Review of School Days

*SPOILERS AHEAD* If I had to use one word to describe School Days, it would be "baffling". I found myself at a loss for words all throughout the series for various reasons, but now I'll try to find all those words that I've lost and arrange them into a review. So, here we go: I decided to watch this show because I've heard that it was bad, and I wanted to get some laughs at lousy editing or a poorly written story. However, I got something completely different than I'd anticipated. It started off just like any cheesy school romance anime, and although it was exactly whatI thought it was going to be, I found it really... boring. Makoto and Kotonoha's relationship wasn't going anywhere, it was just a vicious cycle: Makoto does something stupid, Kotonoha gets rightfully scared/angry, he has to apologize with the help of Sekai, they get back together. Repeat for four episodes. Nothing groundbreaking, but I wasn't exactly seeing why people were calling it trash, either.

And then, the inevitable happened.

After Makoto started cheating on Kotonoha, I felt that the story really picked up, and it turned from a school romance into a psychological drama. It was really heartbreaking and hard to watch how head-over-heels Kotonoha had become about her boyfriend, just before he started cheating on her pretty intensively. From that point on, the anime turned into a story about three completely normal characters gradually losing themselves and giving in to their urges. Sekai going from feeling genuine guilt and trying to break off the affair to being open and vocal aout the fact that she is seeing Makoto. Kotonoha constantly denying the obvious fact that her relationship is only in her head, leading to a complete, although silent, mental breakdown. And shy, awkward Makoto turning into a womanizer who only sees girls as sexual opportunities.

That being said, let's talk about other characters. I can honestly say that I hated every single character except for Kotonoha and maybe Kuroda (and Kokoro, but I don't think she really counts). Makoto was a piece of shit, as stated before, and Sekai was just as bad. The side characters were also just really shitty people. Setsuna pissed me off in particular, blindly worshipping her friend and hurting Kotonoha so much I suffered second-hand heartbreak. The gang of bullies around Otome was similar, teasing the poor girl for seemingly no reason other than the fact that their clique leader wanted to essentially steal her "boyfriend". The short-haired basketball club girl was basically an extension of that bully gang, but she had even fewer reasons to justify her actions. And Sawanaga, although coming off as a perfectly fine comic relief character at the beginning, just straight up raped one of our mains and neither suffered consequences nor felt any remorse. This is truly the most abysmal cast I have ever seen. But you know what? It actually served the show well. It was a unique experience not rooting for any of the characters, and it made watching this anime something heavy and memorable. I would rather have characters I hate than characters I am indifferent to, at least I got some involvement out of wishing them a bad ending.

School Days is about how low humans can get if they overlook the feelings of others, and the dire consequences selfish actions may have. And I am already feeling the dire consequences that watching this had on me. There were many moments that made me squint my eyes at how ridiculous they were, for example the existence of a room where you go to have sex during the school festival, with a person overseeing who goes in it. I sure do wonder how the teachers are ok with this, since it's hidden in plain sight so there's no way they don't know about it. Also, the writing really did turn into a porn plot at some points. Makoto having sex with everything that moves became tiring pretty fast, but I guess it was necessary to set up his change of personality. They also tried to dabble in comedy, which may have been at least a bit funny if I didn't hate the characters involved. The opening sounded like something out of a middle school disco for me, but hey, that's not exactly a bad thing. However, I wish they'd changed the smiling faces of the main three in the animation, they just didn't feel right after certain events.

Overall, it's a 6/10. It's not as bad as some say it is, but I couldn't bring myself to give it a higher score either. It was a heavy show for me, I definitely did not enjoy watching it, but I feel like it was not meant to be enjoyed. I appreciated the story, and it will definitely stick with me for a while, due to the emotional exhaustion I felt combined with the downright bad aspects of the show that I mentioned before. School Days is a hard-hitting, unique and memorable show that I absolutely never want to watch again.