Yes Traab I think we all agree that the Land of Waves arc did that to Naruto.

But the point I am making (I am not sure if others are making it.) Is that if you continued that level of grimdark throughout the series and overlaid that level of grimdark onto the rest of the first 1/3rd of Naruto (aka the pre-shippuden era) and you would get a different product entirely. The Chunin exams may be darker than a typical shonen but it is not as dark as the grimdark of the Land of Waves and if they made the Chunin exams the same level of darkness than the whole manga and anime would be a different story even if the actual events are the same.

It literally changes the style, genre, and the response community of the manga who is reading it. Our "expectations" of what is possible in this darker more grimdark naruto would be different if the Chunin exams was as dark as the Land of Waves. Would we readers of the manga expect any surprise from Naruto and Shikamaru when Gaara just lashes out and kills people during the Chunin exam finals? I would argue the answer is no for we had 2 years and over 100 manga chapters establishing the idea of Grimdark instead of an individual event that was less than 33 chapters of the manga.

Naruto the manga has a 13 year old protagonist [much like Kitty Pryde in the 1980s X-Men comics] the world out there seems crazy and cut-throat but ones own team, ones own village seems to operate on rules of comradery, caring, and trust. When in reality one's own village is just as absurdly created by its place in the world and it also perpetuates the absurd world continuously. Birthing an absurd world and simultaneously being molded by this absurd world in turn (thus creating a negative cycle, a feedback loop, a world locked in purgatory / hell.)

Naruto the story needed the concept of hope, innocence, the world can get better, etc in the protagonist main character, a 13 year old boy. If it did not have this expectation then the later installment of Jiraiya's insanity, the Tale of the Gutsy Ninja, would feel out of place in this story. It would not have gelled with the story. If everything is grimdark and without hope where Naruto is Sasuke-Lite it just would not have made sense.

Links to 5 minutes of video.



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Remember the story of Naruto is the inversion of the story of the MCU's Dr. Strange. Orochimaru like Dr. Strange experienced loss and the MCU movie is about said character forgiving the world and rebuilding it instead of being angry at the world and hating it out of spite. The world stole Dr. Strange's hands and he can't handle it so the first half of the movie is him punishing himself and punishing others until he is ready to move on. This is the lesson Orochimaru refused to learn until the end of the 4th Ninja War and the day that just would not end. Dr. Strange the MCU movie is showing what would have happened to Orochimaru if he picked a different path.

Likewise the story of Sasuke is the same as the story of Orochimaru and thus Dr. Strange. He too repeated the path of hatred, while simultaneously trying to break the cycle who created him. Sasuke after learning about the dialectical truth and how it was Itachi who felt imprisoned by the world and wanted to give Sasuke a chance to escape this cycle of hatred (and Itachi is a bad older brother / parental figure for he never knew what it was like to help Sasuke grow in a healthy matter) repeats the cycle of hatred while simultaneously trying to escape it.

Naruto, the tale of the Gutsy Ninja, is about having faith and hope even when there is no reason to have this expectation, to continuously strive for a better world even though you have little past history that such a world is possible and thus it looks like an absurd No Place, a fictional ideal like a Utopia even though we from the outside the text knows such a world is possible that peace can occur.

Make the story too grimdark and it changes the audience relationship with Jiraiya, and it changes the audience's relationship with Naruto, and thus by addition it also changes the relationship Jiraiya has with Naruto. The style of the story would be fundamentally shifted instead of changed at the margins.