Spoiler Pain would have been a better main antagonist then Madara.

[Vornmusion]

Originally Posted by gama-sennin

Spot on.

Kishi should have stayed with Orochimaru. No other villain has raised as many goosebumps as Oro did with that evil laugh of his when he was fighting the third. He symbolized everything a true villlain should have; a desire to be the strongest, immortal, a liking for torture, homicides and a serious disrespct for rules and ruthlessness.

No other villain is as personal to the main three as he is either. Though it is unfortunate that Sakuras relation with him is far less than Naruto or Sasukes. I've always said that if Orochimaru had killed Tsunade after the timeskip it would of come full circle. As it is, Sakura can only hate him for "taking" Sasuke away, compared to the other two her symbolic context with Orochimaru is almost nil. I don't think even with Tsunades death it would improve though. Really shows how utterly cashed in her character is. If I remember correctly, Kishi originally had planned for Sakura to die early on mostly because he didn't want to write a main female lead. Either way it really shows that he didn't want Sakura to be a part of anything in any meaningful way. Still shows actually. >_>

Another reason I like Orochimaru has the main villain is because he is less fleshed out than the others. He has a little sob story but even that doesn't explain how he arrived at the level he is at now, it allows one to wonder. Every medium does this, they create complex histories for bad guys and humanize them. Humanizing something detracts from it's inherent fascination. Humans are inherently fascinated with the unknown. I once read a study about this in media, when left to the unknown most people tend to associate a villains background with an outside source. To put it short, most people don't like to think that a normal human could commit such acts, so when nothing is explained they interject the unknown to offset this thinking. For some it's demonic, for others supernatural, etc. The end result was that humans are a species that have a drive to know the unknown, take away the unknown and humanize it and they lose that. This is why you see such huge backlash in movies when they explain how the evil being became that way or operates after establishing it has an unknown, because people don't want to actually know, they don't want that evil humanized. Even giving an evil cloud logic is humanizing it because logic is a human trait. It's rather ironic, it is assumed that people wants complexity to evil, and is true that a good subset of the population do. However the majority has been proven to not. I believe that is why you will find that most of the famous and greatest villains in media have little to no backstory. There's also the simple fact that people have their own ideas for how something happened and most of the time the writer will explain it in a way that the speculating person doesn't like compared to their idea. So there's that angle too.

I'm the kind of person that likes villains to be left to the unknown. I've seen enough villains that have more backstory than the main characters. Orochimaru had a good amount of unknown attached to him, and besides that he also had his symbolic meaning to Naruto and Sasuke. For all of Kishi huff about the next generation surpassing the last he sure did throw away the greatest asset he had created. I mean it wasn't like the first half of the entire damn manga wasn't leading up to that or anything, that's why we didn't get over symbolic crap thrown into our face every other chapter.

[Vatanui AKA Pride]

Originally Posted by deidara330

Sorry, I don't recall that. The way I remember it, Orochimaru made some metaphor as to how a windmill that doesn't turn is really boring, so he wanted to set it in motion by destroying the Leaf/killing the Hokage. Might've been an anime-only thing, but even if he did hate the Leaf, he's still had less of a reason for it than any of the examples you mentioned. Sasuke didn't hate the Leaf until Madara told him the truth. He just left for power.

It's quite different. They both lost their parents at a young age, and it's how both of their backstories start. But Nagato's hits off from there, whereas Orochimaru's is lacking. Orochimaru's parents are the only people close to him that he lost, if my recollecton serves me right. I also don't recall Orochimaru having tried to revive his parents. (It's been a while since I read the original Naruto, I might be missing some details.) However, Nagato was different. Shortly after Nagato lost his parents, his extremely rare and unique Kekkei Genkai kicked in. After his dog died as a result of a battle between Konoha and Ame, he was taught by a Konoha ninja that he himself said he couldn't forgive. Jiraiya was convinced that Nagato was someone prophecized to bring peace, and after leaving Jiraiya, he started a peaceful group. It ended with the closest friend he had ever had dying and him being unable to stop it, and his allies from Akatsuki were all killed one by one. He eventually adopted the goal he had as an Akatsuki and believed himself a god. The main contrast is that the way I see it, Orochimaru's main motivation is still greed, whereas Nagato's was based off of a strong emotional reaction he had to past events concerning peace. The death of Orochimaru's parents didn't lead him to want everything in the universe, and assuming that's true, I can't recall anything else that sets it up.

Kabuto's monologue to Naruto about being raised by the enemy, living the life of a spy, having no home and no sense of identity, finding a home with Orochimaru only to lose his home and himself some time later. It's not the best backstory of the series, but it's similar to Naruto's since Naruto spent almost his entire childhood without having an attachment to anyone and being alone, and since Kabuto was a spy, he must've gone through the same thing. He states his former dependence on Orochimaru's power and his inspiration from Naruto to be his reason for grafting Orochimaru's skin onto himself and mastering/surpassing all of Oro's jutsu. It's at least better than being a villain just to be a villain, if nothing else. For that matter, we don't know what his current goal is or why he has it.

In my opinion, because he isn't just a simple villain. No matter how small, he does have a backstory, and he does have a villainous intent and air around him.See the last two paragraphs of my above response.

@puppetmasterpossession: I'll respond to you later.

He hated the Leaf's moral, which opposed him entirely.

He wanted to. Hence why he studied into topics such as reanimation and Edo Tensei, and eventually was consumed for his lust of power. This also led him to kidnapping shinobi and dissecting him, which was how the 3rd busted his ass.

Look up.

That's no back story. All you did was just restate everything in different methods. Here is the back story: Kabuto lived his entire life as a spy. He once served under Akatsuki.