school days: nothing like human
This especially tl;dr entry is dedicated to Ashley and Marmot. Thank you for keeping me SANE during all the trying moments when I was so sure that I was going to lose my shit all over the Internet and sticking it out with me through the crazies, dorama, and trolling.
During a conversation with Iknight about notoriously hated characters in various anime where I was trying to justify my undying love for Naruto and Shinji, he taunted me and said, “[What about] Makoto? Go on, defend Makoto Itou.” Oh, IK… Don’t think I won’t take you up on that, you hater! Now let me tell you exactly why Makoto is the perfect prince for me because really, he’s just MISUNDERSTOOD and he has a lot of LUV inside of him… so much so that he has to share it with anything that moves.
/i’masoreloser
All jokes aside though, I do think that a lot of the hatred is unevenly directed at Makoto, while the girls are more or less excused because they are perceived as victims of his irresponsible manwhoring. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending Makoto or justifying his actions in any way. But I think people might be missing the point if they were to simply cast all of their disgust and hatred onto Makoto as the ultimate failure of a man, when the anime itself facilitates blame in a complicated system of karmic balance and [un]poetic justice.
School Days sets itself up to be a typical shoujo anime with a love triangle in a school setting fueled by poetic adolescent angst. It was so seemingly typical in fact that nothing could have prepared me for the ensuing 6-hour mind-fuck that I sat through. School Days shattered all expectations and preconceived notions of shoujo plot lines and cliches. In short, it was a religious experience for me.
The cast of School Days are more or less caricatures of people, epitomes of adolescent vices and virtues.
- Kotonoha Katsura is the formulaic truluv of anime protagonists: beautiful, naïve, shy, soft-spoken, chaste, co-dependent, forgiving, loyal, victim of bullying
- Sekai Saionji, the martyr of truluv: self-sacrificing, an empathy-manipulating conception of melodramatic antics and passive-aggressive angst, indirect when it matters, outspoken when it doesn’t, tries to compensate for her jilted feelings by being a cheerleader for her luvah’s truluv
- And then we have the infamous Makoto Itou himself: emasculated, awkward, cowardly, indecisive, over-sexed, self-indulgent, incapable of protecting his loved ones, worthless
So then, why do all of the girls wanna hit that?
This is where the mechanics of the logic, “It’s not you, it’s me,” come into play.
Because Makoto is so unremarkable as a character and an epic failure as a representation of masculinity that he is able to serve as everyone’s sounding board for them to work out their own issues. Think about it, what else do you know about Makoto from the anime besides the fact that he is indecisive and cowardly? He has no redeeming qualities that would give him agency. He has no actual human partiality that you can recall like “Makoto hates mint chocolate” or “Makoto loves green tea ice cream” that would endear you to him. Makoto likes sex. Period. He is a sex machine, in the most literal sense. He is the collective letdown of every girlish fantasy, the gaping black hole into which they put so much of themselves without the hope of compensation for their sacrifices. He is only acknowledged for his promiscuity because girls throw themselves at him. However, when Sekai reveals her pregnancy to the school, he encounters an existential crisis because he no longer has that reputation to sustain him. The girls reject him one by one because he is no longer just a body for them to fuck with; he is now forced into the role of fatherhood and that is repulsive to them. The pure blankness of the old ideal is now painted over with domestic responsibilities and obligations, ruining its mystique and allure. New standards subverting the old.
