It’s only when watching the third episode that I finally realised just why I got so annoyed at Takamiya Naho, Orange‘s protagonist. Her timidity and passivity reminded me too much of the worst aspects of my own personality — not often a character can get under my skin enough to have me shouting at the television. The central gimmick is that the sixteen year old Naho gets a letter from the future, in which her ten year older self tells her to please avoid making the same mistakes she made and especially her “biggest regret”, which revolves around transfer student Naruse Kakeru. What annoyed me was that even with those hints Naho still ends up making some of these same mistakes, while she drags her feet on others. But what annoyed me even more was the way Future Naho instructed her past self to not invite Kakeru to walk home with her and her friends, something that she had good reasons for wanting to avoid, as was explained in the second episode.
Seriously? Who thinks that’s enough to convince anybody, especially your own weak, going along with the crowd, past self? So incredibly vexing watching that once you know just what happened because he did walk home with her. Yet as a character flaw it’s oh so recognisable, to want to persuade somebody to do something but lacking the nous or the will to do it properly. And to be fair, Future Naho is in a tight spot, because how can you make anybody believe you’re writing from the future without evidence? Easy enough to tell your past self she’ll oversleep on her first day of school, not so much revealing the reason behind your request to not invite the new transfer student without having it dismissed as a prank. However, you’d expect Present Naho to at least start following her future self’s instructions to the letter afterwards, but episode three still finds her dithering. So frustrating.
Meanwhile it’s interesting how Kakeru reads Naho’s character, not as somebody insecure and unable to make decisions, but rather as somebody who’d rather sacrifice her own desires to keep others happy, something he first noticed on that walk home from school. It seems to be the theme of the series, with both Kakeru and her future self urging Naho to think more about her own desires rather than what others want or what the proper thing to do would be. As we get short scenes set in that future ten years on at the end of each episode, we also get a hint of where Naho’s self sacrifising nature got her, apparantly married to her best friend Suwa Hiroto, with at least one child. Writing a letter to her past self then might be Naho’s ultimate act of selfishness, because if it is successful, that marriage and child wouldn’t exist anymore… So far this hasn’t been acknowledged in the series, but might this also be why she went about it so half assed, subconsciously realising that?
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