School Days is infamous for its extremely dark ending and despicable protagonist, but what most people don’t understand about School Days is *why* it has them. The answer to that is because it’s meant to be a deconstruction of the harem genre—or, more accurately, the galgame genre, as it’s adapted from a visual novel. And therein lies the kicker.
Part of why School Days fails is that it is a visual novel adaptation.
The main character, one Makoto Itou, is someone meant clearly for audience projection. You, the assumed male target audience, are meant to imagine yourself as him. In fact, his personality varies wildly depending on your choices in the VN because he is not a real person; he’s an audience insert. So, bringing that to the silver screen is immediately less effective.
Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible for audience-inserts to work outside of interactive mediums. There are plenty of audience inserts in television and other non-interactive mediums out there, and they have proven to be effective at drawing in an audience (if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have dozens of mass-produced isekai cheat-skill slave harem light novel schlock every season). What I *am* saying is that it does not work for School Days, as not only is it adapted from a visual novel, but it’s adapted from a visual novel where *your choices matter.* When bad things happen to Makoto Itou as a consequence of his actions, they’re actually bad things happening to *you,* as consequences of *your* actions, because the story is sending a harsh anti-infidelity message to you, the player, directly.
When bad things happen to Makoto Itou as a result of your choices, you think, “damn, I guess I should have chosen to stay faithful.” When bad things happen to Makoto Itou as a result of *his* choices, you think “man, this guy fucking sucks.”
And, of course, it’s certainly not impossible to deliver your story’s message by way of having a character who does bad things who you’re not supposed to emulate who makes the audience think “wow, fuck this guy.” Just the opposite, in fact. Generally, most works of fiction aiming to send some sort of message require a bad guy who does terrible things in order to do so. However, it only comes off as effective if this bad guy was written as a complex, meaningful villain from the get-go. Makoto Itou was not initially written as a complex, meaningful villain. He was written as a blank-slate audience insert.
When a character does bad things, you are supposed to find it compelling and interesting. You’re supposed to think “wow, what an intriguing antagonist!” Makoto Itou does not make anybody feel that way. Rather, he instills a violent rage in everyone who sees him because he is nothing but unpleasant to watch on screen. His villainy is not compelling or interesting; it just makes me wonder why I’m watching a guy do terrible things for no reason.
I wouldn’t even call his descent from amicable, friendly guy to sex-addicted woman abuser interesting either, because, as an audience insert, he had absolutely nothing going for him before his descent. The only thing he had going for him was being a vessel for the player’s choices and now he isn’t. He is an absolutely nothing character.
However, this is not the only reason why being a VN adaptation makes it fail. The other reason is that the VN sucks too.
School Days is an eroge. It is a porn game first and foremost. This takes away from its message. When you are focused on providing trashy porn to your audience first, any moral message immediately gets lost (and yes, the hentai scenes *are* trashy. I’ve seen them). Like, why is this fucking seedy hentai game telling me not to cheat? Lmao.
If it only had tasteful eroge scenes, I could be more on board, but that is not the case.
The fact that it’s adapted from an eroge is blatantly obvious with the high amounts of fanservice present. Sorry, I couldn’t hear that moral message you’re screaming at me, I was too distracted by the bouncing boobs and panty shots.
And at the end of the day, I just can’t take a message about the mistreatment of women seriously when it’s trapped under layers upon layers of the male gaze. It doesn’t respect women enough to send this message; it hasn’t earned it. This is an erotic story for men about the abuse of women pretending it’s not trashy as all hell by dropping an anvil on your head about how cheating is bad. If you’re going to be trashy, at least own it.
I think the biggest example of how the men making this game clearly don’t actually care about or understand women well enough to send this message is that there’s an almost *random* rape scene at the beginning of episode ten for absolutely no reason. It adds nothing to the story and could be removed without consequence. It’s there for cheap, quick sympathy for poor Kotonoha. Because the female characters in School Days aren’t really people. They’re objects for the audience’s desire/pity who sometimes get violent to drive home how bad cheating on your girlfriend is. It’s moe before it’s a message.