So what is it about Makoto that brings all the girls to the yard? Well, quite simply, the answer is NOTHING. There is NOTHING about him that is attractive or worth investing in. That’s not how relationship dynamics work in the School Days universe. The reason why Katsura is so desperate to hold onto her relationship with him is because she wants to preserve for herself the role of the “girlfriend”. Her classmates spurn her because they feel threatened by her physical assets [boobs], her position in the committee stresses her out and wears her down, she has no one else that she can turn to in her time of need. And after having fought so hard to persevere, suffering through the cruel jabs and relentless bullying from the other girls, she progressively puts more and more weight into her role as Makoto’s girlfriend as her grievances add up. She hangs onto it like a lifeline because if she loses that, then what else does she got left for herself? If she loses Makoto, then all of her pain and suffering for the sake of their relationship would amount to nothing, and she couldn’t bear the prospect of that, can’t standing having her martyric sacrifices be in vain. In being able to stay by his side as his “girlfriend”, she has a purpose, a role, a function to fulfill that she believes will complete her and counteract the criticism and cruelty that others inflict upon her. For her, he is her buffer against the painful reality of her social life at school and the emptiness and depression that she harbors from being repeatedly rejected by her peers.
karma: usually loli shaped for dramatic effects, also likes to cosplay
So therefore, it is not a question of what he has to offer to these girls, but rather how they utilize him to their own ends. Means and ends. He himself has no inherent worth. He only exists and matters in so far as the meanings and values that the girls put into him. Sekai wants Makoto because she had originally stolen him from Setsuna. She speaks about him as a flower that she was supposed to give away, but instead decided to keep for herself. In objectifying him through a metaphor, he is reduced to a thing, a commodity, the value by which she measures her own self-worth. Because she obtained him through unethical means, she grows paranoid and delusional in her possessiveness over him. She is painfully aware that in the same way she was able to snatch him away from Katsura, another girl can just as easily steal him away from her because of his wayward nature. The foundation of their relationship was built upon stolen happiness; therefore, she’s forever worrying over his intentions, questioning his fidelity, agonizing over the prospect of losing him. She does not want to lose him because that would mean that she has lost to her own transgression, has become a victim of herself. She doesn’t want to be caught in her own trap, doesn’t want be proven wrong. And she can’t, she can’t, she CAN’T afford to be wrong. She would rather KILL off the boy in an attempt to eradicate her own sins than admit that she is wrong, because that would mean succumbing to all of her comeuppances and facing the darkest part of herself, stripped of martyrdom and white lies.
Note the use of cellphones throughout the series: They mediate emotions by providing a hyperreality in which the character are able to exploit and maintain their ideals, communicating their thoughts and feelings through a substitution for real human interaction.
For both of these girls, chasing after Makoto is like digging a hole so deep, it goes right through the other side and they free fall endlessly, crashing and burning into eternity along with all of their hopes and expectations. It’s not because of TRULUV that they gave him everything. LUV has got nothing to do with this. What it comes down to is these girls being unable to cope with their own fallibility and personal circumstances. Because they can’t reconcile the reality that they live in with their own ideals, they sought to use him to simultaneously forget and reaffirm their existence. It’s NOT you, it’s ME. I’m willing to bet that they don’t know anything about him beyond the superficial, and ultimately that doesn’t matter to them. They can just fill in the missing gaps with their own fantasies of what he SHOULD be for them. And that’s as much as he will ever amount up to for these girls. He is a placeholder for their jilted desires and stifled dreams.
The one girl who was able to come back from the black hole after falling into it is Katou. Initially pursuing Makoto because of her memories of him from junior high, Katou finally acknowledges his flaws when she confronts him about Sekai’s pregnancy. Because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, Katou’s idealisms of the caring boy she once knew are destroyed. And in their place is something so ugly and harrowing that it is able to subvert her memories of him and replace them with the harsh truths of the [non]person that Makoto is. Unlike Sekai or Katsura, Katou manages to escape the trap of self-delusion and destruction that the other girls set for themselves. As a result, she was the only one who was able to move on with her sanity intact and all the hard-earned life lessons that he inadvertently taught her.
