The Other Worlds Shrine

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  • You need to (re)read the manga

  • Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
 #157950  by Don
 Sun Sep 30, 2012 3:51 pm
This is an argument I see all the time when talking about manga in general, though also about Anime. You might as well replace the word 'manga' with 'Bible' in such conversations. Now I don't really watch Anime, but for the most part this is because it takes 2 minutes to read a volume of Naruto and you'd be lucky to be able to finish the equivalent content in Anime in 2 hours. While sometimes the Anime does stupid things it's not like manga doesn't have its share of stupid stuff. The average guy who writes the manga probably has a lower literary level than an average college graduate anyway so it's not like people are reading/watching this stuff for literary enlightenment. Sure if you thought Naruto was 8 tails instead of 9 tails maybe you should reread some of Naruto but other than that I don't really think it's possible to 'not get' something in manga unless it's something really subtle or cultural-based. Let's say you've some random controversial topic, like maybe you think Jiraiya should've been able to beat Pain. The guy making such an argument presumably knows what was the actual outcome, and it's not like that fight had anything interesting. Since Naruto often doens't make much sense to begin with, even if you make something that's outright contradicted by the source you can make an argument that the author was dumb anyway and your interpretation is more correct. Without regarding to whether the point of view is actually correct, reading the manga isn't going to resolve anything unless you go with a stance that the author's words are absolute and you can only judge exactly on whatever events happened in manga. Of course then you might as well never have any discussion. You wouldn't even be able to discuss whether Sasuke would beat Naruto in a fight now, since they've yet to fight each other after their various upgrades, so anything you can talk about is by definition wrong because there is no possible source to back anything up until they actually fight each other again.

It almost feels like some people just feel having 10 volumes of Naruto is like owning the Encyclopedia Britannica and it'll tell you everything you need to know about Naruto, never mind that millions of people owns exactly the same thing (Naruto sells in the 1-2 million range per volume in Japan alone). I don't really like to check on my manga because I'm running out of space to put them and it's a pain to pull one out and then stuff it back in when your bookshelf is completely clogged up with them, and everytime I checked my manga it's usually the case that it's exactly as good or bad as I remembered it. If I want to do some fact checking some variant of Wikipedia is usually sufficeint (though sometimes they're wrong too), but most arguments are over opinions, not facts. People don't exactly argue over how many tails Naruto has.