The Naruto Heavy-Hitter Who Should Have Taken Kisame's Akatsuki Spot

I know, spicy take: if anyone from the early arcs deserved an Akatsuki cloak, it was Zabuza Momochi. Not Kisame. Zabuza. The Demon of the Hidden Mist, one of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen, and somehow still underrated next to heavy-hitters like Pain and Madara.

Why Zabuza still hits harder than people remember

Zabuza doesn't get a ton of screen time, but he makes every minute count. He isn't plotting to conquer the world. He's the first villain who actually points at the rot in the shinobi system and says the quiet part out loud. His whole worldview sets the moral tone for the series way earlier than people give it credit for.

"Shinobi are just tools."

That idea comes into the story through Zabuza, and it lands because he's a product of the Blood Mist era: a village that normalized kids killing kids and rewarded emotional numbness. He calls Haku a tool not just to be cruel, but because that's how he survived. He hides what he really feels behind that mask until it's basically too late.

And the way his arc resolves is quietly brilliant. Masashi Kishimoto doesn't hand him a teary redemption speech. Naruto calls him out, and that moment does double duty: it reframes Zabuza without sanitizing him and supercharges Naruto's own arc as the guy who refuses to accept "tools" as the price of peace.

He's built different (in a good way)

Most of Naruto's big bads are high-concept: Pain is the ideological mirror, Obito is tragedy snowballing into catastrophe, Madara is practically a myth walking around. Zabuza is smaller-scale and more human. That grounded quality makes him weirdly more relatable than the god-tier threats that show up later.

Why he fits the Akatsuki better than Kisame

• The Akatsuki core vibe is "discarded by the system" — people their villages used and tossed. That's Zabuza's whole life story.
• He survives the Blood Mist's child-killer culture, gets exploited by those with power, and concludes the system is a rigged game not worth playing.
• Kisame, by contrast, doesn't reject the shinobi machine; he accepts its cruelty and leans into being the monster it wants him to be.
• Members like Nagato, Konan, and Sasori are bound more by their wounds than by some unified grand plan. Zabuza fits that "hurt people wearing the same coat" mold perfectly.
• Only at the end — after Naruto shreds the "tool" logic — does Zabuza budge. That's exactly the kind of scarred conviction the Akatsuki is built from.

So yeah, pairing Zabuza with Itachi would have made a ton of thematic sense. Kishimoto went with Kisame, and that duo slaps visually and in battle terms, but if you're talking ideology and character writing, Zabuza checks more of the Akatsuki boxes.

Quick series refresher

'Naruto' is an adventure/martial arts anime from Studio Pierrot that premiered on October 3, 2002. If you like numbers, it sits at an 8.4/10 on IMDb and 8.02/10 on MyAnimeList. All episodes are streaming on Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video.

Agree? Disagree? If you'd swap Kisame for Zabuza in the Akatsuki lineup, tell me why.