Usually it’s because early discourse around them was dominated by young kids and teens (especially boys) who weren’t yet able to identify that these characters embodied sexist tropes. And hence, their understanding of said characters began and ended at ‘wow, they’re such a bitch!’
Thankfully the conversation has at least somewhat evolved and there’s a bit more acknowledgment that these characters are poorly written for reasons that go deeper than that. It’s the difference between identifying misogyny in a work and just being misogynistic.
Case in point:
There’s a big difference between “Sakura is a bad character because she’s a loud, useless bitch” and “Sakura is a bad character because she’s extremely one note and chiefly revolves around her deeply toxic romantic interest in Sasuke and had very little life or development outside of that.”
I mean, obsession with Sasuke and lack of development/fights is not a new or recent criticism as far as Sakura is concerned, it's always been around as well, lmao.
Though the "useless" criticism doesn't apply in shippuden, it was very much mostly valid for part 1 and it's a relic of og naruto. Shippuden not being enough to make sakura a good character overall despite some improvements, and Sakura's lack of good material after Sasori, helped perpetuate it in the minds of some.
Just for part 1, a character who's part of the main trio, who had no signature jutsus or specialties, whose motivation was centered around a person who didn't reciprocate, who often talked down to the MC while also being the weakest on the team and the one needing saving in dangerous situations? A character who also begged the MC, their male peer, to bring back the crush that still didn't like them back because they were too weak to do it themselves, lol.
I'm pretty sure a male version of the combined profile above would get far worse insults and ridicule than fem sakura did, lol.
Sasuke himself, who is infintely more interesting than Sakura, often gets frequent insults like emo whiny douchelord. His realistic reactions and consequences to the initial genocide and learning that it was state sanctioned get often ridiculed or dismissed.
Obito, that I dislike, gets frequently called a simp due to his motivations and Naruto defending him and calling him the "coolest guy" has been memed into oblivion due to the absurdity of it and the scale of Obito's crimes.
Thing is, some people are simply infinitely more sensitive to negativity thrown at female characters than male characters, so they can rarely resist the temptation of making this negativity into greater moral issues when the female characters are subjected to it.
Yeah I don't consider either Misa or Sakura useless, I just think their toxic one-sided romantic writing was just detrimental to their development as a character that I find it hard to like them.
The difference is Naruto gets a lot of development and characterization unrelated to saskue or on his own. Sakura’s character basically revolves around saskue and to a lesser extent Naruto.
I just feel that the hatred for Sakura has done enormous damage to character analysis, causing people to devalue any female character with a "submissive" attitude and/or attached to a love interest, and overvalue all those with a tough attitude who only fight. There will be personal preferences, but I think that the standards of development, depth, and charisma that apply to female characters should also apply to male characters.
I have a soft spot for Naruto but between Sakuras affect on the discourse of writing women and Rock Lee on talent vs training it's done a lot of collateral damage to how people talk about other shows.
I feel that part of the issue is that so many shows have only one really prominent female character, who has to carry the burden of being "the girl" in a way that makes any failings with how she's written stand out more. Of course, in Naruto it doesn't help that most of the other major female characters have the same flaws.
If you have only one female character of note, then even if you make her a tomboy you risk running into "not like the other girls" issues.
Something someone pointed out about Mad Max: Fury Road was that some of the women in it were more traditionally feminine and some were not; having a heavily female cast let them avoid the problem where The Girl has to bear the weight of representing her entire gender.
They have a right to dislike them, it’s how they express they dislike them. Usually they hate on the woman because she doesn’t immediately drool all over the self insert main character. A lot of times male characters get a pass for behaving nearly the exact same ways but the women doing makes her a “bitch”. Hell, a lot of times it’s the male characters riling a reaction out of the women character and it’s the women character who people bash, not the guy for being annoying/perverted.
A LOT of it comes with age, too. Growing up you couldn’t even mention Sakura to anyone. Now among my adult friends she’s just another character to discuss, no weird discourse the fandom ALWAYS wants to indulge in.
