Term · Naruto
Sannin
Three students of the Third Hokage, given their nickname by the enemy who failed to kill them.
In Otakana the clue reads: The three legendary students of the third leader
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Sannin means three ninja, 三忍, and it is not a rank anybody awards. Jiraiya, Tsunade and Orochimaru survived a fight with Hanzo of the Salamander during the Second Great Ninja War, and Hanzo named them on the spot as the three worth the title. The name stuck so firmly that the rest of the world uses it as a unit of measurement.
They divide neatly. Jiraiya summons toads, Tsunade summons slugs, Orochimaru summons snakes, and the three animals defeat each other in a fixed loop the series stages more than once. Each of them ends up somewhere very different: a wandering spy, a village leader who did not want the job, and a defector running experiments on living people.
The trio comes out of a folk tale. The Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari, an Edo-period story cycle, has a toad-magic hero called Jiraiya, a slug-magic woman called Tsunade, and a snake-magic villain called Orochimaru. Kishimoto took the names, the animals and the triangle between them, then built the next generation of his cast to rhyme with all three.
Spelling SANNIN
SANNIN is six letters and the doubled N in the middle is the trap. San is three and nin is the same nin as in ninja, so the word is three plus ninja with both N's kept where they meet. Say it san-nin and the pause is audible. Only two vowels, A on tile two and I on tile five.