Boruto: Two Blue Vortex Chapter 33 Review

Cover

The only part of Boruto: Two Blue Vortex (TBV) chapter 33 that I was spoiled on was the cover (thanks, Instagram), so I have been champing at the bit for days to dissect it. There are going to be a lot of comparisons to previous chapter covers. You have been warned.

Let's begin by looking at the cover in sequence with the chapter 2 and chapter 21 covers, both of which featured Sarada. The covers tell a story of her progress throughout TBV. We start with a composed Sarada with smooth hair, looking askance at the viewer, hand defiantly placed on her hip. The chapter 21 cover zooms in, her arm dropped, coat falling off her shoulder. She looks at the viewer head-on, one hand raised to remove her glasses. Her hair is wild, uplifted by the gravity-defying properties of her Mangekyo Sharingan. Our most recent chapter cover moves even closer to Sarada. She's pulled her glasses off completely, staring forward though narrowed eyes. Her coat is slipping off on both sides, shoulders bare. What's more, her hair is now flat, having lost its rigid styling while having none of the power displayed on the chapter 21 cover. She's coming apart visually before our very eyes.

While the first two covers maintained Sarada's canon color scheme, this latest iteration returns to the palette used on the last cover of Boruto: Naruto Next Generations (NNG). Through one lens, we can view this aesthetic choice as the intersection of Boruto's eyes and signature pink style and Sarada's character, but due to the tone of the colors, I think it's much more likely they represent her familial background, the original color of her father's clothing design combined with the pink of her mother's hair. This family design works in both contexts: in NNG Chapter 80, she pleaded with her father to save Boruto much like her mother once pleaded with Naruto to save Sasuke. She was the culmination of her parents' stories, a character who cares so much, she awakens a power once associated with death and hatred out of pure love.

While Sarada has removed her glasses on both covers, there are significant differences as well. As I noted once on Bluesky, after Momoshiki began affecting Boruto's life, we see Sarada always talking about how her dreams of being Hokage relate to him when her eyes are averted, a visual nod to her mental state of not acknowledging herself until the battle in the Sand in TBV. Chapter 33 Sarada has stopped looking away, staring towards the viewer just as her dream has been potentially shattered due to the eye injury she sustains while using her Mangekyo Sharingan.

We see this idea echoed in the cover backgrounds as well. On the NNG chapter 80 cover, blue light, the color of Naruto's eyes, surrounds her as she desperately tries to save a friend. We see this color repeated on the chapter 33 cover, manifesting in the text. However, the cover is disrupted, just as Sarada's future has been disrupted, the lettering scraped off or spattered over, a jagged line separating the pink and blue. Whereas everything was composed and aspirational on the NNG cover, the latest one is chaotic, the promise of her parents' past now uncertain.

The pose Sarada strikes is a familiar one as well, utilized first on Kawaki's chapter 66 NNG cover, then again a few months back for Boruto's pose on TBV's chapter 29. For both Kawaki and Boruto, those chapters represented them embracing a power they'd been trying to avoid to meet their goals: their karma. While the boys made deals with their own demons (Amado and Momoshiki) to serve the greater good, Sarada overextended herself while trying to achieve her dreams, all three of their choices potentially leading to tragedy.

As always, Ikemoto's chapter title, Shattering Futures, is on point. The untranslated side text reads "In order to protect until the very end, the price is heavy." Shattering Futures most explicitly refers to the moment in which Koji tells Inojin to follow through with his plan to defeat Mamushi, destroying all the futures in which Konoha is defeated by the Shinju's invasion. However, both Inojin's and Sarada's futures hang in the balance as well, one of Sarada's Mangekyo Sharingan potentially destroyed as well as Inojin's vision, sacrificed to defeat Mamushi. Both Sasuke and Koji told Boruto that Sarada's Mangekyo Sharingan was going to be a powerful assist to insuring a good future. What happens without it? Undergirding those warnings in our knowledge as readers that whenever Koji makes a choice to impart knowledge of the future, his actions destroy those paths forward. With Amado now listening in on his conversations in the hideout, there's yet another individual with knowledge of Prescience who hasn't received the proper warnings about not reacting to potential futures.

Brothers, Sisters, and Sarada

I first want to applaud Ikemoto for starting us off with an aerial view of the battlefield, all characters in play visible. At the beginning, we have Daemon and Eida to the northwest; Delta to the west; Boruto with Sarada, Mitsuki, and Konohamaru to the southwest; ChoCho and Shikadai to the east while Himawari is running to the southeast to help Kawaki.

Boruto cradles Sarada in his arms, the untranslated text in the corner over her face reading, "Sarada and Kawaki collapse! The plan is failing...!! In the face of 1000 Mamushi, what will Boruto and the others do?"

In the last chapter, when Sarada fell out of the sky, Kawaki seemed concerned, issuing an uncharacteristic, "Hey! What's going on?!" I think it was fair to read that as his reaction to their entire battle plan going tits up in one bloody-eyed explosion, but his worried behavior contiues when he tells Himawari, "Relax... I simply ran out of gas. Save all your worry for Sarada instead." I think a more fitting English translation of that second sentence would be "Worry about Sarada instead," which is a way of telling someone to go tend to a more pressing matter. As it reads on the page, Kawaki seems genuinely concerned for Sarada's well-being.

