[ID: Four Panels From The Manga Naruto Shippuden When Ga Meets Kisame Again.

[ID: Four panels from the manga Naruto Shippuden when Gaï meets Kisame again.

First panel: Gaï is looking surpried, saying: "You are..."

Second panel: Lee looks at Gaï asking: "Do you know him? Gaï-sensei!"

Third panel: Close up on the right side of Gaï's face, sweatdroping, his face is shaded dramatically. He asks "Who are you?!"

Fourth panel: Gaï's chest is in the shadows on the front, Tenten is in the middle of the picture, looking at Gaï with an judging expression. Neji and Lee are in the background, probably with a similar facial expression. The speech bubbles for the three of them just says an ellipsis of 9 dots.

End ID.]

I can just picture Gai greeting everyone by smiling and yelling "Well hello there, potential stranger!"

Also, just imagine Dai only wearing the jumpsuit because his child is faceblind and his idea for him to be recognised is to be The weird jumpsuit guy™ because that's easily identifiable.

HC: Gai has prosopagnosia!

In the manga it was a recurring comedic gag that Gai’s memory was so bad that he failed to recognize Kisame several times, but I ran with the idea and I wanna argue Gai actually has a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, or face blindness.

People who have this disorder are unable to encode people’s faces, so they are unable to recognize even photographs of themselves. Its not that they can’t physically see them – if asked to describe the person they’re actively looking at, they can say “black eyes, white hair”, etc – but they are unable to recognize who it is because their brain is incapable of storing a cohesive, complete visual memory of the person’s face.

Folks who live with this condition often rely heavily on people’s voices or mannerisms or other similarly consistent identifying non-facial features to recognize them, but if any of these change – like, say, your partner dyes their hair, or if they catch a cold and their voice gets nasally – then the individual with prosopagnosia will fail to recognize them and probably freak out and act as if the person is a complete stranger.

(Imagine waking up next to a complete stranger!! You’d be like WTF GET OUT OF MY HOUSE but it turns out it’s your boyfriend of twenty years, he just has a particularly severe case of bedhead. God, how stressful!)

Gai having prosopagnosia would explain, at least to me, why he naturally gravitates towards Kakashi. In a sea of perpetually unfamiliar faces, Kakashi is extremely consistent – he ALWAYS wears a mask, for one, so if you see someone with a black facemask walking around, chances are it’s Kakashi. His silver hair is extremely distinctive, too, and he really doesn’t have a wide variety of outfits. It must be nice to know that everytime you yell RIVAL!! and flicker next to this black-masked, silver-haired fella you’ve got it right, ‘cause there’s no one else that looks like him in the whole wide world!

Afficher davantage

[ID: Two arms wrestling. The left arm is labeled "cats", the right is labeled "autistic people". Their joined hands are labeled "people thinking we're heartless/ don't have feelings because we don't express affection their way". End ID]

Also people aren't monsters for not feeling empathy. Ableist people can feel empathy, they just choose to be assholes.

[ID: gif of Sakura and Ino from the game Naruro Ultimate Ninja Storm 1, facing each other in fighting position while swinging from right to left. The way their body and arms are swinging looks like they're dancing. End ID]

They be grooving

Everytime someone in Naruto mentions physical strength and who's the strongest, everyone instantly and conveniently forgets about Rock Lee's existence.