nara shikamaru, GENIN

Shikamaru's dark brown-black hair is always tied back into a high ponytail. His expressions aren't very diverse on most occasions, as he can more often than not be seen carrying a bored look on his face. Small brown eyes that don't have any particular interesting characteristic further emphasize his plain look. Both ears have small earrings in them as well.

As for his clothing, Shikamaru puts a minimal amount of either effort or care into what he wears. He wears a grey short-sleeved jacket with green lining and with the nara symbol in blue on both sleeves and larger on the back. Beneath this is a mesh t-shirt. As for his pants, he wears brown three-quarter pants that go only as far as to his shins. A kunai holster remains tied around his left leg, a pouch of various other tools at his left hip. Shikamaru wears standard blue shinobi sandals, and the leaf headband that he recently received upon graduation is always on his left sleeve, as he finds it too troublesome to wear it on his forehead every day.

As an individual, Shikamaru is known to be of the personality type typically described as calm, cool, and collected. That being said, he does a good job of not letting things bother him or get to him in a way that would cause distress. Supposing he just claims not to care enough to let stupid things bother him when there's really no point in fussing over it. As a result, he doesn't get upset easy, he actually tries to avoid conflict more often than not and when he sees others facing problems, if he has no choice but to be involved somehow, then he attempts to get through them in such a way that inflicts the least amount of damage, such as an unavoidable battle that he cannot run from.

Not a surprise to anyone who knows him is that Shikamaru is also quite the lazy one as well, he actually hates to be overly active or when he's forced to exert himself physically. At most turns, he attempts to avoid responsibility. He deems many things such as fighting and other activities as 'troublesome' as there is very little that actually keeps him entertained resulting in him being overcome with boredom more often than not. Despite being a kid, he is extremely unenthusiastic.

Where he is lacking in actual bravery, his strong moral compass and loyalty toward his comrades win out when duty calls. As a result, if the lives of his friends or the villagers of Konoha were on the line, he would surprisingly sacrifice himself for their sake, despite being, as he calls himself, the number one coward. This trait doesn't present itself often, luckily, so he has thus far been able to avoid any responsibility that would be attached to his natural ability to be a decent leader.

As for his thoughts on women, Shikamaru, on occasion, can be a bit sexist. He clearly does not believe that they can be counted on the same level as men considering his thought that a man shouldn't hit a woman, and he lumps them into a single category of all women being bossy and troublesome. In his mind, all women are aggressive, demanding, and sometimes scary, thus he avoids getting into fights with them, physical or otherwise. His belief is that a man should protect a woman, not the other way around, and certainly not that he should ever strike her.

Shikamaru was born to Nara Yoshino and Nara Shikaku, both shinobi of the Nara clan. In fact, Shikamaru's father is the head of the clan and a member of the former generation's Ino-Shika-Chō trio just as Shikamaru is a part of now. Ever since the boy could remember, his mother had always been a very bossy and dominating woman, not just to him but to her husband as well, leading the boy to believe that women on a whole must all be as terrifying as her. He has long since learned what it means for a husband to be 'whipped' and attributes the term to his father when the man isn't in earshot.

Growing up, Shikamaru had very few friends in large part because he was too lazy to try to make any. Plus, the thought of what he would have to do to keep friends after they were made was too troublesome. Even as a little child, his favorite things were neither playing nor running around, but were instead looking at the clouds and taking naps. Most other things he found boring or too childish to see himself doing. The only time that he did try to play a silly game with some of the other kids was at a point when he was thinking it might be nice to see if he could fit in with the others.

But when the others began to make fun of one kid because of his weight, Shikamaru had lost that sliver of interest in playing with them and chose instead to find the boy they'd ostracized. Akimichi Chouji was that boy, and Shikamaru has been best friends with him ever since.

Soon after, Shikamaru and the others of his age group entered the Academy where Umino Iruka was to be their teacher. The Nara boy had trouble paying attention during class, every word that came out of Iruka's mouth was just so boring or irrelevant that most of the time, Shikamaru wound up napping on his desk rather than giving the shinobi an ounce of his attention. Written papers? Tests? Shikamaru didn't take a single one throughout his entire time at the academy. His first year at the academy, he could have been no older than seven, he noted to Iruka himself that lifting a pencil to paper for that purpose was too troublesome to bring himself to do.

As one might expect, this laziness severely damaged Shikamaru's grades. He didn't try at all in class, and was thus among his class' "dead-lasts" along with Chouji, Kiba, and Naruto. When Shikamaru wasn't falling asleep in the back of the class, he was, on occasion, ditching with the other three and later finding himself getting reprimanded by Iruka.

At home, Shikamaru's life wasn't particularly bad. It wasn't that great either, boring mostly. His mom frequently made sure that his room was spotless and he was doing all of his chores, while his father was a bit of an alcoholic and far less attentive to the boy. There were a few times when Shikamaru had to retrieve his father from a bar and bring him home drunk, but that was the extent of his troubles. And unlike many of the parents in Konoha who ordered their children to stay away from Uzumaki Naruto, Shikaku encouraged Shikamaru to do what he thought was best. Of course, being who he was, Shikamaru didn't make any extra effort to befriend the kid, but neither did he treat Naruto any different than he treated anyone else.

Recently, Shikamaru and much of his class graduated from the Academy and were promoted to genin. He was assigned onto Team 10 along with Yamanaka Ino and Akimichi Chouji under the sensei Sarutobi Asuma.