While Kawaki maybe concerned, Boruto is freaking out. Sumire, only connected to the battlefield via Inojin, asks Boruto about Sarada's condition. He examines her, wiping the blood from her cheek with his thumb, reporting that she's alive, but he's worried about her vision.

Thirty chapters ago, Boruto saw Himawari for the first time since leaving the village, the stoic mask he'd been wearing since he returned to Konoha breaking the moment he saw her. Their reunion here is brief, focused on Sarada's wellbeing as Hima quickly heals her with Kurama's power, fixing the things that are physically damaged, though like with Inojin, she may not have the power to address the underlying issues. I have questions about how Hima now understands blood vessels in the eye, questions I hope are answered by the anime at some point in the future. I've expressed this before, but while I'm enjoying Himawari's character growth, I feel a bunch of steps were skipped to take her from where she was at the end of NNG to where she is in TBV. Everything is surely explainable, but the text itself hasn't taken the time to explain it in a way that's wholly satisfying to me. All the pieces are there to make for a fantastic story, but they need to be put together in a more artful way.

I can understand the Boruto and Himawari reunion needing to wait until later. Thus far, Boruto has been fairly careful when interacting with people affected by Omnipotence, not calling Naruto and Hinata his parents and avoiding referencing his old life. As with Mitsuki and Konohamaru, he seems determined to let people judge him by his merits instead of telling them who he is. I expect him to take this same approach with Hima, and from her perspective, she is helping the outsider, Boruto, right now, which he wanted to do, by healing Sarada at the behest of her big bro. In other words, now isn't the time for a tearful meeting, especially not when there are Mamushi to slaughter.

Mamushi Genocide (Attempt 1)

With the heavy hitters down for the count (Sarada passed out, Boruto freaking out, and Kawaki just out), Daemon takes it upon himself to protect Eida on his own. I think I expressed this earlier, but the Daemon vs Mamushi content is going to slap when it finally gets animated in 2040. In addition to the anime, I really want to applaud Ikemoto for the sensory content he builds into this moment, the stench of unwashed Mamushi, the exploding heads, the growing pile of bodies. From Eida's perspective, this is a horror movie and she's the star, trying to avoid getting eaten by a stinking neckbeard.

Boruto leaves Sarada in the safe hands of Konohamaru and Himawari, finally joining the fight, helping to beat back Mamushi's numbers along with Delta and Mitsuki. We finally see Daemon reaching his limit due to stamina, trying to catch his breath after exploding a few hundred Mamushi heads and fighting off hundreds of others.

Shattering the Future

While the battle rages on, Inojin, increasingly desperate, turns to Koji for answers. We get Koji's usual Prescience spiel, explaining that he can't control his visions or when they update. The difference this time is that we see Amado listening in on the conversation, taking mental notes of Koji's mention of Prescience and Precognition from his lab. I think this is Amado specifically spying on Koji's conversation with Inojin rather than a broadcast going out to the entire ops team, though I've seen different interpretations. Being that Koji is a creation of Amado's and we've seen Amado using his glasses to receive transmissions from Koji's scientific ninja toads before, I suspect he has a way of spying on him once he realized Koji survived the Jigen/Isshiki fight. Sumire notes his distraction, turning around to give him her signature "..."

Koji goes on to tell Inojin that he would have developed his Mind Transmission Formation in the future only after Konoha's initial defeat by Mamushi, ergo having him learn it early and employ it in battle shifted the future from the one he predicted. He defends this choice, pointing out that they're in a better situation than they would be otherwise, Mamushi weak and the girls still alive.

Inojin lashes out at the idea that Koji's interference helped anything due to the precarious state they're now in before he suddenly realizes that there's an alternative use for the abilities he's gained.

Questions about Koji

Uzuruto on Bluesky brought up a fantastic question as to whether Koji purposefully set Sarada up to lose her eyes in order to inspire Inojin for what he does next. While I'm not sure if Inojin needed the loss of Sarada's eye to inspire him, we have some interesting proof that Koji might have set Sarada up to lose her sight. Let's take a look at some of the proof.

When sacrificing Yodo to awaken Sarada's Mangekyo Sharingan, Koji says that it was a critical goal of the battle—not for killing Ryu, not for helping them in the future. He just mentions that it's something he needs on-hand to ensure a good future.

On the last page of chapter 32, we see Sarada's bleeding eye and the growing horde of Mamushi, Inojin's face, and Koji's stillness. Previous times when Boruto has veered from the plan, Koji has freaked out. In this moment, he appears calm and collected. We know from his chapter 33 conversation with Inojin, Mamushi's extremely high number of copies of himself are important to render him stupid enough for Inojin's hive-mind takeover, meaning that he wasn't necessarily aiming for a future in which the Shinju's numbers were cut down to size.

