This week on My Taste is Better Than Yours, it’s another dip into Samu and Enzo’s pool of shared manga experience. Hourou Musuko is both a great and important series – and important to me personally to boot. This is one of our most impassioned discussions for sure, and with good reason. In addition to the story itself we have the general zeitgeist about Wandering Son to consider, and talk more than usual about the anime adaptation and the choices it made. Hope you’l tune in – this is a good one.
Podcast Links:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/45e4SKPssSbuRNZ8lVMACN
Apple Music: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-taste-is-better-than-yours/id1746194902
Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1746194902
Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/z70w36ls
Nadavu
March 4, 2025 at 11:17 amThank you Samu, Enzo.
******** possible spoilers ************
I haven’t rewatched or reread the story since it finished (though I definitely remember anxiously awaiting each chapter to come out, and then anxiously awaiting the LiA review) so I’m on a bit of a shaky ground here, but one thing you didn’t discuss that I seem to remember is that by the time he was graduating, Shuu could no longer casually pass as a girl, and his cross-dressing was mostly limited to make-out sessions with Anna. A poignant reminder that growing up is a unidirectional street.
I think the greatness of this story is precisely that it isn’t a trans manifesto, but rather a coming-of-age tale that just about anyone can relate to. The question is always “who am I”, and the answer, if such is ever reached, keeps on changing.
I love Doi, but my personal favorite is Saori. Shuu and Yoshino (and Makoto, for that matter) might feel they are in the wrong box, but they do have an established box they can aspire to be in. There are no Saori-shaped boxes. She’s the ultimate misfit, and I think that’s really the reason why she joins a church, as it’s probably the only social group she can sorta feel she belongs to.
Guardian Enzo
March 4, 2025 at 11:29 amNot a manifesto is a great way of putting it. It’s a series that advocates understanding of everyone, whoever they are.
I have a lot of empathy for Saori, because I pretty much have empathy for every character Shimura draws in this series. But I don’t find her likeable, to be honest. I’m not sure I’m supposed to and it’s not a problem in the larger sense.