Character · Naruto
Tenten
The only member of the Leaf's rookie year who never gets a family name, and the only one who fights with logistics.
In Otakana the clue reads: Leaf ninja who fights by throwing scroll weapons
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Tenten stores weapons inside scrolls and unseals them in mid-air, which lets one person put a few hundred blades into the sky at once and aim every one of them. It is a precision style with no bloodline trick underneath it, and that makes her the odd one out in a cast built around inherited abilities. She trains with Rock Lee and Neji under Might Guy.
Being on that team is a joke in itself. One teammate cannot use ninjutsu at all and compensates with weight training, the other has the best eyes in the village, and their teacher wears green spandex and shouts about youth. Tenten is the person in the group who notices how strange all of this is, says so out loud, and turns up to training anyway.
She wants to be Tsunade, which is the most reasonable ambition anybody in the series announces. The manga never gives her a surname and never explains the omission, something fans have been mildly annoyed about for twenty years. Her scroll work remains one of the more practical ideas in a setting where most people solve problems by shouting the name of a technique.
Spelling TENTEN
TENTEN is the same three letters printed twice, TEN and TEN, which makes it the friendliest six-letter row in the Naruto set. There is a bonus for kana learners here: ten-ten, 点々, is the everyday nickname for the dakuten, the two small marks that turn ka into ga. Both E's are sounded, neither is silent.