In the last set of panels from this chapter, Boruto has reached out to Shikamaru, asking for an honest assessment of their status. We see the desperate state of the battlefield—Kawaki broken, Sarada passed out. As Koji begins to speak of his visions for the future, the focus zooms onto Sarada's blood-streaked face. It's very likely that Inojin would never have come up with this plan under normal circumstances, that the heavy hitters had to be taken out during the battle, leaving him with no other choice than to sacrifice himself to destroy Mamushi's threat.

A Shinobi's Resolve

As I alluded to before, the plan Inojin develops is to take over Mamushi's collective consciousness with his Mind Transfer jutsu, then using that it and Daemon's reflective ability to defeat the horde.

Back on the battlefield, Eida is buried beneath a pile of Mamushi corpses while still more copies of the Shinju stalk her. With Daemon on her back, she attempts to fly away, but as was established in the previous chapter, they're faster than she is. Boruto manages to buy her some time, killing the Mamushi closest to her, but Shikamaru is unable to come up with a viable path to victory.

Such is the state of things when Koji performs a reverse summoning, dropping Inojin next to Himawari. He issues a brief apology, not unlike Naruto's last thoughts about Himawari and Hinata before using Baryon Mode or Boruto's last words to his father before allowing Kawaki to kill him. He rushes toward the other members of Team 10, shouting at Shikadai to trap a single Mamushi for him. One Shadow-Paralysis-Mind-Transfer-jutsu tag-team move later, and Inojin has taken over the entire Shinju swarm.

I must admit, I was expecting Inojin to sacrifice his life, not just his eyes, right up until the point he told Himawari to "take care of me after," implying that he expected there to be an after. Utilizing Daemon's abilities to simply destroy his eyes rather than his entire life was a genius move.

Three Eyes, One Arc

In chapter 10 when Inojin was impaled by Jura, I wasn't on team #KillHim, but I do find myself wanting the sacrifices in this arc, both Sarada's and Inojin's, to have some lasting results. As the stakes of the story increase, we need to see the ongoing conflict with the Shinju having consequences. Interestingly enough, I think Inojin's Mind Transformation Formation, a jutsu based on identifying people and sensing surroundings via vibrations, possibly sets him up to function as a blind shinobi in the future.

Awkward Bros and Return of Code

As Himawari heals Inojin's eyes, the remaining Mamushi fall to the ground after their eyes explode, all of the corpses throughout Konoha and on the battlefield dissolving into tiny flecks that form his Thorn Soul Bulb.

In what somehow manages to be the most normal conversation and yet the most awkward conversation Kawaki and Boruto have had thus far, Kawaki questions Boruto about his plans for the bulb. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but it feels as though Kawaki might have alternative ideas for what to do with the bulb before Boruto says it'd be a shame to let it rot. (Just now, as I am writing this, I wonder if Kawaki ends up consuming Jura's Thorn Soul Bulb after defeating him, and we're getting a little foreshadowing of that going on here).

The untranslated text at the end of the chapter reads, "Boruto plans to revert Bug back from his tree form! But whose mysterious eye lies in wait?!" which is quite a silly question to be asking because every single Boruto reader knows what Code's luxurious white eyelashes look like.

Questions and Thoughts

This was a heck of a chapter. I saw none of the twists and turns coming in it, as you can see in my previous chapter review. But I have some outstanding concerns...

• I wonder what it's going to mean to both Kawaki and Sarada, characters who have worked to embrace power, to have failed where Inojin succeeded. I want to see them both grappling with how their abilities failed them in this arc.
• I think we're due for another Boruto-Koji confrontation now that Sarada was harmed by plans our favorite Jiraiya clone put into action.
• I was going to include an entire section in this review about the arc and depictions of masculinity, but I'm going to dedicated an entire blog post to the subject rather than try to wedge it in here.
• I've been mentioning for a while now that I'd like a Code-focused arc to break up the recent Shinju-of-the-week plots. My question is... what is he planning on doing when Boruto goes to free Bug? Is he going to try to kill Boruto? Follow Boruto back to Koji? Snag Bug's bulb for himself? Is he going to play along with Jura's demands or do something different?
• I really was hoping this chapter was going to have some Eida and Daemon lore. Perhaps we'll get it in the wrap-up or when Eida eventually talks to Boruto... or never.
• With Sarada's destroyed eye, will we finally get some mother-daughter moments when she's in the hospital? I'm not getting my hopes up, but a girl can dream.
• With Mamushi out of the way, is Shikamaru about to be forced out of a job?
• How are Ino and Sai going to handle their formerly-impaled child getting blinded?
• I just want to throw out there that it was very sweet to see both biological Uzumaki kids taking care of their respective romantic interests' destroyed eyes.
• What is Amado going to do with his knowledge about Koji and will it fuck up the future even more?
• Will Sumire ever do anything with her "..." and what special addition did she make to Boruto's sword?
• Are we going straight into a Code-focused arc or are we going to get some much-needed character downtime and interactions from the entire cast?

I'm sure more thoughts will shake out of me in the coming days, but hopefully not enough that I need to do another chapter review 2.0. As always, a highly enjoyable chapter and a fantastic way to conclude the Mamushi arc!