Sonny Boy E1-3

This review was commissioned by @OpalineDreams.


"Sonny Boy" is an experimental original anime that came out in 2021, and that dared to ask the question "what if a bunch of high schoolers got randomly teleported into a series of sociology thought experiments?"

Did asking this question actually require very much daring? On second thoughts, no, not really. Still a decent premise though.

The "experimental" descriptor comes into play with the very spastic nature of the onscreen exposition. The pilot starts out in media res, major events happen mostly offscreen with the viewer only learning about them from characters talking about it after the fact, and the POV moves around very jarringly from character to character. This makes it hard to get to know any of the characters (at least, in the three episodes I watched), or to keep track of the passage of time.

The two most frequent POV characters (though I'd hesitate to call them the lead duo, for the reasons given above) are a free-spirited girl named Nozomi, who recently returned from a semester abroad, and her melancholic friend Nagara who rarely does anything unless he's pushed to. Their rejection and acceptance of the bizarre situations they and their peers are subjected to form a rough context for analysis of said situations.

At the beginning of the series, the school has been surrounded in an interminable black void that no one can see beyond for one week. This happened during a freak storm just as school was getting out, on the last day before summer break. None of the teachers or staff or younger students were brought along; only the school itself, and its graduating third-year students. In the seven days since then, well, the kids have started to go a little stir-crazy.

This initial predicament ends up being a thought experiment to interrogate the underlying theory of state society. Sort of? It might be more broad or more narrow than that, depending on how you think about it.

In addition to the school being suspended in an eternal black void, some of the students within it seem to have manifested supernatural powers. On the bright side, some of these powers include the ability to conjure items out of nothing, so they aren't at risk of starvation. On the dark side, some of them also include super-strength, destructive gravity waves, and the ability to afflict victims with hypnotic nightmare images. The big point of conflict comes when the student council - led by the creepy weirdo with the nightmare powers - begins to fear that when and if the school returns to Earth, they might be held accountable for the mounting damage to the building. Not the concern I'd prioritize, in their place, but they're an anime student council.

Their solution to this is to come up with a system of draconian rules meant to preserve school buildings and furnishings, maintain cleanliness with bespoke janitorial duties, etc. As none of the council members have particularly overwhelming powers (nightmare-projection weirdo can only target one person at a time), they appoint a popular baseball jock as their figurehead (legitimizing him with a simple majority of a popular vote; it's not clear how many of the trapped seniors even participated in it).

When some students defy the new rules, jock boy manifests a new power seemingly bestowed upon him by virtue of the student government's mandate; he points at you, shouts the word "penalty," and then a black X-shaped mark appears on your face and you're compelled to perform some miserable, demeaning task for the next several hours. No defence works against this. Even the rebellious gravity-warping delinquent boy - otherwise the biggest, most unstoppable troublemaker - is helpless against the black X penalty.

The rules and allocated janitorial duties are disseminated via the school's smartphone chat server. A later episode implies that someone has a WiFi power that allows this to work away from civilization, but I guess someone also could have conjured a radio tower or something idk. And, it is here that the show starts engaging with the concept of the state.

See, it was established earlier that returning student Nozomi doesn't have a smart phone, which means all the regulations and responsibilities go over her head. The student council offers her one, but she refuses to take it; she's not one of the troublemakers, so her behavior shouldn't concern them in the first place. They try to explain to her why the rules and her own ability to access (and therefore be bound by) them are for her own good. She politely disagrees.

They try to force her to accept a phone, and she breaks it...which means she's now committed vandalism and broken a rule. Baseball bro points at her, and her face gets X'd.

...

If the situation were slightly different, Nozomi would come across as a childish sovcit lunatic, and her X'ing would be satisfying to witness. However, this isn't a situation where she's been taking advantage of state programs and infrastructure and now refusing to uphold her end of the social contract. We're looking at the building of the state in the first place, and the ruthless subjugation of genuinely autonomous peoples in its newly claimed territory that this necessarily entails.

She was telling the truth before. She isn't one of the troublemakers. She's not making a mess. She never participated in the impromptu elections, or even had the means to participate in them. No one asked her if she wanted to be conquered by someone else's democracy.

On one hand, she necessarily will end up benefitting from a clean and well-kept environment and people with dangerous powers being reigned in. On the other hand...again, she never agreed to have that care taken of her environment by anyone besides herself.

The most equitable solution would be to divide the school physically into the Student Council Republic and the Autonomous Free Zone and hammer out agreements regarding trade and use of facilities. But, there we'd run into the councillors' more cynical motive of fearing they'll get in trouble for not taking care of the school when and if it returns to Earth, so they'd never accept such an arrangement. The social commentary here being, eh, pretty self-explanatory.

...

