While this post contains no major spoilers in regards to specific plot twists or major events that occur later than the earliest episodes of this series, this WT! does contain extensive discussion of aspects of this series many would say are best experienced blind. If you are of the type that prefers 100% blind experiences with anime, it is recommended you just go watch the show right now. If you are unconvinced to watch the show on mere suggestion or already know of such elements, please, do read further. Thank you, and I hope these messages reach you.

Gakkougurashi! (AKA School-Live!)

MAL / AniList / AniDB / ANN / kitsu.io

2015, Studio Lerche, dir. Masaoumi Andou

12 Episodes, ~22 min.

Based on the manga by Kaihou Norimitsu and Chiba Sadoru

Gakkougurashi! can be streamed legally on Crunchyroll, HiDIVE, and VRV.

TL;DR at bottom.

It is often a terrifying prospect, being a late millennial/early zoomer in the early 2020’s, one who is at all politically radicalized or just even the vaguest bit in touch with the world around us. I mean, you’re living on the same planet at the same time as I am, I can’t imagine you don’t understand at least a fraction of the fear I’m talking about. Apocalypse anxiety is rampant among people around my age or younger. It never seems to end, more and more news about how badly our planet is being fucked and how much closer we are than ever before to total devastation. For as much as we like to preach hope, and for as much as we damn well should, it’s hard not to get disillusioned. Hard not to feel like it’s all, ultimately, meaningless. Hard not to feel like, in the end, the systems aren’t going to change. Those in power obviously aren’t going to heed the warnings and magically start caring about saving the planet, global insurrection is basically a fantasy, and hell, maybe it’s already too late anyways. If the worst global pandemic in a century didn’t spark fundamental change, what chance could things possibly have of getting better? Maybe we’re marching directly towards the cliff and we’re already past the point of no return. Maybe the collapse is inevitable, and it’s something we’re going to have to be ready to face.

When I’m at my most doomer, when I feel like maybe the apocalypse in my lifetime is inevitable after all, and I need some spark of hope in the face of that reality, hope that some kind of beauty or happiness or meaning might still exist in the long run, for whatever humans might remain in the aftermath, if only to keep me going day-to-day… I recall Gakkougurashi!.

Gakkougurashi!, AKA School-Live!, follows the Megurigaoka High School’s School Living Club, comprised of the goofy and fun-loving Yuki Takeya, the athletic and hot-headed Kurumi Ebisuzawa, the caring yet stern Yuuri “Rii” Wakasa, and the shy, hesitant bookworm Miki “Mii” Naoki, who, along with Yuki’s beloved sensei Megu-nee and club puppy Taroumaru, are dedicating themselves to living inside the school building and making the most of every day that they can. However, the true purpose for the club’s founding belies a much uglier reality; an uncontrolled zombie outbreak has swept the land and, unable to cope with the unfathomable horror of the situation, Yuki has undergone a mental breakdown and is unable to perceive reality as it truly is; instead, every day confined in the school is, through her eyes, just a fun, wholesome club adventure with her friends, as though nothing ever changed. The School Living Club, then, was founded as a way to shelter themselves inside the relatively safe school building and build the best life within that they can, all while creating a story to justify their staying within the school walls and maintaining Yuki’s vision of a happy, normal life.

Gakkougurashi!’s conceit is a stroke of absolute brilliance. It’s a chilling concept on its own; a few young girls, trapped in a single building by a zombie outbreak, all alone, forced to take care of one of their own whose mind is in a fractured and fragile state, no professional help in sight. The way it also serves a dark twist on the prototypical high school club anime; the way Yuki’s illusion of the world is that of a fun-times school club, and the way the club itself is built around the same idea as the group’s method of survival, living their lives inside of the school; is genius, on the part of both the writing and the characters in-universe.

