can’t help thinking: When Transformers bang… they actually bang. Or maybe clang. Whaddya think? Bang or clang? Or both?
Fart Captor
I feel like it would be both. It definitely would be very noisy
I can only imagine the paint scratches and dents they’d have afterwards, especially if they like it rough. I suspect the official lore may not have addressed such matters
Betty Anne
Depends on if they’re going for plug-n-play or not, and if so, how rough they like it. Might not need to be any banging or clanging involved at all. :3
Scubasteve0209
Almost certainly indistinguishable from a Michale Bay fight scene.
Fart Captor
So, nobody can keep track of who’s doing what to whom, there’s a lot of explosions, and it’s often unclear just what was accomplished
ValdVin
Soooooo….indistinguishable in the same manner from the actions of Felix Domesticus, I take it.
Fart Captor
I’m really surprised that until now I haven’t really put much thought into the potential mechanical / structural problems that would need to be overcome in order for vehicle-sized robots to do sex to each other
Aren’t some transformers city or even planet-sized? Do they even HAVE genitals with which to smush someone? What do said genitals look like? Clearly they must be internal, since none of them seem to wear pants, and yet I’ve NEVER seem Optimus Prime’s dong.
…I may need to see one of Amber’s fanfics. I have too many questions now
Derek
Ask me what I think about the ending of Naruto. Go ahead, ask 🙂
Ivy
What do you think?
Derek
One big pet peeve is that Kishimoto sometimes doesn’t know what to do with the interesting characters he has introduced because they all must be less powerful/interesting than the Main Protagonist™ and his
boyfriendmain rival, so he ends up throwing to the side characters that have been established to be more intelligent or more powerful than both. Neji’s death and Shikamaru’s small role in the final arc are prominent examples. Heck I think that by the final arc the only character that got showtime that he deserved was Killer Bee.But my BIGGEST peeve is how Kishimoto’s sexism shows through his writing. All good women get married and have babies and STOP BEING NINJAS, and somehow this is their happy ending even though many of these women have worked their entire lives to be capable fighters. Literally the only one that escapes this fate is Tsunade and I think it’s only because her canon age is 50 so he decided she was too old to get married or something.
But it’s so infuriating! The first one to fall into this was Kurenai, who out of nowhere was married to Asuma and pregnant with his child. Like, ok, that’s believable because we don’t see her or her relationships that often. But after this is announced we NEVER see her fight as a ninja again, she essentially retires at age 30 to be a stay-at-home mom even though she’s a widow!
And the trend continues at the end of the series: literally every single female character from the main cast becomes a mother and we see in Boruto that they’re all housewifes. Fudcking SAKURA becomes a houswife, the girl that trained to be both a tank fighter and a healer; arguably one of the most dangerous ninjas in the army. But nuts to that, she needs to make dinner for a husband that might or might not come home. She lost all her self esteem when she gave birth I guess.
Oh yeah and she got married to a man that she had a crush on when she was 12, she apparently loved all the years even though he clearly became a villain and an abusive jerkhole and tried to murder her more than once. But she liked him when they were kids so happy ending I guess!
the final pam
Tenten also was the only one who was still shown to still be involved with the ninja lifestyle as an adult, but she was also shown to be alone???
Because otherwise she probably would’ve been married off to NejiBBCC
I thought Sakura ran a clinic? That’s not being a housewife.
Inahc
it’s not very ninja either. but what really annoys me is she still acts like sasuke is her “husband”, even though they hadn’t seen each other since she gave birth. 😛 he’s more of a sperm donor than a father.
Sunny
Well, sounds like I didn’t miss anything then. I watched two and a half episodes and figured it was not for me.
Derek
and aNOTHER THING
why did Orochimaru become a good guy?? how can anybody trust him?? did they all collectively forget he did illegal human experimentation and he’s a WAR CRIMINAL?
Shiro
Tell me about the Narutos. I used to read the manga but stopped buying it…fairly early on, iirc.
Ninjamaid
I personally think Part One was kinda rushed, like: you introduce all these interesting characters, build a skeletal structure of a ‘friendship’ between Naruto and Sasuke and then just timeskip three years and I’m supposed to believe they had a deep abiding connection, and care about all this development the other characters had offscreen?
I would have liked a few more arcs between the Zabuza Arc and the Chunin Exam Arc. Really fleshed out the characters and developed Naruto and Sasuke’s relationship beyond unbalanced antagonistic rivalry with underlying hints of a deeper friendship.
I liked the designs of Shippuden but I wasn’t invested in the characters. After a couple of arcs it devolved into flashy fight scenes with characters pulling NEW POWERFUL POWER TM trump cards every other move.
I really like the concept of Naruto but I would’ve preferred more character/world building, and more intelligent fights, winning not because of ultimate attacks but because they used abilities we already know about in new and interesting ways. It escalated too fast.
I did like the callback of the Harem no Jutsu though.
AgentKeen
And then Shippuden felt like it had to add a bunch of ‘Naruto and Saskue as Kids’ flashbacks to justify all the stuff Naruto and Sasuke would say about how they were friends and rivals and ect. I kept feeling like I must’ve missed several chapters of Part 1. Why didn’t Naruto bring up this memory before if it’s So Important to understanding his relationship with Sasuke?
Emily
That’s pretty much why Shikamaru’s fights were the most interesting ones: they were about tactical application of the resources he had at his disposal not just pulling a new super move out of his ass.
Derek
all of this! The first part was the strongest, but they rushed to end it for the sake of the weaker second part