Jiraiya

In adulthood Jiraiya was tall and solidly built, with fair skin and spiky white hair that reached his waist and was usually gathered into a ponytail, two shoulder-length bangs falling at his face. Red lines ran down from below his eyes and stretched lower as he aged, and by middle age wrinkles gathered at his mouth and a wart, rendered in the manga possibly as a piercing, sat to the left of his nose. A clash with the Version 2 state that Naruto took on left a lasting scar across the middle of his chest.

He usually wore a short green kimono-style shirt with matching trousers over mesh armor that showed at the wrists and ankles, along with hand guards, a black belt, and wooden sandals, plus a red haori bearing a pair of yellow circles on each flank. A large scroll frequently rode on his back, a tattoo sat on his left palm, and his horned forehead protector carried the kanji for oil, marking his ties to Mount Myōboku.

Light-hearted and sociable, Jiraiya cracked jokes at his own cost and laughed merrily afterward, and he liked to feign smugness or selfishness to needle people and wind them up further. Even in combat he never dropped the showmanship, striking kabuki poses and launching grandiose self-introductions that something always cut short, drawing his loud irritation. He billed himself as a super-pervert without equal, casting his spying on bathing women as research for his wildly popular Icha Icha books, though he hated being called Pervy Sage in front of a crowd. Beneath the clowning ran a fierce loyalty to Konoha and a truly dangerous shinobi, one who warned that he would kill Tsunade should she betray the village.

Failure shadowed him: he never won Tsunade's heart, never drew Orochimaru back from the dark, and lost his teacher the Third Hokage as well as his student the Fourth. His deepest strength was a will that refused to break; he taught that a true shinobi is defined not by mastering every technique but by never surrendering. That conviction he handed to his pupils, guiding three of the greatest ninja ever known, Nagato, Minato, and Naruto, loving Naruto as a grandson while seeing Minato as the son he never had. Quietly yearning for peace, he strove to break the cycle of hatred yet never found the answer, leaving it to the next generation, and to Naruto above all. Even mortally struck by Pain in Amegakure, he forced his failing body back long enough to carve a coded last message, and died smiling, satisfied his tale had ended with honor.

Jiraiya ranked among the mightiest shinobi of his generation and of any that Konoha ever raised, a standing cemented in the Second Shinobi World War, where he held his own against Hanzō and his salamander Ibuse and was named a Sannin beside Orochimaru and Tsunade. His renown was such that even the Uchiha and the Mist's Seven Swordsmen shied from taking him on directly, and Itachi and Kisame allowed that the two of them together could at best force a draw. The office of Hokage was offered to him three times, and each time he turned it down. His chakra ran deep enough to summon Gamabunta and to power senjutsu, and his control was fine enough to shape a Rasengan in either hand or write out messages even while his chakra was being disrupted.

His ties to the toads of Mount Myōboku earned him the title of Toad Sage, and he called up giant toads and a devouring toad gullet to trap his enemies. He spat oil to feed his fire techniques, sank into a foe's shadow to seize control of them, and wielded his own hair to bind opponents or throw up needle-like defenses. A master of fūinjutsu, he grasped Naruto's Eight Trigrams Seal at a glance and stripped away Orochimaru's Five Elements Seal, and he raised barriers to sense movement or take shelter. He could work Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind, along with the Yin and Yang natures, leaning most on Fire, and could merge his flames with toad oil for a fiercer burst. Entering Sage Mode by fusing Fukasaku and Shima onto his body, he saw his speed, power, and durability all climb, and he unlocked combination arts such as Sage Art: Goemon. A gifted spymaster whose network spanned the great nations and whose battlefield mind was sharp, he was later shown so powerful that Nagato conceded he would have lost had Jiraiya known the secret behind the Six Paths of Pain, and Amado in time produced a clone of him named Koji Kashin.