Well, to make a spoiler-free campaign is harder than I thought, so I will begin with the psychological aspects of KnK starting with
Ishida Shoya's character (the main one in the story) as a pilar to build the points that the manga touches.
The will to live: What to do to get happiness?
Big question, dont you think? This is the very first premise of the manga.
How should we face that fearful and exclusively human sickness that is boredom? Well, this young boy's plan is to throw himself from a bridge... yeah, really.
Ishida is a kid with a lot of energy, he doesn't care about the future because he thinks it only leads to boredom: working, paying your expenses, worrying about stability... he's a child for gods sake! he would better spend his time enjoying life to the maximum. Thats why everyday he would try new things to avoid that awful sensation of routine.
And he is happy like that, his life is very simple with his mother's hairdresser shop and his absent sister,so he manages to keep his friends with him as much as he can.
Though this, of course, wont last forever. There's a moment when the ignorance of childhood starts to fade away and we start thinking about whats coming for us, and thats what happens to Ishida's friends. Little by little they start to take distance from him since they start feeling that thing every young human experiences at some point:
the need to mature.
Shoya still doesn't want to give up, he doesn't want to lose to that boring lifestyle thats coming to him, he wants to fight boredom the way he's always done! Why wouldn't his friends understand him? Now he needs something to focus his attention, something to sway away those ghosts that got his friends, he needs something to change the routine-based life thats coming to him.
Bingo...
Bullying: the cruel reality of it and its origin
Some people think the act of taking from others is inherent to our animal nature, I believe this to be true even if we do our best to avoid it with morals and social needs.
The core of bullying its actually simple entertainment, we are inmersed in a world where there are things considered normal or regular so whenever something, or someone, appears breaking that rule it catches our attention with ease.
In the case of KnK, the disability of
Shoko Nishimiya is the thing that catches the attention of the class that can only look at her with awe and countless doubts. Its here when the children could decide whether to get to know more about this different person or not but whats clear is that she's
weird, like from out of their world. What could be better to kill boredom than someone that breaks with your "canon" of regular person? These are Ishida's thoughts...
One of the best points of Koe no Katachi is that it shows a
raw display of bullying and from the perspective of the bully nonetheless. Shoya at first tries to understand how to deal with this "new issue" as she needs a special treatment for various things and she behaves and reacts... differently to many situations, but then discards the possibility of communication for a better option in his eyes:
degrade her to a simple "object" to entertain himself.
The manga also shines when showing the other side of the coin, the spectators or "accomplices" that allow this spiral of discrimination. Those are strongly represented by the teacher of the class and later by Ueno, they know there's something wrong with doing all those things but they subconsciously empathize with Ishida's view... Nishimiya is completely alone even if someone tries reaching to her.
Its horrible that, in the end, no one will take responsability for the emotional and psychological damage caused by this problem, even the victims end up believing that if those horrible things happen to them is because its their fault... a tragic thought that may only lead to self-hate and, ultimately, think of ending your own life.
Its certainly a very serious and dark topic but as real and common as day, so seeing it so accurately depicted in a manga shocked me to no extent. The author did an incredible job at showing the horrors of this problem.
Well, this is it for the first insight, I know its a depressing subject to talk about but its absolutely necessary to talk about isolation and its consequences to explain many other interesting points later touched in the manga.