This is the first time that I can remember ever seeing the wide-angle lens in an anime. The wide-angle, aptly named, is used to capture a wider view of the reality being presented to the viewer, as an alternative to the normal view, which mimics what the human eye sees. Note the convex curve of the school building. This distortion of reality instills a pressing sense of paranoia and anxiety in the viewer due to its hallucinogenic mimicry. It lets you, the viewer, know that the shit’s about to hit the fan.
working within frames: all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream
I’ve only seen the wide-angle used in non-animated films and photography. For Keitaro Motonaga to utilize this in an ero-adaptation strikes me as ambitious and admirable in his own rights. He is intentionally distorting and challenging the reality within the anime, which is in itself already a manipulated representation of our “reality”. By working within multiple frames in the anime, he unhinges the normative notion of “reality” as being singular and absolute. In doing so, and depicting extreme situations in which idealisms clashes with reality to produce monstrosities, he is encouraging the audience to reevaluate their own preconceived notions of interpersonal relations [love, friendship, loyalty, sacrifice]. By presenting popular stereotypes and idealisms and then inverting them, twisting them into something so ugly that they are no longer recognizable as human desires to the viewer, he is purposely alienating the person from the ideal. Conscious separation of the human from the fantasy. However, this separation is complicated by the multiple frames of reality that the anime operates in.
In the moment when Katsura tells Makoto that she will do everything she can to BE that ideal for him, to be The Perfect Girlfriend, she transcends herself as an product of idealism because she is able to vocalize her consciousness that she is NOT that ideal YET. But she will try to be, just for him. And he breaks down because finally, finally, someone is willing to strive to be HIS ideal, even knowing all of the things that he has done, the ruthlessness that he is capable of. Katsura misleadingly offers him the unconditional and he misinterprets that to mean that she accepts him for the flawed, incomplete being that he is. When in actuality, she is offering him her last bid in order to secure the role of being his “girlfriend” to save herself from being completely consumed by her own loneliness and hysteria. It isn’t love. It’s self-preservation and desperation mixing together into something so dark and warped that it should never be mistaken for love. Throughout the anime, Katsura never says, “You can’t have him because I love him.” What she keeps asserting over and over again is that “I am Makoto’s girlfriend.” And the difference between those two statements are profound and irreconcilable.
So what happens when these idealisms are conscious of being idealized, when they know where they stand and what they have come to represent? It’s almost as if they have somehow managed to break through their own limited dimensions and are now suddenly so close to human. Their circumstances being too close to the “real”, their flaws too easy to recognize and point out from personal experiences and knowledge, their emotions so immediate and volatile that the audience can’t help but recoil from a Frankenstein brought to life by their viewership.
In the last episode when Katsura slices Sekai open and looks inside, she calmly states, “Just as I thought… there’s no one inside,” confirming that Sekai was lying about the pregnancy. But it’s a strange statement, given the pronoun “no one”. Because even if there were no growing fetus inside of Sekai, the declaration of a newfound emptiness inside of another person negates the actual being herself, confirms the absence of “the person” whom Katsura asserts was never there to begin with.
The way the shot is angled, you, the viewer, are inside of Sekai’s womb, staring up at Katsura after she has sliced through the fourth wall. And then she is directly speaking to you because Sekai, the fantasy, has dissipated, and there is no longer a buffer between you and the anime. And she is telling you that there is no one there, do you get it?
Sekai is intrinsically empty because she is a dream, she is thick fog and smoky nights, a product of the collective fantasies of fanboys. And Katsura, another version of that dream, is telling YOU that these dreams are just empty placeholders. There is no one inside. You can’t hold onto these idealisms because you would just be grabbing at ghosts, falling into the self-destructive traps of disappointment and bitterness that endlessly reset themselves. The creator is speaking through Katsura and telling you that you’ve been watching a series about a bunch of [non]humans fucking, hurting, dying and dreaming right along with them. And the wakeup call leaves you feeling so strange, cold, and painfully self-conscious because the turbulent emotions that you have projected onto the anime get redirected right back at you, smacking you in the face at full force. And it hurt. That was the moment that cemented this anime as a 10/10 for me on MAL.
~ * ~
June 2nd, 20089:55 am at
W-WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME REGRET NOT WATCHING THIS?!
S-stop it… and by “stop it” I mean “YES! YES! KEEP GOING~!”
