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[personal profile] oyceter
Spoilers up till vol. 32

OMG! This was even better than the first few volumes of the time skip arc!

I loved it to pieces, and I adore Sakura, and she has even replaced Rock Lee as my favorite character!

I do not have enough exclamation points for how much I loved this!

!!!!

Slightly more coherently:

I now see why [livejournal.com profile] rachelmanija continued to insist that Sakura stay behind, even in her "Kunoichi join the Sasuke Rescue Mission" AU idea. The payoff is incredibly good, particularly the panels in which Sakura thinks to herself that it's her turn to rescue Sasuke and Naruto.

I usually have some qualms with the "precious/important person" thing, but often that is because of the passivity of said person, and the way the protected one is almost always coded as female (in yaoi), or is actually female. Ergo my great ire when Sakura stayed behind. But Tsunade has her precious people, and now all of Konoha is her important person, and she's passed this on to Sakura as well.

I cannot wait to see Sakura rescuing Naruto and/or Sasuke. (Please? Come on, Kishimoto! It took you long enough to give her something to do!)

And oh, the entire battle with Chiyo! First off, older woman! Older, powerful woman! Three generations of powerful women (Chiyo, Tsunade, Sakura)! Mentoring between women! Also, I keep saying it, but Sakura kicks so. much. ass. SO MUCH.

Sasori was extremely creepy, particularly in the repeated images of wee!Sasori and his puppet parents.

Speaking of which, Kishimoto is really good at visual motifs. I loved that the one of wee!Naruto gradually being surrounded by people vs. wee!Gaara alone continued through the Gaara rescue arc, culminating with a revived Gaara waking up to find his entire village around him, waiting for him, worrying for him.

And it was so excellent that Team Gai and Team Kakashi got to work together.

But even more than that, I love this series more and more as it goes on, because Kakashi, much like Minekura, is so good at layering the past and the present, making it so that each successive event and iteration accumulates even more meaning because of what has happened before. It's, what, Gaara's third encounter with Naruto now, and this one, oh, this one is so good. It's not even direct contact anymore, just how one outcast cares for another, how that is enough to change the world.

And Chiyo's sacrifice, and the consistent undercurrent of things changing in the shinobi world rocks. I love that Chiyo starts out suspicious of Konoha and ends up sacrificing her life for a child she thought was a danger to the village. I love that while the Naruto philosophy is about precious and important people, it doesn't feel as stifling or overprotective to me, because part of protecting someone is allowing them the room to grow, as Jiraiya and Iruka and Tsunade so aptly demonstrate.

I am so mad that I couldn't get more chapters in time for Italy. Grrrr. Instead, I shall have to reread all thirty volumes!

Also, now Team 7 has got a new guy and a scary member, and right now, I don't care so much. Instead, I shall bask in the wonderfulness of the Gaara arc.

(no subject)

Fri, Sep. 22nd, 2006 12:05 am (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com
Oh - the funny thing I wanted to point you to a while ago but you ahnd't reached that point in the manga yet. Back in May 2004 the anime hadn't (obviously) caught up with the manga. This is a summary (http://community.livejournal.com/chuunin/446260.html) of the story from the point where Itachi and Kisami showed up in Konoha looking for Naruto, to the point where the Sand trio showed up and administered a right royal beatdown to their opponents. :)

And it's where this icon comes from.

(no subject)

Fri, Sep. 22nd, 2006 04:12 am (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com
You're welcome! And it's not very long, so you don't ahve to schedule too much time for it. XD

(no subject)

Fri, Sep. 22nd, 2006 02:03 am (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] rilina.livejournal.com
I disliked Sakura for so long, but oh, did this arc make up for so much!

I continue to be intrigued by the fact that Kakashi watched Chiyo's fatal jutsu with the sharingan. That really makes me wonder if we'll ever see Kakashi do that jutsu himself.

(no subject)

Tue, Sep. 26th, 2006 01:33 am (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] rachelmanija.livejournal.com
My very favorite Naruto arc ever! Actually, I think it's just as well you have a wait before you read more; the next arc is interesting but nowhere near that level, and I think would have been disappointing if I'd read it immediately after this one. (I was too emotionally devastated by the conclusion of the Gaara arc, with him waking up to find that the barren, empty plain of those heartbreaking flashbacks had grown grass, and he was surrounded by everyone who had come running to save him, to read any more of the series for several months).

However, if you haven't gotten to the very end of this arc, with a little bit of aftermath involving Naruto and the Sand Siblings, and Gai and his team and Kakashi, that bit is lovely and then hilarious.

Sakura teaming up with Chiyo to finally get a long battle in which they kick the ass of the master of the guy who defeated Gaara was totally enough of a pay-off to justify her getting left behind for the Sasuke-retrieval arc. I also adored the bit where Kakashi says, "We need someone really strong to smash this wall... Sakura?"

(no subject)

Wed, Oct. 4th, 2006 06:32 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] rachelmanija.livejournal.com
I love Rilina's Sakura story! Could you make me an icon of Sakura smashing the ground, with the caption "fight like a girl"? When you've finished making the icon of DOOM fifteen-image manga fowl of DOOM. And any icons you'd care to share, I will eagerly snatch up.

Naruto and Gaara's farewell killed me. The look on Naruto's face! The sand!

And I had hysterics for several minutes when Gai was carrying Kakashi, and Sakura remarked that she hadn't realized they were so... intimate. And Rock Lee offers to carry Neji! And Neji is all, "Get away from me, you psycho!"

(no subject)

Tue, Sep. 26th, 2006 01:39 am (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] rachelmanija.livejournal.com
You may now read all my fic without fear of spoilers! I have three Sand Sibling stories, one from each of their POVs.

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