Seriously, why did no one promote him?
Spoilers ahead!
Summary:
- By the end of the series, despite many feats and saving the world, Naruto is still a genin.
- He never had a chance to retake the exam to become a chunin, but that doesn’t explain why he wasn’t promoted outside of the exam system.
- However, perhaps Naruto being a genin — and yet becoming Hokage — is actually the point.
By the end of the series, Naruto is arguably the strongest character in the universe. Wielding incredible powers coming from being a reincarnation of Asura, as well as from his own rigorous training, he could only be matched by his eternal rival, Sasuke. And despite Naruto saving Konoha — and the world at large — from many threats, Naruto’s official standing as a ninja has never changed since Episode 1, where he became a genin — the lowest ninja rank out there.
Sure, him becoming Hokage eventually overwrites that, but between those two events, he was actually never promoted, which makes no sense to many fans.
Naruto never had the chance to promote
Technically, the in-universe explanation is that Naruto simply never had the opportunity to be promoted. He didn’t show the maturity required to be a chunin during the Chunin Exam arc, and after that, he spent little to no time in the village, which prevented him from participating in the exam again.
He leaves Konoha with Jiraiya very soon after the Sasuke Retrieval mission fails, and for the next two years, he can’t join the exams (which were actually covered in some anime filler arcs, explaining how some of Naruto’s classmates were promoted). And after that there’s no time to hold the exam at all: Naruto — as well as Konoha itself — is constantly in mortal peril. This culminates in the Fourth Great Shinobi War, during which, yes, Naruto is still a genin.
The system makes no sense
This doesn’t make much sense if you think about it, however. If only a couple of shinobi were promoted to chunin during every exam, most of them would be stuck as genin. While there’s a decent possibility that that’s actually the statistic behind the Naruto world, the number of high-level ninja (including many jonin) shown in the series clearly doesn’t support that theory.
And if a village doesn’t join the exam, does it just promote no shinobi at all? Can’t they just hold their own? And if they can, what’s stopping Tsunade, for example, from promoting Naruto without him participating in the exams? Field promotions must exist in the Naruto world, and Naruto himself is more than deserving of one.
Ranks aren’t everything
In the end, however, it’s important to remember that a shinobi’s rank doesn’t necessarily directly reflect their skill (although there is a correlation). Might Guy’s father, for example, mastered the Eight Gates as a genin — and took out several of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen. Naruto himself is an example of that: despite never being formally promoted, he becomes Hokage in the end. Maybe the point is that you shouldn’t give up your dreams just because the system doesn’t work the way you want it to.