This winter anime season has been a pretty busy one – Solo Leveling has finally received its anime adaptation, the seconds seasons of both Mashle and Urusei Yatsura are here, Blue Exorcist finally has a third season, and of course there’s the excellent Delicious in Dungeon too. A lot of these, among others I haven’t mentioned, are all quite action packed, and typically fit into the shonen demographic. It’s an area I feel pretty well versed in these days, but I’ve been trying to branch out a bit more, particularly into shojo, a frequently underrepresented section when it comes to broader discussions around anime in the West. I’m slowly getting there, with titles like Revolutionary Girl Utena already under my belt, but I fancied something fresh recently, and luckily, the excellent and very cheesy A Sign of Affection was there to meet me.
A Sign of Affection follows some pretty classic romance tropes right from the get go; there’s a meet-cute on public transport, crushes start to form, literal sparkles appear in the air, it’s all what you’d typically expect from the genre. What makes the show a little different, is that protagonist Yuki Itose is hearing-impaired, to the point she essentially can’t hear anything at all. She’s been deaf since birth, and given that sign-language isn’t widely spoken, the main way she communicates is through texting and lip reading.
For most of her life, due to her hearing impairment, she’s been shut off from the rest of the world because hardly anyone puts in the effort required to enter hers; the first few episodes even show that her own mother never bothered to learn sign language. Enter Itsuomi Nagi, a tall, white-haired pretty boy, who just so happens to be a polyglot. He too, doesn’t speak sign language, but right from the pair’s first meeting, he puts in the effort to communicate clearly with her, slowing down his speech so Yuki can more easily read his lips.
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