Manga 55163 Gakkougurashi

School Live is a psychological horror of cute girls doing cute things while trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.

The story is very basic, the girls are surviving in a zombie apocalypse. Its very standard in terms of the zombie genre but it's the characters that truly make this series shine. The cast is so lovable to the point of dangering your health from worrying about their safety. Yuki is my personal favourite and she's one of my favourite characters ever. She's very complex just like the rest of the main four and that's what I love about this. Kurumi is the lovable tomboy, Yuuri is ... the kind older sister and Miki the serious kouhai. If I ever had to choose a favourite group it would definitely have to be the School Living Club. They just have so much good chemistry together that makes the series that much more fun and engaging to watch and read. The manga helped develop what I already knew about these complex characters and got me so engaged to the point of tears and heart-pounding worry. The characters are constantly evolving and showing new sides to them that keeps me reading and wanted to see more. By the end of the manga, I genuinely think the main four of this series are some of the best-developed characters I've ever seen. Especially how they handle Yuki is my favourite part of this series. The mangaka really has made a beautiful piece of art here with this cast and story.

One of the best parts of School Live that make it so good is its use of psychological manipulation. This series will mess with your head on so many occasions. Its what originally got me so interested in the series in the first place and after finishing the anime I immediately started researching and learning about all the little details the series does to portray information, especially surrounding Yuki. Honestly, the psychological elements of this series are unmatchable and masterfully done. Its one of the only series to every genuinely trick me into believing one thing, only for the truth to be shocking me to the core.

The art for School Live is AMAZING!! The mangaka really has a skill for doing character expressions as if you simply search a reaction shot of a character from School Live you'll immediately see. Their expressions really give a sense of dread or happiness depending on the situation. The detail the mangaka gives with some of the frames are extraordinarily done and is the best art I've ever seen from a manga.

Now admittedly I feel the anime did a 10x better job on the portion it covered but that's because they probably had an amazing director to make the changes from manga to anime to enhance and improve it. The manga portion was still enjoyable to read and the second you get past the anime section of the manga it really kicks it into high gear of tension, fun and memorable moments till the very end. This story will never leave me and it was an epic journey from start to end.

In conclusion, I HIGHLY recommend anyone who likes horror, CGDCT, Slice of life, or simply find the premise interesting to immediately pick this up and give it a read, you won't regret it.

Gakkou Gurashi!


After watching the anime, I wanted to know how the story continues. For this, I had to start the manga from scratch because there are relatively significant differences between anime and manga.

The manga comes very quickly to the actual point of the story and therefore makes little fuss. The world is ending, zombies are everywhere. And the 3 surviving schoolgirls must prove themselves in this world, so they do not perish.

This manga did a good job at showing the chaos of the apocalypse and capturing the atmosphere well. Likewise, the conclusion and resolution of the story was quite appealing.

The problem ... with the manga is that the author tried to focus too much on the characters without having enough approach. Thus, he created tension and drama in places where it was completely unnecessary. Among other things, the plot of Yuri, which did not find a real resolution until the end. Or Miki's girlfriend who was practically forgotten until the end. Not to mention several moments where the characters should have died and still survived. These were still comprehensible due to the slow enemies. Why some others couldn't escape, however, was completely questionable. But cannon fodder can be killed quickly, although the plot had enough to compensate for all the deaths. With the explanation of the origin of the "virus"


[Story 5]

During their struggle for survival, they meet new survivors and get closer and closer to the origin of the apocalypse. While they try not to waste their last days.

The concept of the story is a little different from the well-known American zombie movies, they use the same scheme. However, here there is a difference, the psychology of the characters is in the foreground here and how the whole world affects their minds.


The implementation of the final arc with the Randall Cooperation was interesting at first but possessed a mostly disappointing and too quick result.

Reminded me slightly of "lord of the rings" in terms of the perspective of the narrative, by the way. In other words, the perspective of the protagonists concerning the plot was that of Frodo.


[Charktere 6]

This was the biggest focus on the manga, hands down. However, a completely double-edged sword. The character who delivered it best was Yuki. Which could not face reality and imagined everything was fine. In the course of the plot, she opened up more and more and later understood the truth. But she always kept it to herself to keep the others positive. Also in the Yuri arc, you saw how she developed and tried to respond to Yuri as she had helped her before. What later became clear through the drawing in the notepad was that Yuki has already arrived in the present.