The worst part about it is that I *love* the idea of a violent, dark deconstruction of harems/galgames about how damaging cheating can be. Unfortunately, School Days is too busy being dominated by the male gaze.
That being said, there actually *is* one thing about it that the masses are correct about hating:
Pacing.
The show drops pretty much no hints that it’s going to deconstruct the genre until you're well over halfway through the show, which is much too long. Before that point, it’s a regular love triangle school romance. It’s not until you’re over six of the twelve episodes into the show that it even starts dropping *hints* that it’s actually more sinister—and even then it’s still misleading. Based on the previous five episodes, the tone shift in episode six reads more just like a romantic scandal par-for-the-course in a drama series rather than any sign it’ll go in a horror direction.
And even still, the dark tone isn’t totally clear by episode six. If you’re being generous (or rather, trusting), it’s not 100% clear for three more episodes.
It isn’t until the very end of episode *nine* that it becomes clear Makoto isn’t just a flawed protagonist but an irredeemable character, and it’s not until episode *eleven* of *twelve* that his behavior goes from scummy to actual supervillain behavior. He was just an indecisive, horny two-timer for 80% of the show before becoming a full-on womanizing sex maniac in the span of a single episode.
And that feels like straight up tricking the audience. I guess you could argue that Makoto’s horny behavior and two-timing is what foreshadows his sex-crazed villainy, but that alone is not enough to foreshadow the dark things to come when it otherwise looks like a normal romance anime for most of the duration. And not even a good romance anime too! Most of the show is just a mediocre and generic romance anime before it suddenly gets super dark.
And what’s more, even once it picks up a darker tone, the gory ending feels like it essentially comes out of nowhere; a dark tone alone is not enough to foreshadow blood and death. Seriously, I doubt anyone was expecting it to end with bloodshed the way that it did. The violence feels weirdly out of character, even considering his broken the girls are, because it did absolutely nothing to establish either of them, as someone who would do this sort of thing.
Obviously plot twists need time to execute, and things need time to get worse. But I’ve heard many stories of people tricked by this show because it looks like a regular love triangle/harem romance for half of the show if you are skeptical, and 80% of the show if you are generous.
Compare it to its infamous rival, Higurashi, which also plays with the harem VN genre in a gory (albeit completely different) way. Higurashi *opens* with a scene that not only warns you of the gore to come, but uses it as a hook to draw audiences in. After cutting to slice of life shenanigans, it makes sure to once again foreshadow the bloodshed at the end of the first episode, and continues to do so until the big moment. It also has a tonally appropriate OP, as opposed to School Days.
Now, I’m not saying your gory deconstruction needs to start with gore from the get-go, or that the foreshadowing needs to be as obvious as Higurashi’s, but I *am* saying you need to pace it well, (seriously the story shouldn’t wait until it’s well over *halfway* over to even so much as drop a hint that it’s going to be a dark story), and if a character is going to get violent, it needs to feel in-character for them.
Anyways, I figure I might as well end this review with my favorite fact about the School Days franchise, just for fun:
Makoto Itou is canonically bisexual.
I am not joking or exaggerating. In one of the spin-off games, you can make him fall in love with a guy! Granted, it’s mostly just more trashy porn (but this time for people in the otokonoko/trap audience), but he says “aishiteru” while balls deep in a man, so take it as you will. The funniest part is that in this game, Makoto is not the protagonist who is able to wind up on the route of a cute femboy. The *femboy* is the protagonist, and he can end up on *Makoto’s* route. Makoto didn’t get a gay option—he *became* the gay option. Extra funny considering I can’t imagine anyone in the audience wanting to date Makoto since, as I stated before, he was created as a blank slate for audience projection. It should be the other way around. I guess you’re just supposed to ignore that you’re playing as the femboy and not him.
This is the funniest yaoi route to ever exist. Diversity win! The guy who broke the minds of two women by horribly mistreating and cheating on them is bisexual!
If I think about School Days any longer my brain is going to melt.
Remember everyone, it is always correct and moral to slut shame Makoto Itou!
That’s all folks. Have a good night.
