If you've been on the internet for any amount of time, particularly in the past few years, you'd know gender identity and transsexualism are hotly debated topics. Especially if you frequent anonymous image boards, you’ll come across a lot of people trying to paint these issues in a black or white, us and them mentality. The difference between these posts and Wandering Son beyond Wandering Son not being a cynical tryhard, is that Wandering Son understands how complex these issues are and portrays them in a somewhat realistic scenario. I think the reason why so little media has tackled these themes is because a lot of creatives don’t really understand them and are self aware enough to know that. I am not one to give points to a work just for the subject matter it attempts to portray however, but thankfully Wandering Son does not need any charity points and even stands out among similar media that handles these subjects. While shows such as Revolutionary Girl Utena and Steven Universe obscure the subject matter through a lot of allegory and metaphors, Wandering Son tackles the subject literally and is the entire focus of the show.
Like most things that aren't Ping Pong, Wandering Son has problems. The show starts out more than a bit confusing. The adaptation starts at about volume 5 of the manga. As a result you miss out on a lot of character establishment that the anime handles far less gracefully than its subject matter. I found it really confusing attaching names and personalities to faces without the help of Wikipedia filling me in on the backstory to all these kids. On the subject of kids, Wandering Son wants to have its cake and eat it too with having a realistic depiction of its characters. It wants these kids to be mature enough to understand their situation and be pretty intelligent but also wants them to be young enough that they're about to hit puberty, which for Nitori means they’re about to get a deep voice and grow a lot of hair and that Takatsuki's breasts are going to get so big she's gonna need to wear a bra or something. Both of these are all fine and dandy on their own but together they almost broke my suspension of disbelief and could certainly break it for a viewer not willing to give the show the high amount of slack I did. Now I'm going to give somewhat of an excuse for what I think the author is going for by doing this. I think these kids, for the most part, act on a maturity level similar to someone in high school. If the kids were old enough to be in high school, not only would we skip the crucial stage in their development that is puberty but the crossdressing would be a bit less believable. Whether or not these trades in believability of the world were worth it or not is going to depend on your suspension of disbelief which is broken by different things for different people but for me the rest of the shows strengths were good enough to make me overlook these problems which I do consider to be minor.
Is this a perfect representation of children struggling with their gender identity? Nah. Is it accurate enough to portray the themes and character dynamics of this show? Absolutely. Despite my previous complaints these characters feel like real people. More impressively, none of the drama feels forced. Conflicts arise not because of silly misunderstandings but fundamental differences between a character's ideas being at odds with another character's or society's ideas. Sometimes these characters are selfish or just mean spirited. Particularly Nitori I found to be an endearing character, who for the most part I was on their side when it came to conflict, had a few moments where they’re just kinda selfish without realizing it. A scene of Nitori wanting to wear their sister’s dress while the sister tried to pull it off went a long way to humanizing Nitori and showing just how shitty their situation is. Another moment that struck me as extremely well done is when Takatsuki revealed that Nitori was dating someone while in the restroom to Saorin. It’s hard to explain, but I feel it’s an inert wanting to know that other people are just as frustrated with a situation as you are. It was such a fantastic, small moment that me love the character that much more. All characters display this selfishness to some extent, but none as much as Saori. While I found her to be a dislikeable character, she's probably my favorite addition to the cast as she represents a much more conflicted and complex angle than you'll find in some pretentious twitter post. Even if she can come off as a huge bitch that only throws tantrums when things don't go her way, even when her unhappiness is only caused by the world not catering to her specifically, it's always somewhat justified and consistent with her character. However she does change as a character later in the series as she begins to talk to other characters and understand herself more. And this kind of adversity is at the heart of most of Wandering Son's complex characters, they aren't satisfied with the world around them or themselves and how they deal with it is what makes them interesting. I should mention that their problems don’t start and end with gender identity and sexuality. There’s a lot of stuff these characters go through besides those issues they go through. The main thing being these love polygons that keep getting bigger between the main cast I’d usually be groaning at in almost any other anime. The relationships depicted here, while I felt were a bit unrealistic, all fit in with the general theme of these kids being confused in terms of what they want. I think it’s impressive how subtly the show portrays how shitty this world is for these characters from everyone’s point of view. How well this is done is directly proportionate to how much screen time they get, so Nitori gets a little more bias when exploring this aspect of his character. But because they get this bias their conflicts are given the most attention. One of the most powerful moments in the series is the day after he goes to school as a girl. At first I thought it was silly how cartoonishly evil the kids were but a few seconds later it hit me how actually realistic that situation was. What's more is that it's an issue that doesn't just go away for Nitori, it's a huge part of the show for its remaining duration, as short as that is.
It's at this point I should mention exactly how "slice of life" this show is, I'm not that familiar with these types of shows and I'm not too sure how well Wandering Son fits into that genre, but this show is very much characters going through their everyday life. There's hardly any dramatic arc or plot to be discussed. The writing for the most part is engaging and was good enough to keep me interested in something as dumb as a middle school play, even though plot wise it can hardly be called a dramatic arc. This is a show entirely held up by its characters and dialogue. As such this show has virtually no pacing and if that is something you know you're not into I would not recommend picking up this show. That being said I have a very short fuse when it comes to my attention span during an anime which makes me happy to say I was never bored during Wandering Son. The dialogue and characters were strong enough for me and I never felt like I was just waiting for something to happen or wasting time. Even if it was wasting time plot wise, character wise it never misses an opportunity or line of dialogue to develop or humanize the people in this world. There are a few odd moments and while they aren't nearly enough to spoil the whole package, they definitely made me back up and watch the scene again for how bizarre it was. The most striking example to me was in the first few episodes where Nitori's friend, out of nowhere, states that their teacher is cool and wonders if he likes boys. The lines of dialogue right before and after these lines have very awkward transitions that just don’t flow naturally. This is probably the most prominent example, and the fact that it came so early made the later disconnects in dialogue a bit more natural in comparison. But like I said these moments are far and few between. However if you can't get over the barrier of middle school kids being a bit more mature than they should you might feel this way for the entire series.
I hesitate to bring up things like animation or audio because I'm not confident in discussing them properly like I am other aspects of media, and I don't have any meaningful criticisms of the animation and audio. That being said, I hated both of these aspects of the show. The glossy look of the characters and unconventional instruments gave the setting kind of a nostalgic or childish feel that I absolutely couldn't get behind. The backgrounds were generally gorgeous and very understated. An effect I saw used on a lot of the background is a lack of borders, with the background itself fading into some kind of white void. It gave a surreal effect on the environment while never conflicting with the realistic tone of the show.
In this genre, it’s important that your characters aren’t stereotypes. And in Wandering Son none of them can be described in a sentence or two. These are complex people more than anything, except for maybe the girl who follows Chizuru around who was so superfluous I forgot her name. And these characters were so complex and interesting I was rarely bored while watching a show with a plot that’s almost non existent. It’s a struggle to find any real complaints with this series, but to warn some viewers one potential problem is that the characters at the end of the show are still pretty conflicted with very messy and undefined roles in society. They aren’t completely ok with themselves and still have a lot of work to do before they can be satisfied with themselves. Mostly because this adaptation does not cover much of the manga. While some people may see this as a problem, I was more than satisfied with how the show ends and where all the characters end up.
