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a lot of sasusaku people say Karin never tries to prevent Sasuke from the darkness, unlike sakura, the light of his existence what's your opinion on that? (Sorry for bad English !)
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ASKED BY ANONYMOUS
Let’s start with the oft-decried scene in 402, when Sasuke cries in Taka’s presence and says he wants to destroy Konoha. They stand in solemn silence and do not approach him. The way I see it, they were giving him space. He gathered them as a team with the express intention of defeating Itachi and they did. He’d just found out that the brother he hated so much loved him more than anything and he needed a moment to cry. I don’t see Sasuke as someone who wants people to hold his hand; he needed to just stand and feel the weight of the whole thing resting on his shoulders and get used to it, and fast. They all stood near him, completely silent - something they rarely do. It was a respectful silence. Sasuke composes himself and explains what they’ll do next.
The best kind of support they could give him was by being there for him. Even though, earlier on he said he wouldn’t need the team past the point of Itachi’s defeat. Yet he kept them with him and during the Hachibi fight they all risked their lives for him. He thought about Team 7 (thus establishing that Taka means just as much to him, just as Sai and Yamato, Naruto’s new teammates, mean as much to him as Team 7), and thinking about how Taka means just as much, was able to awaken Amaterasu for them. Then he awakened Enton Kagetsuchi, a power no other Uchiha has been shown to possess and which he did not know existed, to save Karin (in spite of the fact that he almost got everyone else on Taka killed in the process).
Their support for him may be less conspicuous than Team 7 in part 1, but it obviously meant just as much to Sasuke. A different kind of support? Yes. But not an inconsequential one.
Okay, that being said, Sasuke said he wanted to destroy Konoha but as far as Taka knew that meant only killing Danzo…and that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me. Sasuke didn’t say he wanted to kill everyone until he had a mental break because of the Curse of Hatred, and he was BEYOND ANYONE’S HELP AT THAT POINT.He had reached that point because of his fight with Itachi and subsequent stabbing of Karin, and no one could have foreseen the effects it would have on him, as no one in the story at the time actually knew how the Curse of Hatred worked. We the readers only found out how it functioned when Tobirama gave an explanation hundreds of chapters later (which simultaneously explained the madness of Obito and Madara).
THIS POST explains how it was activated in Sasuke, how Karin was the medium through which its effects were conveyed and described, and what I think it all means for their relationship. Karin was basically Kishi’s mouthpiece for explaining how far Sasuke had fallen (in addition to being the moral threshold beyond which he fell into darkness), because unlike anyone else in T7 or Taka (except Naruto, but he doesn’t comment on it during the Kage Summit) she knows and understands his chakra very well. She explains that it had become “dark” and “cold” the minute Susanoo was activated, which was not “normal.” It was then and only then that Sasuke broke his earlier promise not to kill bystanders when he slaughtered the Kumo samurai and went on a rampage. He then abandoned Suigetsu and Juugo (which he had refused to do in the Hachibi fight) and ultimately stabbed Karin. She later tells a distraught Sakura, “He’s not the Sasuke you knew anymore” because “his chakra is colder than ever” - since he activated Susanoo it has gone from normal, to dark, to darker than black.
Karin is something of a unique character, I think, because as a member of the morally gray Taka, she’s not a freedom fighter or a harbinger of justice. She’s a survivor. Naruto is on some level, very political. Everyone in Taka got screwed by the village system (Karin’s unprotected village was massacred, Juugo was shunned, Suigetsu was raised in the Mist when it was still a bloody, murderous mess, and Sasuke…well, you should know by now). They fell through the cracks; they don’t fit into the system as it stands. So why would they fight for some abstraction, like justice, when justice hasn’t been shown to them? This doesn’t make their actions okay, but it explains their mentality and makes it easier to sympathize with them and their reasons for fighting for themselves alone. It’s easy to forget that they are all still children (Juugo is 18, and the rest are 16/17), but the horrid circumstances in which they were brought up have forced them into adulthood. Karin sees Sasuke as Sasuke and not some sort of bad boy who needs to be taught a lesson. She’s not here to save him from his immoral line of thought, she’s here to heal him and keep him alive.
But she draws the line at him killing those who don’t deserve it, like Sakura. Which is why she told him to stop.
Taka is a group of anti-heroes, they are not going to care about the Shinobi Alliance much. What has it ever done for them? Juugo was shunned everywhere he went, Suigetsu grew up in the Bloody Mist when young ninja had to fight each other to the death just to graduate from the academy, and Karin’s whole civilian village went up in smoke because of wars between nearby ninja villages. In other words, shinobi destroyed her family and everyone she knew. And then they all ended up in Otogakure, which is no place for a child.
Taka may be fucked up, but they aren’t all bad, and that should be obvious from the Hachibi fight, when Suigetsu said he “didn’t know why he was risking his hide” for his friends, but he did it anyway. Juugo protected everyone in order to fulfill Kimimaro’s legacy. Karin, who didn’t give two shits about Juugo and Suigetsu when they first showed up and wished they’d kill each other, but ended up dragging both of them to safety along with Sasuke at the risk of losing her own life (NOT TO MENTION WHAT SHE DID FOR SAKURA). Karin, who has no skills other than keen sensing skills, a sharp wit, and a potent healing ability, risked her life for them. Then Sasuke awakened Amaterasu to protect them all, and Enton Kagetsuchi to protect Karin.
Sasuke putting the lives of his comrades over revenge is always a good thing in my book, and he did it for Team 7, then did the same for Taka. BONDS ARE POSITIVE, AND THEY PULL AT SASUKE, AND HE HATES IT BECAUSE HE SEES HIMSELF AS A TOOL FOR REVENGE AND NOTHING MORE. Bonds are a distraction.
Team 7 and the K12 tried to force Sasuke to see that bonds are important, but it didn’t work. It was his brother’s dying words that may have done the trick, or at least planted the seed of an idea in his mind. In the meantime, having a team as devoted to him as Taka is can only be a positive thing, because as we saw during the Hachibi fight, they are his reminder that bonds are precious. Team 7 is also precious to him, but they are at odds with him. Sakura’s confession and devotion were not enough to heel face turn Sasuke. We’ll have to wait and see what does.
#SASUKARIN#THEORIES#THERE'S SOME OLD AND NEW STUFF HERE
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