WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Sonny Boy Episodes 3, "The Cat Who Wore Sandals," now streaming on Funimation.
Three episodes in, Sonny Boy isn't geting any easier to understand. Weird things keep happening, and even the characters involved have trouble determining which weirdness comes from the new world and which weirdness comes from their classmates' new---found superpowers. In Episode 3, "The Cat Who Wore Sandals," the big new mystery, which may be key to understanding other mysteries, is the disappearance of multiple students, all of whom are social outcasts. The portal-finding boy Nagahara and the instant delivery girl Mizuho investigate.
These disappearances aren't just people going missing, but literally disappearing from the island. Their outlines are still visible on there, but inside those outlines, these teens have been replaced with a black void frozen in space. Those who've disappeared haven't been active participants in the class's island society, and Mizuho attributes their disappearances to not pulling their weight in the rules of a capitalist world. However, the fact Mizuho's own powers allow her to get anything out of nothing for no cost from "Nyamazon" cats challenges the idea that this universe is operating under inherently capitalist rules.
The numbers of frozen people keep increasing, with Asakaze and Nozomi discovering more black voids where bodies used to be. Naturally, the question arises whether the freezing was a result of someone's powers. Keeping track of powers is one of the most complicated parts of Sonny Boy, and even Hayato, the boy with E.T.-like glowing fingers who's in charge of keeping track of everyone's abilities, admits there's a lot even he doesn't know, and Nagahara doesn't trust Hayato's list. Despite the show's initial set-up of a conflict between those with powers vs. those without, it seems possible that everyone on the island could have some sort of supernatural ability even if they're unaware of it.
Nagahara and Mizuho discover that one of the frozen people, Kaga, is in a parallel dimension. Nagahara pulls down the sky like it's a curtain and enters this new world, where Kaga is lying on a couch browsing the internet on his phone. When asked to rejoin the group, he refuses and denies that anyone could miss him. The other disappeared people are also content living reclusive hikikomori existences in the curtain worlds, either playing video games, working out or sewing dolls. Nagahara and Mizuho conclude that this forced isolation is just another of the island's rules.
Eventually, Radjani is able to invent technology to suck up the curtain pocket dimensions and return the social outcasts to life among their classmates. Nozomi suspects that Nagahara has powers connected to being able to leap between worlds, which might make him responsible for the school's interdimensional travels in the first place. There's still a lot we don't know about the world and characters of Sonny Boy, and piecing together answers to its biggest mysteries will require utmost attention.
New episodes of Sonny Boy premiere Thursdays on Funimation.