Honestly, Makoto’s insufferableness drove me away when it initially ran, but I may have to take a second look for the love triangle card castle collapse.
June 2nd, 20089:55 am at
I didn’t watch SD in an analytical view…well..I didn’t really know how the hell to watch it, considering It’d been spoiled over for me a million times before then. (So I don’t really know how to ‘rate’ this anime at all.)
“Sekai is intrinsically empty because she is a dream…” I never thought about that, and I was too caught up in what the anime denotated I couldn’t get past even a membrane of meaning to see the ideologies behind it.
And the analysis of the interaction between the characters and the viewer (our relative positions) was also new to me, that’s something I never really look at.
I wonder if you could flip this on its head and take a similar position regarding Makoto. Or, in other words, while not disregarding the more ‘female’ based narrative, just see how this affects Makoto’s own narrative. Not to say that this post puts him off as ‘nothing’, a synthetic, hollow conduit by which the girls produce meaning, but to say that while he can function as thus, he is still “organic” - he is (not necessarily ‘human’) not limited to the status of a proxy, but an arena of meaning and ideology in and of himself.
Great post.
June 2nd, 200810:03 am at
Did you just make Ma(n)koto a non-issue? Clever, itsubun, very clever indeed. I do wonder if some of those of us with a Y chromosome felt it wasn’t our place to throw mud at anyone but Makoto - and of course parts of the fanbase took to championing one or another girl, as happens with harem shows, and this too dampened criticism down. I recall the fulsome (and incoherent) review at Anime Source waxing lyrical on Katsura’s virtues (just looked it up: it also says that ‘Makoto Itou is slime. That’s an insult to slime though because even slime isn’t this dirty’).
I felt School Days had enough flaws as entertainment to prevent it high-scoring on my MAL, but perhaps I don’t value the clever bits of anime as much as I should. But I definitely agree on the way the cast are more caricatures than characters - which may have been why I failed to be entertained.
I’m fairly certain I saw a wide-angle shot of the bridge of a spaceship in an episode of MS IGLOO the other day - I think it was being foregrounding an imaginary lens to point out how the bridge could watch the pilots on their screens, but the pilots could also watch back. Or something. But then MS IGLOO is full CGI and consequently rather weird anyway.
I really must stop linking everything I read to Gundam.
June 2nd, 200810:09 am at
Lol…School Days. I only remember this anime as the anime that actually gave me a freaking neck pain because they kept on turning the camera into some weird angle when they zoomed in to the girls. I had to tilt my head here and there to look at those zoomed in scenes. Well, nice rendition of what you think of School Days though. Interesting points. And I know you enjoyed yourself while writing about how Kotonoha sliced up Sekai XD.
June 2nd, 200811:54 am at
My god. You sure know how to put it straightforwardly. The last paragraph was like a punch to my face.
That being said, I like how you analyzed and broke down your argument. And you brought up some things that I hadn’t really noticed before. :]] Really Really liked this post.
June 2nd, 200812:14 pm at
Damn. Honestly, I didn’t think School Days was that deep. I haven’t watched it past episode two or three because how much Makoto pissed me off but you’ve made me want to continue it. That was one enlightening post … really.
June 2nd, 20082:47 pm at
Given that most people who watched School Days were probably guys hell bent on seeing the bloody conclusion I think it was inevitable that the girls were merely declared ignorant and dumb, while most of the rage was directed at Makoto because he was a bigger target. I admit that I had little love the for the female cast ere the end except for Katsura and perhaps Kotoko. Kotoko was essentially a non-issue while poor Katsura was oppressed by the girls and then raped.
