Art of War: Casting a Narrative
Stories are illusions, cast to lead away from reality. This fight is all about knowing what is real and what is not. For one contrahent the fight is real and cathartic, for the other it’s simply a tool to conjure up his image. This concept is what draws me to this fight.
The Context
When Sasuke finally meets Itachi, a journey, set up from the beginning finally seems to come to a closure. The fight Sasuke vs Itachi was always meant to happen. Contrary to Naruto’s fight with Pain, we always knew Sasuke’s opponent as he sought revenge against his brother. Other than that, there are quite a few similarities, between the two fights. They come to the same time in Naruto’s and Sasuke’s respective journeys and as mentioned they are similarly hyped up from the beginning of the series. Both fights are dividable into different stages of different nature. Sasuke vs. Itachi also has a section, where Japanese myths are alluded to, just like the Samsara in Naruto vs. Pain. This time the myths are situated in Shintoism rather than Buddhism, though. Yet, Sasuke vs Itachi feels more personal. Yes, Pain has killed Naruto’s master and some of his friends, and yes, they are some sort of “student siblings” because they learned from the same master. But Pain is a threat to everyone, not just Naruto. Naruto is there to stop him terrorizing the world. Meanwhile Itachi is not really a villain to anyone else than to Sasuke. In fact, both of them more or less devoted their lives to each other. Itachi by leaving Sasuke as the only survivor at the massacre of their clan (later we learn that he devoted his life to protecting his little brother, but we don’t know that at the start of this fight). Sasuke by aiming to kill Itachi.
So, while Naruto vs. Pain is a high-profile fight, where two philosophies clash with each other, fighting for the fate of the world, Sasuke vs. Itachi tells the story of a family tragedy and nothing more. That makes it by no means worse, my point is only that it adds another flair, another vibe to the fight.
While all these things I listed above, that it shares with Naruto vs. Pain combined and the different setting make it an amazing fight to watch, I want to focus here particularly on the first stage of the fight.
The Concept
It is quite a different way to fight than we’ve encountered in the other fights. Itachi is known to be a master in Genjutsu – which means he casts illusions and traps his opponents between them and reality. The first couple of times we think Sasuke has the upper hand, we realize that we and Sasuke were actually trapped in an illusion. Quickly we viewers lose our trust and don’t know what is real and what fake anymore. They even briefly discuss the question of reality and illusion. In fact, this is actually the theme of the whole fight, and, taken it further, a theme for the whole Uchiha family.
When Sasuke finally manages to break Itachi’s infamous illusion spell, we are being ensured that from now on, they can only fight physically anymore, and thus we enter the second stage of the fight.
However, Itachi may have ceased to cast illusions with his spells, but he continued to conjure up one such illusion throughout the whole fight. For him the whole fight is nothing but theatrics. He solidifies his image as a ruthless, psychotic even, killer, stating his motivation to fight Sasuke to be to steal his eyes. Only later do we learn that he never had that intention and instead sought to get rid of Sasuke’s evil master’s influence on his little brother. Which he manages to do before he dies.
What I particularly like about this fight is that, at least at first, the theme is expressed by the tactics. In Videogames one would call this a ludonarrative resonance, when the mechanics of the game fit to the message it wants to convey. The message here is that sometimes things are not as they seem, and even if we think we live in reality, we can be mistaken. Just as Sasuke and us, the viewers were a couple of times in this first stage of the fight.