Quote:
Originally Posted by OverFunk
Oh look. It that thread again. Then again creating this kind of discussion two years later shows the impact this made on us.
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Controversy nit-picks; You can have significant controversy, and you can have insignificant controversy...
And I would probably far from call "School Days" a significant controversy in any way...
Playing the devil's advocate, I'm probably saying this from specifically a Western point of view to some degree...In the subject of real-world context, the Japanese might be a bit more touchy-feely with such graphical violence being portrayed within a setting and genre where it's least expected to thrive at all, and when you take the finale's airing delay into context with the Kyoto axe murder that happened just before the finale's scheduled airing, then yeah I could see how far this could be taken...Not that Western media is without controversy itself, but rarely are works of complete fiction made controversial within the context of real-life connections, short of those with political agendas attached to them...
But in terms of pure dramatic media entertainment, I would hardly say this is breaking any new grounds...Yes, a romance genre typically does not contain the device of murder in it, but in the context of post-modern society and the other types of gratuitous violence you see in other genres, this is really nothing more than jumping on the bandwagon...
The only "controversy" "School Days" offers is being the black sheep of it's kind in the anime community by offering an unorthodox end to a romance title; Nothing more, nothing less...The story told is that of mundane so-called school "romance" which delves pretty quickly from the realm of "love" to "lust" with any hope of sympathy during the climactic tension being thrown out the window when the foundation is laid throughout the plot that practically all of the main-involved characters have no character morals at all...There is
no plot directive and there is
no substantive character development, secondary characters are used like pawns and easily forgotten, and even the main characters are easily forgotten...If there were any plot twists to be had, they moved around as often as a vagabond and needed a GPS tracker to avoid getting lost...The only thing this has going for it as far as audience-to-character connection is the empathy the audience has
with each other, in that those main characters that had no morals to their names were left to die or live by themselves in perpetual insanity, showing what little substantive connections or influences the characters have with the audience...
You want long-lasting controversy that had something substantive behind it, both inside and outside the social and media context of their creation? Take a look at J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", or Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird", or F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"...Come back to me if people are still talking about "School Days" over a half-century after it's conception...
Now, I'm all about context...Within the context of anime, maybe this is
a little controversial...But if it's the ending that's the only thing people are talking about and not the actual story itself, then that tells you a lot about what "School Days" stands for, and will end up being forgotten in mere time...People talked about "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Serial Experiments Lain" for their deep psychologically-rooted story foundations, among many other things, not just largely on the way that they ended...
Just remember that "School Days" would have been
nothing without the violent ending...There is no impact...