Souseke Sagara

Souseke Sagara is the main protagonist from the Full Metal Panic! anime and light novels.

Appearance
Sousuke is a teenager of medium height with somewhat tan skin and brown hair and eyes. He usually wears his school uniform which in the winter consists of black blazer and pants while his summer uniform is a white buttoned t-shirt and the same black pants. His hair has bangs that lead towards the right of his face and he is always shown with a serious face. He has an x shaped scar on the lower left part of his chin. He has a lean muscular build. He is considered somewhat handsome by many, however his unusual upbringing, ignorance of fashion, lack of common sense or social awareness, and his frequent use of military weapons in everyday life and paranoia that lead to the destruction of multiple buildings and objects leads him to being unpopular with girls.

Personality
Due to his upbringing in a war torn regions of the world, he is fairly inept in normal society. Raised as a dog of war from the time he was a small child, he has been surrounded by turmoil, bombs, fighting, and death for as long as he can remember, leading to his current paranoid and militaristic approach to everything and everyday life. The smallest detail out of place can lead him to blow up buildings or objects that look suspicious. He is also prone to attacking people and threatening them with guns and uses his weapons without regard to the damage he causes to the objects or people nearby. His paranoia goes to the point he can't trust himself or his feelings with others and is always on edge. Because of his busy schedule, he is sometimes sleep depraved which further worsens his condition. However, at heart he is a goodhearted person willing to help those close to him. He always has the best interests at heart when he helps someone but sometimes goes about it the wrong way. Over time, he learns and develops his common sense with the help of Chidori while growing to understand human emotions and relations, which he never got to as he lived in a war infested area where the rule was kill or be killed. Because of this, he only saw people as either his allies or his enemies and even the allies he is with prior to his enrollment in Jindai Municipal High School, while close to him, are still not as emotionally connected to him though he was close to his adoptive father. This emotional detachment brought on by his militaristic upbringing leads him to not understand normal social behavior and even the romantic situations he ends up in as he becomes entangled in a love triangle between him, Tessa, and Chidori and is unsure of his situation and how to handle it.

He is very hard working and will try his best at whatever he sets out, especially if it is for a friend. He is very helpful as shown when he helped an old woman he met pick out a toy for her grandson's birthday and when. He is protective of his friends as well. While socially inept and bad with romance, he is shown to be a gentleman at times, as shown by the fact that he set up numerous traps to ensure that his male friends wouldn't peek at his female friends during their trip to the hot spring and didn't take advantage of Tessa who was half asleep when she was hugging him half naked and making awkward, bold advances on him. The person he seems most comfortable with and most vulnerable to is Chidori, as he had allowed her to cut his hair without worrying unlike the last time he tried to get a haircut where he became paranoid by the fact that he was restrained to a chair and he put scissors near him. He even managed to fall asleep near her, aware she wouldn't do anything to harm him. The two care a great deal for each other. As seen when Gauron tells him Chidori dies repeatedly and Sousuke gets mad then kills him.

Before being assigned to guard Chidori at Jindai High School, Souske rarely experienced strong emotions and was unfamiliar with feeling or showing emotions for the most part. He virtually never laughed or smiled, felt longing for deep interpersonal relationships, and did not know how to cry. After his assignment to Chidori, however, he slowly started to change as he gained new kinds of experiences and relationships, namely, those that did not involve death, killing, following orders, and mere aimless day to day survival, jumping from one battlefield to the next. As he started developing a sense of life outside of following orders and fighting to the death, he began taking relationships to new levels and started to express his feelings. For example, his relationship with Weber and Mao evolved from simply co-workers to friends. He was also able to form a friendship with his commanding officer, Teletha Testarossa, on a basis that went beyond military matters. He was able to defy orders for the sake of Chidori, whom he cherished. During the final battle at Merida Island, he was able to suppress his lifelong soldier's instinct to survive and was not able to kill Andrey Kalinin, the man he considered his father. Finally, he was able to come to love and long for Chidori and cry at the prospect of dying without being able to see her again.

Abilities
Sousuke is depicted as quite secularist. He is shown eating pork and his refusal of alcohol is made purely off of the fact that he clearly shows a genuine distaste for it [The Second Raid]. He is capable of reciting the Qur'an from memory, probably due to his childhood in a Muslim country, but finds classical Japanese literature, poetry and history extremely difficult to comprehend. In addition to being a capable Arm Slave pilot, Sousuke is a specialist in Arm Slave operations and maintenance, improvised explosives, small arms, survival training, anti-armor combat, trap setting and camouflage. Additionally, he is proficient in logistics, demolitions, breach and forced entry, covert intrusion, and hand to hand combat. His background and experience as a guerrilla fighter, and later a mercenary soldier has made him much more sensitive and knowledgeable about tactics and methods more commonly used by guerrillas than government trained regulars.

Trivia

 * In Episode 1: The Man I Sort of Like is a Seargent, Sousuke was given a magazine with the character Lina Inverse from the Slayers series on the cover prior to attending Kaname's high school.
 * In the manga chapter 36 it is shown that Sousuke is a lightweight drinker getting drunk to the point of being weakened after taking part of sake in a shrine during New Years.