This is my attempt to adapt my random thoughts from this long Twitter thread into a proper Blog post where I express some things better. And I’ll add stuff I forgot to include in the Twitter Thread.
To me even in the timeline of the 2007 School Days Anime it’s apparent that Kotonoha is the antagonist. But I can see why going off the Anime alone it’s easy to miss her wrong doings and focus entirely on Makoto and Sekai’s dumb teenage mistakes. But once you’ve actually learned about the other timelines of the Visual Novel it’s difficult not to conclude that Kotonoha is an emotionally abusive and manipulative even when she’s not a killer.
The Visual Novel originally only had 3 Bad Endings (bad in the sense of involving Death, some others are indeed not exactly storybook happy endings). The ones added by the remakes muddy the waters of characterization. I still try to make even them fit my interpretation, but it’s difficult. Basically the remakes wanted to add endings where Sekai kills Kotonoha because some fans simply wanted to see that. But there were in fact good character based reasons why that was not originally possible.
Originally Sekai never became a true Yandere, she only ever became a Killer when dealing with the stress of a Teen Pregnancy. And she never targeted her rival, she only killed Makoto and immediately regretted it. There were no Laughing Mad scenes for her. And only the Anime ever even plants the suggestion that she wasn’t actually pregnant, it is in fact clinically confirmed with doubt only ever being placed on the timing of it. And in some timelines the baby is born.
VN Kotonoha does morally questionable stuff even on timelines with no fatally bad ending, like blackmail.
But the ending that makes me hate Kotonoha the most is the one where she kills herself. And I know that sounds harsh out of context, but she intentionally does it in front of Sekai & Makoto when he chooses her, with the premeditated intent of ruining their happiness, and it worked. Suicide or the threat of it is absolutely a tactic Emotionally Abusive people will use, and it's the type I have the most experience with. So discovering this ending really kind of triggered me a bit.
Neither of the Bad Endings that are a result of Makoto choosing Sekai ends with him concluding he loved Kotonoha and should have chosen her. But the one original Bad Ending that results from him choosing Kotonoha does indeed have him concluding he really loved Sekai. He spends his dying moments concluding he is in love with the person who just killed him. That is strong evidence the Story itself wants us to view Sekai as his true love and Kotonoha as an Enchantress coming between them.
Some of the Kotonoha endings really do come off more as bad endings for Sekai even regardless of the information relayed above. In one it seems like her blackmailing worked, in another Sekai gets blamed for a bullying campaign she had no connection to.
Look I firmly believe Kotonoha is like this because of circumstances that are not her own fault, she is also still only a teenager and I am certainly not an existentialist. But as far as the narrative at hand in School Days is concerned, she’s the antagonist.
The Anime’s main problem is trying to condense into one timeline most of the worst things that can happen in the VN. The Manga also has a unique Bad Ending but till then it’s much closer to conveying the experience you should be going for when playing the VN.
Condemnations of Sekai begin with the whole “let’s do it as practice” thing, with even other Sekai apologists conceding that as her one dumb idea. But that itself is encouraging a very conservative attitude towards Sex, maybe that kind of thing should be more normalized. Part of the perspective she’s coming from here is how society tells girls to expect the guy to be more experienced. But even in an ideal world with no Gender double standards, I think doing it for the sake of experience shouldn’t be shamed.
I’m also not as hard on Makoto as other people. That’s a more uphill battle to fight but I’m ready, and I'm not gonna say he did Nothing wrong. To start with in the VN there is no one timeline where Makoto has sex with all the girls. Someone outside the main two is only ever an option at the very end of certain routes besides one special case that will be elaborated on later.
His main sin in the early part of the Anime is that he should have simply ended it with Kotonoha a lot sooner when he realized he wasn’t that into her after all. And ideally before starting a relationship with Sekai.
