A Sign of Affection (2024) is a very good romance series. (jp Yubisaki to Renren)
A Silent Voice (2016) is a great movie. (jp Eiga Koe no Katachi)
Both explore deafness in a very meaningful way.
Have you watched them? What were your experiences and thoughts on it?
My personal assessment:
A Sign of Affection starts great. Positive, vibrant, and meaningful and with depth, exploring deafness. At some point, I felt like it’s kind of the same throughout (stylistically and the kind of things happening), but it never lost its continuous progression in fitting pace or its quality at least.
I’ve wanted to rewatch A Silent Voice for a while, which also has deafness as a central theme, and I remember it being great - albeit quite different to the aforementioned romance. It has more struggling themes, and is a movie rather than a series.
Both had very interesting, insightful, and respectful depictions of deafness, which certainly elevated them into something very good and unique.
I’m going to be blunt. A Silent Voice is great. A Sign of Affection…doesn’t do anything for me. I only watched a few eps. MC is too infantilized IMO. “Be shy and cute and multiple attractive dudes will put in massive amounts of effort to get to know you, overcome your special needs and be your crutch”
I love the depiction in Silent Voice where MC doesn’t speak fluently but kind of grunts. But in A Sign of Affection her inner voice has perfect diction and that IMO completely takes away from the depiction of deafness. The anime director could have been more creative in how to express her inner “voice”, if an inner dialogue was needed at all
I’ve thought about the clear inner voice during watching too. I found it acceptable, not that detrimental. Something different could have had more impact, but I didn’t find it that bad.
It’s certainly the easier way in terms of directing.
I haven’t watched either of these, but if this kind of story interests you, then there are two manga recommendations I can make.
- You Talk Too Much, So Just Shut It Already! - A cute romance story set in high school in which the female lead is deaf. The scanlators have gone above and beyond with many of the chapters by creating gifs and explaining aspects of Japanese Sign Language that are depicted in the series.
- Love’s in Sight! - Alright, this one isn’t about deafness, but blindness. Another romance set in school in which the female lead attends a school for the blind and the male lead has normal vision. This manga has finished publication and is excellent, highly recommended. It does a great job of depicting the finer points of different types of vision impairment through the FMC and her fellow schoolmates.
Those sound interesting, thank you for the recommendation. I’ll definitely take a look. I’m intrigued about how blindness is represented and integrated.
If you want a more complete picture of my thoughts, I wrote a lot about it a while back in !manga@ani.social.
tl;dr: It is fantastic and fairly accurately represents a lot of the issues that visually impaired people experience (I have interviewed a number of visually impaired individuals for work, asking them about these kinds of things).
Ranking of Kings is also an interesting case for Deaf representation.
I’ve got A Silent Voice on my watchlist, so I can’t comment on that, but A Sign of Affection was one of my feel good animes this season and looked forward to it every week.
