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I wonder why this must be the case... I've thought so hard about it my whole life... and I found the answer; no matter how difficult it is to face, it nevertheless gives me clarity.
The reality is that the only reason there are powerful families in the Leaf is because of disappointments like ours.
The Naara Clan has Shadow Imitation Jutsu. The Yamanakas have Mind Destruction. The Hyuugas, Byakugan. The fearsome Uchihas.
And just what do we have, Anri..? What do we have?
Hey... hey, Anri?
The stillness of the meadow had a faint humming sound in the distance. Birds flew overhead and leaves rustled from the gentle sway of the wind. Anri Sato opened her eyes, and there the person from her dream disappeared, fading into the lush greenery of the forest.
She was fifteen years old when Lord Third passed the old law. The Sato clan had the highest child mortality rates in the village for generations. The ban was extreme but, frankly, inevitable with time.
In her years at the ninja academy some thirty years ago, there were two hundred Sato children. By her first year's end, the number was cut to a third. Their deaths were caused at the hands of trusted clan elders through excessive, inhumane training.
The funerals became too much in a row, back to back. Corpses of children even younger than her. Photographs rested above their closed caskets, shielding away their mangled bodies to hide the crime everyone was complicit in. Bright-eyed, cherub-like, hopeful children.
By the spring, Anri looked around the academy at all the other children. Were there even kids from her clan anymore? Sato kids to play with? Were there only children from other clans? Clans she did not know very well, only via outcries by her elders that they were all accomplished and strong, unlike their pathetic clan. So she, as the only Sato child in the academy, had an immense fate for her small shoulders to carry?
She excelled in all her classes at the top of the school, pleasing them greatly and giving them a shred of hope. Anri Sato, the victor, awarded roses painted blood-red before a backdrop of dead children.
Natural selection.
After her, the next generation of doomed children were already bred into existence and filling up the academy as soldiers again. She had already been part of the ANBU, where she met Kei. The man's upbringing was eerily similar to hers.
When the law passed, it felt pitifully too late, but at least all those new Sato children were taken out of the academy. Once they became adults, they left Konoha and never looked back. The elders who tortured them in the name of "training" died in well-deserved jail cells, and the Sato name fell into disgrace, and then... nothingness.
