^{This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.}

^{This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rumi. Thank you for your support.}

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“Yuki’s pretty amazing. With her around, we can always pick ourselves back up.

No matter what.”

The real giveaway is in the soundtrack. The canned, cheery music so common to the school life comedy genre drops out and is replaced by dead silence and howling wind. That’s the first real clue that something isn’t as it seems. Others arrive in carefully orchestrated, almost subliminal drips. A shot of a seemingly normal school hallway with the windows broken, students who seem rooted to their classrooms, and a vague sense of unease that surrounds the actions of every character but one.

By now, the twist at the end of the first episode of SCHOOL-LIVE! (Gakkou Gurashi domestically, and throughout the rest of this piece) is so well known that its reputation precedes the series itself. This is no comedy. A zombie apocalypse is upon the state-of-the-art school building that our four main characters, out of necessity, make their home. Possibly the whole world, too. That first episode is a masterful little clockwork of suspense building, but if the show’s entire legacy were staked on shock value alone, it would not survive in the popular conscience nearly seven years after it premiered. 33 other TV anime served as Gakkou Gurashi‘s co-seasonals in the summer of 2015. Of those, about a dozen persist in the collective cultural imagination. A work’s quality cannot be judged alone on whether or not people remember it, but it’s truly rare for something without some kind of spark to it to persist for that long. Gakkou Gurashi tapped into something. But what?

My pet theory is that as early as its second episode, Gakkou Gurashi draws on a deep, yawning sadness that resonates with those young enough to relate directly to the show’s cast on up. The melancholy, the anxiety, and the outright dread that come with knowing that who you are now is not who you always will be is deeply rooted in modern culture. If not a universal fear, it’s at least up there. Apocalypse fiction is an extremely direct expression of that worry, and after Gakkou Gurashi rips the Band-Aid off at the end of its first episode, it keeps hammering that button, and it’s never less than effective. Just last year, overlooked OVA Alice in Deadly School succeeded in doing much the same with some of the same methods.

Gakkou Gurashi pulling that same trick for a good five hours could conceivably become a slog. But it never does, because there is some sincere levity cut with all this tension; lighthearted moments colored by the characters’ friendships-of-necessity, or when the series indulges in traditional school life anime tropes, even sometimes in the panic-giggles induced by some of its dark comedy. But all of that only serves to ratchet the tension back up when things get more serious again. This is a show that leaves you with a gnawing fear in your stomach between episodes. There’s a rawness to it.

None of this would mean much if the show’s characters weren’t compelling. But each of them is. The titular School Life Club are a fantastic cast. We have Yuki (Inori Minase, who, among many other things, later appeared in Girls’ Last Tour as Chito), Kurumi (Ari Ozawa, who last year played Elisha in BACK ARROW), Yuuri (Mao Ichimichi, notable for voicing Pecorine in Princess Connect! Re:Dive this very season), and Miki (Rie Takahashi, who just a year after this series aired would land the role of Megumin in Konosuba), their teacher and club advisor, Sakura, AKA Megu (Ai Kayano. Perhaps you know her as Kirika from Symphogear?), and finally their cute little corgi, Taroumaru. (Emiri Katou, voice of Kyuubey.)

These characters largely defy easy archetype pigeonholing, but I’ll be as snappy as I can. Yuki, the heart and soul of the group, is burying repressed traumatic memories under her happy-go-lucky outer shell and spends much of the series knee-deep in delusion. Kurumi is the tough one; by necessity, not choice, and wields a gardening shovel she uses to fight off zombies when necessary. She also has what looks to my armchair-seated eye like an untreated case of PTSD. When it flares up, colors wash out in real time and her heartbeat is turned way up in the audio. Yuuri is the “club president,” and the older sister sort. She takes care of the planning and tries her best to keep everyone else in line. Beneath that facade, it’s her who cracks the worst when push comes to shove. (No one can bottle all that responsibility alone, Yuuri.)

Miki, rescued from a nearby mall, is the most reclusive of the four and takes some time to adjust to the others’ personalities. Megu tries very hard to be the best teacher to her remaining students she can be. Taroumaru is a good boy, as all dogs are.

The show’s structure is fairly simple for most of its runtime. The School Life Club must attend to some task, either something fairly serious like a supply run or some whim of Yuki’s. They do it, and along the way fun is had while, simultaneously, the knowledge that this can’t last forever looms large. It’s a difficult dichotomy to make work, but Gakkou Gurashi manages it, and it’s the show’s main strength.

One of the traits that separates art that is merely very good from that which is great is, in my mind, applicability. A story’s ability to resonate beyond the context in which it was originally written. In the seven years since Gakkou Gurashi first aired, the global climate crisis has escalated to the point of emergency. To the extent that even talking about it in contexts like this can feel like a cliché. Gakkou Gurashi so expertly plays that single chord of apocalyptic despair that when it strikes a nerve, the resonance is as deep and dark as an abandoned well. The “zombies” (or whatever they are) are a formality; they’re everyone who’s not looking out for us, either by malice or by being beaten down by the weight of it all. Our collective abusers and our fellow victims united into a single shambling mass of consumptive darkness.

This is to say nothing of any number of other global crises to which one could easily apply the zombie apocalypse metaphor. Some of the writing in the series would seem rather on-the-nose if it were penned today.

It’s pure projection, of course. But in hindsight, it certainly can feel like the “zombie fiction” boom that Gakkou Gurashi came about at the end of was prescient; the skeletal hand of the Grim Reaper knocking on our collective door. Going about our daily lives in spite of it all, we can all feel like Yukis in our own way. If she’s delusional, maybe she’s no more so than we are.

