When it comes to anime series, one of the most notable over the past couple decades has been Naruto, the manga-based TV show that lasted from 2002 to 2007, with a sequel series lasting from 2007 until 2017.
Naruto attracted a large crowd of viewers, with its popularity arguably beating that of Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon at times.
The series starred a young boy named Naruto growing up in his pre-teen and teenage years anxious to one day become the leader of his village.
While the action is always fun, the best part of the series is its heartwarming tale, showing Naruto’s youth as he struggles growing up.
In addition to being a successful anime, the Naruto manga has managed to become the third best-selling manga in history. This is certainly a might accomplishment for the series.
While Naruto may be a very well known and beloved show, it doesn’t mean it was always consistent or made the most sense. This is true for almost all movies and shows, as even Dragon Ball is prone to a number of mistakes.
Considering the amount of millennials that watch the show, the millennials have done what they do best with problems in shows: make memes.
Over the years, Naruto has seen a many number of memes, with a good chunk of them made with one sole intent: pointing out some of the glaring issues of the show.
With that in mind, here are the 21 Memes That Show Naruto Makes No Sense.
21. Keep Your Enemies Close…
Naruto has a number of interesting characters, but the one that is certainly the most off the charts is Sasuke, who is essentially the number two character on the show.
Even though he is supposed to be an important member of Naruto’s friend group, Sasuke tends to be all over the place with his motivations.
Fans have described Sasuke as bipolar. While at times he is heroic, other times he creates more problems than were there to begin with.
While this certainly keeps things interesting in the show, as a loose cannon is always a great way to spice up the action, it still begs the question: why does Naruto keep Sasuke around?
Considering how much trouble Sasuke has gotten Naruto into after all of these years, Naruto should’ve dropped his friend many years ago. Maybe he always saw the best in Sasuke, but eventually, enough is enough.
20. This May Be A Straw-Man Argument, But…
While many anime shows are prone to featuring ridiculous disguises that anyone can see past, Naruto took it to an entirely new level. Instead of hiding their entire suits, these sly dogs figured it would be enough to just put on hats.
How this ever worked is simply miraculous. The logical reason, from a storytelling perspective, for this to work is that the viewers would be able to identify the disguised people rather than just seeing them as random people with straw hats.
It’s a common practice among movies and shows in order to keep the focus on the subject of the scene.
However, the writers and animators at Naruto easily could have done a much better job. Their faces are clearly visible and enough of a distinguishing feature for us to connect to. The cloaks were just overdoing it.
19. Is The Mask Black From Dye Or Black From Char?
The world of Naruto is filled with a lot of cool powers that we wish we could have.
However, the character with the most unique and magnificent power has to be Kakashi’s ability to not catch fire, despite being pressed against a mouth that breathes an intense amount of fire through the mask.
The most memorable defining feature of Kakashi is his mask that he almost never takes off. As cool of a feature as this is, it is never explained how it does not catch fire when Kakashi breathes flames through his mouth. In addition, it is never explained how the mask even lets the flames pass through it.
While the mask is cool and the fire-breathing is cool, together they just don’t make a lot of sense.
18. Context Matters
One of the biggest complaints about the Naruto series is its overuse of filler episodes.
Considering that Naruto was based on a manga series that was still being written at the time, the show would often move a little too quickly for the manga writers.
In order to keep viewers entertained and episodes flowing, despite there being a lack of source material, the writers of the Naruto show would have to improvise.
In order to not interfere with any important content that would actually be important down the road, filler episodes were created that would often be, quite frankly, nonsensical.
That’s where this particular episode came in. To be fair, Naruto is far from the only anime or manga to include an octopus as a vital plot point or archetype, but this episode was just kind of weird.
17. A True Damsel In Distress
Almost all of the characters in Naruto have some sort of signature power or ability. Sasuke has Chidori, Neji has Byakugan, and Naruto has a whole bunch of stuff.
However, one vital character to the series who never seemed to get any powers or abilities, while still having a whole bunch of screen time, is Sakura.
The love interest character is one of the series’ most notable characters, but never really got the chance to show her own strength. While one could go into a long argument about how this is poor female representation, let’s not get into that.
Instead, it’s just worth mentioning that it would’ve been nice to see Sakura kick some butt at least once.
If Naruto could’ve written a filler episode about a majestic octopus, they could’ve also written easily written one about Sakura saving Naruto for once.
16. Has Ever Heard Of Email?
One of the most peculiar parts about Naruto’s universe is that it is set in a hybrid of post- and pre-electronics times. While electrical technology like computers and radios do exist, the ways of the past still exist, with many people acting as though electronics don’t even exist.
One of the most pointless examples of this is Naruto’s insistence on sending all of his messages using birds.
These people already have radios and computers, in addition to TVs and countless other ways to communicate or broadcast an urgent message… yet Naruto uses birds.
