Instead of the paper I should be writing...
Hey, all! I know it's been a long time, so I decided I needed to post something.
In case y'all didn't know, I got rather into anime in the past few years. It's a fun medium that is vastly different from its American counterpart in that it didn't originate from comedy. Traditionally, American animation is comedic: You get Loony Toons, Animaniacs, and a whole host of others that I can't think of right now. On the other hand, Japanese anime has been used in every genre imaginable from an early age, being heavily based in the already-established medium of Manga. I'm not saying that all American animation is comedy or that all Japanese Anime is better than American Animation: I'm just talking about the traditional origins. That said, I'm going to talk a bit about an Anime I finished watching recently.
A while back, a friend of mine recommended Non Non Biyori to me as a fun little slice-of-life anime. I watched it in about a month, and noticed about halfway through that one of the characters suffered from midrange ADHD. The episode goes something like this:
Character 1 does something obnoxious and dangerous, her mother yells at her, she runs away with her sister and has flashbacks to when this has happened before. She comes to terms with herself and goes home at the end of the day.
All of the things she did, she rationalized with something I recognise from my experience with ADHD: "It was there, what did you expect?" It struck me really close to home, but what really hit it home was the mother's reaction. The first time we see the mother react to Char 1's antics, the mother explodes in anger. It seems like the easily-angered-mother archetype, but if you look at it from the angle of having a child with ADHD, it makes perfect sense. Since Char 1 was little, her mother had to deal with all of the shit she got into to the point where even harmless antics get the same treatment as dangerous games. If you've ever had to deal with someone who has severe ADHD, you probably know what I'm talking about.
I'm really tired and kind of talking in circles. Point is, I like the way Non Non Biyori worked with ADHD. Good night.
