✨ I think a lot about how Boruto kind of started as a series about, like, encroaching modernization annihilating not just traditional ways of life, but traditional safety nets for individual people, how greater interconnectedness and global trade also opened up yawning pits in the social contract. it elected to pitch itself on a bunch of ninja kids who are in that final twilight period of the world not really needing them anymore and consciously aware of the fact that their entire lifestyle and cultural history was being reduced to something quaint for tourists to gawk at. it was a story about what it's like to live in the shadow of the world that was and have both the expectations of your predecessors who had ended that world's status quo, and the awareness that nothing in your culture has actually done ANYTHING to prepare you for the world you ACTUALLY live in, crushing you from both sides before your life has even really started.
and then it abruptly decided 'actually no. it's not about that at all. what if if it was just Naruto again, but slightly worse in all possible ways'
