School Days

I’ll admit that I like to watch an occassional romance. When I saw School Days, I thought I’d give it a watch since it’s been awhile since I saw a romance. The anime starts up like one…

Makoto Ito begins as an innocent and naive guy who many girls crush on. He has a crush on Kotonoha Katsura, a reserved shy girl who rides the same train to high school.  Sekai Saionji sits beside Makoto and decides to help him out with meeting Kotonoha.

All pretty standard romance. As one would expect, things get complicated. Sekai starts to fall for Makoto but doesn’t wish to break up the new couple. She continues to help the clueless Makoto with what girls want from  a guy…

It’s hard to review a romance without giving too much away. Only School Days isn’t entirely a romance. As the anime continues, things shift from relationship hijinks and teenage confusion to darker strains of sexual addiction, manipulation, insanity, and violence.

Makoto is a dumbass in the beginning. An innocent dumbass that makes me angry as a male. That angry only gets worse. His drastic character change through the story is extreme and rather unbelievable.He becomes downright evil.

School Days is a dark satire of more traditional romance. Makoto begins as the typical leading male character but shifts to a parody of sexual impulsiveness and manipulation. He doesn’t see anything wrong with it either. The women in the show are …extremely sexual… and use their bodies to get who they want. The anime examines what happens when impulses are thoughtlessly followed.

Situations just keep getting worse until the screwed up cresendo.

The animation quality was noticably lower than what I am used to. Backgrounds were generic, and characters often lacked detail. However, sometimes the quality and camera angles were very well done. This mostly appears at the latter half of the anime.  The ending sequence was especially creepily well done.The first half of the anime strives to be generic all around it seems.

School Days has an equally dim view of both males and females. The males are perverts and sex addicts. The girls are slutty and manipulative. I guess the anime can serve as a warning about following impulses, but it is so extreme the characters are unbelievable and flat. Sekai and Konoha were the only characters I could feel anything about…for awhile. I just wanted to strangle Makoto for emboding the degrading male stereotypes out there.  The entire flow of the anime makes sense when I found it was based on a visual novel with various endings.

School Days leaves the viewer feeling degraded and even a little dirty. There isn’t any balancing influences: no parents, teachers, or families. There is just one bad decision after another. School Days doesn’t really leave the viewer with anything at the end: only a messed up final scene…

…and a general bad taste in the mouth. It really is an unpleasant anime.