The Future of Naruto’s Legacy – The Complex Relationship Between Sarada and Kawaki

When we think of Sarada and Kawaki, we always forget how similar they really are because it’s hard to overlook, especially in the time skip, where they are always clashing and having different opinions about everything. But one thing that shapes both of them is Naruto—and I’m talking about Naruto the character. Naruto is someone who both of them use to shape their own ideology. Kawaki uses Naruto to shape the consequentialist viewpoint that he seems to hold so dearly in the time skip and just won’t let go of.

Naruto filled him with love because he was first just an empty vessel that Jigen was going to use to gain a perfect body and basically destroy everything in the world. This made Kawaki’s childhood extremely dark. He was sold off to Jigen, then Jigen just beat him, implanted Karma on him, and all he knew was abuse. He never knew love; he never knew comfort. Even the other Kara members used to abuse Kawaki. We see this when we first meet Garou, and Kawaki kind of implies that Garou’s chin got blown off by him when he was very young.

On the other hand, Boruto is someone Kawaki has explained inflicted beatings that were even worse than Jigen’s, implying that Boruto kind of took it out on him the most. Being this empty vessel that was found trying to escape the hold of Jigen, it kind of served for Naruto to have this adoptive child. Naruto cracked him open and allowed him to be a part of his family and a part of the Leaf Village, showing him, for the only time in his life, protection, love, and comfort. Naruto made him value friendship.

This is why the thing like the broken vase that he broke with Himawari is so significant. It kind of parallels Kawaki—it shows that both are vessels that were broken but can be rebuilt to be as good as new. And while they both still have cracks in them, they can still serve their original purpose, and they can still be loved. This is why, once something like Naruto and the Leaf Village was threatened by Momoshiki and Jigen, we saw him effectively break again and go crazy.

Already struggling with his mental health due to his terrible childhood that Jigen put him through and the abuse that the other Kara members and Momoshiki had inflicted on him, the thing that pushed him over the edge was his own brother Boruto lying about him fusing minds with Momoshiki. This made him go into overdrive mode and show that he can’t even trust someone he holds as dear as a brother—that being Boruto—to protect Lord Seventh, or Naruto. This caused him, in the now and in the past, to just completely distrust Boruto and not trust anyone, forcing Naruto and Hinata into a dimension where time doesn’t flow until the problem is completely dealt with.

Sarada, on the other hand, in Naruto Gaiden, was saved by Naruto and was taught to value family, thus looking up to him the most—even more than her father—and wanting to become the Hokage. Now, while she does love Sasuke and he is her only father, and she holds him dear, she doesn’t want to be like Sasuke. She doesn’t want to protect the village from the shadows. She doesn’t want to go on and do work that won’t ever be acknowledged by anyone but is super important. She wants to be like Naruto. She wants to be loved and held dearly by the entire village, and she wants to have a family—a family whom she can always be close to and protect from the forefront.

We see in Part One that the traits she shows the most from Naruto are his sense of justice, leadership, and never turning back on her friends—just like the message we learn in Naruto. When she is fighting the Kara member known as Boro, she is able to bring everyone together, even Kawaki, and overcome this great foe who they could not topple alone. Together, and as Team Seven’s leader, she’s the one who figures out the poison, she’s the one who makes the combo attacks, and she’s the one who destroys the core.

Now, of course, we know that after she destroys the core, he kind of goes crazy and turns into his giant mutated form, which could only be handled by Borushiki. But even going as far as to make him unstable as Genin—and that’s 12-year-olds—is something never before seen and probably won’t ever be replicated by someone as young as Sarada. Being able to not buckle under pressure and being able to coordinate that fight while being poisoned and while fighting someone as great as Boro is just a feat in itself. She truly embodied what a leader should be and what a leader is in that entire arc.

Now, in the Omnipotence arc, she is able to put her and her father’s life on the line for something that she sees as right—that being Boruto’s innocence. While awakening her Mangekyou Sharingan, even though she can’t understand everything in the moment because it’s all happening so quickly, she knows what is correct in her heart. She makes the decision to support Boruto and send her father off as well.

This is another part that kind of shows her Naruto-esque personality because it takes real guts to be able to, again at 12 years old, watch your entire world crumble around you and get notified that the person you idolized the most, Naruto, died. And while still going against all of this, being able to make such a good decision—that is, Sasuke training Boruto and running away—was critical. Without Sarada, we wouldn’t have the time skip as it is now, and Boruto would have inevitably probably been killed or, if not killed, fallen into despair, allowing Momoshiki to do the rest.

