"nice boat" syndrome

[yezhanquan]

Actually, I don't hate Makoto. I just find him kinda... stupid?

[KholdStare]

Originally Posted by cerrian

People don't hate Makoto for poor character growth or sloppy execution by the production team, rather they despise that character for successfully evolving into something that most us of revile.

Yes, this. This is why I consider Makoto to be one of the best characters in anime.

[risingstar3110]

First i think this thread is move further and further away from its original topic....

Second, it's amuse me more that people find it's strange to hate something without directly watching it. State the obvious: i don't want to even have a glance at any real crimes screen or any real war footage. Can't I voice my hatred against them.... seriously?

Third, it would be hilarious for SD to set in a mecha/ scientific era. Then we can spot fake otaku everytime he describe a good designed mecha "nice mech".......

[kk2extreme]

wow, I see school days has nice boated a lot of innocent hearts...

I mean having multiple girls and get away with it is just being unreal as in most of the harem shows. take notes anime and drama producers, this is how a harem show should be done...

nice boat to all the pathetic harem leads

Originally Posted by risingstar3110

Third, it would be hilarious for SD to set in a mecha/ scientific era. Then we can spot fake otaku everytime he describe a good designed mecha "nice mech".......

"nice mech"... hmm... it reminds me of something...

Spoiler for romance mech anime:

Macross

[KholdStare]

Originally Posted by risingstar3110

Second, it's amuse me more that people find it's strange to hate something without directly watching it. State the obvious: i don't want to even have a glance at any real crimes screen or any real war footage. Can't I voice my hatred against them.... seriously?

If you say you hate violence and gore so you think you will hate School Days, then sure, that's based on a principle. If you say you hate School Days because someone says it's bad, then...that is based on what now?

[Irenicus]

Originally Posted by KholdStare

Why does Slice of Life think that this is little statement gives him an idea of what School Days is? It's just a biased opinion meant to draw people away from the series and not even a summary of the show.

No, it's a statement of why your statement that everybody should watch it is wrong.

The post you quoted is my saying why *I* didn't care enough to watch it.

School Days was beautifully directed and Makoto is an excellent character. To make us hate him is to do have done his job, and he did just that.

And I hardly faulted School Days for making people hate Makoto then killing him. That you consider it a brilliant direction, however, is very much debatable. Is it that impossible for one to find the premise of this deconstruction altogether too simplistic, uninteresting? Do you yourself watch everything without prejudice; or do you not make choices of what anime to watch based on external information and your own preferences? What is wrong with me offering my perspective here?

I don't "hate" the show, I thought it was clear that I couldn't care less. I just find all the hype overblown. My attitude is simple: what's the big deal? So an otaku romance show pushes the tropes of its genre to a logical extreme. That's hardly worth demanding that every anime fan should watch it.

[KholdStare]

My statement can't be wrong, because it is an opinion, which is neither true or false. In my opinion, everyone should watch this anime. There's nothing to debate about that except by stating your opinion that not everyone should watch this anime.

At least you clarified your original post as an argument to why you don't care. But what does me watching anime based on external information have to do with anything? Sure, I do it. But I make my choices based on people who have watched the anime. I don't like receiving opinions from people who have not watched the anime, and to tell you the truth, I push all hype aside when I watch an anime.

Originally Posted by Irenicus

So an otaku romance show pushes the tropes of its genre to a logical extreme. That's hardly worth demanding that every anime fan should watch it.

Once again, I do not appreciate such a biased summary as a support for whether or not one should watch an anime. If you were to decide whether or not to watch an anime, would you ask a bunch of screaming fanboys, people from the I-hate-this-anime club, or a somewhat-detailed review? I've given none of the aforementioned, but I never tried to justified my opinion either.

[MidnightViper88]

Originally Posted by willyvereb

Or "Head-hug"

Life is fragile but heads are forever; Futurama taught me that...

[risingstar3110]

Originally Posted by KholdStare

If you say you hate violence and gore so you think you will hate School Days, then sure, that's based on a principle. If you say you hate School Days because someone says it's bad, then...that is based on what now?

Blood and gore are not the only things you can see in the crime screen through (even when i admit i hate these two as well)....

