Careful what you wish for…?
So how might the syndrome tie into Mai’s arc? Well, as she explains to Sakuta, she has been a celebrity since she was a little kid, and it has taken a toll on her. She doesn’t seem to enjoy the limelight, and she starts opening up to Sakuta after he shoos an annoying fan away. The burden of stardom is a big reason why she quit and tried to become a regular high schooler in the first place.

This could be a monkey’s paw situation, where she wishes to be free from the public eye, and her wish is granted in the most extreme way possible: by slowly making the entire world forget about her until she can’t talk to anyone. Lots of dramatic irony, and it lets her realize that she didn’t hate her fame in the first place.

Except, did she ever want this to happen? When we first meet her, she seems to have been dealing with the invisibility episodes for a while. She treats it with a melancholy indifference. We never know what happened the first time she experienced it. Did she have a private party like Taylor Swift? She doesn’t seem like the type. Besides, what she really wanted was to wrestle control of her life back from her mother, and her invisibility has little to do with that conflict.

There’s also very little concrete textual evidence that she ever made a wish that went bad. Adolescence Syndrome seems to be like an illness caused by external pressure or internal pain/conflict. Not by getting screwed by an asshole genie.

And again, we run into the same core problem: the solution – Sakuta yelling at his schoolmates – is completely removed from the cause – Mai’s misguided wish to be unnoticed. There’s nothing to indicate that everyone at school wouldn’t forget about her after a night’s sleep, except that the storyline served its purpose.

Because in the end, it wasn’t about her or her issues, was it?