Gray
Furthermore, however, it also turns out to be quite a deep exploration of how those who like the protagonist are both skilled and passionless, generate a complex relation with those with less competence but with more drive. For one, those who are skilled but attribute their achievements to luck, and spend their lives with the possibility of not using their talents at all, make fools out of those who have decided to make their lives and actions about what they were not born good at. Two, they generate expectations from those less skilled, and inadvertently make the less skillful admit to the massive difference in skill, making it worse. Several characters embody the less skilled archetypes, and one character is a good study on how to manipulate even those with skill to do what needs to be done - which is by using the same tactic - implanting expectations. This she does while saying a line that might as well have come from a philosophy textbook - "people should be self-aware of their talents. Otherwise they make those that look up to them look like fools."
It's a tricky way to negotiate a point - ultimately it boils down to passion, and indirectly, self-worth. Or perhaps I am reading too much of myself into the anime, which I tend to do to anything I come across. This makes me feed my god complex (again, not meant as a psychological term) in strange ways: I seem to end up bragging that I am skilled at what I do, but not care enough for it and therefore can live without it, which makes for a perverse thing to brag about. This in itself is misleading: I know that I am not skilled enough at anything to actually care enough for it, but I am of the mind that I can do whatever is in front of me (perhaps not well, but I can do it). This also applies to wherever I end up in: I know that I will make it.
Oreki Houtarou is considering the alternative to living a "gray life," as he calls his, and in that I am his opposite. I seem to be stuck in a colorful one, when all I think I want now is for everything to stop having color. Or for anything colorful to stop having anything to do with me. As I said, this makes me feed my god complex in strange ways. Though at bottom I am grateful for having watched most of it (I still have several episodes to go - I decided to write this in case I get sidetracked by something else in the story), since this is one of the animes that I have watched without myopically looking at the love story. I think there will be that - though in this case having one is, much like in Psycho-Pass and Rurouni Kenshin, a bonus: what makes this a good anime is that it can take me away from looking at things askew. I mentioned I was looking for romantic comedies, and that bull-headed approach makes me unstable at the worst of times, since it makes me unnecessarily angry at my situation now.
If I can cultivate a gray life, then maybe I can transition into moving out of here without the requisite anger and just the right amount of apathy to make it all work. Perhaps that is what I meant when I said I will god complex everything into what I wanted to begin with because I did not want anything passionately enough to begin with. My life seems to be charmed this way - if I do not give it enough thought, if I did not force it, it will work itself out, or the universe makes it work out. No, Oreki Houtarou, there is no alternative to the gray life for me. The hassle of being needed for something you cannot even appreciate in yourself is actually a pain, because you will be lulled into thinking that the expectations people have of you are indeed what defines you.
Aristotle might have something to say about that, but then, I was always weak at and hence underappreciative of Greek philosophy.
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