Naruto Characters

Naruto Character: Gaara


Gaara (Sabaku no Gaara)
砂瀑の我愛羅
Home: Hidden Sand, Wind Country
Age: 12 (currently 15)
Height: 148.1 cm
Weight: 40.2 kg
Birthday: January 19
Blood Type: AB
Registration: 56-001
First appearance-Manga: Volume 04
First appearance-Anime: Episode 20
Seiyu
English: Liam O'Brien
Japanese: Akira Ishida


Gaara is the son of Hidden Sand's Fourth Kazekage, the younger brother of Kankuro and Temari, and the current Kazekage of Hidden Sand Village. There are a lot of similarities between Gaara and Naruto's childhood, but they both dealt with things in far different ways.
Over the years Hidden Sand Village had gradually been losing prestige, and because of that began losing an increasing number of missions to other Hidden Villages. In order to stop Hidden Sand Village from weakening to the point of disappearing from the five great villages, the Fourth Kazekage decided drastic measures were necessary. He ordered Chiyo, one of Hidden Sand Village's Gokyodai to use a possession jutsu to seal the biju Ichibi no Shukaku (One-tailed Shukaku) in Gaara before he was born. The spirit of a Sand Priest corrupted and turned into a giant demon tanuki, Shukaku is one of the nine great biju of the Naruto storyline. Gaara's father had hoped that sealing Shukaku in his son would make him the ultimate weapon to use against future enemies of Hidden Sand Village.

However, thing rarely turn out as planned. Because of Shukaku possessing the baby Gaara, his mother Karura died during childbirth. As she was dying, she used her last breath to curse Hidden Sand Village for forcing this on her and to hope that Gaara would live to avenge her death.

As he grew up, Gaara was trained by his father, but his actual upbringing was left to his maternal uncle Yashamaru. Gaara's father had little to do with him as a parent, keeping distant and uninvolved instead.

For years, his entire village feared and hated Gaara because of biju Shokaku trapped within him. Originally, Gaara tried to win over the villagers by being helpful and friendly, but their prejudice was too deeply rooted. According to the Naruto story, Gaara once used his powers to retrieve a ball for some of the village children who were playing nearby him. The children misunderstood though and ran away in fear, causing Gaara to accidentally injure some of them. Later, after talking with Yashamaru, Gaara took some medicated ointment to the girl who'd been hurt the worst as a way to make amends. But instead of accepting the ointment, she slammed the door in his face and called him a monster.

And such was Gaara's childhood. For the first six years of his life, Gaara had become increasingly feared and hated by the village, and as far as he knew Yashamaru was the only person who held any affection for him - not even his own father. When he was six, his father decided that he was simply too dangerous to the village to be allowed to live and ordered that he be assassinated. During the attack, Gaara mortally wounded his would be assassin and discovered that it was in fact Yashamaru, the one person who loved him, who had tried to kill him. As he lay dying, Yashamaru told Gaara that he had never loved him, and had always resented him for causing the death of his sister Karura during childbirth. It was then that Yashamaru told him the origin of his name and that Gaara's mother had resented that the village had sacrificed her and her son to make a living weapon to make the village stronger, and that she had hoped that Gaara would live to be a curse to the village. After that he realized that nobody had ever loved him and he used his sand to tattoo the symbol for "Love" (愛,"ai") on his own forehead. In combination with his name, it was meant to symbolize that he was a "demon loving only himself" to the exclusion of all others.

Gaara would spend the next six years defending himself from assassins sent by his father. Although he was never injured physically, Gaara became more and more withdrawn until he was almost silent. Years of killing the assassins sent by his own father caused him to loathe all other people and to eventually even enjoy and find meaning to life in destroying the people sent to kill him. As if that wasn't bad enough, years of insomnia to keep Shokaku from eating away his personality while he was asleep have made him even more unstable.

So by the time he first showed up in the Chunin Exam arc, Gaara had spent six years defending himself from his own father's assassins, with no friends and little to no sleep. Unlike Naruto who had Iruka, Hokage Sarutobi, and eventually Team 7, Gaara had never had any relationships to get any recognition or affirmation. Instead, he learned that valuing himself over everyone else and killing anyone who challenged him was the purpose for his existence.


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