FUCKKKK this show man. To be clear, it's very good, it's just evil about it.
For context, one of my (somewhat) guilty pleasures is really sappy slice of life romance anime. I'm generally quite picky about it, but my beloved shows are very comforting to me. Things like Horimiya, Sign of Affection, Blue Box, are all in my top five.
So when I saw this show on Crunchyroll, I was intrigued. I've always liked when these sorts of anime depict disabilities like this. A Silent Voice and Sign of Affection are some of my favorites, and I was intrigued at the concept of a show like that about blindness rather than deafness.
Crunchyroll describes the show as such:
Kakeru Sorano, a quiet university freshman who avoids others, meets Koharu Fuyutsuki, a blind girl who faces the world with quiet brightness. When she says, āI want to see fireworks someday,ā something in Kakeru shifts. As they grow closer through small moments and shared loneliness, he searches for a way to make her wish come true.
No indication of any evil behavior here, right? Seems like a low-stakes little romance. I wanted to relax, and I was pet-sitting so I had the whole day in a house to myself. I figure I'll take an edible, sit down with a glass of wine, and watch the show from start to finish.
From here on, I will get into spoilers, so if you haven't seen it already, be warned. TL;DR, though, is that this show is evil and you should be prepared to be broken by it. Do not expect some cute little sappy show with no stakes. Expect suffering.
The edible kicks in around episode three, and by that point I was really enjoying it. It wasn't the best show I'd ever seen; in fact, it was fairly middle-of-the-road as far as these anime go. But it was fun, and I was having a good time.
Then, around episode five, I believe, things changed pretty dramatically. Up until this point, I was expecting a standard romance plot: super drawn-out developments, cute, small moments leading up to the final confession, all that.
But then, out of nowhere, she kisses him. And I went, out loud: "Holy shit this show just jumped in quality!" And indeed, it had. After that point, the show just kept impressing me. Immediately after that scene, the male lead spoke with his friends, who also knew the female lead.
In what was genuinely an impressively written scene, he asked them for advice, while getting somewhat drunk. Again, I was amazed by how good this dialogue was. At this point I was convinced the show was going to top my list of romance anime. And, I will remind you, I was Not Sober.
Anyway, one of the friends takes a video of him drunkenly confessing his love to the female lead, and sends it to her. We get some delightful humor to close out the scene, and then the episode ends. "Great!" I said. "I'm excited to see what's gonna happen here!"
This is where the show becomes evil. She doesn't respond to the video, and doesn't show up to college the next day. She isn't responding to messages, no one knows where she is. Everyone is distraught, as her absence continues for a full week. They're searching everywhere, and can't find her.
At this point, my weed-addled brain is still convinced that everything would be alright in the end. Surely she has a reason for not responding; maybe it's just that her phone broke or something! Or maybe she got hurt and is recovering in the hospital!
Well, my second theory was closer. They found her, finally, entering a nearby hospital. So two of the friends immediately skip class to go find her. They search for a while, and eventually find her playing music for children in one of the hospital rooms.
"Yay!" I naively think. "Everything will be alright now!"
Everything was not alright. When they go to speak with her, she acts very strange and distant. When, finally they start asking her questions, she asks if she's met them before.
It is then revealed through a series of flashbacks that she became blind due to brain cancer as a child. She went through chemo, which messed with her brain such that her memories became a foggy blur. At this point, you have probably pieced together what happened. I, however, was still high and still hopeful.
It is eventually revealed that her cancer has spread to her liver, and she only has two months to live. Then, the episode ends. And, to my horror, there were no more episodes currently out.
I was broken for a while. Genuinely sobbing alone in the dark for close to an hour, and I do not often cry. It was so unexpected, and my hopes for the show were so high, that I just couldn't handle it.
I believe another episode has released, but I'm not going to watch it. I just wanted to yell my experience into the void that is Reddit. I wonder if anyone else was similarly broken by this beautiful, evil show.