The shortest summary I can give for how I feel about this is that they made me cry really hard to fucking math rock. My actual feelings, while not as fantastically deep as some other works, are slightly more nuanced.

Sonny Boy’s greatest strength is its ability to maintain its paradoxical tones: free-form, boundary-pushing technical achievement to tell a narrative that is exceedingly universal and, bluntly, archetypical; nostalgic trappings making something perfectly representative of the Reiwa era. A soundscape, lacking an OP entirely, focused heavily on ambient sound gives way to multiple and varied insert songs. Its surrealist bent delights in teaching its cast the paradox and illogic of our boring world, and many of its episodic plots are self-defeating or just askew enough to draw questions towards its meaning, if it even has any.

Each episode’s plot positions itself loudly in the foreground while having the cast quietly realize something about themselves or the people around them, often in ways that completely defeat the purpose of the “A” plot as delivered - with a personal favorite being the tenth episode, breaking one of the show’s rules with how it delivers exposition for heartwrenching payoff.

The show picks up emotional heft massively with its last two episodes, but prior to this I feel its low-key approach to characterization and growth harms my attachment to its cast, rather than heightening it. Its universal coming-of-age beats, ensemble cast, and lunatic scope afford it little time to give meaningful time to the majority of the cast, with even characters given an episode to show themselves off being forgotten and ultimately one-note.

This off-kilter character focus is sharpened with the tonal and narrative shift brought with the second half, where the series sets its sights on simply separate subjects; one entire wing of the cast disappears and, when brought back up, are almost unrecognizable. Part of my frustration with this show is my inability to tell whether my criticism is some grand thematic statement - in life, people drift and sometimes the stories you hear about them, no matter how grandly told, simply don’t live up to whatever you’d hoped. Its narrative structure reflects first discovering the rules of the game, then beginning your first steps into being a player - and, just as in life, disappointment is inevitable.

Despite this, one respects the intertwining of realism with surrealism, both disappointing and dazzling in equal measure - both sides of that coin rarely make for a good traditional narrative, and Sonny Boy is unafraid to remind you of that. The grandest explorations of the inner and outer worlds ultimately can’t change much - that comes with a perspective that takes time to build - but, somehow, can’t be formed just with the passage of time. It’s committed to this theme, repeatedly saying it in every episode, and yet it still feels off.

I really can’t overstate how much the music fucks, how much the (broadly applicable) themes affect me, and how much I cried in the last two episodes. It’s very near to an all-time favorite of mine. However, the same distance with which it respectfully treats its cast also separates me from really grooving with the show as a whole - it coheres satisfyingly, but its own maturation comes a little too late to be fully appreciated. Which is in keeping with the themes, I guess.