Yubisaki to Renren

People often compare this to A Silent Voice because both feature deaf characters. But honestly, they’re quite different. A Silent Voice is a heavy, emotional story about guilt, depression, and learning to appreciate life. A Sign of Affection is more about the day-to-day experiences of being deaf and how that affects relationships. It’s lighter and more focused on romance.

What really makes A Sign of Affection stand out, especially in today’s shoujo anime, is how it avoids the usual clichés. Instead of having a cold, perfect male lead or a bunch of guys fighting over the girl, it focuses on real communication, especially through sign language. ... And yes, the character designs, especially those big lips, are hard to miss.

The main story is a sweet romance. Yuki, who is deaf, meets a guy and slowly starts falling for him. Her hearing loss creates some challenges, but he genuinely tries to understand her. Their relationship grows naturally, not through love at first sight, but through real effort and honest feelings. Yuki also talks to her friends about her emotions, which makes her feel more real.

The author, Suu Morishita-sensei, clearly put a lot of thought into showing deaf culture in a respectful way. The direction is also really smart, for example, the sound fading out in some scenes helps viewers feel what Yuki experiences.

All in all, A Sign of Affection is a heartwarming and genuine love story. It’s great for anyone who wants to learn more about deafness or just wants a sweet romance. It’s already one of the best anime of the year and brings something fresh to the shoujo genre.

I am clearly not the intended audience for this anime, yet here I am, reviewing this anime. Making the female MC deaf was definitely a trick to get more people to indulge in this anime. I think it's already clear how this romance anime caters to the Shoujo demographic when you have every character having the most kissable lips, the male character's rizz game is always at its peak, meant to make the girl infinitely blush with him, all the while also having love triangles and unrequited love stories that are at play. There's a lot of things to not like about A Sign of ... Affection, but what if I tell you, I did enjoy it too?

If I were to name one good thing that this anime did well other than the sign language the show takes pride in, it's the handling of the worst aspect of most romance dramas, love polygons. I kid you not, it's not a romance anime if you don't have any love triangles or anyone who has unrequited love and in almost every romance show, all it has done is make virtually more interesting side characters that either don't get into a relationship with the MC despite better chemistry or make the worst side characters known to mankind, just so the main character will always get with the main one, all the while creating drama about their said backstory with MC and how they were "deeply in love" with the MC which is never returned. I know love polygons are common in fictional romance stories. Still, when it comes to doing this, rarely does anyone know how to properly execute this without overstaying its welcome or getting extremely annoying to deal with. Luckily, the anime fixed this by making every cast an adult. They don't throw tantrums like insecure babies fishing for pity towards them and talking about how they gave the MC the most attention and somehow think that will make them like them. Instead, it handles the subject maturely and calmly, which is a nice change of pace for a romance drama.

Another praise I'd give to the anime is how the romance is also quite decent. I actually enjoyed it too and didn't find it a notorious fire piece of garbage. The male love interest (who naturally ticks all the boxes for your typical main love interest in every shoujo manga), doesn't exhibit any behavior that leans towards stalking psychopathic tendencies, instead, it's just cute teases I can actually see happening and in a sense, I can support the relationship going on between the two. I had a bad assumption about how the anime was going with the relationship given how the man had the recipe of an incredibly insecure and more harmful than protective character, but it was a nice change of pace unless you take into consideration the other romance that does it several degrees better than this anime.

Are you still with me? Because this is where I want to delve into issues I had with A Sign of Affection.

Even if it does some things right in terms of plot and romance, it still doesn't excuse the characters, who are pretty forgettable and I'm willing to say, 'bad', in a lot of ways. From my perspective, Yuki is the weakest character of them all. The only reason you can remember her is because she's deaf. Yuki's character is someone that can be generalized as a "self-insert for girls" because Yuki is like every girl's fantasy who wants to have a perfect boyfriend like Itsuomi (had to search for his name in MAL because I couldn't remember him), but let me stop you for a minute there.

When you call a character "self-insert", you're referring to a character that lacks substance or any form of personality to be considered as a real character but the term "Self-Insertion" refers to the main character being as closely similar to the author's personality or his/her image to how they would react into the real world or if the same circumstances were applied to them as well, typically the correct definition of self-insert or what you would call "the author's surrogate". Here, in this situation, Yuki is the definition of being a "self-projection."

How do I prove this? A lot of things only happened because the supporting characters had a role to play in which Yuki does nothing but let everyone approach her and blush because it wasn't something she intended to do, yet she indulges in it, hoping she gets this treatment without ever trying to put effort into getting what she wants until the latter half of the series, where Yuki somehow does something but reminded her how she needs to be treated like a princess because oh no, she's a deaf person who's being held like a trophy for the guy to get his hands on. I may sound like I'm yapping absolute nonsense, but the idea is that you can't have a main character who does nothing or just reacts to everything without taking any initiative to do anything, the story makes everything served to her on a silver plate.

The cast is only categorized by two driven things, either driven with jealousy or acting as the loud voice just so there is a smidgen worth of comedy other than your usual poetic-esque description of having their voice heard miraculously by a random Prince Charming character. The love polygons are the only notable part where you can have some form of memory indulging in this anime, otherwise, it's another one of your run-of-the-mill romances that participates in satisfying the quota just so it passes off for every romance viewer like myself to watch.

The anime definitely suffices as a romance anime, since there is chemistry between the duo, and have proper romance advances which are much appreciated to see, but I would have definitely recommended it if Yuki's character had more thought put into it. Maybe it's due to my lack of interest in these kinds of characters that are portrayed as shy, timid, and quiet all the more justified with the characteristic being deaf, but I wish Yuki had put a lot more effort into taking interest in what these characters do, maybe provide more gifts or help others more rather than being bestowed with many gifts that can't process the simple line of thought to repay debts for their deeds. In my eyes, it's just decent.

Thank you for reading.

I have never watched a more bland romance in my life and i have watched so many dumb things.
ML womanizer who makes moves/flirts in ways literal harassers do.
This just tells me '' if you are good looking and hot you can get away with literal harassment '' like bro you barely know her keep ur hands to yourself stop being so damn creepy.
FL is literally 19 and acts like she has 10. 0 Personality not only for her but for all characters. Bland. Bland. Bland.
I dont even want to comment on the childhood friend my guy is a insecure bihh whos a "tsundere" ... type. The only cute and good quality he has is that he learned sign language for the FL.
Her being deaf is literally a plot point insted of being a character trait.
The author does not know how relationships work ig? Because if he did who in his right mind would write something like this?
Expected a mature romance and got this disaster that i regret even wasting my time on.