Let me tell you about my anime journey. People tried to convince me to watch anime for a very long time but the idea of subtitles stressed me out so I opted instead to only watch any anime that was ‘dubbed’ in English. Unfortunately, true anime heads never watch it dubbed so no one ever had the content for me. One time, I got lucky and someone gave me Full Metal Alchemist – brotherhood. I liked it but not enough to find subbed anime. Then when I was in Ghana for my 23rd birthday, someone recommended I see Ajin on Netflix which also happened to be in English and that’s when it really began. Because I enjoyed Ajin, I moved on to Seven Deadly Sins and by the time my lover and I met, we were bonding over anime – but this is just the context.
In what I will consider my gap year (Oct 2020 – Spet 2021), I found time to watch Naruto. This is where the anime journey for many starts but I picked it up later because I needed to have the time to watch it properly and the gap year seemed the right time. Naruto has two main parts, Bushin which is 220 episodes, and Shippuden which is 500 episodes, I watched most of them. By the time I got to episode 300 of Shippuden, I started skipping the filler episodes. Naruto is a great show. It is not just great because of how the story is told or how well the animators do their job, it is great because it pulls on a thread inside you of all the things you know about yourself but you aren’t necessarily proud of.
In Shippuden, when Naruto trains with Killer Bee (another character with a tailed beast just like Naruto), he has to confront his true self which as it turns out is full of hate for the people who resented him (for having a tailed beast inside him) but came to adore him because of his strength. You just need to see the show. He eventually figures that the only way to overcome his hate is not to pretend it isn’t there, it is to embrace it and keep chipping at it with the love inside him – it is glorious. Eventual, Naruto gets a hold of this ferocious power inside him and he begins to feel like he must save everyone until Itachi (a guy who everyone thought was a bad guy but was actually good) tells him that the arrogance of thinking you can do everything by yourself is how you get the people you are doing those things for to start resenting you – phew.
I want to recommend first, that everyone watch Naruto but more than that, I want to commend Naruto’s heart. We fight to be acknowledged, befriended, and supported but more than that, we often fight to protect ourselves and I personally hate to look stupid or to be disrespected by someone’s deliberate actions to undermine my love but what Naruto does for Sasuke in pursuing him, never letting him go to the dark side is just phenomenal, it reminds me of Christ in so many ways. It reminds me of how great it is to be loved so deeply that my heart can find repentance.
