Comment by vanderZwan

It's really sad that Kishimoto so terrible at writing female characters. I'm not being a hater when I say this, he has even complained about this himself!

In terms of character concepts he's always really great - Naruto is one of the few series I read almost from the start, all the way to the finish. At the beginning of the series the concept for all male and female characters started out really interesting. But the female characters barely got any development compared to the male ones, and it got worse as the series went on. Partially because it ended up focusing more and more on Naruto and Sasuke, partially because the majority of the female character development was reduced to how they relate to the male characters.

I don't think it's intentional or that Kishi has any malice towards women or anything - if that was the case I doubt he would have been able to come up with interesting character concepts for women in the first place. But the fact that they're sidelined like that still sucks, especially since the potential is there.

I'm glad that Sakura got to be a bad-ass in a few of the side-stories after the main series ended at least.