While laboring under her punitive gease, Nozomi realizes that she can see an alternative. A sort of "north star" navigating her away from the school. As she and a reluctant Nagara investigate this, the rebel gravity-warping kid makes a discovery of his own when he verbally attacks sportsbro while being careful not to break any of the written rules. Sportsbro tries to penalty-X him, but to no avail.

Sportsboi breaks down in a fragile, raging, crying mess at the loss of his newfound dictatorial power and physically assaults rebelkid. Only for rebelkid to penalize him with a black X and a compulsion to frog-hop around the school naked.

It turns out that the student council's appointed leader didn't get any special powers from his position. Nor was the X-penalty thing just a random power of his own. Once the rules are established, anyone can invoke them against violators. It's just part of the rules of the black void world.

The power of the state as an institution is genuinely, impersonally honest and transparent in this world. The laws are applied consistently across class and political boundaries by impartial forces that anyone with sufficient knowledge of the law can invoke.

It's...honestly laboratory-perfect conditions for a state to function in idealized form without the corruption and ossification that's always plagued them historically. Unfortunately, these kids are just not up to the task of making the most of it.

As everything starts to break down in what looks like it will be a bloody war, Nozomi and Nagara make a discovery. Nagara has been collecting bird feathers that fall on the school balconies and rooftops. Nozomi reasons that there must therefore be birds overhead, even if the black void is hiding them from view. It turns out that Nozomi has the ability to see that "guiding star" in a direction that leads to more dimensional portals, and that Nagara has the ability to open those portals once she points them out to him.

This discovery of theirs leads to the school being beached in the shallows just offshore from a tropical island.

Initially, they think that they might be back on Earth. But no. These are the seas of another sociology thought experiment world! The name of the island? The commodity form of production.

A previously minor character named Mizuho ends up being the crux of the new conflict. She has the most impressive matter-creation power of the lot. Specifically, she can summon three magical cats (based on her family pets back on Earth) who can deliver absolutely anything to her in packages labeled "nyamazon." Very droll. But anyway! The laws of Coconut Island dictate that any material item given must be compensated or exchanged for another material item. If something is given away for free or stolen, then it will just burn away to nothing in an eruption of blue flames after a few minutes or hours. When people keep getting things from Mizuho, only for those things to then immolate, it leads to an almost literal witchhunt.

It doesn't help that Mizuho has a major grudge against the student council, and is socially awkward in a way that makes her shut down and flee from confrontations.

Once the mystery gets solved (no thanks to creepo nightmare-projecting student council guy, who was trying to use the witchhunt to leverage himself back into power. While speaking very slowly, with an eerie smile and unblinking stare, all the way through. I'm starting to think this kid is like. The devil. Or something), their technomancer rigs up a credit-app that lets them exchange things more or less freely without causing any fires.

Unfortunately, this ends up turning matter-creators (most especially Mizuho, who now has more reason than ever to dislike the rest of the kids and not cut them any breaks) into a privileged class. In order for the credit to actually mean anything material, the non-conjurors need to be constantly doing menial work crafting shit that no one actually wants or needs out of wood and rocks in order to exchange them. Which causes some of them - especially the less liked and more easily missed among them, who have no respite from their drudgery - to experience capitalist alienation. On Coconut Island, this manifests in the form of the person's body turning into a glossy black statue while their mind inhabits a pocket-dimension that resembles an otaku bedroom-cave full of empty consumerist creature comforts.

Where I got up to, Nozomi and Nagara had just found that they can use their combo-planeshifting power to access the mind prisons of these alienated workers. And also discovered that the Twin Peaks-ish curtains surrounding their private depression shelters might be a gateway to a third world, and a third whacky sociology hypothetical that they'll have to deal with.

They've found some other portals since coming to the island, but none of the worlds they discovered so far are remotely fit for human habitation. Hopefully, this one will be another exception.


There's a lot more going on in these episodes, but the vast majority of it is just opaque foreshadowing and hints toward preexisting character relationships that don't get their payoffs or reveals yet. As such, while I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, I don't think there'd be anything for me to say about the stuff in question unless I also watch the rest of the series. What I've analysed is the material from episodes 1-3 that stands on its own.

Notably, toward the end of episode 3 there's some indications that at least a few of the kids had forewarning about what was going to happen before their school started plane-shifting. And also that some of them may have even had their powers manifest before the shifting started. What this may imply about Nozomi and Nagara's roles in all this, I don't yet know.

Creepo hypnosis student council kid definitely knows more than he's letting on though, that's for damned sure. Everything about this little shit screams "if someone is calling for lifeboat ethics, there's a good chance they're the one who sank the ship."

Bizarre, and hard to follow, but an interesting little show that includes some low-level civics education.