We then, of course, see something wild happen. There’s a three-year time skip, and we don’t know what happened during that little period that, of course, we don’t see. Once the time skip happens, Kawaki and Sarada’s relationship is, of course, strained from the things that we’ve seen within Boruto manga Part One. For three years, she has been supporting the truth and supporting Boruto against Omnipotence. But Kawaki, someone who is keeping up this facade and this lie, has been against this—him basically taking over the village and turning every friend Sarada had against her.

This is where I think the most exciting part of this dynamic happens because, in theory—or in reality, I should say—they are both correct. Kawaki, while it is harsh to hunt your brother and seek to destroy all the Ōtsutsuki, given how Boruto is technically Ōtsutsuki now, is understandable because Boruto did show he is untrustworthy. Momoshiki and Jigen did show how they can destroy everything dear to him and how they are threats to the Ninja World, Boruto, and Naruto. In the simplest terms, Momoshiki and Boruto are genuine threats. Boruto cannot control this mode, and their brains are fusing, as we find out at the end of Boruto manga Part One.

But Sarada is also right because she trusts that Boruto won’t lose control and also how Omnipotence was framed in a way to make Boruto look far worse than what he truly is. This kind of showed that, while Kawaki is technically right, it was kind of malicious of him to try to paint the picture a different way than what it is in reality just to show that he’s correct. So, as it stands now, Boruto is untrustworthy and cannot control his power. But Sarada is optimistic in believing that Boruto can control his power, and she doesn’t know that Boruto’s brain is fusing with Momoshiki. Kawaki does have a bit more information than Sarada, but Sarada is also right to never give up on your comrades and friends and to trust that Boruto will overcome this.

We see a few chapters later the ideological clash between these two. Kawaki explains how he would use the Ōtsutsuki power to destroy them, while Sarada points out the hypocrisy in this statement because he is an Ōtsutsuki himself and how she won’t let him take over the Leaf Village. That’s effectively what Kawaki was doing for the past three years. Kawaki reveals something key, though. He reveals something that, even though we learned at the end of Boruto Part One, we thought maybe might just be a throwaway statement.

As you know, before he sealed Naruto and Hinata, he told them that after it’s all said and done, he can die by their hands. He basically reaffirms that after the evil is rooted out, or Boruto is destroyed, he’ll just disappear. This implies to me that he will just die. So, that kind of shows that he’s not evil or isn’t as evil as people thought, and he doesn’t care about what happens to himself. This goes to show this kind of low confidence that he’s always had about himself due to his upbringing.

They continue on through the first few chapters that we have of Boruto: Two Blue Vortex to battle each other—not physically, but in how they are trying to convince people around them that Boruto is innocent or Boruto is evil. Kawaki, of course, has the aid of Omnipotence working on his side and the lie that Naruto is dead.

Sarada is showing, analyzing, and figuring out how to separate the evils that they are fighting in the village, that being Code and the Shinju, while also explaining how Boruto is the one helping, not fighting with these foes. Kawaki, on the other hand, is trying to find ways to belittle this, and he is finding ways to show that Boruto might be hiding something and/or working with people. Kawaki is basically grasping at straws here to show that, with the little information we have, it is most likely that Boruto is helping the enemy or, at the very least, the reason that they are attacking the village.

Even though I think Sarada’s position is clear and she is the correct person here, we can’t completely condemn Kawaki because Boruto has just been hiding things and won’t tell Kawaki the truth. I mean, Kawaki tries to use Karma, and Boruto kind of freaks out, reaffirming that while he may not be getting taken over by Momoshiki, he still just can’t control that power, and he’s a ticking time bomb.

Going back to Sarada, she has, for three years, been walking on eggshells around Eida because, as we know, once Daemon finds out someone is capable of killing Eida, if they don’t basically submit to her, he will root out the problem himself. So if he ever finds out that she can’t be put under the Eida spell and that she’s kind of resistant to Eida’s whole back, he’ll just kill her. Sumire, as we see in Chapter One, kind of has to tiptoe around the truth as well. Sarada has also been trying to convince Shikamaru. This is why, in Chapter One, she reaffirms that she looks up to Naruto and not him after her efforts to get rid of the lie spread about Boruto fail once again.

All of this together has made her a complete outsider to everyone, kind of like Naruto was. Due to Omnipotence and her supporting the “evil” in the situation, none of her friends want to be around her. She no longer likes Shikamaru because he won’t listen to her, and her and Kawaki’s relationship has been completely broken—shattered beyond repair. Even though both embody traits of Naruto, Kawaki’s obsessive nature and his desire to protect what is dear to him, while skewed, show how far Naruto will go for his family and friends or things that he loves. This shows that he won’t back down due to the simple fact that he loves people so dearly and is an emotional person by heart.