The MC of Rent-a-Girlfriend is the epitome of a male character that lacks self-respect and gets mercilessly clowned on, much harsher than Sakura and Misa (he deserves it, mind you).
thats an isekai self insert character. hes getting hated on because of the genre he exists in.
but then you get people who genuinely like the pedophilic incestuous rapist rudeus in mushoku tensei. hes the main character btw. he never gets shit for being a legit pedo incestuous man — in fact, people defend it.
That's actually a rom-com author's self-insert character, strictly speaking. More importantly, the OP specifically talks about characters that have no self-respect in regards to people they have crush on. It's not about Sakura doing bad acts, it's a very painful, irl-resonating aspect of degrading yourself for the sake of the person who stomps over your feelings that earns Sakura the ire of the fans.
shes a fictional character written to fill a specific trope (being stuck in a toxic, one sided relationship on top of having her entire character development happen in the background, despite being a main character)... why would you ever hate the drawing instead of the man who admitted he cant write female characters?
Criticizing Sakura is inherently a criticism of Kishimoto and his editors. Everything she does, good or bad, is due to them. So telling people they can't hate a character and should only hate the writers is silly, because likewise, why would you like a character at all? You would just like the writer.
You're only trying to make some differentiation because you can't handle ridicule thrown at Sakura.
Depends. Gendered expectations vary and while I'd tend to agree it hits female characters harder there are absolutely male characters who get shit on for failing to live up to them.
Shinji from Evangelion, say. He's good at cooking and cleaning (and does most of the housework at home) and his character flaws are mostly ones that would be more normal for a female lead. At least some of the reason he gets shit on comes from the fact that he doesn't behave the way people expect from a male lead in particular.
I think there are specific arcs and failures that are allowed for characters based on gender, and while male characters are afforded a wider range people will still come down hard on characters who are perceived as failing as a man.
I haven't seen Naruto, but Misa bothers me because she feels like a forced plot device rather than an actual believable character, and that undermines the main storyline, imo. EDIT: Aside from that she's annoying in her interactions. What's likeable about her?
I mean that's still being incredibly vague but okay. Even as vague as that is, you're comparing characters who are meant to be villains vs. characters who aren't (Well Sakura you're not meant to treat as a villain and idk what feelings Misa is meant to evoke).
Pretty sure there are plenty of hateable male villains: Joffrey in ASOIAF/GOT, Scar in Lion King, Burke in Aliens, etc.
sure, there are hateable villainous characters... just as much as theres people liking dio brando from jjba & obito + itachi uchiha, despite all three of them being way more of dickheads to everyone around them than sakura.
I'm not super familiar with those anime but there could be a number of factors that explain the difference. Villains that you love to hate; villains that are so over the top they're funny (Isn't this Dio?); villains who do messed up or annoying things, but have scenes that let you empathise with them; villains who should be theoretically unlikeable or do things theoretically hateable, but aren't written in a way that actually elicits that emotional response (telling instead of showing).
Cartman does objectively awful things and theoretically should only evoke contempt, but he's written in a way that's comedic. Denji (not a villain, but still) bothers some people because he's a horny dipshit, but in the context of the story and its scenes you get to empathise with him, and form a connection beyond just judging him externally.
If we look at a character you're meant to hate like Joffrey, he's written as an antagonist, you get plenty of scenes where you get the full experience of him as a character, which earns your contempt naturally. If you looked at the scenes people think of that make Joffrey hateable, you probably wouldn't end up with his most objectivelty despicable actions. If you looked at his actions outside of the story, you would rationally know why he's awful, but it wouldn't evoke any emotion like the actual story and scenes of him do.
Tbf to Sakura a bit (if we're talking about the same one) Naruto was far more obsessed over Sasuke and was the literal only person alive for a little while who still wanted to help Sasuke.
Looking back on Naruto as a whole I started to see Sakura as less of a "badly written" and more of a pointless character in most of the story, Kishimoto was stuck with her while his story largely moved away from her character
I meant that the bulk of the story went into a direction where her existence in it became largely unnecessary for most of it, and not that it's purely because Kishimoto can't write a character.
I don't know if I'm making sense but I'm trying to say that Kishimoto found less and less things for her to do or be involved in because there was no room for her in his ideas, but she's filling in a main cast position so he was stuck with her character.
