Cruel Angel Theses

Even if it was in poor taste, you can’t deny that School Days had many great moments in its final episode. While we were all sure of Makoto getting his just deserts, the way in which it was done with a triple combo ensures that whatever you thought about the value of it, their respective ends were tinted with a macabre irony that even Jigsaw of Saw fame would approve of.

This is achieved through the copious amounts of schadenfreude amassed during the course of the story. We go from rooting for the generic male protagonist to get together with the girl he has a crush on to wanting to put the whole bloody lot out of their misery, and SD complies with this deliberately-induced death wish. It seems to me like SD came about as the result of the rise of reality TV in the 90s, and why not?

In an age where we’ve been accustomed to laughing at real people doing stupid and embarrassing things in front of the camera for our amusement and their tentative financial compensation, the idea of fictional people doing depraved and criminal acts for the sake of a few laughs (and compensation on behalf of the production house) seem tame in comparison. The way in which SD escalates into a downward spiral of misery will always be remembered — a slippery slope made flesh. The absolute worst-case scenario in which everything that could go wrong did.

On retrospective I’d have to say that not enough credit was given to the final moments of Makoto and his merry harem. The delay and infamous Nice Boat event meant that the hype was at an all-time high. The fans didn’t cry out at the censorship because they wanted to finish the story, the fans cried out because they wanted to see Makoto get what he deserved. With every episode you could hear yet another male fan (any self-respecting female watching this would have made a voodoo doll long ago) swear under their breath that that cheating loser deserved a kick in the balls, a disembowelling, a castration. Sometimes even all at once. It would be female chauvinism of the rare kind, however, to think that Makoto and Makoto alone was the only one to blame for the entire mess. Surely the girls who blindly flocked to him despite his shortcomings were also sorely to blame — where’s your self-respect when you sleep with a guy knowing that you’re going to be his plaything and not a real lover of any sort? What kind of merit does seducing your classmate when you know he’s after another girl entail? Did the ends justify the means at the end of the day? To hazard a reasoned guess, I’d have to say no.

Kokoro was the only one to come out of it all relatively unscathed, and by unscathed I mean untainted, and by untainted I mean not sleeping with Makoto, although a Kokoro After OVA with her doing a monologue juxtaposed on scenes of the aftermath in a Rena-sque voice wouldn’t go amiss (the punchline comes at the end when you realise she’s been narrating it from the confines of her padded cell to her psychiatrist). At least she got a spin-off series, although it would probably be a first in where the supporting cast will be more well-known than the main character is. Having Makoto and Kotonoha as her siblings would also lend for plenty of nudge-nudge-wink incest jokes, which are always good for a laugh.

In order to write this post, I saw the last bit of Episode 12 again. Having not seen it for months made me appreciate it all the more after the numerous and now tiring jokes spawned by its substitute show — the way in which it’s rehearsed was nothing short of perfect. You have no real reason to sympathise with a homicidal maniac who’s betrayed her friend’s trust in order to satisfy her own desires, but the scene of Sekai staring at a garbage can filled with her painstakingly prepared Christmas food from the night before lessens the gratuitousness of it all.

It could be said that the point where Makoto looks at his phone for the last time right up till the scene before the credits where Kotonoha sails away in the sunset is one long moment, for the decadence of the last 10 episodes or so finally come to a head (pun unintended). Makoto regaining his senses and returning to Kotonoha was like the plot deciding to halt at the downhill progress of its characters and progress slightly uphill before leaping down a sheer drop miles below.

Not only is SD’s message pertinent in Christmas for reasons of chronological similarity — don’t cheat on your girlfriend this festive season — it’s also a great lesson in morality. Among the laments I have with modern worldviews is the famous one of relative morality, and SD addresses that by thrusting the fact that there is no such thing in your face. Of course, there’s always the opposing argument that SD is telling you not to judge those who murder, but I’d like to interpret it in a more conservative sense to mean that only bad things can happen to people who choose a morally ambiguous way of life, in this case Makoto.

Likewise, his death is indicative of the sheer mindlessness of it all, a slippery slope in motion as the worst worst-case scenario. The concept of a slippery slope as a logical fallacy is best explained in layman’s terms as an example — the occasional moral panic that seizes countries all over the world due to X, where X can be anything from a genre of music that offends conservative sensibilities like punk rock to even a sub-genre of manga, as Kodomo no Jikan has famously demonstrated with its botched manga release.

Usually what happens in arguments like these is that the object being vilified, with KnJ as an example, will introduce a series of events that leads to its existence being undesirable (KnJ in stores will lead to more people being lolicons, which will then lead to an increase in child sex crimes all over America which is why it should be banned); it is this same aspect of the slippery slope that SD works on with regards to infidelity, i.e cheating on your girlfriend will lead to you cheating on the girl that you’re using to cheat with on your girlfriend and the only good that can come out of it at the end of the day is nihilistic violence as your ex-lovers hack each other and dismember your corpse to little pieces.

Is it truly valid in any sense? While it doesn’t follow logically to have homicide proceed as a matter of infidelity in a relationship (if that was the case then there would be plenty of dead men out there), I can’t help but approve morally, even if the means used to depict such an ending were in question. In a generation of relative moral standards SD is a significant survivor in a sea of subjectivity, a entirely valid if somewhat questionable means of getting people to think about how their relationships affect others more than they think. While a case study of men diverted from two-timing their women as a result of watching this anime will always be impossible, I’d like to imagine SD did more than the standard measure of conventional harem by means of provoking thought (Why am I angry at Makoto’s lies? Why did his death come as a relief?), a matter that its counterparts would find hard to match beat for beat.