How well was hearing impairment represented?
Summary:
- Deaf fans are overall happy with the way the series handles hearing impairment.
- They loved a lot of the representation aspects.
- There were a couple of weird things in the anime, too.
A Sign of Affection (Yubisaki to Renren) Season 1 finished airing last month, and one thing is clear: the anime was a great success. It’s one of the best shoujo series we’ve seen this year, and its scores prove it.
The main protagonist of the series, Yuki, is a hearing-impaired girl, and the anime doesn’t forget that for even a second. She might be hard to relate to for those viewers who don’t have this issue, but deaf fans are happy: there’s finally a wholesome romance with a girl like that.
There Were a Lot of Great Things
A Sign of Affection tries to be very careful with the hearing impairment representation. And a number of deaf fans loved a lot of things about the series. They managed to see themselves in Yuki and were glad her life wasn’t just a big pile of suffering and drama, even though she has a disability.
Fans loved the interactions between Yuki and Itsuomi and enjoyed his process of learning sign language. It’s not an easy thing to do, so it was really nice to see Yuki correcting and guiding her boyfriend.
Yuki is not the only hearing-impaired person in the series, and fans really enjoyed seeing another deaf character who struggled to speak out loud and had some sort of an accent while talking. It showed that hearing impairment isn’t the same for everyone, and people’s experiences are different.
Another great thing is that the anime showed how people’s personalities affect their signing. Yuki’s gestures were always shy and gentle, while Oushi’s were sharp and even a little aggressive. Itsuomi just started learning sign language, and viewers could feel how his signing lacked confidence.
There Are Bad Things Too
Some fans found it weird that Yuki was wearing hearing aids. It was stated in the series that she was completely deaf, so such a device made little sense to viewers.
Yuki addressed that and said the aids helped her hear some noise, but fans feel that it’s odd for her to hear anything when it was said that she was completely deaf. The description of Yuki’s degree of deafness was rather inconsistent.
Yuki’s skills in reading lips have also raised a lot of questions. In the anime, she’s almost always perfect at understanding what other people are saying to her, but it doesn’t work this well in reality.
Fans who have deaf friends or family members admit that hearing-impaired people are indeed capable of reading lips well, but even then there’s about 30% of speech that they cannot understand straightaway.
On top of that, Yuki’s friendship with Rin also seemed a bit weird. They’ve been friends for so much time, and yet Rin never bothered to learn even a little bit of sign language. Of course, this might have been her choice, but it just feels unnatural.
Source: Reddit