Review of School Days

I watched this show for a bad anime binge, but to be honest, I really like it. That isn't to say School Days hasn't earned some of the derision around it. Aside from the general failure to fulfill its harem comedy premise (which I'll discuss in a minute), School Days has a lot of issues with its technical quality; it has this weird, wandering camera that makes half its shots look focused on the wrong details, almost all of the characters have intense same-face syndrome, the pacing is insane and the plot is bogged down by a combination of incomprehensible teenage decision-making and utterly glossed-overleaps in logic. Where are these kids' parents, by the way? Or teachers? Or the police?

I would be more comfortable calling School Days traditionally "good" if it ever gave us a clear sense of why its characters behave the way they do, but as things stand, we're just forced to accept that they do outrageous things simply out of impulse, lust or loneliness. There are a lot of elements of this show that just feel... incomplete. Why is Makoto so pathologically incapable of taking responsibility for his actions? Why is Kotonoha so desperate for his attention? Sekai is the most well-developed character of the bunch, but even she is shrouded in questions - why does she work for some kind of Hooters bar at age 16? Why does she go to the roof when Kotonoha asks in the last episode? Why does she have so few friends when people generally seem to like her? Why does she ever trust Makoto again after he ignores her saying "no"? I spent a lot of this show asking what on earth these characters were thinking, and that's not a good thing.

That said, though, I was engaged throughout all of it. I was invested enough in these characters to *want* answers to my questions. And, to some extent, Kotonoha and Sekai are redeemed as characters because of how we're invited to participate in their experience - to be validated by each acknowledgment from Makoto, to be swept up in the contest to "win" him, and to increasingly resent him for being inaccessible. By the time the anime reaches its famous climax, we may not have a total grasp on anyone's internal logic or backstory, but we absolutely feel what they are feeling. And, to me, the ability to evoke a real emotional experience can override a lot of technical failures.

This show had a very ambitious idea. To take the basic building blocks of a harem comedy and make a psychological thriller is an enormously difficult task, because harem comedies are written completely differently; School Days wants to hide under the guise of a harem show as long as possible, and so necessarily prevents itself from delving deep into character motivation or developing the tense atmosphere a psychological thriller usually needs. Instead it must drive audiences to a violent ending with only the light, low-stakes atmosphere and the occasional cutesy character moments typical of harems.

I think the show is a much better watch with these constraints in mind. What School Days does really, really well is taking all the stereotypical elements of one genre and recontextualizing them into something different. It replaces the interiority and psychological depth of a drama with the pure emotional self-identification of a harem show; it replaces the dense, creepy atmosphere of a thriller with the dissonantly upbeat trappings of a comedy. The horrifying last episode is what's best remembered about this show - and the final episode is genuinely disturbing - but what makes it unique is how it finds a new, interesting path to get there.

Anyway, I don't think it would be fair to pretend that School Days is a misunderstood masterpiece - it's plenty flawed - but I do think it's unironically worth the watch. Most notorious "bad anime" are bad because they lack originality, inspiration or memorability. School Days, if nothing else, has all three.