Jeez. Do highschools always need to be depicted this harshly? I mean, I know it sucks (it really all goes downhill when middle school starts), but it’s like these kids are in a competition in the gameshow “who’s the biggest asshole?”. They even acknowledge that they are straight up bullying. What do they even get out of being so mean? At least in mine it was more of a “I ignore you, you ignore me”. Also with how absolutely terrible and mentally damaging pretty much EVERY school story depicts highschool and students, you’d think the government would do something useful to make it suck less and damage kids less. You know, considering it’s mandatory (at least in the states you can’t drop out until you have maybe 2 years left). I don’t know the laws for attendance in Japan, but regardless it leaves far too bad of a stigmatism . It makes it harder to get a successful career than having been in prison (which is a problem of itself). And honestly I can’t say I learned anything in highschool except how to take X test and be a good college student. And then you relearn everything you actually need in college, and then you relearn it all again on the job. You’d think by now they’d let you skip the total shit show highschool is; the whole experience feels like a really dramatic preparation stage for college.
I haven’t even read the full chapter yet. Stopped midway to write this. That’s how terrible those kids are. At that age they should have enough self awareness to not act like total dicks. It doesn’t even make sense. If you don’t like someone just ignore them. Why go out of your way to be mean? What’s the merit there? What’s the payoff? In the middle of a pandemic people still can’t even be bothered to wash their hands for 20 seconds or use handsantizer, and that can keep them alive. But people always seem to find the time, effort, and care to be hateful and mean. To other people; to other animal species; to whole environments; to the earth itself. Why not just be kind? Or at least don’t take the effort to be anything. Indifferent and ignorance is better than being the mean and hateful for no reason. I know people always say that indifference is what allows bullying to continue, but just imagine if the only two options people took were either to ignore or be kind? There’s not even a need for bullying to be an option. I understand not caring enough to bother with someone (me all the time) or being nice/kind for that fluffy feeling, but I never got why people just act so mean all the time (I feel terrible mean I’m accidentally just mean to someone). Someone’s just sitting there minding their own business not being a bother. What goes in someone’s mind that just makes them think “I’m gonna bully them for existing”?
Edit: okay, so read the full chapter, and no teacher? At all? That was like homeroom right? Isn’t there a teacher in charge of that? Are they just never there policing their classroom? And do those kids just have no respect for authority, rules, each other, or themselves? (Actually who am I kidding? They’re human. Of course they don’t). I actually kinda really want the mc to fake a suicide and have all those bullies be charged with murder for leading her to it. Actually that’d be a really useful fear tactic that schools and the police could work together to do. Get together with the bullied victim and show the idiots bullying them the consequences they could face for being generally bad people.
