Things don’t always go the way mangakas want and it’s quite common for some stories to end up being lengthened or cut prematurely due to an editorial decision, or even to completely change the way in which certain plots were going to be presented. Even if they’re in the shade editors are key when it comes to building manga as we come to read themand their decisions do not always fix the life of the authors.
In the case of ‘Naruto’, Masashi Kishimoto he was able to finish his sleeve to his liking, but it is true that his editor Kosuke Yahagi He put a stick in it to change the rhythm of the narrative and include a tournament that Kishimoto was not amused at all.
The last word has the Shonen Jump
He Chunin Exams Arc marked a before and after because it introduced many characters that would later be essential in the series and especially introduced ninjas from other villages. However, what Kishimoto wanted was to gradually focus on four-member ninja teams and take a slower pace, and that did not fit with the narrative expectations of Shonen Jump magazine.
So in order to keep a good pace with action and introducing all the players that were going to be needed in the storyKishimoto’s editor came up with a kind of tournament in the plot, which led to the Chunin Exams.
Kishimoto wasn’t too keen on the task and felt that a tournament arc would be too hectic. He even went so far as to tell his editor that doing something like that would kill him, but Yahagi had the last word responding that “he would do it even if it killed him”.
According to Kishimoto, coming up with so many characters so quickly was hell, and he also ended up asking Yahagi to help with some designs. We already know how the rest of the story went, but the mangaka admits that he would have liked to be able to carry out his story as he had imagined it.
This tournament gave us some of the most iconic manga fights so far and served to hook us to characters like Neji, Gaara and Rock Leeintroducing the Sound and Sand villages and much more… In the end, Kishimoto ended up enjoying drawing this arc and that was definitely when the manga started to become more popular, so maybe Kishimoto’s editor ended up being right and the bow came in handy for ‘Naruto’ in the long run.
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