 In many stories and symbols throughout history, the snake is a strong one. The Yuroboros for example, an ancient Greek symbol used in alchemy, represents the snake as an immortal everlasting being. As the snake continues to eat its tail, it symbolizes eternal life, infinity. The snake sheds its skin and takes on a new life, never bound by the constraints of time. I have a profound appreciation for good character entrances, and even more for good villain entrances. Naruto has given me two that I will never forget. Madara's during the 4th shinobi war was spectacular. It showed his legendary skill prowess, and it also showed us a lot of who Madara as a character was. For one shinobi to take on the entire alliance by himself as a warm up, showed us that Madara was arrogant, but he oozes charisma that matches his immense power. The second entrance happened in part 1, when Orochimaru enters the Chunin exams. The signs of the snake were there, literally. Orochimaru first disguises himself as Naruto, to later reveal what would be his second disguise as Shiori, one of Orochimaru's host bodies. The snake's entrance brought a real sense of horror and darkness to the early series. Sasuke calling the woman death itself only after a single glance, Orochimaru swallowing the scroll and then emerging out of the snake. Combine that with the overall environment that is the forest of death, and his face being melted off to symbolize his shedding skin. And you have an entrance that tells you exactly who Orochimaru is. He's creepy, smart, twisted, and unrelenting. He can't die. It's an entrance that I will never forget. Fast forward to the end of the Sand Village's invasion, when Orochimaru is fighting the Third Hokage, it's here that we get a glimpse at the depth of his true nature. At one point when he faces off with hirizen, Orochimaru sheds his current face to adopt one of a little girl. It's deeply unsettling, even for his former mentor. He talks and laughs at hirizen, parading around with this girl's face. It's an emblem of his cruelty. He then resurrects the first and second hokage, hirizen's mentors. Not only is he twisted, but he's smart enough to attack the mind and the heart of the third hokage. These are the lengths that Orochimaru is willing to go to if it means he can live forever, and he doesn't discriminate with his victims either. Children, adults, little girls, weak, strong, it doesn't matter. Orochimaru's ties to humanity and to his own body have been severed long ago. It's why he is okay with his true body being that of a snake, why he has so many host bodies, and why he's so comfortable experimenting on whoever he comes across. Orochimaru is on a quest for infinite knowledge. As he says it himself, he wants to acquire all jutsu and grasp all of this world's principles. To become the ultimate being, and to do that he needs to live for a very long time. It's important to mention that he's incredibly unclear about what he wants to do and what he's truly feeling. He isn't the most trustworthy shinobi, and he very much embodies the snake that he is. He's elusive, cunning, and he never shows his hand. But what we do know is that the leaf is responsible for Orochimaru's parents' death. Orochimaru isn't ever shown with other friends, or even being a personable individual. He's introverted, and he's to himself always. Shortly after their death, the young prodigy is seen at his parents' grave, having just found a white snake. Orochimaru never cries throughout the series, but his younger self was still rather expressive. And it's clear that Orochimaru wasn't always without his humanity. The reason tells him that the rare white snake that he found represents good fortune and rebirth, and it must be a sign that he found the snake, a sign that maybe his parents have been reincarnated, and can one day meet him again. And Orochimaru eagerly asks when, and looks at the snake with a sense of endearment, and even purpose. As he got older, Orochimaru was surrounded by death. Don Nowaki, the second and third ninja war, and of course his parents. He saw how easy death could come by him. In the panel where Nowaki dies, Orochimaru truly looks hurt. I think being surrounded by death, he began to fear it. He says it himself that aging brings a sense of utility to life, and that essentially life is fragile. He understands the fragility of life. If he was able to learn every single jutsu out there, he could learn how to defend himself forever. He could even learn how to bring his parents back. If not, he could live forever to eventually see them once again. When Orochimaru asked his teacher when his parents would return, he seemed ready to wait forever. It was the white snake of rebirth that set him on this path, but along the way, he threw his humanity aside in order to put this plan in motion. We don't really hear much about Orochimaru's childhood, but we do know that he was an incredibly gifted shinobi. There are few shinobi that get called geniuses, and Orochimaru was one of them. Praised by the third hokage himself, Orochimaru was a prodigy. Someone whose skill set was quite similar to the god of shinobi when it came to the sheer amount of jutsu that he knew. He alongside Jiraiya and Tsunari later became legendary saanin for surviving their battle with the reign's leader Hanzo. He then joined the Anbu and later defected from the village. From that point onwards, everything Orochimaru did was to further his search for immortality. From that point onwards, Orochimaru left his humanity behind. It was that search for immortality that led him to Sasuke. Orochimaru mentioned to himself the