Forever_ambivalent wrote:On a different note, I find the difference between how Hisao treats Lilly's blindness and Shizune's deafness quite annoying. It almost gives off the impression that blindness is worse than deafness. Dealing with deafness isn't just learning sign language and boom all problems solved. But it almost seems that way with how Hisao deals with it.
You have to keep in mind that you're seeing Hisao's perspective and not Shizune's. From Hisao's perspective the apparent problems are communication and understanding Shizune's character (which implies understanding a bit of Deafness, not all of it since no Deaf individual encompasses the entire Deaf culture). Communication between the two of them is being solved by Hisao learning Sign Language and during her route Hisao slowly starts to understand her a bit (not that he really understands her, just enough for the phase of their relationship).
If you were hoping to see Shizune's struggles in the world, the only way that you would see that from Hisao's perspective is either being with her when she clearly comes across such a problem or when she tells Hisao about her problems. The latter? Knowing her character, not going to happen. She does not really like talking with others about her problems, never mind the ones directly related to her deafness because she is the sole expert on what she can and want to do. For example in the route, she is carrying a cell phone with her and knows how to call someone (mind you, this refers to just ringing their phones to attract their attention, not actually conversing with someone using audio). She also does receive texts on them, but barely checks them (which is apparent when Jigoro comes to Yamaku to update her since he just got a new number). This indicates that someone else ascertained a problem (in case of emergency what should she do?) and the Hearing world decided on a solution that is easy for them, not a solution that she likes. And before you are going to reply with "but it is for her own good", that is what our governments try to do in various ways too (taxes, fines, regulations etc etc, they're all for our own good) and we usually don't like that. Does she ever talk about it? She keeps her head high and knows she has that resource, but doesn't talk about whether she likes or hates it and only because of Hisao being observant at that point he and thus we know that she doesn't like that phone.
As for seeing her struggles with the hearing world, some of it is actually in the story hidden between the lines, such as the issue above of cell phone which was forced on her.
All this above does not mean that her struggles aren't there... Most of the deaf community does not really talk about it with the Hearing world exactly because the Hearing world tend to reason from their own perspective (feel free to refer to the other thread about the article on Cracked, including the recent enough bad memories about the school of Bell). And even I, a 22 years old deaf individual having adapted to the Hearing world, have anecdotal evidence of the Hearing world not being very accommodating to the 'hearing impaired' portion of our population (OV-chipkaart which is a RFID card for public transport in the Netherlands, during the design phase of the check-in/check-out machines it has been pointed out how Deaf-unfriendly it was and how easy it was to tweak that, yet that did not happen whatsoever and that was a recent implementation of less than ten years ago... Luckily there are two kinds of machines of which only one has this flaw, the other is IIRC more recent but not everywhere and especially not in the bus that I frequently travel with).
Or how about subtitles? Even now there is still plenty of TV programs not being subtitled (BBC is an exception as they subtitle almost everything and as long as it is not live subtitling it is of a pretty high quality). That is even more apparent with digital/webbased services as for example a lot of webepisodes aren't subtitled. Or how about services like iPlayer (the Dutch version of that, I've seen several cases where there was an issue with subtitles on live TV and they NEVER bothered to fix that even on Uitzending Gemist, despite people complaining).
Or how about even recognizing the Deaf community? The Sign Languages legally recognized by their country totals just 24 world-wide (depending on how you interpret the list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_reco ... _languages it changes a bit but still wouldn't go over 30). I really liked where that list mentioned the European Parliament urging the member countries to legally recognize their national Sign Language as an official language of the Deaf TWICE, once in 1988 and then again in 1998 and in 2014 the Netherlands still has not done it at all, which is iconic of how useless the European Union is with just an illusion of power...
I'm still curious as to what the status is in other countries with being able to reach emergency numbers using your cell phone without audio. Because here it is starting to improve but needs paid software (covered by health insurance in theory) to do this currently, instead of being able to at least text them (not possible because of possible abuse?
).
So if we make our problems apparent, usually they're either ignored, solved in a half-assed way or takes ages to even get remotely satisfactory changes in. Not to mention how stupid the Hearing world can be at times with their misconceptions, some of them even being self-perpetuating (Deaf education being usually crap and based on the teaching principles for the Hearing world with Hearing teachers not fluent in Sign Language or even needing interpreters... That's like having English as your native tongue and a basic understanding of German yet being expected to follow high school / college level education in German at the normal pace: Obviously that does not work well, even if you have an interpreter to interpret it to your native English. So why would that work with Sign Language, considering that it is even a bigger step than between two spoken languages?).
With this information, are you really surprised that most Deaf individuals are keeping up a facade towards the Hearing world, including Shizune? That it looks like there are no problems anymore at the end of her route? Because the illusion of no problems tends to be the best way to keep the Hearing world from meddling when they shouldn't meddle.
Off Topic
If you're (people in general, not directly aimed at you Forever_ambivalent) going to write with capitals where appropriate, Sign Language should be capitalized as per the notion that all names for proper languages, dialects and families of languages should be capitalized, such as the language Latin, the Germanic family of languages etc. This is because Sign Language actually refers to the world-wide family of languages using hands to converse with many similar elements such as indexes, positioning etc (this family does not include systems like Signed Exact English as that is not really a language but a translation/depiction system like Romaji for Japanese).
As for Deaf/Hearing vs deaf/hearing, this is a convention that appears mostly in discussions related to the deaf/Deaf culture, indicating the difference between the physical ability of hearing or being deaf and the cultural background of being Deaf or Hearing. For example CODA (Children Of Deaf Adults) are usually Deaf but hearing: They can hear normally but their cultural background is strongly influenced by the Deaf culture.
) to get money from the government (the government funds the school for support teachers to support disabled kids but my school only uses those funds for those who seriously need it). It's quite abominable. My school basically reaps money from mentally disabled people who do not need the support. Although I (and many other mentally disabled kids) do not need the support it is quite displeasing to have my school take money from government taxes in our name. It is a type of fraud I believe. 
). 