Boruto Fans Are Howling Over Naruto’s Hypocrisy

Boruto: Naruto Next Generations‘ latest episode has started the time travel arc fans have been looking forward to for quite a while. As a celebration of Naruto franchise’s 20th Anniversary, Boruto and Sasuke have surprisingly traveled back in time and found themselves within the early days of the series before the Shippuden time jump. This means Boruto will soon meet the younger version of his father, and fans know all too well what kind of a troublemaker Naruto was as a kid. That’s why his latest chastising of Boruto has fans howling over just how much of a hypocrite he’s become.

Episode 128 of the series sees Boruto plead with his father to help with a mission to catch Urashiki Otstsuki on the outskirts of the Hidden Leaf Village, and Naruto deny him. When Boruto presses further, Naruto tells him to “act like an adult” and that he was much more “reasonable” as a child.

Now this isn’t the first time fans have noticed Naruto pretending like he didn’t act like Boruto did when he was 12 or so years old, and this probably won’t be the last, but it’s definitely an egregious examples. Naruto’s most famous arc in the original series was how he and his friends quickly left the village to chase after Sasuke post-Chunin Exams, and Boruto has been in similar situations but handled himself much better than Naruto has. But the word “reasonable” is an outright lie by omission.

This could be attributed to how long Naruto’s been the Hokage, and how much he’s been through since childhood, and he might have just forgotten how he used to be. But the main purpose here is definitely to set up a shock for Boruto when he sees just how wily the young Naruto used to be. They probably won’t even get along.

But what do you think? Was Naruto being a hypocrite here? Is it a matter of just forgetting how far he’s come? How do you think Boruto compares to the younger Naruto at times like this? Let us know in the comments or talk to me directly at @Valdezology on Twitter!

Originally created by Masashi Kishimoto for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1999, Naruto follows a young ninja, with a sealed demon within him, that wishes to become the leader of his home village. The series ran for 700 chapters overall, and was adapted into an anime series by Studio Pierrot and Aniplex that ran from 2002 to 2017. The series was popular enough to warrant a sequel, Boruto: Naruto Next Generations which is set several years after the events of the original Naruto story and features the children of many of its key characters such as Naruto and Hinata.