Neji Hyūga

Neji had pale skin and long black hair, which the anime tended to render in a dark brown shade. With his Byakugan dormant his eyes appeared blank and white, given a faint lavender wash in the animation. Through Part I he layered a beige top over a duller blue shirt and mesh armor beneath, paired with blue sandals and dark purple accents, and wrapped bandages over his right arm, chest, and right leg. His hair sat in a loose ponytail bound a few inches from the tip, and a black forehead protector covered a second smaller headband whose side straps framed his face and hid the seal on his brow.

Come Part II he traded that outfit for a white kimono-style shirt with long, loose sleeves, matching trousers, a navy-grey apron knotted at the waist, and black sandals. He let his lengthened hair frame his face rather than the straps, and slung a tan and black drawstring bag over one shoulder on missions. Once the Fourth Shinobi World War arrived he adopted the Leaf's standard flak jacket, wearing his hair tied back at first and loose as the fighting wore on.

As a small child Neji smiled easily and was gentle in nature, even confiding to his father that he found the infant Hinata cute. That warmth drained away after his father Hizashi died in Hiashi's place during a hostage dispute with the Cloud, an event the young Neji misread as his father being sacrificed for the main house. He grew cold and grimly serious, and settled into a fatalistic conviction that every person's destiny is stamped upon them at birth and cannot be undone. Believing himself a rare talent shackled by mandatory servitude, he looked down on those he judged weaker and nursed a deep bitterness toward the main family.

He liked to preach this doctrine to anyone straining against their supposed limits, including Hinata, whom he nearly killed in a rage when she cut too close to his own hidden pain. Naruto Uzumaki dismantled the philosophy the hard way, beating him in the Chūnin Exam finals despite being written off as a failure. Freed from what he called his darkness, Neji came to see destiny as something a person shapes rather than inherits, and he chose for himself the goal of never losing again. He rebuilt bonds with his teammates and the main house, grew especially protective of Hinata, and in the war laid down his life shielding both her and Naruto from the Ten-Tails. Dying, he said he finally grasped what it meant for his father to choose death for the sake of a friend. Birds recur throughout his story, from the caged bird he once likened himself to, to the wing-shaped formation the Allied forces took in his memory.

Neji's genius showed early and ran far ahead of even the gifted Hyūga line. Though branch members were formally barred from the clan's advanced arts, he absorbed many of them by sight alone, and Hiashi came to feel Neji should have led the main branch and would one day outstrip every Hyūga before him. He topped his Academy class, was hailed as the strongest genin of his era, and was the only member of the Konoha 11 to reach jōnin during the timeskip. Hiashi eventually took over his training in the clan's guarded techniques, and Neji could also wield Fire, Water, and Earth Release.

His Byakugan granted a nearly full 360-degree penetrating field of sight, letting him read the chakra pathway system and every one of its 361 tenketsu. A single blind spot lurked behind the third vertebra of his upper spine; unable to erase it, he learned to flood the area with chakra so he could sense and slow anything coming from there. His range widened dramatically over time, from roughly fifty meters in Part I to at least eight hundred by Part II.

In close quarters Neji relied on the Gentle Fist, the clan style that uses the Byakugan's sight to strike directly at an opponent's chakra flow with the lightest of contact, doing crippling or lethal internal harm. Fast, precise, and gifted with sharp reflexes, he could slip past attacks while landing his own. His arsenal ran from the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms, which sealed many tenketsu at once or swatted away volleys of projectiles, to the spinning Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven that deflected assaults from all sides. When pinned he could release chakra from his tenketsu to break free, and in Part II he added the ranged Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm, its force multiplied when combined with an ally's.