With Miki and Kurumi, on the other hand, there is less to say. They did possess their problems and also fluctuations of will. However, little developed there. Only Kurumi's development of her body was interesting to watch. How the virus reacted to her and under what circumstances it brought her.

Yuri's arc, on the other hand, disappointed me for the most part. Even though it succeeded well in showing the development of Yuki. So Yuri's arc had too little approach, came much too spontaneously, and also ended without real resolution.

Most of the other survivors were unimportant to the plot and had no reason to exist in the manga. Their only reason was merely to bring more life to the work so that the characters wouldn't have been so lonely. It would have been enough to introduce the doctor alone.


[Drawings/Backgrounds 6]

This is the very clearest difference between anime and manga. By being much more detailed and gritty, the manga has managed to create a very good atmosphere.

Certainly, the drawing style of the characters was quite mediocre and did not fit much to the actual setting (similar to Higurashi).



Conclusion

For any horror/psychological and especially fan of "zombies" I can highly recommend this manga. It has required improvement in several points and has wasted a lot of potential. But it has also been very convincing in several aspects.


[Enjoyment 8]

I've got beef with School Live. On one hand, I really do commend it, any series that can convince me to read 78 chapters of material has some sort of merit to it. But in the case of School Live, much of that merit is purely hypothetical. I think this was a concept that had a lot of potential on several fronts, but A) didn't understand the themes it initially presented enough to follow up convincingly, and B) didn't understand the draw of the concept in the first place. But I should back up and define that concept in the first place. School Live, as ... becomes immediately apparent after the very first chapter, is a subversive and psychological take on a zombie apocalypse story. Which makes it a bit difficult to talk about, because it becomes one of those things where the initial draw is really valuable to experience and helps draw in the reader. But I digress. The story follows the aptly named "School Life Club", a school club which focuses on, well, living in the school, a psychological framework created by the other surviving girls for the poorly adjusted protagonist Yuki, as they attempt to survive the zombie apocalypse. I think the real appeal of the concept lies within its scale, and its psychological themes, which at the start, it embraces heartily. But as the series goes on, these roots grow weaker and weaker, until School Live is little more of a zombie story than any other, with the caveat of eternally static characters and frustratingly unnecessary tonal shifts.

Art: 7

School Live's art style is generally pretty inoffensive, and the characters are well designed. Kurumi and Yuki in particular I think have very striking designs, and the attire of the school live club embodies their aesthetic nicely. One big complaint I have in the art though, lies in Yuki specifically. For much of the beginning of the series, by design, Yuki is our lens in the world. Of course that's not to say reality isn't shown through the other characters at this stage, but Yuki's frame of reference, her uncorrupted fantasy provides a consistently interesting contrast to the stark and grim reality. But there comes a point where that isn't really a part of the series anymore, which can really be seen in how the zombies are portrayed. For much of the beginning of the series, whenever Yuki is with the group, the zombies have less form, less definition, because Yuki has no real concept of what a zombie is. It doesn't fit into her bubbly world view, so as she she refuses to interact with it. At the end of the first arc, this ceases to be the case, and the zombies at large become zombies, shambling decomposing dead. Granted, I will say that these zombies are largely better detailed and defined than the traditional zombies we see near the beginning, but it nonetheless undercuts its psychological angle. It could certainly be argued that this art change coincidences with a change in Yuki's character, but that is a WHOLE other can of worms. To keep this simply in the real of the artstyle, its good.

Story: 5

This story has problems. There's a point where I feel pretty clearly that the aims of the series and the author change from a short scale, self contained piece, where I would presume its popularity necessitated a development to a much wider scale narrative. This really is almost two different stories, a psychological look at mental stress in extremely hostile, and even futile circumstances, and then knockoff Walking Dead but with a psychological tilt. The main problem here is that this could work, it could be fine if it was always leading to this, but the way the story pivots makes me think that it wasn't really planned from the start. Furthermore, it widens the stakes ridiculously. I am of the opinion, however cynical, that the school life club should have ended in the school. Because once they leave the school, this is no longer school live. The themes it originally wanted to present become dry and hollow in all but very few avenues, and the story warps into something that has no business being as large as it is. Indeed as it goes on, I find much of the conclusions and circumstances leading to, of all things, a happy ending, extremely contrived and silly. Granted, the story tends to remain entertaining, if nothing else, and it plays with ideas throughout that could be of some real intrigue if developed. But it fails to really do so in a meaningful way, in my opinion.