However most people talking about this Anime aren’t condemning him just for not doing that. In fact when they are aware of VN differences they still condemn him even on routes where that’s exactly what he does. They condemn him for wanting Sex more then Kotonoha does in the first place. Some people want lots of sex, some people want no sex, some people want it in moderation, none of those is anything to be ashamed of. But if your partner isn’t on the same page as you simply end it, don’t try to pressure them and certainly don't do anything they didn’t explicitly give you permission to do.
To me one of the ultimate signs of fake wokness is “puritanical sexual morality is fine when it’s men being shamed”. And yes at least when critiquing fictional scenarios I do see people be explicit hypocrites on this issue. The same media critics quick to condemn any male character who wants sex more then his female partner, when a show swaps that dynamic are all for rooting for the girl to dump the guy not giving her what she wants while calling him Gay because even many SJWs don’t know that Asexuals exist much less that straight men can also sometimes want to wait.
Makoto at the very least is one of the few characters who never violates anyone else’s consent (in School Days, the other VNs of this franchise I am not required to consider canon to how I analyze School Days). The worst things he does in the Anime are after his own consent has been violated more than once.
The problem with discussion around School Days is both the people simply calling it bad and most of those calling it a "deconstruction" are using the same superficial face value readings of the characters. If it’s criticizing the Harem genre, it’s criticisms aren’t the same as yours. If anything, the kinds of viewers who think Makoto deserves what happened to him in the last episode are who the show is condemning. That’s right, the “ain't it cathartic watching this teenager face consequences for his actions,” viewers I’m equating to Fight Clubbers.
My obsession with School Days this last year is pretty weird in the grand scheme of my history with Anime. I first watched it years ago and expressed basically the same contrary opinions I have now, but did so to spite certain people I’d seen talk about it and didn’t really care that much, and as such didn’t make my arguments as eloquently or well thought out as I'm trying to here. Now I have been drawn to revisit it for reasons that escape me and have become utterly fascinated by it. The show as a whole is still not 3x3 material but Setsuna has become my favorite Anime character period.
I’ve self identified as a Kuudere for awhile now, my self insert characters in stories I never finished were basically Kuudere before I knew the term. But I lacked a specific Kuudere I considered worthy of being my social media Avatar. I liked Setsuna when I first watched the show but took her crush on Makoto at face value and was rather disappointed by that since I liked seeing her as Yuri for Sekai. Now that I’ve dug deeper into VN information I realize she is basically me.
My main justification for actively shipping Makoto and Sekai is their dance in front of the bonfire at the festival. They looked genuinely happy there, happier than anyone else ever is at any point in the show. It’s unfortunate what the Anime intercuts it with, I don’t think that’s the timing of those two events in any VN timelines. But the fact remains that that is the most genuinely romantic moment in the show.
If only Makoto would have broken up with Kotonoha before or at the start of episode 6, she probably would have moved on just fine. However the character flaw that led to Makoto making that mistake is a perfectly believable and relatable one, he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings and is uncomfortable in difficult situations. Logically it’s obviously better to do it sooner, but humans have trouble acting logically when emotions are involved.
What makes episode 6 the turning point here is that the happiest Kotonoha ever was in this relationship was not any time actually spent with him. It’s the moment where Otome’s crush on Makoto became known to the rest of the class. In that moment Kotonoha instantly goes from being this shy timid girl simply taking her bullying to having the confidence to stand up for herself. Out of context I can see that as an empowering moment that viewers who’d been bullied in similar ways may have latched into. But in the context of this being a show about relationships, I really do see it as evidence Kotonoha doesn’t love Makoto at all, she became invested in the relationship when it became a source of power. Even before this the investment she had came off merely as investment in the social status upgrade of having a boyfriend and not Makoto himself.
This quote from Makoto’s conversation with Setsuna in episode 8 is so often glossed over by those who want to paint Makoto as preferring Sekai only because she’s the one giving him the sex. “No, it’s more like I can be myself more with her, I can relax”. I feel like if we were analyzing any other relationship melodrama we would all agree the person you feel more comfortable being yourself with is the healthier option.
