Naruto Gaiden, Chapter 3: Chance Meeting, Part 1
The author has taken to calling the Naruto Gaiden chapters '700+3' and whatnot, but I'm not going to. Naruto goes off on his own, knowing that he's missing on the packed lunch Boruto is bringing for him. Dude is the fastest ninja in the world, can't he just zip back, talk to his son for a bit, before zipping straight out? Seriously, these scenarios only work in sitcoms set in apartments, not in a world where ninjas run around transforming into giant energy beings shooting out nuclear bombs.
Sarada and Chouchou are like 'we're going to go off to follow Naruto' when Boruto and Mitsuki show up and they argue a bit about the packed lunch. Chouchou is still annoyingly delusional about love and is just annoying in general. Sarada is kind of projecting her own parental issues of, y'know, not knowing where her father is and who her mother is... and Boruto even calls her out on that. But the all important packed lunch is given to her.
Meanwhile they're being watched by this thing that's a cross between the Ten-Tails, a squirrel and a pokemon. It's got the Ten-Tails' Sharinnegan thing, and the same weird wooden mouth. Whatever that is, all it's missing is the weird single ear to look like the Ten-Tails' grotesque... second? Third? Whichever form that has that weird eye-mouth-ear thing.
Onion-Head is apparently called Uchiha Shin, so there goes my running joke. Hood-Man orders Shin to bring Sarada to him, and we see that he's not Orochimaru... he's got an implanted Sharingan with dark-coloured conjunctiva, but instead of implanting it nicely like every other sane people in this ninja world, Hood-Man has taken into stabbing the corners of his eye with little Hellraiser stake things.
He's totally Shishui, isn't he? Random dude that suddenly got prominence in the chapters of a recent game that the author apparently wrote himself, his eyes have apparently been replaced, we never see Shishui's death specifically in either the manga or the game, and an obsession with Itachi... yeah, totally calling it.
Naruto, despite not wanting to wait for his own kid, realizes that Sarada and Chouchou are chasing him and heads back. Man, Naruto, you're a shit father. Shin, of course, confronts Sarada and Chouchou and the two have some generic back and forth. Shin then places a scroll on the ground and calmly pulls out this gigantic shuriken on a chain while Chouchou makes eyeroll-inducing vaguely love-related ditzy remarks.
Sarada launches some kunais at Shin, and Chouchou moves in with a Bubun Baika no Jutsu, but Shin just does some ninja hopping around while playing with his chain, and moves in to kill the expendable Chouchou... but of course, Naruto goes in to save them and goes all 'ah, you're the dude with the Sharingan'.
Overall not a bad chapter, really, it just has this really weird focus on the really soap-opera-like condition of Sarada and Chouchou and Boruto and all sorts of parental issues and whatnot. It's certainly nice themes to explore and I certainly prefer this to the bogged-down bullshit of a mess that was Naruto's quote-unquote grand finale, but, y'know, the tone of this series in general feels more like a drama-comedy thing instead of an action-packed shonen.
Still not quite impressed with Sarada as a lead, though she's grown from 'irritating' to 'inoffensive', though that might just because she's paired up with a more annoying character. The whole Uchiha mystery is not boring, at least, though Shin doesn't really look like much of a threat, especially not to Naruto. Though since Naruto is like overpowered as hell I don't think short of introducing a threat equal to the likes of Madara or Kaguya anything's going to be a threat, and I've had my fill of those kind of 'shrug off every attack' villains. So.
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