similarities between him and the young Uchiha, genius children who both felt great losses, both highly praised. But one intriguing similarity is the way that vengeance fuels them both. At one point in time, Orochimaru had put himself in contention to become the fourth hokage. And of course, Minato Namikaze was chosen over him by his own teacher. Add on the fact that the leaf was responsible for his parents' death. It might not just have been on a whim that Orochimaru wanted to destroy the leaf. When he reflected on his own sentimentality to the village, surely the third hokage's face appeared. But at this point, Orochimaru was already so far gone. There's one panel specifically that has Orochimaru standing in front of just a few of the bodies that he used for experimentation. And it's one panel that has been burned into my mind. Only because of how this is an incredibly small insight into really how twisted Orochimaru was. How far gone he was. As I said earlier, he experimented on whoever he wanted. And not only that, Orochimaru experimented on hundreds if not thousands of people. All of his host bodies, the faces he's stolen, Anko, Kimimaru, Jugo, Karin, Suigetsu, the sound 4. He once tested on 60 children who he abducted and infused with Hashirama cells, and the only one to survive was Yamato, and Kabuto, who was in search for an identity, was so intensely manipulated by the Sani. Orochimaru has had his hand throughout the entirety of the Shinobi world, all for immortality. But there's something else that drives him. A goal that he mentions to his former teacher, that he enjoys when things move, he wants to make the windmill spin, he says. That's how Orochimaru views the world, as entertainment. The fact that he is able to use human bodies to torture and to experiment is the same reason why he wanted to watch Konoha fall. Moreover, he is so arrogant to the point where humans are tools to him, there's so much lesser than him. He believed in himself so much that he thought he could force the Shinobi world to bend to his will, that he could truly become the ultimate being. But Orochimaru has changed. Since the death of his parents, there was a darkness, a potential for evil that Sartor Tobi snuffed out. He believed that the snake would turn out to be a force for good. And Orochimaru spends the majority of the series unchanged, up until his apparent death at the hands of Sasuke. But it's when Sasuke brings him back that Orochimaru seemingly does change, even if it's just a little bit, as Tsunade points out. Orochimaru outright says that he was eventually going to change, as it is the order of things. While Orochimaru still had that same goal, he did change. During the war, the snake reanimates the Hokage for Sasuke, and even follows him into battle and protecting him, and even healing Tsunade in the process. Action, war, conflict, they all excite Orochimaru. It's interesting because here's in mentions that Orochimaru hasn't changed when they met back in the Leaf, and he refers to this idea. Orochimaru has always been enamored by the motion of things, the chaos in everything, and clearly he's always been like that. This part of him is unchanged. There was a point in time when he wanted to be the one to cause the action, to cause the windmill to spin, but what excites him even more is the unknown, which is why he aligns himself with Sasuke later on. Sasuke's path was filled with uncertainty, being manipulated by so many different people and uncovering all of this new information, he doesn't know who he wants to align himself with, frankly he doesn't know who he is. Considering the fact that he was on his way to destroy the Leaf, Sasuke had the power to become the wind. Add that into the fact that Sasuke had become so much stronger than Orochimaru, I do believe this snake realized his shortcomings. He said it himself that in the face of Sasuke, in the face of the Uchiha, he wasn't a real prodigy compared to them. Orochimaru might be incredibly arrogant, but he did display a sense of self-awareness and maybe even after helping Sasuke Tsunade mention the fact that Jiraiha hadn't changed, maybe this was a small sense of his old humanity. Orochimaru has always understood the fragility of life and the futility of aging, and I truly do believe he feared it. The fact that he might one day drift into nothingness and might never even get the chance to see his parents again, the older he got, the more death approached, the stronger his enemies got. The Sani narrowly avoided death at the hands of Hanzo, they were only named that because they survived, so the mortality protects him from all of it. With all of the death he witnessed, the bodies that surrounded him, they were opportunities. When he gave himself to his goal, somewhere along the line, he was perverted by the white snake, to the point where he became it. Orochimaru's ulterior motive was lost, and he truly believed that he could become the ultimate being. I think Orochimaru's philosophy, his goals and his plans being so vague adds on to what makes him so intriguing. At any point in time he could become a friend or a foe, he can display a sense of compassion and understanding in one moment, only to be hidden by a devious intent. This unpredictability, along with his inability to be killed, made him fun to root against. He was a true villain in every sense of the word. I don't keep up with Boruto, but from the little that I've seen, the snake has shed his skin one more time, and changed once more as he will again and again. That is the essence of Orochimaru, the Yuroboros who will swallow his tail until the end of time.