I agree that Sekai was empty in the end though I still fume at the thought that Kato escaped the righteous fury of Katsura. Perhaps in the end Katsura was desperate, but at times it seemed to be only the tenacity of a die-hard who never gave up and never gave in. Perhaps she wanted vindication most of all, and she did get it in the end for the Crimes of Makoto Setsuna, Hikari, Kato, and the three stooges shall feel in themselves! Katsura started out as a non-threating rather pliant girl and through her trials she ended much more terrifying and awe inspiring. Her methods of revenge were skillfully done, her tactics ruthless. I am an advocate of quick decisive actions, and violent execution as a means to archive goals. Katsura was not quick, but she was decisive, and her execution of her final revenge was indeed violent. I applaud Katsura for her prowess in battles of love and wars of attrition.
To think that Itou evasion of responsibility in turn sowed the seeds of his destruction only adds to the deliciousness of her revenge. Katsura was the only one who never slept with Beast Itou, and that is why she is the light that illuminates the darkness. Unlike the rest Katura was never despoiled by the seed of the beast, and while she too lost the flower of her maidenly innocence, she lost it unwillingly and tragically. Thus she is the tragic heroine of this tale.
In place of a timid girl we have a Queen! Treacherous and terrible as the sea! All shall love her and despair!
June 2nd, 20086:16 pm at
Didn’t think about it that way myself, but now that you mention it, I totally see it. :O
What I got out of School Days was the message that ultimately sex is never “just sex.” You can’t just go around fucking everything in sight and not expect feelings to be hurt.
AND ILU BB~
June 2nd, 20087:05 pm at
Your face!
Btw, I didn’t read this article…that makes this a troll comment.
June 3rd, 20084:39 am at
Six degrees, IKnight, six degrees. The modus operandi of many an anime blogger.
Unlike Riex, I actually read this article in its entirety, but as I’d rather be indie in the face of many a mainstream comment saying “good post”, I’m going to turn it into a paradoxical self-satirical thing instead. That being said, it’d be interesting to see if you could get the same out of, say… a Key work. Or any other recent eroge adaptation.
June 3rd, 20089:53 am at
More like one degree, in this case.
June 4th, 20089:22 am at
While I haven’t watched School Days, nor am I planning to torture myself into watching it, at least not now, I’d have to say that your analysis on Makoto also applies to Butter of Kaiba in episode 2. Girls were flocking to this pathetic guy, like bee to a honey, and the reason boils down to how they can conveniently project their fantasies to him, and that’s all there is to it.
How I wish I can view animes with wide-angle lens as well, still working on it, in due time I hope I’ll be able to do so. Props for another great post!
June 5th, 20081:13 am at
@Ashley: Shut up and take it like a good uke! TAKE IT ALL IN!
@Lelangiric: Hm, perhaps you would like to pick up where I have left off in my analysis and do a post about Makoto? I think you would have a lot more to say about him from a male’s perspective in so far as personal insecurities, shortcomings, and desires.
@IKnight: LOL at the slime > Makoto comment. Can you link me to the Anime Source lyrical waxing bit?
@townberry: Yup, yup. Media masochist and all that jazz.
@Hoshi: Thank you! I’m flattered to know that my post made such an impact on you.
@saimaisama: If you do decide to watch School Days, I would love to talk to you about it and hear your thoughts on it.
@Crusader: Ah, I see that you are in the Katsura fanboy camp =]
@Marmot: Words from the wise. Funny that your words would apply to our current dorama as well. Heh.
@Riex: Hey, you! Quit posing as a troll. Cuz everyone knows that you’re a big, ol’ teddy bear in RL. [Read: don't make me draw orange-haired loli adaptations of you] =D
@Owen: Thanks for the meta-comment. I actually haven’t seen that many eroge adaptations. I only picked up School Days because of the yanderes.
@Usagijen: Hey! I totally didn’t make that connection to Kaiba! I wonder if the series will follow up on the aftermath of those girls that Butter smuggled into the spaceship. From the way that episode ended, I had thought that there would be more to the Butter stint than just a one-episode knockout.