The question that must rear its ugly head, then, is… is it right for the other girls to be keeping up Yuki’s illusion? Is their effectively letting her continue to be insane potentially toxic to her? Or would shattering the illusion only leave nothing left but a traumatized husk of a person; is this the only way to prop up some version of the human being known as Yuki Takeya at all? What would you do if you were in the rest of the School Living Club’s shoes? Even Kurumi and Rii don’t know for sure if they’re doing the right thing; Kurumi herself says it, they’re not psychiatrists; they just have to maintain the state they are familiar with handling, if only to bide their time. It is a truly haunting situation that provides a lot of food for thought. There is a palpable sense of innocence and childhood to Yuki, which is at once deeply endearing yet deeply, deeply sad given the context. Such a gleeful soul, her right mind taken away from her by circumstances far too extreme for her to handle.

Gakkougurashi! does not shy away from the utter, crushing horror and near-hopelessness of the situation. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that it’s the end of the fucking world, and these girls have experienced no shortage of loss and trauma. The girls have to put their own lives on the line, make impossible moral and practical decisions, and face the terrors and tragedies of a zombie apocalypse head-on, to ensure the survival of themselves and of their dear friends. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that one of our people is literally mentally broken from the situation, whom we must care for on our own, no professionals in sight. It’s hard. It is so, so incredibly hard for them. It is a deeply effective work of horror when the chips are down for our beloved crew. We are not spared any of the horrible truth, past or present, and the truth is harrowing. These four girls go through things that four young girls… four innocent, young girls like this… shouldn’t have to go through. They are forced to come to serious, mature, morbid truths far faster and far more suddenly than they ever should. These are truths they have to come to grips with to move on as people, but they’re truths that it’s… hard to watch these fun-loving teenagers have to reach. It’s an alarming statement on the nature of the morbid - on death and on grief. That sort of thing doesn’t always come to us when we’re prepared for it, when we’re emotionally or mentally equipped for it. And that’s… tragedy. That’s the blankest, purest, roughest, most naked definition of tragedy there is. Gakkougurashi! only expounds on that by putting one of the most recognizable symbols of innocence and simplicity in anime - the high school club full of BFF cute girls - and placing it into this context.

It takes advantage of the best element of the slice of life show; letting the viewer form a personal bond with this group of people as they watch along and vicariously take part in their friendship, as though they were one of them themselves; such that you share not only in the blossoming of their friendship, but in their collective trauma as well. In that way, the vicarious bond you end up forming with the School Living Club is only that much stronger, making you feel both the good and the bad with such deeper intensity and personal care.

And yet, for a show soaked in fear and suffering and blood and tears, its ultimate theme is one of idealism. There are many things that become lost or broken within these girls; chief among them, their innocence. For one, her sanity. But there is one, exactly one, thing these girls have that never wavers, no matter what; their friendship.

Because in the midst of it all, in those blessed moments of peace and safety that they can, these girls do... what I could argue is the most important thing they could do, cut off from society and with only their own prolonged survival to worry about. Namely… they have fun.

Raiding a mall for supplies? Why not try out the clothes? Freshly cleaned water tank? Why not… just have a fun summer’s pool day? Splash around, play volleyball, fight with water guns? We’ll play pretend, we’ll talk over meals, we’ll laugh, we’ll… enjoy life, as much as we can, simply through our togetherness. We have all the time in the world, after all; why not take advantage, goof off, bond?

Gakkougurashi! shows how, after the collapse of society, in the absence of supposed structure and reason, what we would resort to is... friendship and camaraderie, finding whatever joy we can in this new mode of life by coming together. It’s almost like a cry of defiance; suffering and desperate though we are, lost many though we have, not only will we protect and look after one another to our dying breaths, we will still love. We will still make merriment, we will still have revelry, we will still make memories, we will still laugh, we will bring one another joy. And as long as there are humans, we will always be able to find joy in one another’s company, until only the very last man on earth is left.

And those things matter; hell, when you may well be the last humans alive, those things just might literally be the single most important thing on earth. We’re social creatures, after all, and we can’t truly live if we don’t have one another to lean on, to create community with, and yes, to find fun and laughter with. That is what keeps us going, that is why we would choose to survive in the first place over giving up and perishing. That is our motivation. That’s what makes surviving worth it. That is, straight up, one of the most profoundly beautiful messages I’ve ever gotten out of a work of fiction.

