Namikaze Minato: Military Propaganda, The Character! (Part 2)
AN: This post has manga scans; however, you'd have to refer to AO3 to read them as fan-fiction doesn't allow scans.
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It isn't as if his poor deduction was done in record time or anything to grant it any "wowzers!" factor. Not only was it incomplete, but it wasn't as if anyone couldn't figure out Obito's Jutsu: they all broke it down faster than he did and better than he did. Sakura? She broke down Intangibility perfectly, granted she had the help of Shino's Sensing Bugs, Yamato's Mokuton, and Hinata's Byakugan; but she did it regardless:
(It cracks me up that the above deduction by Sakura took Kakashi only 200 chapters to reach, "is that my bro, Obito, and our eyes are connected, fr?! Huh, no way!" another S-Class smarty pants like Minato and Itachi; did he let Sakura's very accurate conclusion enter from one ear and exit the other? What a fucking thumb-sucker.)
Toruné and Fū? They figured it out even quicker than the above lot, and their deductions were perfect, unlike Minato's:
Sasuke figured it out the quickest in the entire manga. Sasuke did that with just one swing of the sword. That's it, just one! We know this when Sasuke explicitly mentions it here; and that's a call back to this. So where are his "amazing" battle feats? Nowhere. (He had this one one-decent feat in the War-Arc to bypass Madara's Truth Seeking Orb, but that's just about it; but that strategy is so dull that I'm not even interested in posting anything about it on here; and that's pretty much the complete list of his earth-shattering accomplishments on the battlefield; but he peeked from behind that unwary Jōnin in Kakashi Gaiden that one time, so isn't he, like, kwel, fr?!)
The claim "Minato killed 1000 Rock Shinobi" is made up and complete conjecture. It's got no basis in canon or filler anime. None. For starters, Ōnoki's quote from the Shadow of the Anbu arc is maimed to pass this off as some sort of fact, when he implied or stated no such thing.
Ōnoki stated: "With the pride on our line, we sent 1000 of our shinobi and I hear that it took just one of them, the yellow flash, to stop the invasion. And that's the reality of it." Minato was simply credited by Ōnoki for stopping the Stone's invasion. He never stated that Minato took down a 1000 shinobi for it.
The manga goes more in depth in Kakashi Gaiden: Minato lays out the situation to his team and tells them that the Stone Village has deployed 1000 Shinobi to the frontline to invade the Grass Village. Minato then tells his team that, after they make it to the border, team Kakashi will sabotage a crucial bridge while Minato will head to the frontline:
Minato shows up to the frontline when the opponent's forces have dwindled to just 50 whilst Konoha only has 4 Shinobi remaining. He didn't even throw the FTG-Jutsu-taped Kunais himself—his men did!
As Ōnoki stated in the Shadow of the Anbu episode, they were about to succeed in their invasion (50 against 4) before Minato showed up and took out the remaining 50 and ended the invasion; however, as always, when you want to embody a caricature, things have to invented for you to feel perfect enough in that perfect mold.
And the manner in which he got his arms lopped off was the most hilarious bit as he witnessed how Obito made short work of Hiruzen and his jutsus with his TSBs, which he'd fashioned into various shapes:
You can see Minato witnessing all of that in the above panel and mulling over the regeneration of the Edo Tensei, so it isn't as if he didn't know what was going on; and still, he's so fucking elite-class, with Rank S up his arse, that Tobirama had to break it down for him when Hiruzen had done that on his own just fine:
Imagine constructing an entire character as Elite Prodigy (what the ef does that even mean? However, it's a very real category on his wankers' ready-made checklist of prodigies in which people like Sasuke, Orochimaru, and Madara are just mediocre, yet canon states the exact opposite) over his mere passing out early, which was due to war time and war time alone, from the Shinobi Kindergarten that literally doesn't exist in canon.
