Sign of Affection #01 — Face Grabbing

January 6th, 2024

 

You're 19 and never had a crush on a boy? Not even… I dunno… Vigo Mortensen?

Impressions:

I still feel like there's something deeply weird about starting from the premise "Did you know deaf people have feelings too?" but let's give it the benefit of the doubt. Or I don't know, maybe you shouldn't, as that's a thing that comes up. He keeps physically grabbing her, oftentimes by the head, and right as I'm thinking to myself, uh, this is weird, she internally narrates "Yo, it's pretty weird that he keeps grabbing me and I don't mind because he's such a hunk." Which is also certainly a very shoujo romance approach to take, and just makes me default back to it probably not being too much better or worse than the default. 

I will say that at times, it does fairly effectively use silence to convey her isolation like you'd expect from a show centered on deafness, which makes the internal monlogue make a little more sense and be easier to stomach, but it just as often goes ham on the romantic piano, which I feel undercuts the entire theme. Yes, I was isolated in silence, but then a dude hit on me and music and light filled my world. It strikes me… I don't know what the proper term is here… disability tourism? How wonderful he is for accomdating her, even though this is the kind of show where everybody does that without a second thought. Like the other shoujo thing, it seems… fine, I guess, but nothing much gripped me. The characters barely have any personality, let alone chemistry, and there's certainly no actual plot to speak of.  

Posted in Sign of Affection | 2 Comments »

2 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • residentgrigo says:

    People aren´t accommodating to Yuki or her family but that is for later, being disabled in Japan can be a death sentence, and manga ends up being quite good at show don´t tell when it comes to showing disability. A car ride chapter really stuck out to me a few weeks after reading on how it showed isolation despite all passengers being friends. The manga´s many awards are justified but it has issues. The childhood friend character and how much time is spent on him is simply bewildering. Shoujo stories about adults also exist but realistic adults are hard to come by.

    This is purely a slice of life story. There is zero plot.

  • […] piece: The writing pays similar attention to detail to the animation. For example, one reviewer remarked that it seemed odd that Yuki, a 19 year old young woman, says she never had never had a crush […]