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The Uchiha Clan. Regarded in series to be the strongest of all clans, with an exceptional amount of skilled ninja in the clan and great power as a result. The fandom, (for the most part) however, thinks of them as cowardly thieves, weaklings, unintelligent cheaters, and all other manner of things, none of which are true. I intend to, over the course of this minor essay, prove the strength of the Uchiha, despite the thoughts of my peers. But, before I go any further, I have to clear the following up: I do not like Sasuke, and quite frankly have more than once had dreams where Kishimoto was assassinated and left me the series, and I then urinated on his grave before urinating on his memory by having Sasuke die a horrible and ironic death. But, my hatred of cannon Sasuke and Kishimoto do not cloud my thoughts on the clan.
A common argument against the Uchiha is that the Uchiha are unintelligent, and this is proven wrong by on thing: the Sharingan. The Sharingan, as we all know, allows you to see and process things faster than the standard human eye can ever hope to do. This, though, is where most of my peers stop paying attention with the standard Sharingan and its abilities (besides jutsu copying and, occasionally the eidetic memory) and instead move on to its more advanced form. The standard Level 3 Sharingan, based upon the Valley of End fight in the anime slows down an action that, at by my calculations, lasts between 0.23 seconds to 0.34 seconds to lasting about 3.5 seconds. This means, even with conservative estimation, a final stage Sharingan is processing the world 11.667 times faster than you or I. Now, assuming that at least some Sharingan users, like Itachi, have theirs activated at least 5 hours a day, and you have someone who's thinking entire days faster than you for any given day alone, not including the add up of every day before then. Now, lets assume that we aren't talking about the Sharingan wielders but the clan in general, most of whom have probably never activated the Sharingan before. You'd think that, because they don't have the eyes, they're limited to human level thinking speed, right? Well, as demonstrated by Sasuke not getting himself killed by his own reflexes going haywire after his initial Sharingan activation, we can assume that the Uchiha have probably got at least a 1.5 times normal processing speed, meaning that every 2 days you live, they've mentally lived 3. This, of course means that they can't help BUT be highly intelligent. I will concede that many (probably inbred) Uchiha are slow to retarded, but with the Sharingan in their favor, they would equate to standard, easily.
Another of the claims of the fandom is that the Uchiha are weak, thus unable to hold their ground against another of their level without needing tricks to help them. This claim, like many others, is rooted in the "Stupid Arrogant Uchiha" thought process: the lazy bastards don't train because they think their Sharingan will protect them. To anyone with inherent skill and ambition, they should be able to see right through this: No matter how good you are, you WILL fall from glory unless you keep working at it. Think about it: how many of those genius kids do you see skipping grades and then simply coasting off what knowledge he has now? I can think of exactly one person in my grade who's gotten an A in anything without taking a single note, or really listening to the teacher, and the bastard's probably gonna regret it. In fact, the Uchiha probably have to train far harder than almost anyone else because of the Sharingan. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Sharingan suddenly ups your thought speed and, by extension, reaction time. If anyone has ever played a flash game at low quality and suddenly gone to high quality (assuming your on a computer from 2001) then you know how hard it is to adapt to suddenly being able to react faster than the world around you. Now, imagine that with more than 5 controls and up the speed difference by a factor of 5. Think about the training needed to fight like that.
Another common argument along this thread is that the Uchiha are unable to really use the jutsu they copy. The argument is usually something along the lines of, "They just mimic the hand signs and probably just think that's good enough," and, "they probably don't bother to make sure they have the chakra needed to use the jutsu properly" and things like that . This can be settled quite easily. The first argument can be double countered first by the fact that (as evidenced by the Land of Snow movie) the user can copy the jutsu at the same level of skill as the person it was copied from, and also by simple psychology: when someone learns a new skill, they want to experiment with it. This is probably magnified by the fact that they just learned how to blow something up. The second can be countered by the stated nature of chakra: a mixture of physical and SPIRITUAL energy. The Uchiha have already shown themselves to be religious, and their belief in their gods must be magnified by the fact that several of their number have been able to summon one of their gods in combat. Assuming that an increase in either of the two component energies causes an equal and direct increase in chakra, it would go to follow that a high chakra capacity is almost natural to them.
Many people also claim that the Uchiha Coup is all the evidence needed to render most arguments against the Uchiha pointless. The fact of the matter is, they actually probably had a fairly good chance of success based upon one factor: Sharingan hypnosis. Most people tend to forget about this ability the moment the Wave arc is over, and even if they do remember it, they only do so in regards to Uchiha Shisui. This, though, is the exact point that they shouldn't forget about it. In the manga, they state that Shisui was a master of the hypnosis ability, and thus it carried over in his eye when implanted. The thing is, a true master of a physical art has his most used skill imprinted in his flesh and bones: you could tell that a person had practiced 1000 flying side kicks every day for years by looking at his bones. This, though, doesn't mean that a person who simply can use a flying side kick has it etched into his flesh. This means that, assuming the clan was competent in strategy, they would probably have this skill worked out to the point of being at least able to do what Kakashi did to Zabuza in their first fight. If the clan worked out how they would strike with true military precision, they would probably have worked out how to stop most of their foes with their own cross-fire. Assuming they have at least a few of their number with control of the hypnosis near the level of Shisui, they could probably get dozens of their foes to side with them through the liberal application of brainwashing.
I hope that this has educated you upon the strength and importance of the Uchiha clan. While I myself dislike Sasuke and Fugaku, I at least am able to realize one doesn't gain fear of a power without good reason. I simply hope that this will help stop the fandom from painting the clan wrong.