Thank you all for reading and commenting~
June 5th, 20082:30 am at
Well, I actually thought this anime was pretty funny and the bloody parts just got me excited. I totally thought they were going let us see the chick’s stomach torn open, but NOOOOOOOOOOO
But I never liked Makoto and never will
June 5th, 20086:02 am at
Oh, really? I heard that Shuffle! has a yandere (or to be precise, the yandere before Kotonoha dethroned her @ the Wiki article, much to the chagrin of many), and it’s an eroge adaptation too, so you’d cover all bases that way.
June 5th, 20088:15 am at
actually, the reason why i watched this anime was there wasn’t anything else good that was airing when this aired. to be honest, i would think that this would actually be one of those forgetable anime in the fandom if it wasn’t for the nice boat. i mean, i know a lot of people have watched it and flamed it but after everyone cheered at makoto’s death, i didn’t think it would have much after that.
anyway, i don’t hate him or any of the characters of the anime. everyone in this anime just have screws loose.
June 5th, 200811:56 pm at
I have never watched School Days but after reading the review, the main lead reminds me a little of the main lead in Shuffle. Well, at least the main lead from Shuffle has some redeeming qualities as compared to Makoto.
June 11th, 20084:21 pm at
This is why even deluded fans never try to reenact eroge in real life, they would get pawned and stabbed by the girls.
Although I didn’t like SD (I wanted to punch everyone’s faces) I liked the fact it counters every anime harem out in the market. It’s just frustrating to see a swarm of girls fight over a guy who has few to none redeeming qualities, doesn’t do anything besides falling over breasts to ‘win’ a girl’s heart and escapes retribution for the many broken hearts left behind.
But I watched the last episode like 50 times just to see Sekai and Makoto get a bit of their own medicine.
June 11th, 20084:56 pm at
Needs more manwhoring.
Yes it did happen.
Hikari is fuckwin.
June 16th, 200812:36 am at
Oh man this post is worth a thousand orgasms. Omg film theory in an anime post yes yes YESSSSSSSS.
Fucking love you, Buns. Shake it fast.
June 17th, 20088:30 pm at
Dammit, why’d you have to go and make this series actually worth something? It’s like I can’t even bash it now, geez.
June 19th, 200810:09 am at
Ohmicakes, did you just use a pseudo-Baudrillardesque approach there,? A small glimmer of one? Ohmicakes. That’s just brilliant.
I had the rare luck to see Zizek! the same week as I finished School Days, which led me to easily sum this one up: “Love is aggressive”.
June 19th, 200811:44 am at
@Kaiserpingvin: Hey! You’re the first person to call me out on Baudrillard’s influence on my blogging! NICE! XD Thank you for taking the time to read and comment. I haven’t seen Zizek! Time to google.
June 19th, 20082:42 pm at
Zizek! is probably floating around on Youtube, and I doubt he’d be upset about you not paying for it. He’s a very angry stalinist with a cute lisp after all.
I had my doubts there were any anime-centric blog out there with a Baudrillard influence, and I am so glad you proved me wrong :3
July 6th, 200811:00 pm at
Interesting analysis, but it’s a hit and miss in my opinion.
It’s going too far to say that the series was ABOUT emptiness, sure there’s some emotional depth missing from the relationships, sure the characters were not well developed, but was it a statement? I don’t think so. Simply put, it’s a reflection of real life that many relationships are superficial, desires are superficial, people can be superficial. But that’s more of a side effect of the realism of the series than its focus.
So to say that Katsura slices through the fourth wall would be to miss the point, similarily, your interpretation of ‘there’s no one inside’ as proof of a fake pregnancy rather than proof of Katsura’s deranged status is wide off the mark.
Interestingly, this analysis reveals rather more about you, the author, than it does of the anime.
You’re clearly inserting some ill-placed and preconcieved notions about the nature of TruLuv, what it means to be in a real relationship, or even, judging from the title, what it means to be human. The genius of School Days is to step outside those boundaries and give us people, uncomplicated by the trappings of civilization.
