If you’re reading on past this paragraph I’m assuming that you’ve either finished the first episode or at least know what happens in it. It’s pretty much impossible to describe the show without giving away things that happen in the first episode, but I’ll avoid spoiling anything beyond that.
If someone had come up with the idea of ‘moe horror’ I would have regarded it with the same suspicion that I would regard a ‘death-game harem’, or a ‘mecha romance’. It’s all well and good in theory, but if you try to keep a consistent tone while staying true to the concept you’re inevitably going to wind up with too much ‘harem’ and not enough ‘death-game’, or too much ‘moe’ and not enough ‘horror’ (or, to continue with the analogy, some really inorganic character development). To balance out the conflicting themes in this instance you really need some sort of excuse to violently flip between a light-hearted slice of life show and a dark post-apocalyptic horror without breaking the audience’s immersion. Fortunately, one method to making this strange transition between completely different tones work resides under Yuki’s cat-ear beanie. With what comes across as either complete insanity or a pathological determination to keep things happy and light-hearted, Yuki manages to get the other characters to forget about their situation, which in turn lulls the audience into that same sense of security. With such a setup, flipping the show back into a horror is as simple as cutting away from the mood Yuki has created.
We soon discover that the show’s title is a clever pun in more ways than one. ‘Gakkougurashi’ follows the daily lives of a cast of mostly schoolgirls that are quite literally living at a school, flipping between their attempts to have fun and enjoy their lives on a day-to-day basis, on the one hand, and showing how each of them found themselves in such a situation, on the other.
A significant portion of ‘School-Live!’ is spent on flashbacks, showing events that led up to their current situation. This approach takes away from the tangible sense of threat, but has the advantage of bringing the oh-so-rational Miki into the first episode (which is an amazing thing for people that aren’t a huge fan of Yuki). It’s a trade-off and a departure from the source material, which unfortunately leads to a few minor plot holes being ripped open from the fabric of the narrative. Given the context of the narrative presented, I was happy for them to spend plenty of time showing how the situation had come to be the way it was. That’s where most of the excitement of this setting should reasonably come from given the nature of the show. Once our protagonists have managed to find safety, the plot as it is generally needs to rely on their desperation or stupidity to inject any new threat into the narrative without the audience losing immersion, so focusing on the lead-up to their situation was a good idea overall.
The characters vary widely in personality traits and outlook, and you’ll likely find that at least one of them has a mentality you can gel with. The power dynamic and relationships between the girls are multifaceted and interesting mainly because of what they represent. Yuuri holds an unspoken and uncontested authority over the group as a pre-designated maternal leader, Kurumi is a hot-headed badass that quickly resorts to violence, Yuki is a psychotic and emotionally manipulative idealist, Miki is a stoic and cold-shouldered pessimist, and Megu-nee is very similar to that clumsy yet lovable substitute teacher you likely once had: she panics, falls over, and drops things, and is ignored far too often by her students when they don’t need her help. From that melting pot of conflicting ideals and character archetypes comes a series of friendships built from necessity; built upon the cornerstone that is the hardship of their desperate situation.
There’s a sense of self-awareness maintained in the writing throughout, whether it’s (quite literally) pointing to other works that it has drawn inspiration from (such as the movie ‘I am Legend’ and the novels of Stephen King), or lampshading apparent plot contrivances by having the characters ask questions the audience were themselves wondering about (viz. why is this school so oddly well prepared for what happened?). This is one of the biggest strengths of the show and a huge part of why I’m comfortable giving it a high score. The writers clearly knew the artistic context of what they were doing and had a reasonable sense of how the audience would react to what they were seeing.
The art of ‘28 Moes Later’, however, was an unfortunate stumbling block that marred the show in some respects. I’m not against the ‘moe’ art design and see nothing intrinsically wrong with it (except that it’s being used so often in modern anime that any departure from it feels like a breath of fresh air). The problem is moments of laziness and inconsistency that were obvious enough to be distracting: the characters are occasionally drawn out of proportion or with slightly misplaced features. It’s not something I would normally bring up, but it’s an obvious bad sign when such mistakes are even apparent to people that aren’t looking for them.
I briefly mentioned before that this show had departed from the source material in several respects. Some of these changes were worse than others. The inclusion of Miki in the first episode was a reasonably appropriate change from the manga; however, cutting out most of Miki’s character development by simplifying her backstory was a strange decision. If only they hadn’t included multiple episodes worth of drawn out sequences of events that did nothing to further the plot (viz. filler), we could have at the very least blamed the restrictions in episode length and number for biting the source material in the backstory! Speaking of backsides, that’s about how abruptly (and awkwardly) this show segues into fanservice. The artistic direction panders to its audience in this regard to the point where it gets in the way of the plot; the writers of the show seemed to hold contempt for the idea that there are only so many appropriate times and places for panty shots or getting changed into bikinis. Fortunately these moments don’t tend to occur in conjunction with the more ‘dark’ scenes, a plot contrivance that I’m more than happy to forgive when faced with the alternative (a brutal deconstruction in more ways than one). Suffice to say, if you’re put off by unnecessary fanservice you may find a few scenes cringeworthy. Most of it is well within the bounds of plausible deniability though, so it’s fair to bet that you won’t find it worth dropping the show over.
Back to the positives, the OP of this series is a blast! Each episode the opening video is slightly (or dramatically) altered so that it’s full of Easter eggs and little pieces of foreshadowing. One of the fun things about following along with the show week by week as it aired was seeing the community pore over all the minor details and changes, most of which I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise! The ending songs ranged from ‘boring enough to skip’ to ‘delivering emotional crits’, depending on how well you’ve connected with the characters.
‘Night of the Living Lolis’ is in some respects what you make of it, which is fitting given that one deeper theme brought up in the show is about the extent to which one can construct their own reality, and to what extent this functions as a tool for overcoming adversity. It’s a theme that’s there, but the onus is on the viewer to engage with that theme if they want to. No direct questions and answers about these things are thrust in the audience’s face, but how you engage with the aforementioned ideas will be made clear from what you think of the characters that espouse respective opinions on those same ideas through their conduct.
After a middle arc easily described as wading through treacle, the final arc of ‘GG’ regains focus and the plot starts to lunge forward to an exciting conclusion, quelling any fears that the setting had been forgotten about. How much of an impact this show will have on you will come down in part to how willing you are to forgive plot contrivances due to being invested in the characters, although in your judgement of such things you’ll often be less disappointed if you give the writers the benefit of the doubt. For what it’s worth, rape alarms are that loud, rusty metal is that weak, generators do make noise, and shovels are heavy.
If ‘not judging a book by its cover’ has equivalents in anime, one could be ‘not judging a show by its genre’. And while it certainly wasn’t many of the animators, at least someone from Lerche genuinely tried to make this work. At a first glance, Gakkougurashi! looks like the result of moe creeping into ever more unfitting genres and settings, but thanks to the great writing it truly showed signs of life even when it should have by all rights been dead on its feet.