Idk it's different than purely bad character writing in my head I don't think I can explain it well
she's filling in a main cast position so he was stuck with her character. Idk it's different than purely bad character writing in my head I don't think I can explain it well
I don't see how you can separate the two? Making Sakura's motivation "catch up to the other two" is a symptom of her being a fill in and token character. Compared to Naruto and Sasuke, whose characters are involved with each other but have more to their characters than just being part of the trio.
Obviously not misogynistic to dislike those characters but in sakura’s case there was tons of gross comments fans made about her (and still do) in 2000s-2010s imo
Like I remember people saying she deserved to get her head smashed in mid-war arc cause???? Saying she’s useless when she’s objectively more useful than most fan favorites like rock Lee. Downplaying all her actual achievements in manga, etc
r/Dankruto still says disgusting stuff on the daily
1- Misogyny is often at the root of disliking a feminine character, even when we don't wanna realize it (not saying you are in that boat, but it does happen and sometimes we don't realize until we actually soft our way to the bottom of the pile of negativity.
2- Some characters are written like that for a reason, either thematically or textually. I can't speak to the provided examples cause I'm not overly familiar with them- "characters who suffer because they don't respect themselves" do exist and kinda teach an important lesson. That being said a lot of women are socially conditioned to be that way, and hating women for the problems they were raised into is misogynistic; especially if there are other perfectly valid reasons to dislike them. (like, a lot of people who dislike Sakura from what I've heard are mad she had so much unfulfilled potential.)
3- a lot of times these criticisms hand wave valid mitigating circumstances (like iirc, the Naruto cast is a bunch of kids raised in a murder cult that treats them like disposable weapons. All of them lack self respect on some level, why is her case special? A lot of characters who are mistreated or neglected and tolerate it do so because they were groomed/ raised/ shaped to believe the treatment was acceptable and no one else has bothered to help them.
4- to me, the biggest thing that makes me lean towards finding blanket criticisms of "female characters who lack self respect" is that the criticism is almost only reserved for the femme in question, not the people who mistreat her, the world she is raised in, or the creator of the story. So many people make a huge deal out of characters like Sakura being obsessed with Sasuke even when he was an asshole to her don't ever seem to complain about Sasuke- What I usually hear is anger that she picked someone other than the Main character and a lot of it sounds like nice guy projection rather than an attempt to understand why a character would do something like that. And all of them are more than happy to continue consuming a story that writes women like that rather than focusing on finding and promoting stories that hit the themes they like without reducing teen girls to boy crazy idiots. There's a reason I don't read Naruto- I found it's handling of femme characters to be shallow and in service of the masc characters rather than being there for their own sake. If I read a story that has poorly written women I stop reading. There are better stories to spend my time on than ones that can't write 50% of the population like real people.
Sakura wasn't a medieval child bride forced into remaning with an abusive husband. There was absolutely zero pressure or threat hanging above her that forced her to remain that embarrassing situation, so why should Sasuke get most of the blame in that case? Is there some "institutional" mechanism preventing her from stopping her simping? No.
Not to mention Sasuke, unlike Sakura, has immense trauma, genocide trauma, that gets frequently invalidated or downplayed by large portions of the fanbase, with him often reduced to an emo whiny douchelord. To claim he doesn't get more than his share of criticism is delusional. You make a derogatory remark to a "nice guy" mentality while implying some revenge/justice driven genocide survivor should be held responsible for the stupidity of some girl who kept running after him after he had long severed ties, unable to take a hint, lol.
The girl meanwhile, can't be blamed for her own foolishness. Even more amusing is that Sasuke trying to kill Sakura was a response to Sakura attacking him or willingly being part of a team tasked with forcing him back to a place he did not wish to return to. So yes, there is a tremendous problem of self-respect involved in that situation for her.
And there are also endless conversations in the fandom about the darker aspects of that world and of those institutions, stuff more complex and trauma-filled that Sakura's long unrequited crush: the genocide, the slavery, the ostracization, the imperialism, the demand for absolute loyalty, the switch up and hypocrisy of the villagers after Naruto becoming a savior, Naruto himself having or not having changed the world enough at the end and whether he satisfied his promises to certain people or certain smaller nations, etc, so here again...
