Makoto Itou's lack of Free Will

One mechanic that separates School Days and its sequels from many other Visual Novels is how making no choice serves as a sort of secret third choice further complicating the branching path system.

The Philosophical and Metatextual implications of that are further layered by how the player isn’t in control of every choice Makoto makes, or indeed even every important choice.  It really is more like we are merely being consulted on choices he can’t immediately make on his own.  For all my interest in apologizing for this guy, yes some of his decisions I can’t directly influence do frustrate me. He is sometimes a dumb horny teenager, but unlike seemingly most Anime fans I don’t think that’s a capital offense. 

Thing is, some of the results of choosing nothing do not look in universe like Makoto not making a choice, some do, sometimes it is as simple as him not answering a question he was asked.  But sometimes it seems almost functionally indistinguishable from what one of the offered choices were.  In fact the first choice of episode 2 is one of those, making no choice results in Makoto asking about the kiss, clearly that’s what he wants to do but his hesitation gives the player the chance to prevent him from asking. 

But there are also times when we’re only given one option, that is secretly two.  As I talked about when discussing Makoto as a Rape Victim in one situation the options for him are to say no or nothing to what Kotonoha is asking to do.  Remember the casual fanbase memes on him being a horny idiot who never doesn't want to have sex.  So the fact that in this case the player does not have the option of making him consent is a very huge oversight in the popular perception of him. 

I feel all of this adds up to making it a valid reading of the text that the Route which comes from the player making no choices is the most Canonical baseline for who Makoto is.  And that the player made choices are not quite equally valid representations of his personality but the player being an outside influence on him. 

Maybe you think that’s a reading one can only come to in a post Doki Doki Literature Club world, or before that in Japan You and Me and Her: A Love Story.  But the thing about a good metatextual commentary or “Deconstruction” is that it’s drawing attention to what was already there, making explicit a subtext that is in fact nothing new. 

A lot of my defense of Makoto is based on how in the VN everything that happens in the TV Anime can’t happen on one timeline and there are timelines where he does very little wrong. If you still think that every version of him should be judged based on the sins of the worst versions of him, that says a lot about you and how you view questions like Human nature and Free Will. 

One of the reasons why Calvinism and Arminianism are functionally the same to me is that if you have an absolute belief in human Free Will then inevitably you can conclude what choices a person makes reveals who they always were.  So Calvinism and Arminianism both result in simply believing Bad people just are innately Bad people. And as I’ve said before Existentialism is just Secular Arminianism.

I am a Materialist with an Optimistic view of Human Nature. I believe when people are at their Best they are being the closest to who they truly are, and that when people are bad they are succumbing to their material conditions and proving their lack of Free Will. But even that is not entirely the point of what I’m saying about Makoto in School Days. 

What I’m pointing out today is that who Makoto turns out to be when the Player doesn’t interfere is far from the worst version of him and may very well be the best.  

The ending that results from the player making no choices is With Honesty.  Making no choices isn't the only way to get that ending, the Overflow wiki at the top of it’s page says it’s a moderately hard ending to get,, which tells me one editor got it through a more convoluted means.  To be more specific the no choices route results in episode 2 being The Distance Between Us, episode 3 being Conflicting Desires, episode 4 being With Great Reluctance, and episode 5 being A Christmas Invitation.  I’ve affectionately nicknamed this The Luigi Route.

This ending is a Sekai ending, which feels very vindicating since I concluded Sekai is who Makoto should be with well before I learned this little fact about the game. But most importantly he never cheats at any point. The stuff that’s uncomfortable to watch in this route is mainly Taisuke’s behavior. 

Which does lead to the one thing in this route people are hard on Makoto for, his lack of intervention when he sees Taisuke’s lack of respect for Sekai’s consent. Makoto is clearly bothered by what he saw, unfortunately the way Japanese culture is about these kinds of things it is pretty expected that he’d conclude it’s not his business. And other cultures are like that too, including our own sometimes. This is not me saying it’s fine, but it is me saying its a product of society, of Material Conditions. 

Maybe you think it’s bad game design that what happens if the player does nothing is still a good ending, isn’t the point of a Video Game that the player saves this world from some bad fate it’s heading towards?  Of course a lot of RPGs and Zelda Games have a major element of McGuffin Delivery Service to how their plots are written, the player making things worse first is far from unprecedented. And even for players who want Makoto to get with Sekai, other Sekai endings probably feel more emotionally satisfying even when the route to get there involves more ethical misdeeds. 

The infamous Bad endings of the Game are themselves fairly difficult to get.  I can’t say they aren’t at all potential results of trying for a good end and failing, you can definitely be on a certain route long enough and wind up with a bad ending being what you’re most likely headed towards. There is a degree of High Risk High Reward where one Bad ending is closely tied to the route for the Threesome ending. But they are not from the start what you are most likely winding up on from simply playing the game badly. 

The most common endings one winds up with on a blind playthrough seem to be Christmas Eve if going for Kotnonoha or Setsuna’s Feelings if going for Sekai. Christmas Eve is in fact the Kotonoha counterpart of With Honesty in terms of the scenario leading up to it so it’s one where how much Makoto does wrong is about the same as that route, maybe even less.  Setsuna’s Feelings is one of many routes that involves Makoto cheating on Kotonoha with Sekai, but at least he doesn’t swing back later, once he realizes he’s happier with Sekai he sticks by that with a lot of the failure to break it to Kotonoha sooner coming down to equal hesitation from both him and Sekai.  It’s not good but hardly worth labeling him an irredeemable womanizer.

As I argued in other posts, going off just School Days I don’t think Makoto is ever as bad as people make him out to be.

It’s definitely unfair to hold against any Makoto of School Days the crimes he committed in different games, normally that’d be a given, School Days was clearly not written as something that needed a sequel, it’s a stand alone work of art.  But since vilifying Makoto as much as possible is everyone’s favorite pastime, the morally worst route of Summer Days has to be referred to as a revelation not an addition. I was at first gonna include a parallel analysis of Summer Days/Shiny Days but it looks like that may have to be a separate post some time in the future.