Sasuke Uchiha

Sasuke Uchiha joins the story as a member of Team Seven alongside Naruto Uzumaki and Sakura Haruno, and quickly becomes Naruto's fiercest rival. Over the course of the series he moves from teammate to enemy and, eventually, back to ally, making his path one of the most dramatic in the story.

As a boy, Sasuke keeps his distance from other people and rarely shows warmth, though he secretly does care about his team. His single biggest driving force is a hunger for power, first to get revenge and later to protect what matters to him, and that hunger sometimes makes him selfish or willing to hurt the people closest to him. He eventually unlocks rare eye powers inherited by his clan, growing stronger and stronger as the story goes on.

Sasuke's tragedy begins the night his entire family is killed, leaving him as the only survivor of the Uchiha clan. The killer is his own older brother, Itachi Uchiha, and for years Sasuke lives only to defeat him. He later learns that Itachi did not act out of hatred but followed cruel orders from the village's leaders, a discovery that completely reshapes Sasuke's view of his brother and his home. His rivalry with Naruto becomes the emotional core of the series: even after Sasuke abandons his team to train under a dangerous outside teacher, the two eventually fight side by side again, having grown from enemies back into something like brothers.