Surely you can understand that the difficulty gap between "Changing the entire socio-political system to prevent tragedies" and "Sakura should get a hint" is quite massive?
You can like or dislike whomever you want; if there's something about their characters that you dislike, that's not a problem, it's your opinion. Just like people can like Sakura and Misa if they want, and that shouldn't be a problem either.
its not about disliking them, its about why you dislike them. I hate the star wars sequels (honestly I hate most star wars movies outside the OT) and think its absolutely fine to hate the star was sequels because of normal reasons, but 99% of posts about hating the star wars sequels on this subreddit are just whining about Rey in the fact that they dislike female characters. Thats why you/or they get called misogynistic (not saying you do). Same thing with Sakura.
It's a weird conversation. Because ultimately its more than valid to dislike these characters because they aren't written well. But I think the issue is that some people are using this as an excuse to release their misogyny onto these female characters because it's universally accepted that they aren't written well, and you never see them blame the creators for writing them in a misogynistic way. Like people can hate on Sakura but they will never ACTUALLY criticize Kishimoto for not knowing how to write women.
Because we're sick of fans and especially fangirls demanding for female characters as a whole to be tough-ass biatches who never commit mistakes, aren't too attractive AND must jump through hoops to deserve even a sliver of respect, while male characters can get away with almost anything as long as they're hot.
A fictional character cannot have such a thing as "self respect", because a fictional character is not a real, living being with a sense of self. Characters do not make decisions, writers make them.
So any character you would describe as "having no self respect" actually simply isn't respected by the writers.
So any character you would describe as "having no self respect" actually simply isn't respected by the writers.
That's nonsensical. I'm not going to argue these characters are written well, but the idea that a character whose written to have no self-respect is written that way because the writer doesn't respect them is insane lol. The whole point of storytelling is to create an emotional experience through purposeful fictional elements. What you're saying would be like arguing Kentaro Miura hated Guts because he wrote bad things happening to him.
Characters do not make decisions, writers make them.
No shit, but we still view characters through the lens of the fiction, since that's how we're meant to engage with the art. Even when we analyse the writer's intented experience, we still have to look at the actual fiction to understand that intent.
It's not nonsensical in the context of this post. If a man writes a female character who has no personality outside of being obsessed with a man, it's not the fault of the character, it's the fault of the writer.
We're talking about men writing women badly here, not about well written & compelling characters.
Your original point that a character having no self-respect being a reflection of the author's views is absolutely nonsensical. These specific example characters are absolutely poorly written, but it's not just because they have no self-respect and that any character with no self-respect is due to the author having no respect for them. That's massively oversimplifying it and it's a weak conclusion to leap to.
Say anything critical, regardless of what it is, about any character that isn't a straight, white, cis-genedered male and you're going to have some people, somewhere, that are going to accuse you of being racist, sexist, intolerant, homophobic, transphobic, etc. It's going to happen.
Fortunately enough rational people in the world realize that so it doesn't drive the conversation entirely like it used to, but you'll still get them slung at you from time to time.
That’s odd, usually people say it’s misogynistic to like them for those very reasons you listed
There seems to be a new trend? I did see a few YT videos these last few months saying the dislike for those characters is rooted in misogyny.
It's not wrong to dislike this kind of character, it's just the way you might word it that will make others consider you misogynistic.
Usually it’s because early discourse around them was dominated by young kids and teens (especially boys) who weren’t yet able to identify that these characters embodied sexist tropes. And hence, their understanding of said characters began and ended at ‘wow, they’re such a bitch!’
Thankfully the conversation has at least somewhat evolved and there’s a bit more acknowledgment that these characters are poorly written for reasons that go deeper than that. It’s the difference between identifying misogyny in a work and just being misogynistic.
Case in point: There’s a big difference between “Sakura is a bad character because she’s a loud, useless bitch” and “Sakura is a bad character because she’s extremely one note and chiefly revolves around her deeply toxic romantic interest in Sasuke and had very little life or development outside of that.”
