Six years pass and Shoya endures trouble all through elementary school and junior high. His resentment against her swells, and he gets into a fistfight with the girl, prompting her mother to remove her from the school. From that point forward, he is systematically bullied by his former friends in a manner far more vicious than that with which he instigated against Nishimiya. When it eventually becomes too much, the girl’s mother complains and all blame is pushed onto Shoya’s shoulders. She is scorned, mocked, and has her hearing aids repeatedly torn from her ears and destroyed.
Nishimiya’s inability to hear and the problems that crop up as a result are too strange for Shoya and so, leading by example, he creates an environment in which Nishimiya is bullied daily and with extreme prejudice. I’m loving the ride and I’m loving the characters.Ī Silent Voice begins with the story of two kids in elementary school-Shoya the reckless, popular kid and Nishimiya the new girl, who is deaf and communicates through writing in a notebook (since nobody knows sign language). I don’t care that the end will be predictable. We can chart that from miles away, but it doesn’t matter. While it hasn’t been published yet, the finale is not in question. And I am loving watching this story unfold. And so as a series, A Silent Voice crawls toward restoration with baby steps and miscommunications. With a series, the author would have the space to move beyond the pat answers and trite solutions. Like all short stories, it avoided the struggles that longer fiction has the opportunity to explore. It was sweet and even powerful, but too pat. Ōima’s original ended suddenly and happily, a moment of apology and repentance wiping away all scars. An expansion on the original story seemed too delicious to pass up. Though it was just one of those short comics that you’ll see linked on Reddit or wherever, Ōima’s story of the deaf girl and the bully stayed with me-well enough that when I saw a series-long repurposement of the original on Crunchyroll Manga, I was immediately drawn in. It struck a chord with me through the hazy recollection of my own history with bullies and bullying. It was well-done, touching, sentimental, brutal, and warming. Some time ago, I ran into a scanlation of Yoshitoki Ōima’s one-shot version of A Silent Voice. Sometimes the voice isn’t all *that* silent So while I wasn’t either mercilessly bullied or a merciless bully, I had enough of a taste of the whole thing to be fully invested in the dilemma presented in A Silent Voice. And struggling to lay that aside after a decade of behaving badly wasn’t easy.
I hate the me that was, but that was the me that I was at the time. So I abused people with off-hand comments and cutting cynicism. I was tired of not having power but too timid to get it legitimately. I didn’t talk bad about people behind their backs and I was never violent or physically destructive, but I did make people around me feel like crap. Whatever the case, like many of the unpopular, I grew up to become a full-blown passive-aggressive bastard once I was a young adult. I would be kicked from behind while urinating so I’d get pee all over my hands. I mean sure, I got punched in the arm a bit. I never got beat up and I don’t think I was ever trash-canned. I was one of those quiet kids who’s just likable enough to avoid the worst kind of attention. I was vaguely smart (I actually repped my school in an academic decathalon thing), I was a reader, I liked comics, I didn’t enjoy team sports (even though I was athletic enough), I never had a girlfriend, I had non-negligible acne. So maybe I only contributed to the systemic abuses of these two kids or maybe I was actually bullying-just not alpha bullying. He was also pretty much a jerk, but by then I could understand why, so I felt more complicit in his misery when he saw the cartoon in which I depicted him as ugly and obnoxious. And there was that one kid in high school who was definitely bullied (not by me!) and who I drew an unflattering comic of. He was kind of a jerk and he stole stuff from me and I did pee on his bike once. There was that one neighbourhood kid in elementary school who I could be quietly mean to while other kids took care of the actual bullying.
0 kommentar(er)