There’s a perfectly simple explaination why all these girls are attracted to Itou. He’s hot. On a date with Katsura she remarks that he looks like a movie star. School Days is primeval, so to assign post-modern conceptions of identity and guilt would be undue extrapolation, especially since the show presents us with very few frames to support statements like this:
‘She does not want to lose him because that would mean that she has lost to her own transgression, has become a victim of herself.’
July 7th, 200812:36 am at
@Miraploy: While I have employed a post-modern lens in my viewing of the series and in this entry, I agree that it’s not the only possible set of interpretations for School Days because there are multiple discourses at work within the series that address a variety of issues ranging from interpersonal relations to preconceived idealisms. I think you bring up another interesting lens by stating that “School Days is primeval”. But in the same way you have stated my observations to be “undue extrapolation”, I could also say that your own interpretation of the series is limited in its narrow scope of what the series is capable of as a social deconstruction and discussion. By stripping it of its social context beyond the forth wall or “trappings of civilization”, you are disregarding its ability to engage its audience with its negotiation of “realism”. I would say that School Days is an incredibly self-aware series that intentionally pushes people’s buttons and provokes them to react in certain ways to its depiction of a warped society in comparison to their own perception of society.
In my entry, I wrote about my own reaction towards the series and examined the emotions elicited by the anime. Therefore, it’s no surprised that this entry revealed certain things about me, the writer, since my thoughts and writings are a product of my own beliefs, desires, insecurities, and values.
“Simply put, it’s a reflection of real life that many relationships are superficial, desires are superficial, people can be superficial. But that’s more of a side effect of the realism of the series than its focus.”
This statement seems rather odd to me because here you are asserting certain notions about relationships in general and supporting your generalizations by declaring them to be aspects of the “realism” that you have perceived in the series, which I disagree with from my own experiences and beliefs. Realism is a tricky thing to argue because what it comes down to is personal experiences and values. The elements that you deem to be more “realistic” in School Days would differ vastly from what I consider to be “realistic” simply because we have led different lives, come from different contexts, and experienced different things. But that does not make either of our experiences or viewpoints any less valid than the other. We derive different sets of semantics from a work due to our accumulated differences as mentioned.
Ultimately, to scrap a stylistic set of interpretations in favor of your own is a bit harsh and small-minded in my opinion. As a viewer, I try to be mindful not to flatten the multiple dimensions of a work, not to collapse its many meanings into something condense and oversimplified.
So on a different note:
“The genius of School Days is to step outside those boundaries and give us people, uncomplicated by the trappings of civilization.”
I’m actually quite curious about this statement because I definitely think that this is an interesting thought process to work through. Would you mind elaborating more on this? I think it’s an interesting concept that the characters are actually liberated from the norms and standards of society and that is why they act as they do according to the internal logic of the anime. Although I have to wonder just how far removed they can actually be from their socio/cultural context because the anime itself is a cultural production that retains the creators’ viewpoints and values. Personally, I’m very doubtful that a person, real or animated, can actually exist outside of their context because they are still engaged in a dialog with the standard society that they are constructed in, which allows for productive criticism and emotional assessment.
July 7th, 20085:42 pm at
Yesterday I saw School Days for the first time and it quickly became my all time favorite anime, or even, TV show in general. Imagine my delight when I found a beneath the skin blog post! Unfortunately my response was probably too quick and not properly developed, so thanks for your reply, I’m going to give it another shot as well as answer some of the things you just said.
You seem to misunderstand my comment as a critique of your approach, not at all! Your lens is great, I just disagree with the conclusions you draw. Like I said, it was a hit and miss, that means I agree with a lot of it too.
“And after having fought so hard to persevere, suffering through the cruel jabs and relentless bullying from the other girls, she progressively puts more and more weight into her role as Makoto’s girlfriend as her grievances add up. She hangs onto it like a lifeline because if she loses that, then what else does she got left for herself?”
I like this a lot, an absolutely accurate description of Katsura’s psychology. Most of your post are along the same lines, except for a few sentences such as:
“She does not want to lose him because that would mean that she has lost to her own transgression, has become a victim of herself. She doesn’t want to be caught in her own trap, doesn’t want be proven wrong.”
