Kisame Hoshigaki Quotes

He has just fed himself to his own sharks rather than let the Allied Forces read what he knows, and the last thing he does is check his work against a dead man's. The question is not rhetorical. Kisame's whole life ran on a suspicion that he was nothing but an appetite with a sword, a man who killed his own squad on orders and found he did not mind. Itachi was the only person who treated that as a problem worth being patient about. So the sentence is a verdict delivered in a colleague's absence, by a man who needed an outside opinion and had exactly one candidate for it. Note what he does and does not claim. Not that he was good, not that he is forgiven, only that the evidence is now in and it does not support the worst reading. A henchman gets a better death than most of this franchise's heroes, and gets it by finally passing a test he set himself.

The easy objection is that a man who murdered his own squad does not get to sound wry about it, and that the sentence is a killer arranging a comfortable seat for himself. Take it seriously. Kisame's history is not ambiguous: ordered to eliminate his comrades to protect information, he did it, and the part that unsettled him afterward was how little it cost. What complicates the objection is the plural. He is not excusing himself; he is filing them both under the same heading, which forfeits the one thing a man in his position usually wants, which is to be the exception. There is no claim of circumstance and no request for a different verdict. That is why the eulogy he eventually gets, from an enemy who barely knew him, lands as something other than sentiment. He had already published the harsh version himself, and nobody had contradicted it.