[Haak]

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

That is the point. It's reinforced especially when the mob runs out into the sunlight at the end, looks back sees nothing like they've all been scared by...exactly nothing.

It's to show just how mass hysteria can get out of hand, that people can be driven insane by a story someone twisted to her own aims.

Also, if you think such things are uncommon in real life....they are not. Especially in middle school...

Sorry but I find it hard to believe that it's common for middle schoolers to go into mass hysteria and attempt murder because of a prank.

The problem here is that the whole pretext is flimsy. Students were apparently getting scared because a few people started disappearing and Yuuko was attacked and they just suddenly decided to take Yuuko's word for it that a ghost was doing it. That's all we know.

And how exactly was Yuuko making students disappear? Black magic? Were the students that disappeared complicit in her scheme? If so then why didn't they come out when things got out of hand? Did she make them disappear by force? How did she manage to pull that off without anyone noticing and where are they now? Did Yuuko simply convince them to leave? If so then why couldn't the other students simply contact them using their phones? And how were they convinced that Yuuko had been attacked by ghost? Did anyone actually see anything? And this is all before they went into mass hysteria. For all we know the students could have actually tried everything but we don't know. This crucial turning point was given far less attention than what was required. Are we really supposed to believe that it's human nature to just suddenly start believing in ghosts at the slightest provocation? In this day and age and in modern societies, I just don't think that's something that would happen so easily. Maybe it's a bit of values dissonance but if that sort of thing is actually common in Japan then its news to me.

The other explanation I've seen is that there's something about the school that pushed the students into believing it so easily, which would make sense but is not particularly well set up because the only hints that would suggest such things are Yuuko-san's pranks and that's always been played for laughs (There's also Momoe freaking out over everything but...well...that's just Momoe...). And if it was Yuuko-san’s previous pranks that pushed them into believing then you would’ve thought another moral of the story at the end of the episode would be for Yuuko-san to knock it off.

And frankly I thought the students running outside to find everyone else being normal, made even less sense. Because then that would have to mean there were two groups (The mass hysteria group and the majority of students outside) that were completely isolated from each other without any interaction, as was the case in the War of the Worlds reading. How does that even come about? What extremely specific set of circumstances (which ought to have been explained) would’ve allowed that to happen? You would’ve thought that someone from the majority of students outside would’ve noticed a bunch of crazy ass students running around screaming and acting like Armageddon is coming and wonder what the hell was going on. And you would’ve thought that someone from the mass hysteria group would’ve noticed the majority of students outside and wondered why none of them are worried. And it’s not like the mass hysteria group was stuck inside the building either since we frequently saw them outside as well. There’s just a lot of holes in this case so it’s really difficult for me to buy.