Again I fully agree that he should have formally broken up with Kotonoha well before this point. But so many people are not mad at him only for that. Half of it is men who would themselves prefer Kotonoha not liking that this MC has different preferences than they do. And then there are the people who are like “he couldn’t handle that relationships take work” and I’m like “your American Capitalist ideology is showing”. Why should it be a given that relationships take “work” why does everything have to revolve around some platonic ideal of being “earned”?
But more importantly the “work” being expected of Makoto here is very much the product of Patriarchal norms where the “work” of a relationship is supposed to be all on the man while the woman is a prize to be “earned”. I certainly feel it’s unfair to claim Makoto wasn’t putting effort into this relationship but Kotonoha was.
Now to elaborate on my seemingly most unique School Days hot take, that Otome raped Makoto in episode 9. Because I’m unsure if the writers of the show know that’s what they made happen, but it is.
First off early in episode 9 we’re shown how inviting a boy to the “rest area” is supposed to go. And I kind of like it. But the important thing here is how that should make us note that what Otome does is explicitly NOT that. She doesn’t ask Makoto anything, she tells him to grab her hand, he’s from a different class so doesn’t even know what this is supposed to mean, then she gets mad and grabs him and drags him into the Rest Area. Then she confesses and what he says in response seems to get translated inconsistently (I’ve watched different subs of this same scene). But to me exactly what words he says is irrelevant anyway, he’s stammering and shocked to be in this situation and not being given time to think about what he’s saying. At any rate the Subs on the official BluRay I now own look like he’s turning her down but trying to be nice about it, again his hamartia is really not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings. Then she pushes him down and starts kissing him, and his eyes have a weird expression, which in Hentai is constantly the visual language of Trauma caused by Sexual Assault.
If the genders were reversed no one on Tumblr would read this scene as consensual. But because he’s a Generic MC-kun many Anime fans hate for being so “inexplicably” popular with Girls everyone clings to him not explicitly saying no.
What concerns me about how this scenario is written is that after the sex is over he seems fine. Maybe in real life when boys are raped by girls this way they cope by pretending they liked it as much as they’re “supposed to”. But on a Doylist level I feel kind of like the time constraints on the Anime version of the story needed him at the Bonfire dance right away and that scene wouldn't look right if he seemed traumatized. In the VN Makoto having sex in the rest area and dancing at the Bonfire can’t happen on the same timeline. Also in the VN it’s with Kotonoha not Otome and how it plays out is different, I do consider VN Kotonoha a Rapist but not based on the Rest Area scene.
Thing is acknowledging what happened here as Rape changes how we read everything Makoto does after this, how he suddenly becomes more aggressive then he ever was before.
Now for how the Anime deals with Sekai’s pregnancy. Is there a literary term for “fake twists” where a story pretends to end on a reveal but when you analyze the evidence that reveal was clearly a Lie? Paul Feval’s John Devil as interpreted by it’s English Translator Brian Stableford is perhaps the ultimate example of that.
We the audience see Sekai alone by herself way too much for the possibility that she lied about the Pregnancy to have any credibility. There is no ambiguity that she believed she was pregnant. Maybe she had a false alarm, but given what we know from the VN I find that unlikely. Kotonoha is not a trained medical professional, she is in that ending a mentally unstable teenager seeking to confirm what she already wants to believe.
This is different in the VN where doubt is only cast on the pregnancy's timing. But even there Sekai didn’t have sex with anyone else, the VN is just taking advantage of how most people don’t get that “conception” doesn’t necessarily happen the same day you had sex, the sperm can linger.
Another character I kind of like is Hikari but the reasons for that are largely VN only. The only issue I have with the Hikari ending is that you’re cheating on Sekai. I like how Hikari gets over her crush on dickface right after having sex with him and then does it with Makoto. I like that she’s open and unashamed about only wanting sex from the relationship. And I also like the part about her deciding it would be selfish to keep him to herself. The Anime should have had Hikari initiate the Orgy, instead the three named extras just doing it on their own. However all that is my glossing over how she’s a Pimp and a Blackmailer, so she’s also a villain but a likeable one. Not like Kotonoha or Otome who I’d be terrified to be in the same room as.