I mean, obsession with Sasuke and lack of development/fights is not a new or recent criticism as far as Sakura is concerned, it's always been around as well, lmao.
Though the "useless" criticism doesn't apply in shippuden, it was very much mostly valid for part 1 and it's a relic of og naruto. Shippuden not being enough to make sakura a good character overall despite some improvements, and Sakura's lack of good material after Sasori, helped perpetuate it in the minds of some.
Just for part 1, a character who's part of the main trio, who had no signature jutsus or specialties, whose motivation was centered around a person who didn't reciprocate, who often talked down to the MC while also being the weakest on the team and the one needing saving in dangerous situations? A character who also begged the MC, their male peer, to bring back the crush that still didn't like them back because they were too weak to do it themselves, lol.
I'm pretty sure a male version of the combined profile above would get far worse insults and ridicule than fem sakura did, lol.
Sasuke himself, who is infintely more interesting than Sakura, often gets frequent insults like emo whiny douchelord. His realistic reactions and consequences to the initial genocide and learning that it was state sanctioned get often ridiculed or dismissed.
Obito, that I dislike, gets frequently called a simp due to his motivations and Naruto defending him and calling him the "coolest guy" has been memed into oblivion due to the absurdity of it and the scale of Obito's crimes.
Thing is, some people are simply infinitely more sensitive to negativity thrown at female characters than male characters, so they can rarely resist the temptation of making this negativity into greater moral issues when the female characters are subjected to it.
Yeah I don't consider either Misa or Sakura useless, I just think their toxic one-sided romantic writing was just detrimental to their development as a character that I find it hard to like them.
Really Sakura is no different from Naruto tho and their relationship at very least in part 1 wasn’t that one-sided
Sasuke refers to her as family on multiple occasions even at end of part 2.
The difference is Naruto gets a lot of development and characterization unrelated to saskue or on his own. Sakura’s character basically revolves around saskue and to a lesser extent Naruto.
I just feel that the hatred for Sakura has done enormous damage to character analysis, causing people to devalue any female character with a "submissive" attitude and/or attached to a love interest, and overvalue all those with a tough attitude who only fight. There will be personal preferences, but I think that the standards of development, depth, and charisma that apply to female characters should also apply to male characters.
I have a soft spot for Naruto but between Sakuras affect on the discourse of writing women and Rock Lee on talent vs training it's done a lot of collateral damage to how people talk about other shows.
I feel that part of the issue is that so many shows have only one really prominent female character, who has to carry the burden of being "the girl" in a way that makes any failings with how she's written stand out more. Of course, in Naruto it doesn't help that most of the other major female characters have the same flaws.
If you have only one female character of note, then even if you make her a tomboy you risk running into "not like the other girls" issues.
Something someone pointed out about Mad Max: Fury Road was that some of the women in it were more traditionally feminine and some were not; having a heavily female cast let them avoid the problem where The Girl has to bear the weight of representing her entire gender.
I think it’s symptom of a larger trend.
Back in the day it was default for female characters to be meek and submissive.
But that began to be criticized as misogynistic, and more people started writing “Strong Female Character” archetype.
But today that “strong” type has been so oversaturated that a lot of people are in turn hating that as well (see: Rey from SW sequels)
They have a right to dislike them, it’s how they express they dislike them. Usually they hate on the woman because she doesn’t immediately drool all over the self insert main character. A lot of times male characters get a pass for behaving nearly the exact same ways but the women doing makes her a “bitch”. Hell, a lot of times it’s the male characters riling a reaction out of the women character and it’s the women character who people bash, not the guy for being annoying/perverted.
A LOT of it comes with age, too. Growing up you couldn’t even mention Sakura to anyone. Now among my adult friends she’s just another character to discuss, no weird discourse the fandom ALWAYS wants to indulge in.
It isn't misogyny to dislike any goven female character. The misogyny is, usually, in how a lot of people choose to express that dislike.
bc yall eat up any male characters who also lack self respect by saying things like "hes like me frfr" & calling him a simp.
bc yall will eat up any male character who has done worse than these female characters.
The MC of Rent-a-Girlfriend is the epitome of a male character that lacks self-respect and gets mercilessly clowned on, much harsher than Sakura and Misa (he deserves it, mind you).
