Review of School Days

Macoto took sex for granted and this made him a psycopath. So many women liked him so much that he had no reason to like them back. Why invest love if sex is free? Why be moral if sex is unconditional? Macotos selfishnish comes from his privilege. He has dehumanized himself to fufill his lust because he will have sex with more girls as a savage. Makoto is actually very innocent, not moraly of course, but more deeply in his child-like selfishness and lack of awareness. Kotonoha is traumatized by bullying, loneliness and objectification. Despite her shyness she is tenacious and assertive. When she sees Makotoon the train she fantasizes about being watched by him and this makes her feel less alone. Then this fantasy comes true. This to her feels like she is being saved. When he rejects her she becomes detached from reality as a way of coping with being betrayed by her saviour. After boiling for ages her pure love is evaporated and reduced to a vacant obsession. Because of this emptiness and her nature she never becomes angry, witch makes her even more dangerous, because she is beyond reason and emotion witch makes her unhindered by reality in her drive.

Sekai is an insecure romantic thrill-seeker. She looks for intimacy in drama because she feels like love is only valid when its disobedient. And she is never honest because she is scared of being vulnerable so she plays games to get what she wants. As a person who relates to other people trough manipulation, when she could no longer manipulate Makoto she asserted herself in the most dramatic way posible.

Most people seem to hate Makoto. Less people but still some seem to hate Sekai and even Kotonoha. I like them all. They are all young people living their lives to the fullest with completelly unrestrained passion despite the fact that two of them have serious psycological limitations. Passion has no morality. Believing that it does is the deepest form of repression because it controls us when we our at our highst, unlike just following mundane rules every day unquestioningly, like a student, witch is much more shallow because you probabily dont have that much better to do anyway and you probabily dont even believe in it even if you dont think about it. I respect passion more than morality because morality wouldent allow Makoto intimacy with 8 girls, and societies payment for that restraint is not worth it.

When several who are high in passion and low in social consideration get together it often ends in tragedy because usually these two tipes of people keep eachother in balance. The restrained people control the passionate people, and the passionate people liberate the restrained people, allowing them both to enjoy the benefits and minimize the risks of freedom. But when three people of one of these two dispositions get together and they love eachother, if they are all restrainded nothing will happen and they will all regret it, and if they are all passionate its a recipe for disaster.

I think their personalities are well crafted on paper but I dont think they are that well executed. The pace is always either to slow or to abrupt. Lots of it feels like filler. Lots of time was spent on unnecessary things that could have been used, not to further develop the characters, because I think they were complex and we were able to understand them, but to show it more. This anime, untill Kotonoha starts losing it, looks like many other animes that are much worse but it is different in subtle ways and maybe to subtle. Makoto does lots of obviously "bad things" but the rest of the time he doesnt do anything. Im not saying that each step of entropic progress was a jump with no warning or context. It was quite clear something was very unusual and there was potential for lots of violence since the first episode. I might be going to far here but I thought something was off since the moment he took a secret picture of a girl in the train. And then of course it was obvious something was very off when he violently grabbed Sekai and what was even more weird was her underreaction and posibly enjoyment. Im saying it felt to me like there was some levels missing in the middle between the shallow and the deep witch makes lots of it a bit boring and the whole thing not quite come together.

Anyway I watched this anime a weak ago and ive watched lots of anime in between, and this is the impression I remember so if I watch it again I might reconsider. Despite these criticisims, that im not very confident in, I really liked this anime.