People like fairy tales. If you still have doubts about it, check out the winner of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.
People love beautiful stories with love between beautiful characters. If these heroes face danger and complications, you have a story that sells. And when the characters are not black and white, neither flat nor good villains, when they are endowed with qualities both advantageous and not so good, you have a plot that can give you a name in the literary world.
Masashi Kishimoto is yet another example of this phenomenon. His manga character Naruto made him and his creation world celebrities and sold over 100 million copies in many languages.
Here we make a little comparison of characters in the Indian and Japanese fantasy worlds.
In Indian mythology, Krishna is believed to be the same God who descends to earth and plays the role of a beautiful boy who has a lot of power when it comes to fighting demons. In his everyday life, he has a nice but slightly mischievous personality who plays practical jokes on his fellow villagers. Being a son of a royal family, he was abandoned because of the danger of being killed by a Kamsa demon and moved to a small town in Vrindavan where the people led a simple life. He has many friends, cowherd boys, who have a lot of fun between the regular attacks of the demons. Then Krishna and his powerful brother Balaram come to rescue them.
Naruto is a fictional character created by a manga artist about ten years ago. Although he is a beautiful and nice boy, his fellow villagers ostracize him because they believe that a nine-tailed demon is sealed in his body. He is kind to people, but has a bit of a mischievous nature. He fights against villains and demons that attack his village Konahagakure. He has great fighting skills that allow him to build his authority among the villagers.
When we speak of avatars in Indian terms, we are referring to the offspring or incarnation of gods or their expansions. The term avatar means a completely different concept in online communities. It’s kind of a small image that people use on forums and discussion boards. More than 100 thousand people search for Naruto avatars every month on Google. The divine avatars of Krishna are enlisted in the sacred scriptures Shrimad Bhagavatam that have five thousand years of history.
So if we take into account the mischievous personality of both beautiful children and their surroundings, their villages being attacked by demons, great fighting skills and practical jokes, we see a lot of similarities between these characters. People love them very much, so they look for their avatars, albeit in their different meanings.
