Hashirama Senju

Tall and tanned, Hashirama carried dark eyes beneath waist-length black hair that parted at the centre and framed his face. In the field he wore the dark red plate armour of his generation over a plain black bodysuit, each shoulder guard stamped with the Senju crest, and he swapped his early clan headcloth for Konoha's forehead protector once the village existed. As Hokage he adopted the traditional maroon and white robe and hat, while off duty he preferred a light brown short-sleeved kimono shirt worn over mesh armour. In boyhood his hair sat in a rounded cut, and he dressed in a dark kimono shirt with a short green jacket and a white scarf.

Loud, high-spirited and endlessly sociable, Hashirama loved new acquaintances, friendly contests and a good gamble, and his impulsiveness often left level-headed relatives like Tobirama to rein him in. A single blunt remark could flip him from laughter to sulking, though the gloom rarely lasted before his cheer returned, and later generations found it hard to square either mood with the legend of the God of Shinobi.

Beneath the clowning lay real conviction. Born during the Warring States Period as the eldest of Butsuma's sons, he grew up burying brothers on the battlefield and came to loathe a system that marched children off to die. That grief bonded him as a boy to Madara, an Uchiha who had suffered the same losses, and together they imagined a world where the young would be spared. Duty as clan enemies drove them apart, yet Hashirama could never bring himself to kill his friend. When the two houses finally sought peace, he offered his own life to seal the truce, a gesture that moved Madara to relent, and the rival clans built Konohagakure together.

Elected First Hokage over his own wish to hand the seat to Madara, he preached that every villager was family worth dying for, a creed remembered as the Will of Fire. Humble enough to bow to fellow leaders and trusting to a fault, he forever saw the best in people, traits that put him at odds with the wary Tobirama. Even after he was forced to strike Madara down at the Valley of the End to protect their village, he counted him a brother to the last. Peace never fully arrived in his lifetime; he died as Konoha began to flourish, passing the office to Tobirama and asking that the Uchiha be treated kindly.

Widely called the strongest shinobi of his age and one of the greatest ever born, Hashirama drew even Madara to admit inferiority despite the latter's Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan and the Nine-Tails. His Senju heritage gave him enormous life-force, chakra so dense that merely flaring it cracked the ground around him, and stamina to fight for a full day without flagging. That vitality fed a regeneration potent enough to mend almost any wound, and cells so rich that anyone who safely received a transplant gained boosted stamina, healing and even access to his signature power.

That power was Wood Release, a fusion of earth and water chakra unique to him, which he used to reshape whole battlefields, raise flowering trees whose pollen rendered foes unconscious, form giant grasping hands, and build a colossal humanoid to trade blows with Madara's Susanoo. Through it he could also subdue the tailed beasts, lulling them to sleep and holding several at once, the feat that made him one of the few able to fully control such creatures. His huge reserves let him slip instantly into Sage Mode, which swelled his constructs to staggering scale and culminated in the True Several Thousand Hands that helped carve the Valley of the End.

He was skilled besides in medical ninjutsu performed without hand seals, in sealing, in barriers strong enough to bind the Ten-Tails, and in taijutsu and genjutsu. His combat prowess was shown again when Kabuto and later Orochimaru dragged him back through reincarnation to fight in the Fourth Shinobi World War. After his death his coveted DNA passed to many hands, from Yamato and Danzō to Madara's living clone and the White Zetsu Army, while his Will of Fire became a lasting cornerstone of Konoha teaching.