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Game of Thrones is now notorious for letting everyone down in its series finale, but one dark anime series failed to stick the landing even worse. Such is the case for the controversial School Days anime, which features one of the most controversial anime endings of all time.

Like Game of Thrones, School Days tried something bold and gutsy at the end that did not pay off, and in both cases, fans felt betrayed and bewildered by what they saw. All expectations were upended in the worst ways possible, so even if School Days is not high fantasy, it joins Game of Thrones in the club of once-promising stories that fell flat on their faces. To make matters worse, a tragic crime in Japan darkened School Days‘ reputation even more.

School Days’ Harem Deconstruction Ends With a More Shocking Finale Than GOT

The concept of subverting expectations or genres in anime has become popular and even a mainstream expectation in a variety of genres, but breaking the rules does not guarantee a good story. An anime series needs to subvert expectations and break the rules for a good reason, to tell a worthwhile tale and say something profound about the genre or the characters involved, but School Days gets it all wrong. Shock value is a blunt and often ineffective way to grab the audience’s attention quickly, but it can just as easiliy generate a bad reputation in the process. In the case of School Days, this terrible ending is one inspired by the wrong creative choices.

The genre deconstruction in School Days is a failed one, aiming to take apart the harem genre to lead to the most ghastly outcome rather than happily ever after. There’s no denying that the harem genre can be gratuitous, but it can still be done reasonably well, such as in The Quintessential Quintuplets or even Nisekoi. A genre as silly and unrealistic as a harem is ripe for deconstruction, but going too dark is just replacing one problem with another. First, the School Days anime agitates the audience with the hideously unlikable male lead Makoto Ito as he chases the girls in his high school. Then, School Days goes off the deep end to round out this ill-advised deconstruction with the ending.

School Days is an older anime from the 2000s, meaning that the pickiest modern fans wouldn’t even want to watch it, much less know exactly what went wrong in the end. From the innocence of School Days‘ harem emerged a twisted love triangle between Makoto and two girls named Kotonoha Katsura and Sekai Saionji, and jealousy reared its ugly head. Makoto wanted to end up with Kotonoha, so Sekai stabbed Makoto to death, only for Kotonoha to kill Sekai in response. School Days ends with a chilling scene of Kotonoha sitting on a boat with Makoto’s severed head, putting her yandere side on full display as she clings to what’s left of Makoto lovingly.

The School Days finale is one of the most revolting and unwelcome endings in all of manga and anime, and unlike the trauma or gore seen in anime like Berserk or Vinland Saga, it hardly even serves a purpose. The harem genre was twisted and broken in School Days seemingly for its own sake, or for crude and ill-advised shock value. Whatever School Days was trying to do, it absolutely did not work, and it made for an unsatisfying end to an unsatisfying attack on the harem genre. It didn’t feel like School Days was saying anything profound — it didn’t make some memorable argument or point about the harem genre, about antiheroes, or about teen drama. Dark stories can be stomached if they make fans think, such as Happy Sugar Life, while School Days seems to have no reason to exist, or at least, the ending has no reason to exist like that.

A Real-Life Crime Still Casts a Dark Shadow on School Days

Image by studio TNK.

It’s bad enough that School Days went overboard by making its characters act in such terrible ways and commit bloody crimes. It’s even worse when, by unfortunate coincidence, real-life crimes make the events of anime like School Days go from unpleasant to downright unacceptable. Tragically, around the time School Days aired, a violent crime in Japan unfolded, with the victim ending up decapitated. It was uncomfortably similar to Makoto’s own gruesome fate in School Days, casting yet another dark shadow over this questionable anime. While there’s no reason to believe the School Days anime exploited that real-life crime to add yet more shock value, the entire affair still seemed to be in bad taste.

In a strange coincidence that’s still shocking, a teenage girl in Kyoto murdered her father with an axe on September 17th, 2007, the same day TV Kanagawa was slated to air the School Days finale. Something had to be done in response to that ghastly crime regarding the equally violent School Days finale. TV Kanagawa made sure to cancel the final episode’s airing out of sensitivity for the real-life tragedy in Kyoto, and most other stations did much the same. One station, AT-X, opted to air the final episode of School Days later on September 27th and October 1st. The stations made the right call to take the final School Days episode off the air or at least delay its arrival, but even so, the real-life crime only darkened this anime’s reputation in hindsight. Studio TNK certainly isn’t to blame, yet School Days feels downright haunted as an anime regardless. That only builds on the anime’s controversial reputation and cements its place as one of the darkest anime out there on all levels.

School Days Has the Most Controversial Anime Ending of All Time

Despite the drama and unlikable characters in School Days, there was still a chance the anime could have provided a glimmer of hope or decently in the end to balance things out, only for the anime to go right ahead with its blunt and bizarre ending anyway. When a genre is deconstructed, or when expectations are subverted, there is still room to hang onto some sense of normalcy or goodness to make the subversion stand out that much more.

The characters in School Days went to troubling extremes with their words and actions to twist the harem genre and present a dark drama, but even so, that was no reason to push the boundaries with the final scene on the boat. Going dark doesn’t have to mean probing the bottomless depths as much as desired. It’s much better to explore the darkness just enough to get something out of it before retreating into emotional relief and a necessary glimmer of hope. School Days was already testing the limits of dark storytelling with its unlikable cast and clumsy drama, but it might have saved itself with a more tonally mixed or vaguely hopeful ending to make fans think. Instead, School Days ended the darkness with more of the same, all while making fans wonder who they were supposed to pity or root for in such a narrative.

A scene of regret and mournful introspection wouldn’t have been enough to save the finale of School Days from being such a controversy, but perhaps it could’ve been controversial in a more constructive way by having fans argue whether Kotonoha deserves any pity or redemption or not, as the Attack on Titan fandom is doomed to mull over Eren Yaeger’s legacy for the rest of anime eternity. Like it or not, it’s hard to argue against the fact that School Days went too far with its gory ending, especially given the fan response all these years later.