That analysis is just simply too formulaic to be plausible. In the previous few sentences you discussed Sekai’s conception of him as chattel. But then you leave that subject in favor of something new and unsupported.
Also, “For both of these girls, chasing after Makoto is like digging a hole so deep, it goes right through the other side and they free fall endlessly, crashing and burning into eternity along with all of their hopes and expectations.”
Again, I don’t see it. There’s no reason why Makoto shouldn’t have met their expectations, if only he made choices slightly different from those which he did. That he’s a sounding board or that the girls were insecure had nothing to do with it. I completely disagree with your conclusion then, it’s absolutely you, as in Makoto.
You describe a black hole, but isn’t that what love is? Love is absolutely about looking for reaffirmation, love is absolutely about exposing your vulnerabilities, love is absolutely about surrendering control of your esteem to someone else. Katou managed to fall out of love in time, Sekai and Katsura didn’t. But does that mean it’s a self-delusion and destructive? No…
I really dislike your propensity for value judgments. Your continual emphasis of the emptiness of this and that implies that there is something wrong with that, or at least, that there should be something there. That’s probably too ethnocentric to make good analysis.
And your ethnocentrism is what leads you to the mess of the last few paragraphs (below sewing and cooking screenshot).
“So what happens when these idealisms are conscious of being idealized, when they know where they stand and what they have come to represent? It’s almost as if they have somehow managed to break through their own limited dimensions and are now suddenly so close to human.”
It’s very possible that you’re trying to say something different from what I understood, but I’m going to address the quote as I understand it. To rehash… there is nothing inhuman about ideals. Certainly I’ve imagined what an idealized myself would be like and I strive toward it. Does my approach of my ideal make me more human? Was I any less human before? Or do you mean ideals are less human than a more flawed image?
That’s the only way (making value judgments) you can get at this conclusion:
“Sekai is intrinsically empty because she is a dream, she is thick fog and smoky nights, a product of the collective fantasies of fanboys.”
Frankly, that strange attack on fanboys came out of nowhere. But evenmoreso, this profoundly post-modern statement is completely out of place in a post about School Days. It’s not a matter of different lens, it’s just simply wrong.
Sekai is NOT NOT NOT an idealized empty image. Sure, maybe not many real girls would act like her, but for all purposes, she’s supposed to be real. Yes, there are multiple frames of reality, yes anime is fake. Maybe
it’s incredibly self aware, but it never, consciously or not, breaks the fourth wall.
Here’s what I think your logic is:
Sekai is fake > Kat cuts away the fake > exposes reality, the viewers.
Here’s what I think it should be.
Sekai is fake > WRONG. Period, full stop!
I’m all for social deconstruction, but you have to admit that’s NOT what your post is. You discussed psychology, not sociology.
Sociologically speaking, these characters seem to live in their own bubble. Outside of society. In-society characters think, I hate this person, but killing him can land me in jail. Outside society characters act on their emotions. So I agree that the characters are a lot more libertine than conventionally portrayed. Itou apparently feels no guilt whatsoever at cheating, and we’re given none of the ‘should I or shouldn’t I’ monologues that are stable in this kind of series. These people, (or at least Itou), are different and primitive. Perhaps it serves as a warning against anomie and for why civilization is necessary.
And just to beat a dead horse, I’m not convinced that emptiness is part of the thematic repertoire at all. I think Itou could have used more development, I think that the relationships he had with the various characters could have been explored in more depth, and I think it would’ve made for a more excusable protagonist and a better show. The conclusion about emptiness is off-base and forced.
July 7th, 20086:36 pm at
When I came out of School Days, I noted that every character of high school age with a role of some importance in the show was pathetic. So I assumed that School Days also helped to highlight how pathetic we can all be. :3
July 18th, 200811:45 am at
Ah hah, Makoto for president!
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/07/07/obama_books/