Sweet Sixteen, Day 1 AniMarch Madness Match-Up #1

Oshi no Ko vs A Sign of Affection

The irony is that the story presented in the silent medium that is the original manga is probably EXTREMELY better as representation than the show can ever be. That making this show into an anime without having the guts to really make bold decisions makes it the worse adaptation. It makes it so all the little red flags you might ignore otherwise are that much more noticeable.

So yeah... This show is going to go on to be a massive success probably. Be absolutely loved by folks. Because if I know anything about people trying to educate abled folks from disabled perspectives, people want to ignore folks "being downers" and just wanna enjoy the stuff they watch uncritically, not realizing how it will affect real lives. This is how abled folks want disabled folks to act, so seeing it positively put in front of them on a screen is going to reaffirm those beliefs hard while being a comfort in a sick way.

There's no way I'm going to be able to enjoy this show. It's going to hurt watching abled friends and colleagues in the anime space deeply love what they're watching, affirming no matter how much they espouse allyship, they have so much more to do and grow before having true solidarity with disabled people.

It's already been so damn hard seeing this from the Covid pandemic in general. Having it shoved in my face in everyday life. Seeing it in my happy place, a space where I tend to escape for enjoyment... That's gonna suck.

I think it's time for me to drop this show. No point in even continuing to watch it purely to write an essay on it later. Especially since I suspect if I could even get said essay published anywhere, I'd be attacked beyond belief because abled people wanting comfort in their ableism can be really horrifying from experience.

Just blegh. Disabled folks deserve better. We should be given the opportunities to tell our own stories. Abled folks should stop being praised for doing the bare minimum with their works and still fucking up royally. But we don't live in a world where that's gonna happen in my lifetime.

I GOT IT! I know why A Sign of Affection has such bad vibes! If you're abled and reading this, you're going to feel uncomfortable. Don't let cognitive dissonance kick in, really try to absorb this.

- This show is for abled people to be voyeuristic about living as a disabled person.

- This show is made so abled folks can imagine a little bit what being deaf must be like. To feel like they "get it" when they have absolutely no clue.

- This show is made so abled folks can engage in empathy only to feel better about themselves, to feel morally superior to others without having to practice self reflection. The kind of empathy that does not lead to active compassion.

So much of the show's praise so far has come from how good the audiovisual work on the show is. Like in the first episode, as things turn to focus on Yuki's perspective, the background sounds and music become quiet, sometimes just becoming white noise. Or when she cannot lip read what someone is saying, the audience can't hear the voice acting in the show.

Ya know what's interesting about all these things? They're all praised as being amazing ways to represent deafness in the main character, to allow someone to experience a bit of what their life must be like, while not doing a damn thing for someone profoundly deaf.

Can you imagine how many people would deem this show unwatchable if the creators made the bold decision to make it completely silent, only providing subtitles? If someone like Yuki in the show, who is confirmed to be 100% unable to hear this show were to watch it, that's how she'd experience it. So why isn't it made in that way if the idea is to give people a true taste of what her experience is like?

The answer is that this is made to be entertainment for abled people, hearing people, not for the people it is supposedly representation for. It's made so people can say, "Wow, it's awesome we have an anime with a deaf protagonist presented pretty realistically" while the show gets so many things wrong, especially how lipreading works.

The show is representation the way abled folks want to imagine it should be, not in ways that are realistic or grounded in actual deaf people's experiences. Abled folks can do all the research they want, they will never be able to craft a story that truly captures our perspectives. ESPECIALLY if the goal is to make something marketable to abled folks. Which is how you get A Sign of Affection green lit as an anime. It's not offensive to abled sensibilities and will be just enough inspiration porn (a disabled person finding love with a "normal" guy while striving to live in "normal" society instead of embracing deaf society and culture) while getting a few things right that people will overlook it because they not only don't know better, they won't choose to learn so they can know better after watching.

A Sign of Affection is still giving me off vibes today... I'm disabled and have a little bit of hearing loss, so make sure to take this with a grain of salt since I'm not deaf, but like...

It feels odd seeing a show where basically everyone else is hearing and seeing Yuki specifically wanting to be away from deaf culture and spaces as a plot point.

Especially in schooling, a lot of abled folks don't realize just how isolated we can end up. The Ugly Laws aren't on the books anymore, but they basically take place in a lot of schools. Having some desire to be around folks doing things "normally" kinda makes sense? It's just how it's presented in this show feels off.

Despite the show still having some strengths, especially with some unique portrayals of signing and communication, I don't know how to explain it. The vibes are off? My radar is going off? I see red flags but just don't know where to plant them?

By far, this is a story made by abled people for abled people and it shows. No amount of research done can make up for that, even if it makes for better representation than usual. The show is messy and I have a feeling it'll be irksome to see abled people praise it at every juncture non critically because they don't know better. Or hell, don't want to know better.

I'm also not loving the infantilizing vibes that seem to be going on towards Yuki either. This is one of those things that is hard to point to exactly, but disabled viewers who have experienced it first hand will likely notice immediately when viewing.

In general, the vibes given off by Itsuomi are also skeevy as hell. How he touches Yuki without permission, turning her head towards him when he wants to speak so she can lip read... It's played off as romantic when it feels so disgusting it hurts. The instantly falling in love with a guy just because he cares a bit about your disability and is nice to you about it once thing is also something I NEVER need to see in a romance ever again.

Reading online, many folks (me included) get the vibe that Itsuomi is more interested in Yuki just because she's deaf more than anything else. Some folks have dropped the manga entirely for this reason from what I can see. This one may be more up to interpretation to be totally fair.

The ease of lip reading on display is an instant red flag in the anime. No, the one mistake she makes is NOT enough to let that slide either. It's estimated only 30-40% of speech can be lip read and it's even HARDER in Japanese. The majority of words are formed inside the mouth, not on the outside. Yuki's accuracy at what is mostly a guessing game is inhuman.

The way it was animated, it seems like Itsuomi is also over-enunciating his words, which actually makes lip reading even harder.

None of this even mentions how mentally exhausting lip reading is. It is VERY intensive to do. Don't believe me? Try to learn how yourself and feel your brain melt.

Here's a wonderful post from a deaf person if you want a first hand account on why this trope needs to be dead already: https://jennafischtrombea.com/2022/02/03/death-to-the-magical-lipreading-trope/