To put the fat nail in this Minato coffin (and consider that for Itachi and Kakashi, too, while you're at it), it's mentioned thrice in the manga, especially in the first two panels (1 & 2) of Kakashi Gaiden. Mikoto also mentions it. Even the novel backs this up, albeit it's non-canon:
Kakashi, Itachi, Sannin were all allowed to early graduate during war time (something which happens in our militaries, as well). Consider this quote from the Itachi Novel # 2 (Kakashi speaks first):
"When I graduated, it was in the middle of the Great War, and they needed ninjas. The situation's different now."
Now that Kakashi mentioned it, the current system at the academy was different from how it had been when Itachi graduated. The Great War and its aftereffects still lingered when he graduated. Because of that, once his actual abilities were recognized, he was skipped ahead, leading to his early graduation. But now that it was a time of peace, the Hokage was determined that ninjas must be carefully cultivated over a number of years, and it was no longer possible to graduate in a short time, as it had been in the past. Thus, no matter how talented Sasuke was, he couldn't become a ninja until he was eleven years old.
Are we done with this? Good!
His Jutsu repertoire? It's very tiny as it took him a good three years to create and perfect Rasengan, which, by the way, is an incomplete ability as it's just an A-Rank Shape Manipulation, nothing else:
(The data-book oddly categorizes it as S-Rank, when the manga doesn't? I suppose, when Minato invented it, he did that without aid, so when passing on the Jutsu, the rank would naturally be lower; that's how Raikiri and Chidori are; they're the same Jutsu, with the same Hand-Seals in the manga, but the former is S-Rank, in spite of being massively weaker in feats when it comes to its potency and destructive power compared to Chidori, and the latter is A-Rank; Raikiri is just a nickname given to Chidori.)
His FTG is inferior to Tobirama's as he can't mark objects and use them at will; but Tobirama can, as evidenced by his Flying Thunder God Slash, with which he took Uchiha Izuna's life, and his skirmish with Madara where he'd marked the Kunai to use against him:
Minato can't do that as he's not skilled enough, so the FTG Jutsu tag is literally pasted on the special kunais he uses; and I've provided many panels of them thus far. And he only invented one variant of FTG, with which he teleported away Kurama and the Jubi Bijū Dama (BD). No, really, his offensive skill-set is just 3 Jutsus, discounting the Summoning. His skill at Senjutsu is as good as worthless in combat by his own admission, and Kushina taught him all the Fuinjutsus, including the one which he used on Naruto to seal Kurama's one half, so it isn't as if he invented or reinvented them with his own spin on them:
There's your "perfect specimen", a string of made-up fanon myth and none of the canon myth as "never meet your heroes" seems to be the theme of this guy, given that he lived up to . . . basically nothing in particular.
My point being, this character never could support the whole narrative because of how he's supposed to be, not is, perfect in every way (as a man, father, husband, soldier and a leader, a kwel-dude that supposedly aces life all the time, things most men in capitalistic/neo-liberal set-ups want to be and women want out of men).
That's why people can't apply this logic inwards and wrap their heads around the fact that the Prince Charming/White Knight in shining armor trope that men want to be and women want is such a boring and lazy writing cliché; however, when you caricaturize your life, you, too, would want your ultimate "man goal" and "woman male-ideal-partner" to be spotless models of virtue all the time, people who never showcase the conflict with their ideals, but embrace them wholly, never rubs them off the wrong way, and never do or say something they disagree with or disapprove of. Why? Because Minato is charming to become and to pair off with as he compartmentalizes his "pesky emotions" in a manner that's ideal.
In other words, he's a soulless automation, a perfect Shinobi, an illustrious solider that'd make their dreams come true. This isn't a character that's real, but an ideal to live up to or attain, a man who's perfect because he aligns with their morals without a contradiction in sight (Itachi, who's at number 2, is just his slightly "edgier" version, but they're very much the same characters). Then you all wonder why he won, voted en masse by the men, poor dreamers in all ages? It's not that hard to see.
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