Review of School Days

I feel it's time to lay down some truths about School Days. This delightful little anomaly has managed to become infamous, a universally-reviled attempt at adapting a visual novel that is always either condemned as the worst shit ever to grace the screens of viewers or ironically upheld as a cult classic, mockingly praised for being utterly unique. In some ways, I'd agree. In others... Not so much. The truth of the matter is, School Days is actually a fairly inspired, creative and even necessary show. It's also pretty intelligent. It's also horrendously terrible. This review is going to have two halves: first, I'm going to explainthe constantly overlooked importance of School Days, and then I'm going to describe my reaction to actually watching the damn thing. Let's go.

To begin, I'd like to take a moment to talk about harems. Before I got into anime, the concept of a harem was about as outlandish as something like anarchy or cannibalism. A pack of women attached to a single man sounded like something reserved for old-world tyrants or a Spinal Tap album cover. Its almost certainly going to be a toxic, manipulative, dehumanizing experience and anyone who stands in the center and pulls the strings in such a situation is pretty much a textbook villain. Right? Well, turns out, anime found a different way to portray this vile concept, over and over again: a single, heightened immaculate male protagonist who is 1. totally oblivious, and 2. too goddamn nice for his own good, who therefore ends up in a situation where large numbers of females constantly fawn over him and attempt to seduce him while he manages to remain in a perpetual state of ignorance and inaction. Apparently, people like this. It makes them feel important or powerful or magnificent as they step into the shoes of this completely unrealistic dude and get a taste of what it feels like to be simultaneously morally righteous and universally adored. The formula sometimes gets shaken up a bit, sure, like in Steins;Gate, and there are even times where even though its textbook harem I can survive it because it's not the focus of the show, like Bakemonogatari. But the fact of the matter is, I can't think of a single instance where the presence of a harem has ever done anything to improve the investment, creativity, or values of a show. The fact of the matter is, it's a pretty twisted scenario. It's a result of a selfish and manipulative person messing with the insecurities and emotions of a number of other people. Every once in a while we get a show like "The World God Only Knows" which jabs at the lucrative nature of this far-too common story element, but only once did we get something that truly attacked it with all of its might.

Only once did we get School Days.

For all the hate he gets, Makoto Itou is in many ways a more believable character than many of his far more popular counterparts, like Kirito or the beloved Onii-sama. He's a high-school boy who finds himself in a position where a bunch of girls want him at once and he starts fucking as many as he can because he's a sick, borderline-sociopathic spawn of satan. His harem is believable: he leads all of the girls on by showing them attention and compassion whilst simultaneously destroying them because they all know that they aren't anything special to him. He's just a horny womanizer who has no understanding of his emotions and wants to get with people. But YEAH, see, THAT'S HOW HAREMS WORK IN THE REAL WORLD. Unless you live on a commune, if you want to remain the ever-present center of sexual attention in a group of competing girls, you have to be a pretty selfish fucked-up bastard! And if you take part in said circle, it's probably either because you're extremely emotionally insecure and crave compassion of any kind, or because you see this as a good opportunity to get some (for several of the characters in School Days, this is indeed the case.) School Days absolutely despises harems, it hates the genre, it hates the people who feed and support the genre, and it wants to tear back the veil and show people just what it is that they're laughing and blushing over: a disgusting sack of shit. It is the front-runner in the line of attack and an absolutely necessary approach to take if there is to be any hope in ending this idiotic fad.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, this review has two parts.

The positive terms I have so far used to describe School Days are things like 'inspired' 'innovative' and 'necessary'. Notice how I have not once referred to it as 'good'.

This show has some of the worst execution I have ever seen on anything, ever.
It can't hope to ever possibly get its point across. No one is ever going to have the slightest desire to listen to anything that this show has to say, because goddamn Mars of Destruction was directed better than this. I absolutely hated watching this show. It wasn't because I thought that the ideas were bad, it's because how they were presented made it feel like the people behind it had gotten all their knowledge of film from infomercials. I'm pretty sure the artists for this show had about two colors in their palette: grey, and more grey. The character designs are utterly uninspired, to the point where it's difficult to even tell them apart. The animation could be aptly described as "there is none", the soundtrack at its best sounds like it's from a bad sitcom, and those aren't even the biggest issues, not by far. The writing is offensively bad: it reminded me of watching "Maisy" when I was six years old, except those voice actors seemed to grasp the concept of basic emotions like happy and sad rather than sounding like the pre-recorded features of voicemail. I can't even recall a single goddamn line from the show: it's like what happened was beamed directly into my brain so that my mind could forget the terror of the experience of actually watching it. The characters themselves exist for only one of three purposes: 1. to fuck, 2. to be fucked... Wait, did I say three? Whoops. They don't exist as people whatsoever outside of that, which is simply awful character writing as it is difficult for me to empathize with a character whose entire existence can be summarized with the phrase "pork bucket". The pacing reminded me of when I used to play with slinkies and they would get all tangled up and I would just say 'fuck it' and hide them under the bed. This, if anything, did the most damage to the show: watching 11 episodes of pointless womanizing is going to make anyone irrevocably hate what they're watching before they even finish the damn thing, making the point moot. It falls on deaf ears. In the end, that's really the show's undoing: it falls on deaf ears because it's so utterly incompetent at what it does.

While I detested each and every moment of watching this show, I still find myself pleading that we get more shows like it. Sure, it probably couldn't been a worse version of itself, but at least it was A version of itself, as opposed to being another fucking Clannad or Sword Art Online. The harem genre is idiotic, it exists only to appease a shallow and lifeless fan-base, and it needs to go. I don't want to see any more of it. If what that takes is a few more shows like School Days to come in and absolutely brutalize it, then I will accept them with opens arms. The fact of the matter is this, though: if the show isn't executed well, no one's going to care. So please, let's have this concept not be produced by the same people next time?