School Days (Spoilers)

When you think of harem-anime, you think of some guy living with bunch of pretty girls for no particular reason. The cast includes all kind of compulsory character types, such as tsundere, silent girl and so on. The plot is usually something stupid like saving the world from whatever is threatening it, the guy helping the girls to solve their personal issues or just having fun together with little or no story.

School Days is based on an eroge, so it can’t avoid having at least some harem-ish elements. The protagonist is an ordinary high school student, Makoto Itou. He is secretly having a crush on Kotonoha Katsura, a girl he travels to school with. Sekai Saionji, a girl who’s sitting next to Makoto helps him to get closer to Kotonoha. With Sekai as the matchmaker, Makoto and Kotonoha get to know each other and start dating. However, things ain’t that simple: by the end of the first episode Sekai kisses Makoto and acts as if nothing happened.

Following three paragrapsh contain major spoilers so skip them if you don’t wanna have the rest of the story spoiled.

The situation slowly gets worse and worse as Sekai, who is teaching Makoto how to be with girls lets him do whatever he wants. While Kotonoha, who’s really shy and restrained, won’t let Makoto do what he wants and Makoto, the man whose brains are located somewhere around his crotch decides to dump her and start dating with Sekai. Kotonoha is still claiming that she’s his girlfriend, but soon enough Makoto tells her it’s over.

Suddenly, dozens of girls who all have their eyes set on Makoto appear. At the school festival, Makoto cheats Sekai with one of his friends from middle school. Too bad for Makoto, Sekai finds this out and things get really complicated. Sekai doesn’t want to see him, but Makoto doesn’t really mind and is having sex with whoever is willing to do it with him. One day, Sekai comes back to school and tells Makoto that she’s pregnant. Everyone hears this and suddenly none of the girls want to be with Makoto. Except for Kotonoha who still believes that she’s Makoto’s girlfriend even after he told her it’s over and everything else that has happened. Makoto finally realizes what a jerk he has been and promises to never betray Kotonoha again.

Sekai doesn’t know that Kotonoha and Makoto are dating again and when she sees her at his door, she completely snaps. She asks Makoto for a private conversation. While she’s making tea for Makoto, she picks up a kitchen knife and kills him with it. After Kotonoha sees what’s happened, she invites Sekai to rooftop of the school, the place they would usually hang together in the beginning. Kotonoha tells Sekai that she knows she never got pregnant in the first place and just made it up to make Makoto her own. The girls try to kill each other, but Kotonoha is faster and cuts Sekai’s throat open with a saw. Kotonoha then opens her stomach to see that there was no bady inside her. With Makoto’s decapitated head with her, Kotonoha can finally be alone with her loved one.

Right… That was all certainly different from usual harem-animes. No matter how I look it, all the characters are really fucked up. Compared to usual heroic eroge protagonist, Makoto is definitely an anti-hero and THE enemy of all women. In a way I can understand him, but damn… you don’t have to cheat your girlfriend just because she doesn’t want to it with your after one or two dates. If School Days didn’t end the way it did, I would’ve totally hated the show.

Makoto’s girlfriends are no better. Sekai is almost as bad as Makoto. She’s always doing more than Kotonoha, so that Makoto would prefer her over Kotonoha. Like it was said in the last episode, she never thought of Kotonoha’s feelings. To Sekai, she was just a way to get closer to Makoto and point out her own good points. And Kotonoha is no better. She practically did nothing but claimed she still was Makoto’s girlfriend, when she saw Makoto cheating her with other girls. And after all that’s happened, she still doesn’t open her eyes and face the reality.

There’s usually at least one or two likeable characters in every anime, but School Days is different. You just can’t help but hate and despise these people. At times, some of the characters get really annoying and you just want them to disappear. School Days is really hard to enjoy, but that’s not the point. Instead, you should take it as a lesson. Love ain’t always that easy like seen in most harem-animes. Sometimes people get their feelings hurt by the ones they love and such. It wasn’t actually that fun to watch School Days, but I think it was still rather interesting and different anime. Certainly more tragic than animes in usualy which was kind of cool.

So if you’re looking for some mushy love-comedy harem-anime like Nagasarete Airantou or something like that, don’t watch School Days. It’s something competely different, but in a good way.