It took so long / Still I believed / Somehow the one that I needed / Would find me eventually (Vision of Love – Mariah Carey).
Help, I can’t stop writing reviews!! It's kind of funny because I’ve always been under the impression that I could never get into journaling because I’d be in there lying and shit. But now, who knows? Maybe this has been my secret calling all along. Dear journal, I’m mostly here to tell you that it’s come to my attention that there’s a staggering abundance of gay manga out there that I’ve never even heard of, let alone tried to read before. For someone who’s always talking about how into the medium I am, I certainly don’t know or read as much as I pretend to! Always the casual enjoyer and never the hardcore fan. I guess I’ll have to fix that by the only way I know how; reading more gay manga. And now that I’m getting back into it, finding and reading all these great LGBT+ manga is making me feel like that old dude in Ratatouille when he takes a bite of the dish that the rat made and he’s instantly transported back into his childhood. It’s a whole thing because damn, that movie was wild. This is all a roundabout way of saying that this manga captured a peculiar feeling of nostalgia despite the fact that I’ve never heard of it before a couple days ago when the Goodreads recommendation page finally did me a solid and showed this to me. I’m realizing that my stories about finding new “5 star” reads all start the same; I’ll say I was casually flipping through something that I picked up on a whim and then all of a sudden happiness hits me like a train on a track. Yeah so, here I was flipping through I Hear the Sunspot one afternoon and then out of nowhere, it wasn’t just a cute love story to me anymore, but literally a revelatory moment! A core memory, if you will. It’s good. Really good, even! Because the thing is, for the longest time I think the gayest manga I’ve ever read was Naruto, and I figured nothing else could ever hope to come close. And now that I’m more of a learned man with a much more diverse palate of manga under my belt (I'm mixing up my sayings), I can now say that the gayest is now… well, it’s still Naruto, but this was a pretty good runner-up. Oh, just so I make this clear, I only ever use “gay” as a complimentary descriptor. I hear "that's so gay" and I think, oh cool, sounds great. So, when I say that I Hear the Sunspot is pretty gay, I might as well say that it’s the kind of manga that I’ve been always been looking for. But maybe I’m doing this manga a slight disservice by delegating it to one thing, because while the romance aspect was lovely, I also enjoyed how the character arcs didn’t solely revolve around each character’s need to be in each other’s company. They've both got their own stuff going on and I respect that. It reminds me of how in the book, Picture Us in the Light, the main character realizing his sexuality is, like, the fourth sub plot in the story because he's much too busy to think about all that. I totally get it.
This story follows the growing slow-burn romance between college students, Kohei Sugihara and Taichi Sagawa, the former suffering from alienation due to his hearing loss and the latter being a well-meaning, loud mouth who isn't as well off as he'd like to be. You could probably see where this is going, right? I thought that it was interesting how this manga took the classic manga character archetypes of the “darkly brooding, sexy guy” and the “lovable and goofy yelling dude” and not only gave them realistic reasons for acting as such, but also gave them enough depth to make you want to know what’s underneath each façade that they put up. Hold up, "brooding dude," "outgoing gregarious guy?" This is starting to sound just like Naruto all over again. The accidental transcendent queer love story carries on through the ages, I suppose. I'm mostly kidding, because I think that this manga is a lot more intentional and empathetic in its portrayal of its subject matter, and no shade, but it’s not every day when you find a manga with actual character writing. What I mean is that a lot of manga are so focused on keeping the characters the same so that they stay recognizable that they forego things I tend to enjoy like character growth or interesting dialogue. Though, I will admit that at first I thought this manga would be a little hokey and do that trope where the romantic interest is the only person in the world that Kohei can “hear,” and I was worried that this manga would just be another one of those overly sentimental Hallmark-eque movies where people with disabilities only exist under a veneer of tokenism and are constantly infantilized, but I think I Hear the Sunspot wonderfully manages to avoid this by making sure all the characters feel like fully realized people instead of heightened stereotypes. Kohei’s hearing loss informs his character, but doesn’t define him. His relationship with Taichi becomes romantic in nature, but nobody's here to save anyone, it's just a relationship where they genuinely enjoy each other's company. And you'd be surprised how hard it is to find a story like that, what with the "enemies-to-lovers" craze going around town. And whenever I find a story that finally hits like this one does, it really does make me a little emotional. I’m just sitting here like, oh yeah, there are good things out there, and I don’t have to always settle for mid! Anyway, I think it’s the little nuances that made this manga especially sensitive as well as uniquely impactful. This is just one example, but it’s shown in the way Kohei will constantly ask people to repeat themselves after they speak too quietly or quickly, and they’d almost always brush him off because they think he’s being stand-offish or simply that “it’s too much trouble” to give him the extra bit of time and patience that he needs. That's real. It shows how casually hostile people can be towards those with disabilities, and I enjoyed how Kohei’s love for Taichi was jump started by the fact he’s the only person who doesn’t just hear him, but actually listens to him. I Hear the Sunspot is a lovely story, and... would you look at that, I think I’ve found yet another “5 star” read. Hey, I should totally journal about this!!