Sarada’s view on justice and valuing friendship above all, even the Shinobi system, also shows the message that Naruto was taught in Part One and Part Two: that abandoning comrades makes you something worse than scum. She has gone so far as to even not care that she’s a Genin or care about the ranks in the Shinobi system, just like how Naruto stayed a Genin and still became Hokage. She does this for the sole reason that she thinks Boruto is being mistreated, and she is right. She is effectively valuing Boruto over her goal to become Hokage—something that Naruto would have done for Sasuke and Naruto would have done for anyone that he loved.

So, unlike Boruto, the main character who is very close to Sasuke and embodies a lot of his ideology, such as stoicism, Sarada and Kawaki are very close to Naruto’s ideology. We are left with one final question: if they are both correct, why are they clashing, and what will happen once they reach their boiling point?

Well, let’s answer the first question. Sarada is right in actuality because we, the readers, know outside details and the full truth of the matter—things that Kawaki couldn’t possibly know, like how Boruto doesn’t use Karma and the stuff about Kashin Koji seeing all of the different futures. But Kawaki is also technically correct because the threat is there, and Boruto did lie about Momoshiki fusing minds with him.

So, the question kind of becomes muddy. Do you think being a complete consequentialist and thinking that the worst outcome is the more probable one is the truth, or are you an optimistic person and think that you should always value friendship and relationships overall? That is the main thing that separates Kawaki and Sarada. He is overly emotional, thus making his response to the threat of Momoshiki way more inflated than Sarada’s. While she is also very emotional about it, she has a far better relationship with Boruto, thus making her trust in him way better. As we know, she has spent far longer with Boruto than Kawaki, and their dads were basically siblings as well.

Now, on to the second question: when do I think they will reach their boiling point? As we see in the flash-forward in Boruto: Naruto Next Generations Part One, Chapter One, the whole village is destroyed, no one is in sight, and only Boruto and Kawaki remain in the middle of the destroyed Hokage Monuments, basically about to have what we presume to be their final battle. Boruto’s shirt is half-torn—or I guess the sleeve is half-torn—kind of implicative that Momoshiki might have gone on a rampage or that Momoshiki might have done something. Kawaki is basically telling Boruto that he’s going to send him to the same place that Naruto got sent. Boruto’s reply, of course, was, “Was this the only outcome?”

I presume at that moment, Kawaki or Borushiki—one of them—has gone on a complete rampage and destroyed everything in sight, basically leaving the village just a pile of rubble. Whatever happened in this moment will prove whose ideology was correct. If it truly was Kawaki and he destroyed everything due to being pushed over the edge, and Boruto never lost control, then Sarada was right to believe in Boruto. But if Borushiki did go on a rampage, killed everybody, and destroyed the entire Leaf Village, then Kawaki was right to be this pessimistic, and this consequentialist viewpoint did prevail.

Of course, there is no way to know 100% until that happens, which we aren’t close to. We’re on, what, Chapter 16, maybe 17, when this article comes out? So it’s not going to be just a few chapters leading to this moment—we’ve got build-up to this moment. No, Kawaki doesn’t even have the same outfit he has in the flash-forward yet, and Boruto can’t use Karma at this point in time, which he does use in the flash-forward. So, in a couple of years’ time, we will finally get proof of either ideology.

The last question kind of doesn’t have anything to do with the truth of the matter. I’m just going to give my opinion: who do I agree with more, or whose viewpoint do I like more? You know Sasuke is my favorite character in everything, so people might think that I would agree with Kawaki more, but that’s not true. Sarada, and me liking Sasuke and Boruto—her father and her best friend—the most, I, of course, believe that Boruto Uzumaki will learn how to control Momoshiki’s power in due time and that it was not Borushiki who destroyed the village.

I think that she is right for valuing her comrades over the Shinobi system because the Shinobi system in Naruto has just proven time and time again to be the downfall of a lot. This, partnered with me believing in how Boruto will succeed in his mission for this to not end in brotherly bloodshed, all leads me to believe that Sarada’s ideology and viewpoint are the correct ones to go with. That is my final opinion, and I’m most likely going to hold that until we see the actual fight. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but if I’m correct, then so be it.

With that being said, tell me in the comments: who do you agree with more? Is it Sarada? Is it Kawaki? Or do you think they’re both inherently flawed and shouldn’t be taken that seriously?