Review of School Days
It is spring at last, a sunny Monday morning: the breeze feels cool on your skin, the cherry blossoms have bloomed, filling the surroundings with their sweet, acidic, smell; gently caressing all your senses, while you listen to your favorite morning playlist. You have just boarded the train to school when, suddenly, she appears. She dashes towards the train, barely making it through the closing doors, scraping through their thin gap. You observe her quietly, enchanted by her beauty, as she bends down to catch her breath. She lifts her head and your eyes finally meet. You both instinctively look away right when the trainstarts moving again. At that moment, while pressuring yourself to avoid eye contact, you know she was the one; the first love had blossomed.
Whether you believe it or not that’s what it felt like watching the opening scene of School Days: it had this soothing effect you would expect from the beginning of a romance anime. In a sense you could even call it healing. Based on that, it seemed like the typical High School Romance with a bit of ecchi in there too. Nevertheless, it was intriguing enough to keep its viewers hooked, wondering how everything will turn out. Eventually though, it becomes noticeable that after a certain point, the tone that was building up suddenly shifts. The darkness that was lurking beneath the surface exposes its true colors to crush every unsuspecting viewer’s dreams of a feel good romance.
School Days never disappointed anyone in terms of shock value or crazy plot twists, rather, it sacrificed every other aspect of a decent Drama/Romance for the sake of them. If it wasn’t evident by this point in the review, this anime prides itself in "the darkness within" trope: surprising its audience with unexpected plot twists in order to disguise itself as generic on first glance. It manages to do this in a pretty “shocking” way to say the least; a shockingly disastrous way. When following this theme it’s sensible to progressively reveal the darker storyline over the course of a few episodes -maybe with some subtle foreshadowing- in order to keep the audience engaged. However, nothing of the sort happens.
School Days, decides to throw all that trashy conventional theory nonsense out the window and instead have the protagonist get kissed on the cheek once and have that be the cause of his unraveling. Genuinely, it was as if he became a completely different person. After that scene his personality instantly shifted from an anxious social reject to an edgy sex champion playboy. This change not only feels awkward to watch, it is straight up nonsensical. At no point in the story does the protagonist hint at this sort of behavior. He consistently acted with an entirely different persona that you could even call a bit timid or introverted. This was all just thrown at the audience as a fact they were meant to accept.
As a side note I am not even going to comment on how all the characters are completely unlikeable and impossible to root for or how the plot is a complete clusterfuck of random ideas the author threw at a wall to see what sticks or heck. As I mentioned previously every good aspect of writing was sacrificed for shock value, so there is literally nothing else noteworthy to analyze. School Days's plot and characters are a total mess with no appealing traits whatsoever. It’s honestly a disgrace that this show was aired on live TV with no trigger warnings.
TL;DR: Overall I can say with full confidence that I wouldn’t even recommend this anime to my worst enemy. The only reason I was able to persist and finish all twelve episodes -rating it a two instead of a one- was because I was watching with a friend for a challenge. They were re-watching and I bet they had a great time witnessing my live chat reactions. I made sure they were as vivid and authentic as possible. If you’re insisting on watching this make sure you bring your med-kit, your trashcan, maybe some pain killers and a friend; trust me you will need them.
Note: Watched this show earlier this year, but never got around to post this review. Finally decided to post it anyway.
Thank you very much for reading!