It’s Spooky Season! – Day 16: School-Live!

As a long time anime fan, something I rarely experience is feeling “fooled” by something that I watch. There are certainly many anime with plot twists and turns, some of which spring up out of nowhere, but often enough the writing is on the wall if you know where to look (and if a twist is a complete and utter surprise with no clues whatsoever… well, that’s just poor writing). I do, however, enjoy being surprised by the media I consume, and then I further enjoy realizing that I could have figured out the surprise all along if I had just been paying better attention to the clues being dropped in front of my face.

School-Live! begins as any typical “cute girls doing cute things” anime series tends to – by which I mean, the first episode is comprised of extremely tedious and insubstantial fluff. The series focuses on a group of girls belonging to the “school living club,” which means that their primary club activity is that they live… at their school. Most of the episode is taken up with the search for their escaped puppy. The first time I watched the episode, I had a difficult time paying attention. I was bored.

As the episode plods on, however, one starts to feel uneasy. There are some odd camera angles and brief glimpses that imply that there’s something very wrong with the school. There are images, such as a white cross placed in the school’s rooftop garden, that only gain meaning after watching several more episodes. And why in the world is there a school living club anyway? Do these girls (and their teacher) ever go home?

I feel like the statute of limitations has run out on any spoilers about this show (and if you go looking for a synopsis anywhere else you’re bound to encounter what the first episode attempts to obscure until its conclusion) so I’ll just go ahead and say it: the reason these girls live at their school is because it’s the only place that’s safe from the zombie apocalypse that has occurred in the outside world.

I have a bit of a limited tolerance for the combination of cute anime character aesthetics and gratuitous horror or violence, because for a long time I felt like the visual dissonance was used mainly for shock value. For reference, it took me several years to come back around to the Higurashi series, which I found completely repulsive when I’d originally watched it partly because it seemed to be fetishizing violence perpetrated by/against little girls.

Since then a lot of my opinions on anime in general have cooled off quite a bit, and I’ve been more willing to give series a chance that would have originally set off my squick senses. What makes School-Live! stand out is its craft. While I think the whole zombie situation and related material (mainly the fact that Yuki, the pink-haired girl basically exists mentally within an extended delusion after a complete psychological breakdown) seems pretty shocking at first blush, the series is so well-crafted from a visual standpoint that the facts can be pieced together by those so motivated. The series is fun to watch a second time simply because there are so many little background clues that then add richness to the story.

Ultimately, though, what I love about School-Live! is that, in spite of the bleak situation its characters are in, having to fight for their lives against zombies that were formerly their classmates and to eke out an existence when they may very well be all alone in the world, the series maintains an element of hope. Come for the zombie decapitations, stay for the bittersweet and hopeful character moments.

You can watch School-Live! on HIDIVE.