A Casual Ethnography of the Boruto Fandom: Kawaki Edition
One of the main reasons that Kawaki is such a divisive character comes from how he was introduced to the series. Part of this was due to how the anime handled its production, part of it was fan reception, and part of it was good writing.
The Boruto anime spent 188 chapters letting viewers fall in love with the life Boruto was supposed to have if not for Karma. Friends, family, a shinobi career—the series gave him a complete life so that viewers would truly feel how much he had to lose when he lost everything. An unintended consequence of this is that Boruto did feel as though he had a full life, a real team, a family, and a lot of fans of the series fell in love with the adventures of Sarada, Mitsuki and Boruto and wanted that to be the main story.
(I once had a shipper who hated Kawaki tell me how awful and abrupt it was to have him added to the story so far through, and when I pointed out that he’s in the very first freaking episode, she responded with, “Oh, well, I forgot about that,” which seems really disingenuous given the weight of the flash-forward scene. For her, Kawaki interrupted her perfect little dream of a ship-focused story by introducing a non-Uchiha deuteragonist.)
Then we have the introduction of Kawaki, which was one of the best-animated episodes in the series. I’ve heard from long-time fans of the series who experienced the shift from pre-2021 to post 2021 that the entire character of the fandom changed after Kawaki’s introduction with new fans coming in and others viewing the entire anime as having to always be judged against the quality of episode 189. The general idea is that Kawaki wasn’t the problem, but the type of fan that arose after Kawaki’s introduction changed the fandom for the worse.
If you look at criticism of Boruto, both the anime and the manga, the rise of Kawaki fans makes sense. He was a remedy to criticism that had been levied at the series since its inception: Boruto is a brat, he’s annoying, he’s privileged, he hates his father, it’s a series for kids. Kawaki’s introduction turned all that on its head by introducing an anti-brat, someone who called Boruto annoying to his face, who loves Naruto, who exploded a dude into tiny pieces, blood spatter and all, when he was first introduced. For people who took issue with Boruto the character, or internalized the complaints with Boruto the series, Kawaki felt like the antithesis of everything “wrong” with the series.
However, you can also see that long-time fans of the series would take issue with this shift. Kawaki fans were edgier, sometimes assholes, and they weaponized complaints against the series into fandom wars (e.g., the famous desire to want to rename the entire series to Kawaki: Naruto Next Generations and kill of Boruto long before Kawaki actually killed him). We talk a lot now about how often Boruto is featured in the manga, but three years ago, the conversation was reversed, with Boruto fans complaining that Boruto had no fights featuring just him and that Kawaki took up the limelight after his introduction.
Now, in my personal opinion, in both the manga and the anime, Kawaki is supposed to feel like a disruption, and the uncomfortable feeling some fans get is an extension of good writing. Boruto did have a complete life before Kawaki (though his Karma is truly to blame, not the other victim of it). To readers (and viewers), Kawaki enters the story as an outsider. It’s not just something we’re told of happening through flashbacks or internal monologues. We feel that disruption when he enters Konoha and everything goes wrong, when he enters the Uzumaki household—which had just found its peace—and throws it into chaos. We’re supposed to see him as friendless, as apart from everything, experience his alienation even as people reach out to him. We feel that he’s an outsider just as he feels as though he’s an outsider. But a lot of fans aren’t critical readers and don’t pick up on the fact that the unsettling feeling they’re getting about him is authorial manipulation.
When you add all this up together, then layer Kawaki’s actions in the series on top of it, you end up with a lot of Boruto fans who legitimately do not like Kawaki and more so than in the Naruto/Sasuke split of the original series. Kawaki’s introduction abruptly interrupted an existing story dynamic and the fans he brought to the fandom were contemptuous to the main character and the series. I’d argue that a lot of the current toxicity in the Boruto-character wing of the Boruto fandom is a direct reaction to the energy Kawaki-character fans created, which is also a reaction to outside hatred for the series. It feels as though they’re forever engaging in an argument with a third party to explain why Boruto is edgy, cool, mature, and adult—all of which he now is, but there’s an inherent aggressiveness to their glazing, almost in competition with that of the Kawaki fandom.
Personal addendum here: I got so much shit on Twitter for liking both Boruto and Kawaki. There were entire conspiracy theories that I was a secret Kawaki fan, posting positive content about Boruto for clout (that’s a word I haven’t typed since leaving anitwt). I used to do NGL posts so people could ask questions about writing and fanfic, and I’d get aggressive “You have to choose. Who do you like more: Boruto or Kawaki?” because people could not accept that I just like the series. (I responded to that with “your mom” which was probably one of my lowest and highest moments on anitwt). The entire fandom is so divided among character lines that simply liking Kawaki or arguing for his point-of-view feels transgressive and taboo. Which… Yeah, I’m really happy to be on a social media site where we’re mostly adults, even if there are only ~20 active Boruto accounts. I enjoy the series so much more without that energy.