Hidamari ga Kikoeru
I Hear the Sunspot

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“Looking for a note taker”

Words as simple as these can easily impact someone's life. "I Hear the Sunspot" tells the story of two college students who meet by chance yet end up closely intertwined in each other’s lives. While doing so, the story explores themes of isolation, self-regard, happiness, and social anxiety.

The dynamic between the reserved, hard-of-hearing Kouhei and the lively and vibrant Taichi is endearing. Kouhei is easily misunderstood by most people so he finds comfort in Taichi, who is fond of Kouhei’s good-natured personality. While the presentation of many themes is subtle, the manga is realistic and easy to follow. The characters ... don’t harp on typical shounen ai tropes, they feel human and layered. It’s not often that we get tasteful portrayals of characters with disabilities, especially queer ones. Nonetheless, "I Hear the Sunspot" doesn’t get overly wrapped up in identity and representation for the sake of it. The characters have meaningful interactions with each other and their identities affect them without making their entire struggles about disability or queerness.

Although some of the themes are serious, the manga still manages to remain quite light-hearted. Every theme is dissected a little but not excessively. Instead, when events happen the characters mull over certain actions, talk them through, or move on. There’s a very quotidian aspect to the story-telling without being redundant or boring, this adds to the creation of nuanced and grounded livelihoods for our cast of characters. It feels like they’re real people rather than idealized versions of people.

Story: 8/10
As mentioned earlier, the story feels down-to-earth and realistic without being boring. It’s relatable and still manages to further the plot in an intentional way.

Art: 8/10
Since this is my first manga review and one of the first manga series I’ve read I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of artwork. I don’t have a clear barometer for manga art but it seemed quite good to me.

Character: 9/10
The characters really shine in this manga. As I mentioned earlier I find them to be endearing yet grounded in reality. They’re not without flaws and they have their own battles irrespective of the world around them. On top of that, their identities aren’t the reason that they exist which I appreciate, they’re not just vehicles of representation.

Enjoyment: 8/10
I really enjoyed this manga!

I'm going to start out with the negatives. The romantic scenes were definitely lacking but aside from that the communication and misunderstandings between the main characters, Taichi and Kohei are beyond frustrating. It seems like 98% of this story is just them getting into fights or being too busy to even be together. Which I understand, those kinds of things happen which makes it semi realistic but I think it's just overly excessive and reused the same plot line of them having a lack of communication throughout the majority of their story. It was starting to become heavily repetitive and it seemed like they couldn't ... figure out how to solve the issues on their own without constantly hearing advice from friends/family. Because of the whole story basically being (for lack of a better word) "angsty", we got very few happy moments to just see them being in a healthy relationship. Also I could go on about how unrealistic the whole prejudice of hearing disabled came across, though that might sound a bit ignorant coming from me considering I'm not audibly impaired and not from Japan. When I was reading it, I felt like it diminished how society actually views the impaired. Though there are lots of people out there who are more over arrogant when it comes to the disabled, most of society is accepting to changes and adjustability. Granted, we can do more to learn and educate ourselves as a society, but unfortunately we haven't reached that length just yet. Once again, this is all based on my ignorance, because depending on the time period this is taken place in, could have a heavily impacted how the prejudice is justified in here. And not to resummarize but like I mentioned, I'm not from Japan and I'm not familiarized with the prejudice that happens specifically towards the hearing impaired. Although, this is just my opinion as an American reader. Like that whole thing with them constantly separating the hearing and non hearing into separate categories and how the disabled viewed the "hearing" as people who are condescending and/or makes fun of the impaired just seemed hyper unrealistic imo. Maybe it is like that in Japan or like that with the impaired and I'm just ignorant or maybe I'm just an idealist who has too much faith in society and blinded to how things actually are. Either way, enough of that ramble, I hope I got my point across without trying to sound too uninformed or what not.

Moving onto the positive sides of things, for this being a romance, like I mentioned before it was kinda lacking in those scenes however, I like to think the main focus of this wasn't indeed the romance but in prejudice and society. There seems to be a bigger lesson here that we readers can take and digest. As I mentioned earlier, the prejudice seems a tad unrealistic, but overall it's not entirely wrong when they show how "normal/hearing" people always seem to pity the impaired. I think the story does a really good job at displaying things that us, who don't have disabilities, can come to understand those who do better as well as the hardships they have to face on a daily basis. The author does a fantastic job when it comes to diving into the depth of emotions of characters and their thoughts. It's very clear that the characters all view the world differently from one another, so at least for me, it didn't seem like anyone's view was in the wrong. Yes, at the beginning of meeting Ryuu, he had pissed me off so much, but the further we delved into the storyline and came to understand his thoughts and emotions, I actually felt really bad for him. Like I said, the author does a great job at explaining everyone's sides to certain situations, making us, the readers, conflicted with our thoughts and really forces us to think things we normally wouldn't think.

Overall, like every story it has it's good and it's bad. Though, given this is my first time writing a review on MAL, should show that it's definitely an interesting read to take upon.

This story should have ended with the first volume (the first 6 chapters). It treated the subject of disabiity in a realistic and respectful manner, showed likable characters growing closer in a way that felt natural, and skillfully avoided problematic tropes.

I would recommended not reading past that point. Chapter 6 is where the story was originally meant to end, with just a bare hint that the characters would grow to develop romantic feelings. But because it was serialized in a BL magazine, the author was told to add more chapters and ramp up the romance content. From that point on, every scene feels forced. ... Annoying characters are thrown in to cause interference, and the rest of the drama rests entirely on misunderstandings due to lack of communication effort. It's frustrating to watch, and we end up losing most of what made the first volume enjoyable. We run into clichés, the characters feel off, and it's obvious the author isn't having a good time.