The most obvious other is how f*** up the victims and the culprits became, I know for sure that I won't want to witness either there final moments nor how it has been carried out...
I remembered someone in AS once mentioned how he enjoy seeing the most innocent thing get corrupted.... Back then I seriously had an urge to hit that guy with a bat, screaming "how you like it now..." (yeah i'm hot-tempered occasionally)

[MidnightViper88]

Oh, jeez, as if this show had any emotional attachment included; So many sins were committed in the show I feel like it should have had the tagline "What goes on in School Days stays in School Days"...

In either case, people need to differentiate the difference between entertainment and real life...A murder investigated on an episode CSI is fictional while a murder investigated by your local PD is reality...I think the vicarious thing about "School Days" is that it's completely fictional and is acceptable within the realm of morals because something that has no morals has no boundaries where it would otherwise be completely bizarre in real life...

This show one of those things you can hardly take seriously...But then again, I'm sadistic with my romance genre at this point...

[Haak]

Originally Posted by Slice of Life

I noticed that everybody hated him but there are people who were always hated and people who were always hated only after the shit hits the fan if you catch my drift.

And do we need to have that discussion again? You're not enlightened enough yet to talk bad about my animu? You can trash a show you have never watched as well as you can hype a show you've never watched. And everybody else can ignore it if they want. I wish people were so protective about human beings as they are about anime series ...

I have absolutely no idea what you're on about.

[Theowne]

I guess I must be strange because I didn't have any significant positive or negative reaction to School Days. I just didn't really care about it, was indifferent to the characters or the attempt at character development, and didn't think their "love" consisted of anything worth debating or caring about. I don't think there's anything special about it. Has the skeleton of a typical harem where a bunch of girls all want the rather dull main character, except here they make the main character an impulsive lust-driven jerk with the predictable results. At best it should serve to disprove anyone who thinks anime exists on some higher plane than other entertainment.

[MidnightViper88]

There was practically no emotional connection with any of the characters to be had, maybe short of Sekai's little sister who was about as misplaced in the show as a stand-up urinal would be in a women's restroom, so really to me this show was completely devoid of any meaning, short of the extremely entertaining ending...I think that's why there are people actually callous at the way the show ended...

[BetoJR]

I find several meanings in the story, but then again, this is a completely subjective point, so... and Sekai's sister? Don't you mean Kotonoha's?

[MidnightViper88]

Yeah, right, her...That kind of shows how opaque my attention was when watching...

And I'm curious what possible practical things could have been picked out of this show...

[MeoTwister5]

I'm more of the opinion that Kotonoha going off the deep end was catalyzed primarily with her getting

Spoiler for spoilers:

Raped

Than being two-times by Makoto. I mean yes the psychological and emotional burden was there because on Makoto, but if she didn't get what came to her perhaps she would never have initiated said boat. I can't even remember if she was already knocked up by that time.

Of course that does not exonerate Makoto being a complete testosterone-driven asshole but you get my drift.

[OverFunk]

Oh look. It that thread again. Then again creating this kind of discussion two years later shows the impact this made on us.

[Marcus H.]

But I think tormenting a living Makoto is a more suitable ending for School Days than the bloodshed on the last episode.

@topic
I admit that I haven't watched a single episode of School Days, but I think I have all the necessary info to give it a verdict. Some of the fans will most probably throw down my response as a mere speculation, but at least I've given my two cents on it.

School Days went into a big gamble for one of the first ever Slice-of-Life anime to have that kind of storyline. Most of the same genre will have a much brighter atmosphere into it. I salute them to pulling off such a typical scenario and warping it into a darker mood. What turns me off was the violent endings, the only reason why I avoided to take a even glimpse of the violent endings.

Spoiler for reception:

According to a national ranking of based on the sales of bishōjo games in Japan, the PC release of School Days premiered at number one in the rankings. It was then dropped to the second place the following two weeks, and the seventeenth on the next ranking, but was raised back to the fifth in the following chart. It then remained at the twenty-seventh for the next month, and was then removed from the chart.

[MidnightViper88]

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.

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...

[yezhanquan]

Like I said somewhere before, I prefer the non-violent endings of the game, especially the watermelon ending. That is LOL-worthy.