The official Family Tree of the Overflow universe implies Bavarois+Watermelon is the canon ending. It’s not officially classified as a Harem ending because there is no Threesome scene. But emotionally I think the route to get that ending is the best Threesome story the VN offers. It’s on a route where Makoto is preferring Sekai and the Kotonoha ending of that Route is considered a Bad Ending being called Lust.
But Makoto and Setsuna do have sex along the way, and it’s not at all like how they wind up doing it in the Anime. They develop a deep emotional connection that isn’t solely based on but is tied to how much they both care about Sekai. You can have a Threesome relationship where all three never have sex at the same time, so yeah I feel like that is a stealth Makoto/Sekai/Setsuna route.
Meanwhile the official Threesome ending of the VN bothers me. I want to like the Non Monogamous resolutions of Dating Sims and VNs as a Polyamory advocate. But this one has issues.
First, Sekai and Kotonoha have no relationship with each other outside of Makoto, Sekai first befriended her to help Makoto. That alone could be overcome, they could develop a bond, but….
Second, Kotonoha is acting like a Yandere even in this ending. Just a Yandere who’s taken a different strategy than usual. She says Makoto can sleep with as many girls as he wants as long as he says he loves her the most. That kind of confirms my conclusion from episode 6 of the Anime, that what she really wants from this relationship is to use Makoto to feel Superior to other women.
And then there is the way she’s still accusing Sekai of malicious intent, even as she’s trying to pressure her into this threesome. “You thought I was some innocent naïve girl you could easily deceive”. If that’s how you actually feel about Sekai then I don’t trust you with her well being.
So this ending kind of feels more like something Kotonoha is seducing Sekai into. Even when Kotonoha kisses Sekai right after she has an orgasm it looks like Kotonoha was an evil genius who knew exactly the perfect moment to do that.
And the start of this ending is also the same as one of the ways to get the ending where Sekai snaps. One wrong decision on that rooftop results in Sekai being brutally Reverse NTRed.
I shall return to Otome’s role in all this, this time in the VN where she isn’t a Rapist on any timeline but is still a Bully. There is one timeline where Kotonoha will mistakenly think Makoto is dumping her for Otome. She will actually confide to Sekai how she had intended to just kill her rival, but she apparently has no confidence in her ability to overpower Otome because she’s “fit” athletically speaking.
That explanation is BS, Otome being good at Basketball will not be useful to defending herself against Kotonoha coming at her with a Knife. It’s clearly really because Otome has been bullying her since well before all this started, she is irrationally afraid of Otome in a way she isn’t of anyone else. In Kotonoha’s head here she is experiencing the reverse of episode 6 of the Anime. She feels defeated by Otome in the worst way possible and helpless to do anything about it. And I’d feel bad for her if it wasn’t for everything else.
I bet Otome’s the kind of Bully whose Bark has no Bite. And that in truth just the sight of Kotonoha pointing a knife at her would have her falling to her knees begging for mercy like Rick Flair in a match with Ricky Steamboat. But she’s successfully traumatized the second most iconic Yandere in all of Anime to feel powerless against her, because bullying isn’t as easy to simply get over and deal with as many conservatives and liberals want you to think.
I know some people may be planning to respond “you sure are glossing over Kotonoha’s rape in order to vilify her”. First of all in the VN she can become a murderer or a blackmailer or a rapist all in routes where the VN version of that rape doesn’t happen. And even in the Anime she was showing manipulative and morally questionable tendencies already before then.
Like the scene on the Train where she can tell Makoto is about to break up with her so she uses her body like she never had before to get him to agree to dance at the festival. She also basically blackmails Setsuna after she catches her kissing an unconscious Makoto in episode 8.