Character: 3

This is the big one, the one thing you want to hinge your psychological story on. If you bill your story as a psychological journey and examination, there must be an understanding of the characters and their development. But. School Live does not contain this. Yuki is nothing but a dead end. And if you like Yuki, like, a lot, you might find solace in this. But it really becomes a problem. Just to expound on this a bit, Yuki is, of course, the impetus for the school life club to even exist. Her fragile psyche and refusal to accept the grimness of reality requires the existence of this veil over the apocalypse, just to keep her alive. The reader can question if this is healthy or not, or if this actively detriments from their survival, but lucky for everyone involved, it becomes a completely moot point. Despite being shown explicitly to struggle between recognization of reality and psychological commitment to delusion, the introduction of Miki marks the end of any psychological intrigue, because through her it becomes clear that these characters have no capability to develop. Miki explicits tries to break Yuki's delusion, and in doing so does not reveal any subconscious or interesting character underneath Yuki's facade. It does nothing but demonstrate that Yuki is.... simply mentally deficient. She comes off as nothing more than stunted and childish, not really creating a veil but almost too undeveloped to even begin to understand her circumstances. And that's the end of it. Although this supposedly "solves" her delusion, she remains the same character, just somehow now without the need to paper over reality, even though nothing in her life or her understanding has changed. Which, as the story progresses, just makes her dead weight. SHE was who needed the framework, once the framework is gone and she continues to treat life like a game, she actively works against the health of the group. It truly boggles my mind how this character was not allowed to develop whatsoever over the entirely of the series. Past that, Kurumi is a fine character, and invariably has the most interesting stuff happen to her, but little is done to expand the really interesting things she experiences. Yuuri is largely static and not terribly interesting, but she does have the best psychological arc with Ruu, probably the strongest aspect of the series past the school. And Miki.... I'm sorry she's just bad. She's cynical and doesn't mesh well with the group, and she has a single, 1 dimensional, character trait: She really feels bad about Kei. She never manages to move past Kei, never has any other development and frankly by the end I was really praying she would bite the dust, because she really just is not interesting. I'll be honest with you I cannot even remember what she does in the university arc, but it was probably wallowing in self pity about Kei. She is the weakest member of the group, she cannot kill zombies because she thinks they might be Kei, and frankly its insulting that she lives through more like like 10 chapters, let along 60. Past that I'm not going to go into any of the secondary university characters, as they do very little except the biologist, but I will say Megumi embodies another problem in the series, namely the inconsistent zombie rules. But while she's alive she's fine.

Its been a whole year since I finished this, and really just thinking about how wasted this concept is still makes me as angry as when I first read it. Almost all the main cast either develop backwards or get written out of the story, the stakes and scale get blown up insanely and without warrant, and all in all the story ends so far removed from what it could (and should have) been. Its really bad news when a zombie series has you actively rooting for the zombies by its climax, and nearing the end of my own reading of this almost everyone but Kurumi was on the hit list. If you're looking to read this, I would recommend never leaving the school, just imagine they get holed up and killed valiantly protecting Yuki's innocence, or accepting the futility of their mission but having enjoyed protecting the remaining vestiges of humanity in the face of the apocalypse. Because frankly I don't think the series understands much of any of why its concept had promise past like chapter 15. If you wanna go past that, you better REALLY like Yuki's attitude, because she never stops. On the whole, School Live, Gakkougurashi, is deeply flawed, and incredibly static past a promising beginning. If you enjoy the characters at the start, there's a chance you could enjoy the same characters by the end. But if you're looking for dynamic and interesting characters, in a well structured and planned apocalypse narrative, I would recommend you look most anywhere else, unless you absolutely must have the School Live aesthetic.