
a review by ThirtyThree

a review by ThirtyThree
There seems to be a problem with a lot of these "psychological" and "mystery" shows where it looks as if they're trying a bit too hard to make themselves look smart by going overboard with all the symbolism and mystery and shit that it all just seems too confusing and almost nonsensical where you would need to fully analyze everything, watch for every single small detail in hopes of trying to make sense out of whatever the fuck you're seeing and try to get a meaning. Sometimes you can piece everything together and it all makes sense! Sometimes it's just all a bunch of random horseshit that doesn't really mean anything.
Sonny Boy started off simple enough - a bunch of kids getting stranded in some weird ass dimension and no one seems to know how or why. Some of them found themselves with incredible powers, even bending space and reality itself. Just a very simple story of "what happens when you put all these different people together in a confined space with some of them suddenly gaining powers" much like the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. With our quiet MC who seems to have closed himself off of everyone else and seemingly lost the will to live, learning to appreciate life and make friends, growing out of his own box much like a coming-of-age story. Sounds simple enough, great premise.
We even got the appointed leader going crazy with his newfound power and position and starts abusing it and the other students rebelling. Pretty straightforward so far but soon enough it descends into the weird madness that Sonny Boy is. After the first few episodes, things get real weird. They travel to various dimensions with various rules and their own oddities. We found out that there's other groups of students with their own society. Some of them have been here for thousands of years, and there's all sorts of time travel fuckery. I'm sure people with more time and way smarter than me should be able to (try to) figure out what's going on.
For the average viewer, watching Sonny Boy might seem like watching a bunch of random nonsense where you can't understand anything. I know I understood almost nothing. But despite that, I actually found the show extremely entertaining. I'm able to sit through 20 mins of whatever the fuck is going on, and think to myself "that was entertaining." Why? I'm not sure if I can tell myself. Perhaps it's the visuals. The show looks very pretty and all the weird parts are still very entertaining to look at. Perhaps it's the "chill" nature of the show. Watching it just makes me feel relaxed and it just has a very chill atmosphere to it. The coming-of-age story of our MC did seem well done. He's really grown as a person if you compare it to what he was at the start. As for everything else, I can't say much.
Sometimes shows like this end where everything makes sense once you have all the pieces laid out before you. Sometimes it's all just nonsense pretending to be something smart but none of it makes sense. And sometimes there's no real intended meaning but there's enough in there to at least give you something to think about and maybe make a meaning for yourself. Maybe none of it really means anything and it is indeed all just pretentious bullshit but if you can get something out of it, at the end of the day, isn't that what really matters?
If you watch this, I'm sure you that you will at least get something out of it, whatever that may be...
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