Kotonoha’s rape scene feels particularly gratuitous and unnecessary to me. All we needed to set up Kotonoha’s mindset in the closing episodes was her seeing the Bonfire dance. Otome’s rape of Makoto feels far more important to explaining his future behavior.
Back to the VN, there Kotonoha being raped by Taisuke doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the morally worst version of her. In fact I don’t know how to feel about the way her being Raped actually seems to decrease the odds of her becoming a Supervillain. Oddly enough the only ending that depends on that rape happening is the Hikari one where Kotonoha winds up in a relationship with Taisuke, which doesn’t sit well with me either. Of course Kotonoha can also wind up dating Taisuke seemingly without even being rapped first, so maybe those jerks are just meant for each other.
In the VN Taisuke can also wind up raping Sekai on routes where you are preferring Kotonoha. And again that is not really a factor in whether or not she ever gets homicidal.
Now I’m gonna talk about the Anime’s ending. A lot of it can be reverse engineered to how one looks at the two original VN endings it’s combining, just remember in the VN these murders don’t happen on the same timeline. Though Sekai snapping can still be preceded by Kotnoha becoming a Yandere with a different tactic.
So in the episodes leading up to the finale Makoto had started doing a lot of sleeping around but I’ve explained the reason for that already. His main sin is distancing himself from Sekai when she tells him she's pregnant. That is messed up, but remember he’s not an adult, in fact now is perhaps the time to ask “where is everyone’s parents”. Well according to information you’d get from the larger universe the original VN was a part of, all of these teens seem to be the product of teen pregnancies themselves. So their parents probably don’t know what they’re doing either.
The fact I already emphasized that originally Sekai can only Snap if she’s pregnant (and aware of it) is important because one detail the Anime forgets to mention is her resentment of her father for abandoning her mother when she got pregnant. Setsuna’s obsession with taking care of Sekai is also tied to her knowledge that they are half sisters, maybe even some guilt that she’s the one their father at least kind of helped provide for. But the problem with the greater Overflow universe family tree is that my desire to ship Makoto with Sekai and Setsuna is shot in the foot by the knowledge that he is unknowingly their uncle (I want to see UsefulCharts do a video on it, I think it would break him, it makes the Habsburgs and Ptolemies look normal). So I’d rather pick and choose what to acknowledge from there.
Makoto is himself also very stressed by the end of episode 11, and the way Kotonoha approaches him at that point, I really feel like Makoto’s own consent to anything he does with Kotonoha in the last episode is dubious at best, he seems really zoned out through all of it. But critically thinking about Makoto’s own mental state would distract from everyone’s desire to just go “Harem protagonist gets killed for being a man slut, take that Otaku perverts”.
Another thing Sekai’s breakdown in the Anime has in common with at least one route to getting that in the VN is her being Reverse NTRed. And I guess I’m a bit messed up in that after everything I’ve said in this post, I find that scene hot. I am on Sekai’s side here, she’s who I’m empathizing with the most, but I also have a thing for Reverse NTR and so this scene that is about emotionally and mentally destroying a character I like, I have fapped to multiple times.
The thing that cuts even deeper however is everything Kotonoha says to mindbreak Sekai here isn't just about calling her a Slut who manipulated Makoto (really the standard reading of the show kind of is just people believing what a clearly unreliable Kotonoha says here), she also brings Setsuna into it and convinces Sekai she was a bad friend to Setsuna. Setsuna obviously doesn’t feel that way. If anything, and I'm saying this as a huge Setsuna Stan, Setsuna was the one in the wrong in her handling of her relationship with Sekai (in both the VN and the Anime). Her hamartia was always placing Sekai’s wants and needs over her own and allowing Sekai to become way too emotionally dependent on her. When she kissed Makoto in episode 8 was the one time she ever acted selfishly and tragically Kotonoha just happened to be there. But of all the things Kotonoha could have done with that dirt she had on Setsuna, using it to convince Sekai that she had betrayed Setsuna is worse than any more conventional blackmail tactic.
