School Days is a detestable show with a story and characters that makes you want to smash a wall, until the ending lets you cheer with sadistic glee, providing you with some of the strongest catharsis possible.
However, when rating an anime one should be aware of its genre and what it is trying to achieve. Let us actually look at what School Days’ intentions were. It is a tragedy about characters spiraling down into depraved debauchery, making a statement about human selfishness and venomous relationships, and it succeeds in that regard. It pushes the limits on its themes and plot in ways most shows wouldn’t dare to do, mainly because some of the things that happen are just plain offensive. Unlike most tragedies it does not try to make you cry, but rather make you angry. It uses psychological means to bring that feeling out, with a bit of well-deserved shock-factor toward the end. If the intention was to make the viewer feel negative, should you rate it low for making you feel that way, or rate it high for succeeding in what it wanted to do?
Where I do think the anime becomes less effective is when it tries to delve into the motivations of the characters, because it wants to act as a twisted mirror of humanity so bad, yet most of the time the characters are forced to act like assholes for the sake of being assholes. Only once does it discuss something of weight, which would be self-entitlement and how it causes relationships to crash when we are trying to earn love in dishonest ways.
My heart is telling me to give this the lowest of the low, yet my brain acknowledges that it deserves praise for pulling out all those emotions from me, while at least trying to make some smaller points. Overall, it deserves recognition, but it needed more heart in order for it to be truly worth the cringing it puts you through.
Stay in school, don’t do drugs, prevent forest-fires, say no to cheating, and please just be honest about your feelings when in a relationship folks.