I do not see your point here.
thats an isekai self insert character. hes getting hated on because of the genre he exists in.
but then you get people who genuinely like the pedophilic incestuous rapist rudeus in mushoku tensei. hes the main character btw. he never gets shit for being a legit pedo incestuous man — in fact, people defend it.
thats my point. hes done way worse than sakura.
I think you're thinking of another manga. RAG isn't an isekai, just a shitty romcom/harem
That's actually a rom-com author's self-insert character, strictly speaking. More importantly, the OP specifically talks about characters that have no self-respect in regards to people they have crush on. It's not about Sakura doing bad acts, it's a very painful, irl-resonating aspect of degrading yourself for the sake of the person who stomps over your feelings that earns Sakura the ire of the fans.
shes a fictional character written to fill a specific trope (being stuck in a toxic, one sided relationship on top of having her entire character development happen in the background, despite being a main character)... why would you ever hate the drawing instead of the man who admitted he cant write female characters?
So if Sakura was well written, you should only be allowed to like the writer and not the character, right? Lol.
??? why are you acting like criticizing writing is a bad thing now??? weird behavior.
That's not what I said.
Criticizing Sakura is inherently a criticism of Kishimoto and his editors. Everything she does, good or bad, is due to them. So telling people they can't hate a character and should only hate the writers is silly, because likewise, why would you like a character at all? You would just like the writer.
You're only trying to make some differentiation because you can't handle ridicule thrown at Sakura.
Literally Naruto with Sakura (I didn’t like either of them because of it and stopped reading lol)
Depends. Gendered expectations vary and while I'd tend to agree it hits female characters harder there are absolutely male characters who get shit on for failing to live up to them.
Shinji from Evangelion, say. He's good at cooking and cleaning (and does most of the housework at home) and his character flaws are mostly ones that would be more normal for a female lead. At least some of the reason he gets shit on comes from the fact that he doesn't behave the way people expect from a male lead in particular.
I think there are specific arcs and failures that are allowed for characters based on gender, and while male characters are afforded a wider range people will still come down hard on characters who are perceived as failing as a man.
I also dislike male characters that are obsessive in a toxic relationship, plus any male character gets made fun of being simp, look at Obito.
thats your own opinion. many people like obito while hating sakura, despite him being more despicable than she is.
Examples of comparative characters?
I haven't seen Naruto, but Misa bothers me because she feels like a forced plot device rather than an actual believable character, and that undermines the main storyline, imo. EDIT: Aside from that she's annoying in her interactions. What's likeable about her?
literally every single male villain in existence. every single one of them.
I mean that's still being incredibly vague but okay. Even as vague as that is, you're comparing characters who are meant to be villains vs. characters who aren't (Well Sakura you're not meant to treat as a villain and idk what feelings Misa is meant to evoke).
Pretty sure there are plenty of hateable male villains: Joffrey in ASOIAF/GOT, Scar in Lion King, Burke in Aliens, etc.
sure, there are hateable villainous characters... just as much as theres people liking dio brando from jjba & obito + itachi uchiha, despite all three of them being way more of dickheads to everyone around them than sakura.
I'm not super familiar with those anime but there could be a number of factors that explain the difference. Villains that you love to hate; villains that are so over the top they're funny (Isn't this Dio?); villains who do messed up or annoying things, but have scenes that let you empathise with them; villains who should be theoretically unlikeable or do things theoretically hateable, but aren't written in a way that actually elicits that emotional response (telling instead of showing).
Cartman does objectively awful things and theoretically should only evoke contempt, but he's written in a way that's comedic. Denji (not a villain, but still) bothers some people because he's a horny dipshit, but in the context of the story and its scenes you get to empathise with him, and form a connection beyond just judging him externally.
If we look at a character you're meant to hate like Joffrey, he's written as an antagonist, you get plenty of scenes where you get the full experience of him as a character, which earns your contempt naturally. If you looked at the scenes people think of that make Joffrey hateable, you probably wouldn't end up with his most objectivelty despicable actions. If you looked at his actions outside of the story, you would rationally know why he's awful, but it wouldn't evoke any emotion like the actual story and scenes of him do.
