Review of Shiki

I thought it's a mediocre story after watching first 9 episodes and skipped right to the last episode. And later I completed the rest of the series, and I'm so glad that I did. I would give the first half 7 out of 10, and the second half 9 out of 10. Story/Ideology and Characters The first half is simply story telling, and some characters of the episodes are pretty immature, like Megumi or Masao (Honestly, this guy is one of the most stupid characters in the series, although he's a tragedy himself.) The second half brought into light many interesting issues. Like how people areunwilling to accept an unintuitive fact that they are not willing to accept, whether killing shiki is a "justice" thing to do, and how people start to murder those innocent, including Muroi's mother etc. Also it later reveals the reason why Muroi attempted to commit suicide. It's a reason I can completely relate to.

Toshio and Muroi have two typical and completely different reaction to the situation. One is to hunt down every shiki, and the other admits that killing others in order to keep one alive is of course not right, yet not wrong either. "Killing is never justice, no matter what kind of noble cause one upholds." Sunako also pointed out that death treats everything equally and that there is no death that is not terrible. I think the audience probably also can be divided by their preference of the two opinions. The two types are pretty extreme. Most people may fall somewhere between the two.

Music

Music is not very impressive in my opinion. I watched the BD episodes with Japanese audio, but the background music gets cut off sometimes...The OST does fit the series, but it's simple (Simplicity itself is not bad. It's the music that's not great.), not something that would surprise people.

Two bonus episodes

The bonus episodes are pretty good. Usually bonus episodes of an anime are about something not so related to main story and are completely extra, but it's not the case here. Episodes 20.5 and 21.5 are great side stories from viewpoints of two people living in the village.

Hasegawa in episode 20.5 directly points out the brutality and unnaturalness of the fact that most people behave incredibly cool towards killing shiki, not treating them as humans at all, kill humans who are just sucked and take that for granted. Arguably they're doing it just to protect themselves, but Shiki kill humans to protect themselves too. How're they so different from Shiki after all?

Episode 21.5 is about how a woman gets crazy, due to the death of her family and the whole situation. It's nice to have the episodes, since most people behave quite normally and it's not weird to have some people go crazy given what they've experienced.

Overall it's a great story that brings up interesting questions.