Perhaps that’s a bit heady, and one would prefer to look at Gakkou Gurashi as an outgrowth of or reaction to the school life genre. The endless everyday that defines that sort of work turned vile and strangling. Consequently, I sometimes see Gakkou Gurashi spoken about as though it is a singular, weird blip in modern TV anime history. I have seen it referred to as an attack on (or worse, a “deconstruction of”) that genre, and I’ve seen it criticized as being all shock value. (And to avoid seeming like I’m talking strictly about other people, I naively believed some of this myself when the series was new. It is a part of why it’s taken me so long to watch it.)

For my money, none of these things could be further from the truth. Gakkou Gurashi is a comparatively early example of a strain of anime that would come to define some of the very best of the 2010s. “Post”-school life work like A Place Further Than the Universe, O Maidens in Your Savage Season!, and even Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It is distinguished from these far more grounded stylistic cousins by its apocalyptic setting. But if one views the slice of life genre as an organic, living thing, one can imagine Gakkou Gurashi as a sort of evolutionary defense mechanism. A warning: “Our daily lives are under threat, here are the stakes.” (If you wanted to, you could also probably draw a line backwards connecting it to other fare that combined a high school setting with supernatural elements and a broadly similar tone space. Say, Angel Beats!)

With all this in mind, Gakkou Gurashi is not without light. The School Life Club’s rare excursions outside their school, while dangerous, contain moments of joy and human connection they would never have if they stayed locked up. This is how they meet Miki in a flashback that spans most of episodes four and five. The original School Life Club trio is able to liberate Miki from her comparative isolation. Miki’s own history with her friend / maybe-more Kei–who struck out on her own out of frustration sometime before the events of those episodes–serves to frame all this. Both Miki and Kei eventually choose freedom over isolation, but because they don’t do so together, they lose each other. It’s a complicated tangle of cutting loss and the balm of simple contact, and it’s remarkable how well Gakkou Gurashi can walk that tightrope, and how well it continues to walk it as the series goes on. Nothing is without sacrifice, but at the same time, it tells us, no situation is truly hopeless, either. This is, I would in fact argue, Gakkou Gurashi‘s core thesis.

This is best expressed with Yuki. Yuki is, by any conventional definition, extremely mentally unwell. But while Gakkou Gurashi sometimes seems like it might play this for shock, it never really does aside from arguably that first episode swerve. Everyone who actually gets to know Yuki–including Miki, who is initially extremely offput by her mannerisms–finds her a necessary ball of joy in a world that sorely needs it. Her friends in the club indulge her tendencies where they’re harmless and curb them on the occasion they cause real trouble.

She is never treated as lesser than any of the other characters simply because she has specific needs, and when at the series’ end she becomes more lucid it feels less like some part of her is being erased and more that she has simply grown as a person. She confronts a truth she’s been hiding from; the fact that Megu sacrificed her life to save the School Life Club some time ago, and reconciles with the state of the world in general. A lesser “zombie apocalypse survivors” sort of story would frame her as a burden. But Gakkou Gurashi never even suggests it. The one and only time she ever voices the concern that she might be weighing the others down, she’s immediately corrected by all present. Yuki is a symbol of a hope placed not on some distant Other coming to the rescue, but in each other, a slice of life lead girl slipping that genre’s bounds to become, in her own way, a genuine hero.

In general, the girls’ relationships with each other feel as authentic as any friendship from a “normal” slice of life series. And that’s the thing, despite what it may be easy to assume, Gakkou Gurashi still is a slice of life series. Decent chunks of even very serious episodes are spent on fairly mundane activities. Some whole episodes are devoted to them, such as when the club gets the idea to send out letter balloons in episode seven. Or episode nine, where Gakkou Gurashi manages the impressively absurd feat of squeezing an egregious pool episode into its remaining runtime, complete, at least in the fansub I watched, with a random reference to the then-recent Kill la Kill. (It’s easily the least essential episode of the whole show, but even something that nakedly cliche is a welcome breather between what comes before and after.)

In its final stretch, the girls of the School Life Club are thrust into crisis. Zombies break through the school’s barriers. Kurumi gets bit. It’s bad. If Gakkou Gurashi were the shock schlock people (including my younger self) have mistaken it for at times, it would be very easy for the series to end on a down note to be “shocking.” Instead, we get a miracle. Yuki gets the idea to dismiss the zombie horde via the school PA. Improbably, it works.

The scene falls apart in the retelling, but in the moment, it’s magical. There are losses (poor Taroumaru really looks like he’s going to pull through, but he doesn’t), but the School Life Club carry on. Maybe all of this is helped somewhat by the fact that I binged the entire series in only two sittings. Maybe it is also helped by my new HRT regimen making me even more vulnerable to sappy bullshit than I already was. But I like to think I’d have bawled like a baby regardless. The show is as good at tugging your heartstrings as it is inspiring dread. Not many anime can claim that.

Gakkou Gurashi can get away with that heartstring-pulling because by the time it happens, we’ve already spent some five hours with these characters. We have seen them not just survive but thrive in a world that has well and truly gone to shit.

And that difference, the distinction between simply surviving and truly living, is what that line in the maddeningly catchy OP theme means. “We have dreams like we’re supposed to.” Different dreams, maybe, than the ones we had when we were younger, but dreams, nonetheless. Gakkou Gurashi‘s final shot is the School Life Club, having held for themselves a “graduation ceremony” now that hiding out in the school is no longer tenable, flying down the empty highway in Megu’s old car, seeking to link up with other possible survivors. The city they drive through is in ruins, but there’s barely a hint of melancholy. The future is theirs to seize.

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