Happy Chinese New Year to those of you descended from the motherland, and may you collect more of those delicious red packets this festive season. I spent the reunion dinner eve in bed, with a majority of the New Year’s Day going towards getting more sleep in view of my erratic nocturnal schedule. While part of me felt like Nobita in that chapter of Doraemon where he decides to spend the first day of the new year in his room with gadgets in lieu of real human company, I figured trying it just this once wouldn’t hurt.

obligatory picture since it’s the year of Yuki Sohma the Mouse

In other news, the discussion over at In Search of Number Nine and a later post by Cameron Probert reminded me that I should stick to this rule in 2008: If comments don’t achieve their required effect after the first one, taking it to a post would be more productive given the growing length.

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.