I would really like to get someone like LegalEagle to look at the scene where Sekai snaps. I really do feel like it ought to fit the legal definition of Temporary Insanity, I really don’t think it was premeditated, I think even seconds prior Sekai wasn’t planning to do that. And like in the VN she regrets it instantly, and again she's dealing with the stress of a teen pregnancy and now being accused of lying about it. Every version of Kotonoha killing Sekai however is clearly premeditated, she may be acting more conventionally like a “crazy person” but that’s because whatever mental illness she has isn't temporary. Her crimes are always way more methodical and well planned.
To me the Anime ending is all about Kotonoha becoming the most successful supervillain of all time, even Palpatine in ROTS got less of what he wanted. The circumstances that lead to Sekai killing Makoto was the result of Kotonoha’s intentional premeditated actions. She was evil and she won.
Update July 2023: I eventually played the VN myself some, and I found the VN basis for that scene in episode 6 of the Anime I fixated on so much. The Anime version feels better executed in presentation because of more precise Animation and use of Music. But the Dialogue confirms my interpretation of what this scene tells us about Kotonoha even more blatantly. Kotonoha goes beyond just saying "we're dating so I can talk to him if I want", there really is an even more clear catty "He loves you not" subtext to it. God I really did love that song.
Update July 2024: I'm not even more intimately familiar with the content of the Visual novel then when I first wrote this. And over all I feel nothing but vindicated.
If anything my focusing so much on Otome as a Rapist in the Anime is unfair to her in the context of how it's Kotonoha who does equivalent stuff in the Visual Novel even more blatantly. VN Otome is still a Bully and her role in inspiring Taisuke's actions is much more intentional. But as far as the issue of Female on Male Rape goes it's all Kotonoha in the VN.
In the scenario that comes from episode 5 being The Video Tape Kotonoha repeatedly assaults Makoto on the train against his protests, once start jerking him off while he's still asleep, and more. Twice in these scenes a prompt will come up for the player but our options are only say no or nothing, no option to actually consent.
In a scene leading up to Bavarois/Lust after he tells her he loves Sekai and wants to break up she undresses in-front of him and tells him to touch her and when he doesn't she walks over and forces his face in her breast.
The issue today with how society treats Female on Male Rape is less a denial that it's theoretically possible and more having a different barrier to considering that's definitely what happened. When it's a male assaulting a female at least most self described feminists understand that any Consent given after an encounter begins as non consensual is dubious. But in the scene I just talked about will go "look how easily he starts sucking on them" but I'm like "he barely even looks aware of his surroundings".
Then there is the matter of SA victims themselves often not being willing to recognize that's what happened to them. And for male victims an added reason that is this very double standard. But because people enter this franchise with such a baseline cynical view of Makoto it's easy to go "even he admits he did something wrong...." when that's not how human psychology works, people feel guilty about things that aren't their fault all the time.
Leaving that issue I also hate Kotonoha for how the pregnancy storyline plays out in the VN, because in the VN she isn't even in full "Yandere Mode" for that. Makoto had little interest in questioning if he was the father before Kotonoha pressed the issue. And no this isn't me blaming her for Makoto's actions, what she's does here is vile and despicable whether Makoto would have acted on it or not. She's doing this to try and get Makoto back even though he left her for Sekai before he was even told about the pregnancy.
For anyone still questioning the parentage of the child, the fact that Sekai only pregnant which has sex with Makoto early in the game even if she is with Taisuke for the same period prove the baby is Makoto's. He simply must have really potent Sperm.
I also learned recently how the ending you get for making no choices at all is With Honesty a Sekai Ending. If the Bad Endings are really consequences for Makoto's indecisiveness then how come the most maximally indecisive route has a good ending? No that being the ending that happens if we don't interfere at all vindicates my belief that Sekai is who he's meant to be with.
I'm incredibly hard on Kotonoha but I also sympathize with her when the focus is on Otome and Nanami's bullying of her. But I can also sympathize with them sometimes. The game just is really well written with nuanced characters.
