My theory on the manga's short term future

[Gabriel Angelfire]

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Delirium &#064; Dec 7 2003, 01:40 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Sasuke is Vegeta (Arrogant, thinks he&#39;s the best and has trouble getting over the fact that someone (Goku/Naruto) is better than him). </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Lol except almost everybody liked Vegeta. Im saying this cus everybody that I met that watch DBZ liked Vegeta as theire favorite character. Thats from high school all the way to college and my workplace. I dont know about this forums though.

The people that I know that watch Naruto either dont like Sasuke for what he did or they always hated him from the begining. That includes girls to, well i only know 8 girls that watches and read the manga though.

[Stoopider]

People like Vegeta because he&#39;s a bad-ass. Thats all. He&#39;s the too cool for school kinda character. One who would either be lucky and be a somebody or a nobody.

But at the end, all bad-asses usually turn out alright.

[SirCharlesIII]

enough db-bloody-z talk. back to neji sacrificing himself. it&#39;s gonna be like naruto v kabuto...except this time we&#39;re in tsunade&#39;s position, i guess..

[Noonan]

Personally I think that Neji is going to go down - and possibly the seal will fade away (which would be interesting)

But I bet long term Neji and Chouji do survive heres how -

Shikamaru got this job directly from The 5th Hokage -

The 5th Hokage&#39;s apprentice as shown much earlier has run into the sound 4 and knows how dangerous they are - at about the time of the chouji battle she or one of the other members of that jounin mission could have reported to the Hokage what happened.

This would hopefully lead to the Hokage realizing how outmatched the Leaf 5 were and sending jounin/anbu/medical ninja backup (or maybe coming herself)..

Given the hokage&#39;s focus on healing and regeneration techniques, its possible that chouji and neji could &quot;die&quot; and still be barely kicking at the end of the storyline.

Done that way the characters could survive without it being too cheezy -

Noonan

[Uchiha]

I think neji will do something naruto like....something really unexpected that&#39;s why he took that last arrow to trick the sound nin or something by maybe playing dead so he would get closer to neji. Anyway I think something like that anyway but neji must win, they can&#39;t make him lose it would be awfull. Neji is for hyuga as Itachi were for Uchiha, they both were really genius even among their clans. And hinata&#39;s father even said that Neji maybe supassed himself and he is still a genin. So if neji would lose it would make the Hyuga seem weak and if the hyuga is weak then konoha would seem weak because hyuga is the strongest in konoha.....

[Zuttasoxx]

If you look closely to the picture you will see that that arrow is connected with the spider his tong so neji can force spiderdude to come close and neji will us ehis badass gentle fist and pow spider dude down. 2 for the leaf 0 for sound

[RamenNoodles]

Im not saying DBZ was bad. It was a great concept and besides the slow moving plot it was pretty good at first (You could actually see the characters fighting). However, after a while things just got way too repetitive and boring.

[Mut]

that cuz the whol dragon ball (db, dbz, dbgt) series had like 500 eps total.

[Stoopider]

The medic jounins are nearby.. just a reminder though. I&#39;m sure they can do something. Like Whatsisname getting punched a big hole in his stomach by Naruto.

[Immortal Boner]

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Stoopider @ Dec 7 2003, 01:29 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> The medic jounins are nearby.. just a reminder though. I&#39;m sure they can do something. Like Whatsisname getting punched a big hole in his stomach by Naruto. </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
Oh yeah now I remember. It&#39;s Kabuto. But what&#39;s different about that time and now is that not only did Kabuto gather chakra to lessen the impact, it wasn&#39;t really shown as a see-thru hole. For Neji, it&#39;s a clearly a painful chunk of flesh ripped from his shoulder.

I sure hope you ppl are right. An armless or dead Neji would surely piss off most Neji-holics.

[narutosharingan]

Will someon explain something to me? Is chouji alive or dead? It seems to me that he is still alive but very tired....

[Elessar]

Maybe Neji will get into a near-death state, teh seal triggers, seals up the byakuugan and then he survives. Free.

We know that Neji can destroy kidoumaru&#39;s undestroyable spider web by releasing chakra into it. We also do know that he can extract that stuff from his whole body, as his body seems to produce it &quot;naturally&quot; or consist of it. So Neji sending some chakra big pack up the thread to him should be a serious problem for this guy.

[Immortal Boner]

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (narutosharingan @ Dec 8 2003, 02:21 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Will someon explain something to me? Is chouji alive or dead? It seems to me that he is still alive but very tired.... </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
It indicates that he&#39;s likely to be dead since the butterfly is suppose to represent death or something like that. The flashback and finished life goals, add to the clues (though we did see Sasuke go through the same thing.)

It&#39;s anybody&#39;s guess whether the medic-nins can do something in time or not.

[Death BOO Z]

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Elessar @ Dec 8 2003, 01:30 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Maybe Neji will get into a near-death state, teh seal triggers, seals up the byakuugan and then he survives. Free.
</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
which leaves hinata as the only genin with Byakougan and opens her an oppertunity to ditch Kiba and Shino, and will let her get some spotlight of her own.

i think the problem was that chouji had a too &#39;stupid&#092;easy&#39; fight and Kishomonto had to make up for it in the next fight, but becuase Kiba still needs 15 min of fame and he can&#39;t kill Shika (cuz he&#39;s too popular), Neji had the luck to be the one to die and suffer.

the &quot;sending chackra through the theards&quot; thing sounds too much like shino VS kanakruko or an electircal overload (think every ep of pokemon, or DBZ goku vs Yarkon&#092; Goku + Vegita VS cooler at movie 6). i would much rather have Neji get spidy with a comibination of Bunshin Henge (he was impressed when naruto done it) and have an anti-climax vicory than see how kishomonto struggels to keep this battle making sense.

it&#39;s pretty obvious by now that the&#39;ll fail, but we still need to know how close will they get to Sasuke, and if Sasuke will see how his new friends kills his old ones (not like Sasuke has friends, but you know).

[kaigan]

it&#39;s likely that they will fail this mission. I really hope that sasgay go to join the sound village. that would open a lot of doors for our hero(es). i think that at the climax, something to happen and it will be stop. like itachi shows up and kidnap naruto or something like that cause they want the kybui

[NaokiSama_5]

I must agree, there has to be some sort of failure to this mission. It&#39;s their very first huge one, and failing will have a very harsh reality to it for all of them. The points brought up in the beginning replies were awesome, I&#39;m agreeing with them. It just makes sense from a storytelling POV, there can&#39;t only be victory, there has to be some sort of failure for the eventual victory to seem that much greater.

[Uchiha]

I agree that they need to fail somtime but why againts some stupid soun nins that are leaching on cursed seal....I hate that&#33; they should all die&#33; stupid 4 sound&#33;&#33; caurse them&#33;&#33;&#33;

[Noonan]

I&#39;ve been Watching too much get backers lately I think - I keep expecting this story arc to end whith the Konohana five holding sasuke-in-a-bucket and Shikamaru asking the 4 gates of sound if they had a good dream.

... or not.

[jing]

Oh how about Neji&#39;s seal triggers, and then when they meant &quot;Seal&quot; they meant explode, so he Neji sacrificed his life and took down kidoumaru? =P

[Noonan]

or maybe now that Neji has a hold on the chakra line he&#39;ll just go into a rapid series of Kaiten spins and reel the spider into himself .....