This is comparable to the Harry Potter universe, where many of the characters send messages using owls.
However, at least Harry Potter provides an explanation for this when they state that magic and electronics cannot interfere safely. Naruto never provides any realistic explanation for Naruto’s bird obsession.
15. You Can’t Even Blame Sasuke At This Point
Though Naruto is often seen as a great hero, considering that he is the protagonist and titular star of the series, we often forget that he is still young.
Whether it’s when he’s a pre-teen or a teenager, Naruto is not always the brightest and can easily be outsmarted.
However, this instance was just a step too far. Considering that Hidden Leaf is Naruto’s home village that he has sworn to protect, you’d think that he’d do a better job of protecting it.
While things did work out in the end, and Sasuke did not manage to destroy Hidden Leaf, this entire situation was utterly avoidable had Naruto just made an independent thought for once in his life.
However, he is still a kid, so I suppose we can cut him a little bit of slack.
14. What Did You Expect? He’s A Guy?
This is one notable example of the writers of Naruto suddenly changing their priorities without any explanation.
During the beginning of Naruto, Lee was completely infatuated over Sakura. He was so madly in love with her that he even challenged Sasuke to a duel over the girl’s love.
However, with no logical explanation, Lee’s love over Sakura disappeared and was never really mentioned again.
It’s almost as if the writers of the show and manga suddenly regretted their decision to put the two characters into a romantically-tense situation and decided to just stop doing anything with it.
While this wasn’t really a bad thing, as most people would agree they didn’t want to see that relationship continue, it was sort of nonsensical the way the writers went about it.
13. He’s More Of A Comedic Relief
While the character Naruto may be very entertaining, he is not the best hero. Other anime like Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon have been successful and easier to follow because their protagonists, though flawed, were at least competent.
Naruto has proven time and time again that he is not like any other hero, and this isn’t particularly always a good thing.
When even the other characters in the show start to doubt whether or not the protagonist should actually be a protagonist, there is certainly a problem. Naruto is amusing, but his incompetence becomes very hard to overlook at times.
Of course, there is a positive side to this. While other anime have the advantage of a character who is completely competent, it gives Naruto the chance to tell a greater story, considering that the hero is an underdog who shouldn’t be able to accomplish anything, but does nonetheless.
12. Come On, Guys. Be Supportive.
Sakura rarely gets her chance to shine. Considering that she is arguably Naruto’s weakest character, she is regularly underdeveloped and pretty much achieves nothing as a character.
The one time she did start working to achieve something, though, no one seemed to care. Finally breaking her limits, tired of always being a damsel in distress, Sakura began working and training to try being just as strong as Naruto and Sasuke. And did it pay off? Heck no.
Instead of being met with cheers and support, pretty much no one seemed to care about Sakura’s accomplishments.
Maybe it’s because she wasn’t male like them, or maybe it’s because they always saw her as a damsel in distress. Whatever the reason, though, no one seemed to care, and Sakura’s beautiful moment was wasted.
11. Thanks For That New Information, Naruto
Now it could be argued that for this entire situation, Naruto was repeating “Water Prison Jutsu” for anyone who didn’t happen to hear it mentioned literally a moment before.
Outside of this completely ridiculous argument, we really have to wonder what it is the writers were thinking when creating this moment of repetition.
Perhaps the writers were trying to connect the actions if this new enemy to the previously mentioned events from earlier in the episode.
Maybe the writers were just making Naruto say this so we will actually believe that what the enemy was doing was Water Prison Jutsu, and he wasn’t lying about it.
However, the most likely reason of all was that the writers were just too lazy to come up with any logical response for Naruto, so they just used copy-and-paste.
10. These Just Get Worse And Worse
Of all of the “out-there” characters in Naruto, the weirdest of them all has to be Condor, the run-away pet ostrich who trained in the ways of the ninja and eventually became the leader of the Four Ninja Animal Warriors.
This talking, fighting ninja ostrich has, for whatever reason, appeared during a number of occasions over the years. He has vowed to defeat his sworn enemy, who for whatever reason is Naruto.
While his motivations and reappearances don’t make sense, neither does the fact that he is a talking ninja ostrich, so it is what it is.
Over the years, Condor was seemingly the go-to for the writers at Naruto if a filler episode ever popped up. For better or for worse, this ostrich kept coming back.
9. This Really Could’ve Looked A Lot Cooler…
The transition from manga to anime isn’t always the most flattering. Things that look cool on paper don’t always turn out looking cool when they’re animated, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, this means that when the manga is calling the shots and deciding how everything turns out, the anime may end up having a poor result.
That is how this scenario came about. While this looks peaceful and relaxing on paper as non-moving images, it had a completely different effect in animation.
The spinning and movement looked more like the ballet than anything else, taking many of the viewers out of the moment.
