I dunno, I'm all about reading into stuff way deeper than is reasonably justifiable, and trying to set this story in my head against a philosophically metaphorical context feels... I don't know, it doesn't have much traction for me. Part of that is definitely a result of my personal lack of enthusiasm for these kinds of philosophical musings, but more than that, I feel like explicitly casting one character as a specific metaphor for this or that is an incredibly weak way to explore or relate anything. If you're deconstructing the tug-of-war between love and reason, then you can do that far more flexibly and convincingly through theming and motifs. Like, you can talk about complex issues from multiple angles and in various contexts, with real, tangible struggles relating to larger, more essential conflicts of human existence, or you can... literally name a character "love" and have her general character arc vaguely parallel an abstract philosophical theory of how love relates to other stuff.
Like, okay, Tomo represents the concept of reason, and its weaknesses are reflected in the story of the monkey king and her failure to meaningfully challenge this ambiguous something that is greater than herself. Great. The quirks inherent to limited human rationality is also represented by the symbol of human reasoning sleeping with her stepmother? While the distant greater "something" passively accepts it because he just wants a trophy wife? Later, the manifestation of wisdom coolly rebuffs love's tentative attempt to connect on a deeper level, agonisingly distancing herself despite longing for that contact, and was saving up money to fund her suicide vacation by selling women to other women? I'm 100% certain that there is, in fact, a workable reference in that behaviour to some established philosophical musings that I'm not aware of, but if I can't even derive even the POSSIBILITY of a metaphor from it, then I feel like the symbolism is at least somewhat poorly rendered. If you have to be intimately familiar with the entire narrative arc of the concept before you can even parse the metaphor, then how is the metaphor actually useful? What are you even exploring with it?
And yeah, this was one of the issues I had with Feelings Endurance, too. You could, if you referred to the characters versus seven sins breakdown chart, sorta maybe kinda see how each character basically more or less fit their archetype, if you squinted a bit. But the list the author personally wrote and published was indistinguishable from any other random person's post-hoc stab at categorisation, and was actually less compellingly argued than some who had ostensibly gotten the matchups wrong. They're supposed to embody this or that, but what you actually get in the end isn't much more insightful than a ten-minute personality quiz. So sure, if you want to tell me that Amano Shuuninta writes with these complicated philosophical metaphors in mind, I'll accept that, it makes sense. If you want to say she does that WELL, then I'm going to need a looooooot more convincing.