In the most desperate situations, divorced from everything else, divorced from civilization and what we perceive as structure and reason, with only our persons to our name, our most core, naked nature is to come together with our fellow man, to help one another and to create community and find joy. And that’s exactly what the School Living Club does.

Do you want to know what my single favorite frame from this entire series is? It’s this one, from the aforementioned pool episode. This soft look of contentment, of tired, joyous bliss, following a day of unabashed play. This rooftop, this pool, is a safe haven; even as the zombies ravage the cold wasteland just outside our purview, this place, right here and now, is somewhere we can have fun. Where we, as friends, can still just… be friends. Do as friends do. And through all the horror, all the sadness, all the trauma… that, I think, is the single most important emotion that this series conveys.

The way Gakkougurashi! presents such a... humane interpretation of the post-apocalyptic wolfpack mentality is astounding to me. We are so culturally inundated with this idea, this image, of the post-apocalypse being a wasteland of war and division, of a humanity that in times of crisis resorts to backstabbing and fighting amongst one another for the scraps. But I don’t think that’s how we are. Real life has shown that groups of people in crisis tend to behave very differently; when trapped in a seemingly hopeless situation, isolated from any kind of society, our nature is not to devolve into savagery, but to collaborate with those around us and build the best existence we can, to overcome the odds and survive, and to build a stronger connection with our fellow man in the process.

One thing is made exceptionally clear over the course of the series; these girls care about one another. They love one another, to the ends of the earth, and nothing would ever make them okay with losing one of their own. Think about how easily the girls could have already thrown Yuki out into the hoard by the start of the series, keeping her stable and placated too much of a distraction, a burden, her a dead weight. They don’t, and they couldn’t, because Yuki is one of them. It’s not just about surviving; it’s about surviving together. It’s not worth it if it’s not all of us. And that mentality does cause the group serious problems and put them in real danger later into the series, but it doesn’t matter. We look after our own, period. Our people, our friends, are just as important as the materials that keep us literally alive.

I don’t know what the climate apocalypse, and whatever else might come our way in the coming decades, is going to look like. Chances are it’s not going to look a lot like the zombie apocalypse of Gakkougurashi!. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be simple. Many of us probably aren’t going to be fortunate enough to survive, let alone have our existing loved ones survive with us. But I do know that, corruptible and fragile as we are, humans are pretty amazing creatures at our core. Mutual aid, camaraderie, being there for each other is in our nature. And Gakkougurashi! shows us that, even when all else is lost, we still have each other. And as long as we have each other, we can still create beautiful, gleeful, meaningful moments. Human connection in and of itself isn’t something that can be so easily broken, even by the greatest of disasters; it’s intrinsic to who we are as a species.

The potential for human joy, for fun and friendship, as exemplified through the School Living Club, is like... a flower, a tiny, budding little pink flower, poking out through a sea of concrete. A reminder that, even through the harshest of surroundings, and even at the smallest scale, the beauty of simple nature, the beauty of that which is present before all else, can still flourish. And it may be helpless to push back against that which surrounds it. But that tiny, little speck of beauty, that makes itself visible in spite of the bleakest of surroundings, is something... so, so deeply important to be reminded of.

I admit, it’s a very nihilistic kind of hope but... you take what you can get these days, you know? In one form or another, this show did give me hope. And I think it has the power to do the same for you. Please, if you have any kind of apocalypse anxiety, I implore you to experience this story, internalize it, and spread it. This is a work I feel everyone of my generation needs to see.

TL;DR

Gakkougurashi! is an emotional tour de force. It is a tragic, haunting, joyful, heart-destroying, life-affirming, and above all, deeply, deeply human work of art. I know I felt emotions watching Gakkougurashi! I don’t even have a name for, that nothing else before it has made me feel. You will feel fear. You will have fun. You will laugh. You will cry. You will mourn. You will form an intense bond with four girls in a deeply, deeply unfortunate situation. But ultimately, you will come out the other side with a renewed belief in humanity, and perhaps just the littlest bit of hope in the face of a bleak future.

It’s more than a gimmick; it just might be one of the stories we need the most.