Quote Originally Posted by Traab View Post
When kiba was fighting sakon and ukon or whatever the siamese twins were called on the sasuke retrieval mission, he setup an exploding knife trap. It NAILED the guy, and the only reason he lived was some crazy ass "Lets merge together and that lets me ignore my lethal wounds" move. In the very first adventure, iruka takes vicious injuries from kunai and shuriken from mizuki, again the only reason he survived was naruto using his plot armor to protect him from the finishing blow. Iruka was dead meat and virtually crippled. When haku put zabuza in a false death state, kakashi, a highly experienced ninja, believed that needles were an effective tool for murdering powerful ninja. Kunai shuriken and swords are treated as clearly lethal threats in naruto no matter how hard you try to pretend they arent just because noone specifically in the main cast dies to them.
It's not just the main cast, NOBODY named dies from a sword or knife in the entire series, to my knowledge.

Mind you that's not because swords/knives are nonlethal in universe, it's just a funny quirk of the series. Dedicated swordsmen exist to get chumped out in Naruto, and knives are exclusively used to reposition people for more effective attacks. It's part of the charm.

Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
Didn't Zabuza die to like, a bunch of shuriken and kunai sticking out of him or something? like, Gato and his mercs like, filled him up with blades and he fell over giving a speech about him and Haku? like not even enhanced ones, just, plain ol' blades, and Zabuza was like, a jonin level ninja which is like, y'know, the rank just under kage?
Two points here, one minor, one kinda nitpicky.

1.) Zabuza TECHNICALLY expired from knife/spear wounds...after he was already stabbed through the chest with lightning and had both his arms paralyzed by enormous dogs fighting Kakashi. He then basically committed seppuku by killing a dozen guys with his ****ing teeth and making little to no effort to dodge their attacks so he could beeline Gato. Zabuza, specifically, only died because of a combination of being too weak at the moment to properly defend himself and because he WANTED to die anyway after he realized he really did care a whole lot about Haku.

2.) There are several "ranks" between Jonin and Kage. Jonin is a leadership rank that denotes a certain level of skill, and is sort of the highest OFFICIAL rank (though Special Jonin is above that, even), but there's a wide gulf of strength between your average Jonin and a Kage and there's Special Jonin, village specific superheroes like Sannin, S-Class Ninja (most of the Akatsuki fall here) and the catch-all "Kage level ninja" for people who can 1 v 1 manfight a Kage in their prime. Jonin, yes, is the rank just under Kage, in sort of the same way General is the military rank just under the president (with the same nuance that a one star and four star General have vastly different levels of authority).