A series of selfishly-made bad decisions. A downward spiral of people treating other people badly to satisfy their own ends. A tragic story of people callously taking advantage of one another.

All three describe School Days.

If you’ve seen Otaku no Video, you know this story.

Kind of.

Haruka Morishima is weird.

In a good way.

For what’s portrayed by so many as a wish-fulfillment genre for lonely men, harem anime protagonists seem to have a penchant for choosing some pretty hostile women.

They build an identity around how antisocial they are, making themselves feel superior and absolving themselves of responsibility for being unable to make friends or form and maintain relationships.

Fictional characters can make good role models, as their existence is as a set of boiled-down concepts, making them free from the many intricate shortcomings of being human.