Tbf to Sakura a bit (if we're talking about the same one) Naruto was far more obsessed over Sasuke and was the literal only person alive for a little while who still wanted to help Sasuke.
Looking back on Naruto as a whole I started to see Sakura as less of a "badly written" and more of a pointless character in most of the story, Kishimoto was stuck with her while his story largely moved away from her character
How are those not the same thing?
I meant that the bulk of the story went into a direction where her existence in it became largely unnecessary for most of it, and not that it's purely because Kishimoto can't write a character.
I don't know if I'm making sense but I'm trying to say that Kishimoto found less and less things for her to do or be involved in because there was no room for her in his ideas, but she's filling in a main cast position so he was stuck with her character.
Idk it's different than purely bad character writing in my head I don't think I can explain it well
I don't see how you can separate the two? Making Sakura's motivation "catch up to the other two" is a symptom of her being a fill in and token character. Compared to Naruto and Sasuke, whose characters are involved with each other but have more to their characters than just being part of the trio.
Obviously not misogynistic to dislike those characters but in sakura’s case there was tons of gross comments fans made about her (and still do) in 2000s-2010s imo
Like I remember people saying she deserved to get her head smashed in mid-war arc cause???? Saying she’s useless when she’s objectively more useful than most fan favorites like rock Lee. Downplaying all her actual achievements in manga, etc
r/Dankruto still says disgusting stuff on the daily
Are you talking about Fate? There are like a zillion anime characters named Sakura who lack self respect.
Not the GOAT SAKURA OOGAMI
I mean tbf Fate Sakura probably has a better excuse than most to have self esteem issues
1- Misogyny is often at the root of disliking a feminine character, even when we don't wanna realize it (not saying you are in that boat, but it does happen and sometimes we don't realize until we actually soft our way to the bottom of the pile of negativity.
2- Some characters are written like that for a reason, either thematically or textually. I can't speak to the provided examples cause I'm not overly familiar with them- "characters who suffer because they don't respect themselves" do exist and kinda teach an important lesson. That being said a lot of women are socially conditioned to be that way, and hating women for the problems they were raised into is misogynistic; especially if there are other perfectly valid reasons to dislike them. (like, a lot of people who dislike Sakura from what I've heard are mad she had so much unfulfilled potential.)
3- a lot of times these criticisms hand wave valid mitigating circumstances (like iirc, the Naruto cast is a bunch of kids raised in a murder cult that treats them like disposable weapons. All of them lack self respect on some level, why is her case special? A lot of characters who are mistreated or neglected and tolerate it do so because they were groomed/ raised/ shaped to believe the treatment was acceptable and no one else has bothered to help them.
4- to me, the biggest thing that makes me lean towards finding blanket criticisms of "female characters who lack self respect" is that the criticism is almost only reserved for the femme in question, not the people who mistreat her, the world she is raised in, or the creator of the story. So many people make a huge deal out of characters like Sakura being obsessed with Sasuke even when he was an asshole to her don't ever seem to complain about Sasuke- What I usually hear is anger that she picked someone other than the Main character and a lot of it sounds like nice guy projection rather than an attempt to understand why a character would do something like that. And all of them are more than happy to continue consuming a story that writes women like that rather than focusing on finding and promoting stories that hit the themes they like without reducing teen girls to boy crazy idiots. There's a reason I don't read Naruto- I found it's handling of femme characters to be shallow and in service of the masc characters rather than being there for their own sake. If I read a story that has poorly written women I stop reading. There are better stories to spend my time on than ones that can't write 50% of the population like real people.
Sakura wasn't a medieval child bride forced into remaning with an abusive husband. There was absolutely zero pressure or threat hanging above her that forced her to remain that embarrassing situation, so why should Sasuke get most of the blame in that case? Is there some "institutional" mechanism preventing her from stopping her simping? No.
Not to mention Sasuke, unlike Sakura, has immense trauma, genocide trauma, that gets frequently invalidated or downplayed by large portions of the fanbase, with him often reduced to an emo whiny douchelord. To claim he doesn't get more than his share of criticism is delusional. You make a derogatory remark to a "nice guy" mentality while implying some revenge/justice driven genocide survivor should be held responsible for the stupidity of some girl who kept running after him after he had long severed ties, unable to take a hint, lol.
