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.