While the animators easily could’ve changed the adaptation to make it actually look cool, they passed on that opportunity, leaving us to watch one of the show’s greatest heroes spinning ribbon through the air like he was on a stage.
8. Red Hair, Vacant Expression… You Must Be A Yahiko!
Considering that all of the characters in Naruto are, for the most part, drawn by the same people, it doesn’t come as a surprise to notice that a good portion of them look oddly similar.
However, the insane amount of similarities between the appearances of Nagato and Yahiko are just a little too hard to look past.
They both have spirally, mysterious eyes, red hair, and a headband. While Yahiko will often have his hair down covering his face, this is not always the case, leading him to occasionally having the same hairstyle as Nagato.
Because of all of these similarities, and more, it becomes hard sometimes to identify which character is which. Even with their hair being different shades of red, it can be hard to decipher between the two of them.
7. Never, Under Any Circumstances, Pause Naruto
Many anime fighting shows have a trend of showing a close-up on different characters during intense moments like fights and confrontations. In order to stand out, Naruto tends to take these moments to another level.
While these extremely detailed, intense close-ups may add to the mood of Naruto, pausing the show during these moments is not always the best idea.
When you pause the close-ups or even slow them down, you start to realize how unnatural and frankly disturbing these confrontations actually are.
Unless you want to see all of the gums of Nagato’s teeth, or the spit flinging out of Naruto’s mouth, do not ever under any circumstance pause the show during these close-ups.
While they may enhance the show, they are truly unnatural moments that can leave you scarred for life.
6. Frogs Can Be Extremely Useful At Times
There are quite a lot of strange abilities in the Naruto universe that help to keep the show unique from other anime.
One of these strange abilities that was actually super useful was the jutsu allowing Naruto to summon large, fighting toads to do his bidding.
Shortly after learning this power from Jiraiya the Toad Sage, he used his newfound toad ability to win a fight against Gaara. The toads panned out to be incredibly helpful in the fight, proving this jutsu to be one of Naruto’s powers.
Unfortunately, since this was just a filler episode, this ability never appeared again. This becomes a bit of a problem for the show’s continuity, though, considering the number of situations Naruto could have used these frogs in to fix a problem.
5. Going Backwards In Time
When Naruto first opened, it was notable for featuring a wide range of electronic devices in addition to old-fashioned techniques that technology replaced centuries ago.
One of the issues this caused, however, was that the characters would solve big issues using practical methods, when it easily could’ve been fixed with the electronic technology of the time.
Realizing this plot hole, the writers of Naruto made the technological advances of this universe less apparent as the series continued. While this certainly helped take care of a few issues, it created a bigger issue: how did the technology disappear as time went on?
While it was a gradual change, it wasn’t entirely off-putting to most. However, if you watched a more recent episode, and then jumped to an episode from the first season, the lack of technology would become very apparent.
4. Goku’s Got A Point
Naruto made a lot of changes to the typical anime show / manga formula that kept it different from other shows. One change that did not pan out the best, however, was the lack of more powerful villains.
With Naruto being young, his enemies never needed to be as strong as some of the enemies from other shows who would have to face off against powerhouses like Goku.
However, considering that Naruto’s enemies were almost always weaker than normal anime villains, it lowers the stakes of the show for many viewers.
While many of Naruto’s enemies may be fairly strong, they arguably don’t pose as much of a threat to Naruto as characters like Frieza pose against Goku. Without an imposing antagonist, the quality of parts of Naruto tends to drop.
3. What Itachi Doesn’t Know Won’t Hurt Him
Though they didn’t always get along, Sasuke was still damaged by the passing of his brother Itachi. Itachi was a big part of his life, and losing him became a big moment in his life.
However, this did not stop Sasuke from disobeying Itachi’s one dying wish for Sasuke to protect the Konoha village. Instead, Sasuke did the exact opposite and decided it would be a good idea to completely destroy the village.
While Sasuke’s actions were out of vengeance for his brother, as he blamed the political standing of Konoha for Itachi’s passing, his actions were still uncalled for and completely disrespectful to his brother’s memory.
It’s this sort of nonsense that keeps Sasuke from being an actually likable character.
2. Still More Worthwhile Than A Bachelors In Fine Arts
For most anime, if a character trains for a long period of time, they will usually receive a massive power boost that completely changes the stakes of the show. For the case of Naruto, however, this was not the case.
After two long years of training, Naruto didn’t reach the level of Super Saiyan, nor did he master the powers of Alchemy. Instead, his weapon became a little bigger.
Let me rephrase that. After training for two years, testing his mental and physical limits, and truly growing as a person, all that Naruto really achieved was a slightly larger weapon that he probably could’ve gotten on his own in a significantly shorter amount of time– and he was cool with this.