The girl meanwhile, can't be blamed for her own foolishness. Even more amusing is that Sasuke trying to kill Sakura was a response to Sakura attacking him or willingly being part of a team tasked with forcing him back to a place he did not wish to return to. So yes, there is a tremendous problem of self-respect involved in that situation for her.
And there are also endless conversations in the fandom about the darker aspects of that world and of those institutions, stuff more complex and trauma-filled that Sakura's long unrequited crush: the genocide, the slavery, the ostracization, the imperialism, the demand for absolute loyalty, the switch up and hypocrisy of the villagers after Naruto becoming a savior, Naruto himself having or not having changed the world enough at the end and whether he satisfied his promises to certain people or certain smaller nations, etc, so here again...
Surely you can understand that the difficulty gap between "Changing the entire socio-political system to prevent tragedies" and "Sakura should get a hint" is quite massive?
You can like or dislike whomever you want; if there's something about their characters that you dislike, that's not a problem, it's your opinion. Just like people can like Sakura and Misa if they want, and that shouldn't be a problem either.
its not about disliking them, its about why you dislike them. I hate the star wars sequels (honestly I hate most star wars movies outside the OT) and think its absolutely fine to hate the star was sequels because of normal reasons, but 99% of posts about hating the star wars sequels on this subreddit are just whining about Rey in the fact that they dislike female characters. Thats why you/or they get called misogynistic (not saying you do). Same thing with Sakura.
bc its the creators fault, not the characters.
It's a weird conversation. Because ultimately its more than valid to dislike these characters because they aren't written well. But I think the issue is that some people are using this as an excuse to release their misogyny onto these female characters because it's universally accepted that they aren't written well, and you never see them blame the creators for writing them in a misogynistic way. Like people can hate on Sakura but they will never ACTUALLY criticize Kishimoto for not knowing how to write women.
Sakuras not that bad and Kishi has written a number of good woman characters before
Like lady Chiyo’s arc is fantastic, I just don’t see her mentioned a lot cause I suspect her age plays a factor lol
took me a very long time to realize this is about naruto sakura and not matou
Because we're sick of fans and especially fangirls demanding for female characters as a whole to be tough-ass biatches who never commit mistakes, aren't too attractive AND must jump through hoops to deserve even a sliver of respect, while male characters can get away with almost anything as long as they're hot.
A fictional character cannot have such a thing as "self respect", because a fictional character is not a real, living being with a sense of self. Characters do not make decisions, writers make them.
So any character you would describe as "having no self respect" actually simply isn't respected by the writers.
That's nonsensical. I'm not going to argue these characters are written well, but the idea that a character whose written to have no self-respect is written that way because the writer doesn't respect them is insane lol. The whole point of storytelling is to create an emotional experience through purposeful fictional elements. What you're saying would be like arguing Kentaro Miura hated Guts because he wrote bad things happening to him.
No shit, but we still view characters through the lens of the fiction, since that's how we're meant to engage with the art. Even when we analyse the writer's intented experience, we still have to look at the actual fiction to understand that intent.
It's not nonsensical in the context of this post. If a man writes a female character who has no personality outside of being obsessed with a man, it's not the fault of the character, it's the fault of the writer.
We're talking about men writing women badly here, not about well written & compelling characters.
Your original point that a character having no self-respect being a reflection of the author's views is absolutely nonsensical. These specific example characters are absolutely poorly written, but it's not just because they have no self-respect and that any character with no self-respect is due to the author having no respect for them. That's massively oversimplifying it and it's a weak conclusion to leap to.
My original point is in the context of this post, which is about female characters being badly written by men.
Say anything critical, regardless of what it is, about any character that isn't a straight, white, cis-genedered male and you're going to have some people, somewhere, that are going to accuse you of being racist, sexist, intolerant, homophobic, transphobic, etc. It's going to happen.
Fortunately enough rational people in the world realize that so it doesn't drive the conversation entirely like it used to, but you'll still get them slung at you from time to time.