Rock Lee has always been my favorite character in Naruto. And I’ve realized that the way I love Rock Lee is a little different from how a lot of people do. A lot of people seem to feel sorry for him from slightly above: this poor kid has no talent for ninjutsu or genjutsu, so all he can do is train his body like crazy, how sad, how hardworking, how inspiring. But I’ve never looked at him that way, I look up to him. I genuinely think Rock Lee is incredibly attractive. He’s sincere, stubborn, brave, and has this almost awkward kind of burning passion. He says that since he can’t use ninjutsu or genjutsu, he’s going to prove that he can still become a great ninja through taijutsu alone, and then he actually lives as if that sentence were his entire creed. During the Chunin Exams, when he fights Gaara and Guy finally lets him take off the weights on his legs, Lee very seriously asks, “I really can?” Then those two completely ordinary-looking weights hit the ground with a boom and send up this huge cloud of dust. Watching that, I honestly thought: how can someone possibly be this cool? And especially later, when he’s already unconscious but his body still gets back up and takes a fighting stance. A person can believe in something so sincerely that they’re willing to put their body, their time, and their entire life behind it. I would happily be Rock Lee’s student. I would even wear that green jumpsuit, which is already an enormous sacrifice. I’d run five hundred laps around Konoha every day; if I couldn’t do that, I’d do a thousand frog jumps; if I couldn’t do that, I’d walk around the village upside down. I want to stand next to Guy-sensei, flash those sparkling teeth, yell, “This is youth!” and make Kakashi pretend he doesn’t know us when he walks by.
But here’s the problem. I thought about it seriously, and if I had to choose the life mentor who actually suits me best, I probably can’t choose Rock Lee. Because I’m already Rock Lee! I should become Orochimaru’s student. When I used to watch Naruto, my main impression of Orochimaru was: this man is so creepy, why is his tongue that long, and why does he always look kind of… damp? But yesterday it suddenly hit me: wait, doesn’t this man actually have an extremely clear life plan? Other people become ninja to protect the village and become Hokage. Orochimaru doesn’t. As a child, he sees the shed skin of a white snake by his parents’ grave, and the Third Hokage tells him that white snakes symbolize luck and rebirth. From there, the questions in his head apparently just spiral completely out of control: Why is human life so short? There are so many jutsu in the world. How could one person possibly learn them all in a single lifetime? What happens to knowledge when the body dies? If the length of a human life limits how much I can know, why don’t I just solve the lifespan problem first? Got it. I’m going to become immortal. What kind of execution is that? And the thing about Orochimaru that feels weirdly familiar to me is that his interests have absolutely no normal boundaries. He’s insanely curious, just like me. The Sharingan? Wants to study it. Kekkei genkai? Wants to study them. The soul? Wants to study it. Forbidden jutsu? Obviously. Can the body serve as a container for consciousness? Let’s investigate. Can a person’s abilities be preserved across different bodies? Also worth investigating. What exactly is going on with Hashirama’s cells? Everyone has already studied them this much? Great, then I definitely need to take a look too.
This is getting dangerously close to my own mental state, because I do this all the time. I’ll start out trying to understand one tiny question, and then keep digging until I have absolutely no idea where I am anymore. Maybe it starts because someone says one sentence and I want to know why they said it that way. Then I start thinking about language, then the relationship between language and thought, then memory, then identity, then whether the self is still the same self if memory changes. Three hours later I have seven new documents open on my desk, and I’ve almost forgotten what the person originally said. Sometimes I used to wonder whether I should rein myself in a little. Isn’t an adult supposed to have one stable direction? Aren’t you supposed to find your field, go deep, and eventually be able to introduce yourself with one nice clean sentence: “Hi, I specialize in XXX”? But I simply can’t do that. My attitude toward the world is basically Orochimaru seeing a new kekkei genkai for the first time: let me see.
Those three words might actually be my life philosophy. My problem was never that I thought too much. It was that all these strange things kept appearing in my head and I had nowhere to put them. So they just floated around in there: a sentence, an expression on someone’s face, a concept from a book, a relationship, a cultural phenomenon, some random question that suddenly occurred to me. I could sense that there was some kind of connection between them, but I couldn’t quite explain it, so they just kept running around inside my head. Now I’m starting to think: fine, then stop letting them run loose. Catch them. Number them. File them. Writing is a laboratory. Once I think about my life this way, it suddenly becomes extremely anime-coded and extremely fun. I don’t need to have a perfectly neat life. I can have a life that looks like one of Orochimaru’s hideouts: completely unremarkable from the outside, and then you open one door and discover eight underground levels.
That is exactly the kind of life I want. And now I finally understand why Orochimaru got so excited about Sasuke, because I have a Sasuke in my life too. To Orochimaru, Sasuke isn’t just a person. He’s this huge, living unknown: the Uchiha body, how far the Sharingan can evolve, what a person with that much talent and that much obsession will ultimately become. When Orochimaru encounters something unknown, he has this instinctive pull toward it. It’s not, “Is this useful to me?” It’s not even, “What can I get from studying this?” It’s simply that the thing exists, it’s strange, it hasn’t been fully understood yet, and so I want to move a little closer and take a look.
I also really like Orochimaru after he comes back from death. During the Fourth Great Ninja War, when Sasuke decides to go meet the previous Hokage, Orochimaru follows him. He’s no longer in such a hurry to possess Sasuke the way he used to be. Instead, he becomes interested in a different question: where is this kid ultimately going to end up? He still has that completely natural curiosity about Sasuke, but the possessiveness is gone. What a noble character trait!
After saying all that, though, who would I actually rather marry, Orochimaru or Rock Lee? Dun dun dun… I’m still marrying Sasuke! (♡˙︶˙♡) I want to wake up every day in Sasuke’s arms, have someone like Rock Lee as my dad or my son, and have someone like Orochimaru as my teacher.
