Chapter Text
The dehumanization of the Uchiha has a long and brutal history within the fabric of Konoha.
From the very beginning, it was construed as the aftermath of two historical enemies just beginning to make peace that in early Konoha history the Uchiha didn’t speak out against it. Wishing to save face and keep harmony between their two sects, anti-Uchiha propaganda was seen as the lingering sentiments of a newly resolved struggle. At first, many of Madara’s clan were inclined to agree; both sides had been brutal to one another, and even the Uchiha’s sentiments towards the Senju were similarly less than flattering. So, they didn’t speak out against it. They believed that, with time, even the tenuous peace would become more firmly established and the tensions between them would dissipate. Even if this faith didn’t last, Madara looked to his relationship with Hashirama as the bulwark for this belief. That, by being like a brother to him, so too would the Uchiha be integrated into this fabric of the village as part of the greater family they hoped to be.
This never came to be.
As time passed, it only became worse. As Senju-allied and Senju clansmen themselves saturated almost every echelon of government, and with it, the old flames of resentment they bore against the Uchiha kindled into a higher flame. Word spread. The Uchiha became indisposed to the mad idea of the Curse of Hatred, that they were genetically predisposed to insanity, violence, and selfishness that was incompatible with the Will of Fire. Through Madara’s own style of governance, the Uchiha were seen as warmongers who promoted peace through power and enforced that influence, for the sake of the village or not. It was by this that the old backlash against the peace Konoha meant to be spurred itself on, but their voices fell on deaf ears.
Because of the Curse of Hatred and the anti-Uchiha sentiments raging throughout the village, being seen as a clan of evil, the dehumanization of the Uchiha was all but encoded permanently into the societal tapestry of the village. They were inexorably denied voices in government, withdrawn or denied positions of power in the various governmental divisions, and seen as subhuman. Though not usually said to their faces, even Hashirama could do little to offset the offending tides while being absorbed in the greater affairs that affected the entire village, not just the Uchiha.
Because of this, Madara was eventually discredited as being worthy of being Hashirama’s right hand man, let alone viewed as his brother by covenant or in arms. Though Madara did try to speak out against it, his own clan saw him as a flaccid excuse of a leader and began turning on him and enduring the abuses without his voice added to their dissent. With time, his rebellion against the dehumanization he and his clansmen were subjected to was seen as a hallmark of Uchiha hatred and ‘insanity’. His eventual exile and attacks against the village became one of the first and most prominent examples of this, of the idea that Uchiha found dissent in the village’s government not because of injustice, but because of a waylaid selfishness to want power and control to benefit only themselves.
Eventually, as time wore on, it came to a point where the systematic dehumanization embodied in the Senju’s treatment of the Uchiha became embodied in Madara. From it, he slowly stopped seeing himself as a human being and more as an ideal, as a motive attached to a name. When people say that Madara’s name means power, they speak truth. His name does mean power. His name means someone who is willing to usurp the way of the world in order to bring about change and usher in peace through power. Madara is power, an idea; but, Madara stopped being a person quite a long time ago. Though it could be said that, through Obito, Madara’s name became a kind of cult of personality and one would be correct. In Obito adopting and taking on his name, he became not a person, but an avatar of power and his Tsuki no Me plan.
As more time wore on, Madara lost all sense of personhood. In order to achieve the ideals and plans of the early Akatsuki, he almost had to stop seeing himself as a person by necessity. By killing and destroying all attachments, he saw himself as an alter of hatred. A necessary evil upon which the world could direct its hatred while he did what needed to be done. A dehumanization that eclipsed his identity as a person, the avatar of his ideals and goals, what began in Konoha by the Senju became so irredeemably ingrained that he couldn’t regain this sense of self even if he wanted to. He became the villain of the story, a breathing vehicle that would bring the world its salvation no matter what.
Even in the aftermath, it still remains true. Madara sees himself as an irredeemable villain, someone who doesn’t have a right to humanity. The thing that his silent enemies in the early days of Konoha became a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s a machine that carried out a plan, a truth the world denied, being the only one strong enough to ensure its completion and without the hangups and attachments that would have dragged anyone else back–much like what happened to Obito to end. How Obito’s sense of self prevented the plan from being carried out entirely, compunctions that don’t exist in Madara and hadn’t in decades.
To himself, he is the villain. There’s nothing else to his person, something he cannot be persuaded to think differently on. Madara is power, an idea, but the person never existed to him.