*Spoilers for the first episode*
What's the point of Wandering Son? What is it trying to do? It clearly doesn't want to tell a complete, perfectly rounded story, seeing as it begins around volume five of the manga its based, and doesn't end where its source material does. If that's the case, then it's not the best manga promo as well, you aren't getting a good enough grip on the source material after all. So the question remains...
Well, Wandering Son feels like it was crafted to become a documentary instead of an adaptation. Beginning at the start of junior high, it closely follows a group of friends, all with complicated relationships and confusing lives. The main character - Nitori - is a transgender girl that's been dressing up as one for a while. She already met the pain and suffering that acting so differently brings, but thanks to Tatsumaki (a transgender boy who she has a crush on), Mako (who's also been trying to be seen as a girl), Chiba (a girl who has a crush on Nitori) and Kanaba (everyone's friend), she managed to get through. Towards the end of primary school, they get into a huge fight, as Nitori confesses her love to Tatsumaki and gets rejected, which also pushes Chiba and Tatsumaki into a conflict.
With this setup, episode one starts. We see this normal, uninterrupted flow of what appears to be Nitori's and Tatsumaki's daily life, as well as their first day in junior high. While someone like the viewer, looking from the outside, wouldn't call this day particularly normal, seeing as a girl in their class comes in wearing a boy's uniform and we get to see Nitori dress up as a girl and walk around town, it definitely feels like an ordinary day to those kids. The episode flows through beautifully, jumping from scene to scene, place to place, eventually ending up in Nitori's house. After her sister and her model friends leave, Nitori is left all alone in his room.
There's a beautiful, pink dress hanging on the wall.
Without much hesitation, Nitori dresses up. A relaxing, charming track begins to play as we see her happily looking at herself. Just another day...
The music cuts off in an instant.
Nitori's sister enters the room.
She starts ripping the dress off of her, screaming.
Nitori pushes her onto the table
She runs out, wearing nothing but boxers and a tank top.
Running through the middle of the street, she thinks about how she must look to all those people.
Nitori isn't cute in their eyes.
Nitori surely isn't pretty in their eyes.
Nitori definitely isn't a girl in their eyes.
Episode one of Wandering Son is powerful. It takes you from heaven to hell in an instant. Seeing broken Nitori run through the dimly lit streets left me stunned. But then, just like that, he runs past Tatsumaki who stops him, and they start talking again, him just wanting to help her by covering her with his jacket. And we end up in Nitori's house again, her smiling, going to sleep, as if nothing ever happened. Truly, what we know as normal, isn't normal to her.
As the show progresses, we get to see more and more of what's "normal" to Nitori, we see her blushing when someone says she's cute or girly, and the same thing goes for Mako and Tatsumaki. While they're both more secretive about the whole idea, they identify as a different gender already, they want that to be something normal for them. That's their end goal. At the same time, Chiba wants Nitori to be a "normal boy", and does see him as such even at the end of the series.
The idea of Wandering Son is very novel, and it works out in the series' favor. This exploration of normality for those people, seen as weirdness by others, proves rather effective, thanks to the mix of some well put together, typical slice of life elements and the awkwardness and tension during the moments when the scenes handling that topic are presented. It's paced well enough so that I got both of those in measures that satisfied my interests and need for progression while keeping the steady flow of character exposition at all times.
The problems arise in another department. Simply put, the show feels like a big, emotional dump. Its style ends up being on this feeling of melancholy and overwhelming sadness. And it never leaves. Ever. Even when something silly happens, the voice actors explicitly keep talking or even screaming quietly. It almost feels unnatural at points, tends to take away from the actual emotional scenes, seeing as they all feel the same, monotonous, and it's incredibly draining to watch on top of all that. I understand that a style is a style, but it's not just the fault of the script.
The audiovisuals are what truly makes the whole package too hard to handle. Let me describe the feeling of watching Wandering Son:
Imagine a beautifully crafted piano, and someone playing a nice, but rather boring tune on it. Then imagine you being inside that piano, but with headphones.
Sure the tune is nice, it isn't loud and the inside of the piano looks marvelous, but at the same time it's really overwhelming to know that you're trapped inside it, and you can feel a pressure over something that surely was never meant to be digested this way. On top of that this song keeps on playing for who knows how long, feeling samey, with only occasional bursts of freshness that end up being a prelude to the monotonous melody once again.
How do I know that the show isn't supposed to make you feel like this?
Well, maybe because Ei Aoki stated in an interview, that he "didn't want to put the major focus on transgender as an issue, but more as a way to draw out these characters". Do you think making the whole show look and feel sad doesn't seem like it puts it as an issue? The color pallet makes the show feel like an oil painting, but the character designs are very dark and don't correlate well if they were going for a natural-feeling look, creating an even more depressing and hard-hitting picture. Someone screwed up, it feels like the director and the artists didn't follow each other's intentions at all.
While this grating feeling persists throughout every second of it, the sheer strength of the writing and the novelty of its idea makes Wandering Son quite a nice journey, highlighting some of the most interesting takes on the topic of transgender people growing up, especially during puberty. Things like self-realization, romantic relationships, personal growth, developing social abilities, planning out the future and understanding adolescence become completely new talking points when viewed from the eyes of such a person.
While it isn't a particularly pleasant experience all around, Wandering Son is certainly an unique and interesting piece of art, worth indulging in for numerous reasons, primary one being understanding the world around us more in a interesting way, by indulging in an interesting work that makes you want to see it to the end (just in small doses). Well worth a recommendation, there surely will be many people who will find more to like, or perhaps more to grab onto, than I ever could.
As always, this is purely my opinion, I recommend you to develop your own.
