Manga / School-Live!

aka: Gakkou Gurashi

It is highly recommended that you at least read the first chapter/watch the first episode of School-Live! before continuing to read on for the full experience. Major spoilers are ahead.

Cause you wanna do it! If you want to do it!
When you wanna do it? Do you wanna do it!?
Together now! (Yeah!)

"We're fine!"

— School Life Club's balloon postcard

Yuki Takeya is in love with the school. For her, it's a wonderful place, where she enjoys her school activities, especially the activities of her club: the School Life Club. The club has Rii-san as the president, Kurumi-chan as another member, and the teacher, Megu-nee, is always there for them. Yes, she is in love with her school. What follows is the adventures of their club, as they live on the school grounds and mooch off its services for as long as possible!

Except that is NOT the case.

The truth about the whole situation she and her friends are currently in is much less colorful and far bleaker than Yuki is willing to face. In reality, the beautiful school she enjoys so much is in ruins, the School Life Club is more or less barricaded in a section of their school, and she and her friends are the only living people likely left in a city that is overrun with zombies. Despite this, Yuki's friends try to let her live as close to a normal school life as they can manage, and through these efforts find it within themselves to live, and not merely exist day-by-day in the hellish situation they're in.

School-Live! (original Japanese title: Gakkou Gurashi!, meaning "Living at School!") is what you get when you make a most unlikely crossing of genres: Schoolgirl Series Slice of Life, and Zombie Apocalypse Survival Horror, exploring what exactly happens when the cute girls you'd normally find in the former get dumped into the setting of the latter. The manga is drawn by Chiba Sadoru and written by Kaihou Norimitsu of nitro+ fame, and was serialized in Manga Time Kirara Forward from 2012 to 2020 (which serialized, among other series, Puella Magi Kazumi Magica and Dream Eater Merry).

An adaptation done by Lerche (the same studio that is responsible for Assassination Classroom) aired during the summer of 2015 and, with no one's surprise, the script writing is done by nitro+.

A live-action film adaptation was announced in the January 2018 issue of Manga Time Kirara Forward in November 2017 and was released in 2019.

A sequel epilogue series, School-Live! ~Letters~, focusing mainly on shorts of the girl's lives after the events of the main series started serializing bi-monthly June 24, 2020 to August 24, 2021.

---

School-Live! provides examples of:

#-C

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Megu-nee's car and the zombies when there's a whole lot of them in the anime.
• Abled in the Adaptation: Downplayed variant. After escaping the high school, Miki and Kurumi end up injured. Miki has to wear an eyepatch for a while. In the final episode of the anime, these injuries don't occur.
• Action Girl: Kurumi and her trusty shovel.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent: Of all the girls, only Kurumi was curious enough to explore the fates of her parents. The only other person in the group with anything resembling an extended family is Yuuri, but that member died long before the series started. But aside from that, none of the other girl’s families ever get expanded on. By the end of the series and the epilogue sequel, this remains the case.
• Actor Allusion: Ai Kayano was previously the voice of Meiko "Menma" Honma another character who interacted with the protagonist posthumously.
• Adaptation Distillation: In the manga, Miki, along with her friend Kei, was in the mall with a small group of survivors. However, in the anime, the girls are implied to have been the last two survivors the entire time, along with Taroumaru, who was a One-Shot Character in the manga.
• Adaptation Expansion: The first episode of the anime changes many details from the manga. For example, Miki is with the School Life Club from the very beginning^note In the manga, she doesn't join them until several chapters in, when they discover her at the mall as a Sole Survivor., and Taroumaru is very definitely the Team Pet^note In the manga, the dog was just a One-Shot Character just to show other mammals were susceptible to zombification.. What's more, some of her classmates are given rather distinct character designs. Too bad for the latter that they're all part of Yuki's psychotic delusions.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the manga, Miki and Taroumaru never met. Taroumaru died before Miki was saved. In the anime, Miki likes Taroumaru however he usually avoids her.
• A Day in the Limelight: Chapter 22 and episode 3 of the anime focuses heavily on Megu-nee and her guilt over what happened during the Zombie Apocalypse. Additionally, episode 3 shows us what happened to the girls and Megu-nee on the day of the outbreak.
• Adults Are Useless: Megu-nee, despite being a teacher, doesn't seem to be doing anything useful whenever she's on-panel. Obviously it's because she's not actually there, being dead and all. Subverted with the actual Megu-nee. She acted as an adult and protected the children, to the point where she got infected as a result.
• Advertised Extra: The promotional materials for the anime made it look like Akiko Kamiyama ^note The brown-haired teacher with the glasses and Takae Yuzumura ^note Yuki's classmate with the purple hair and choker were going to be recurring characters. In the actual anime they're both killed entirely off-screen by the zombies and only appear in flashbacks and Yuki's delusions, though a zombified-Takae sometimes appears in certain episodes.
• A House Divided: It's very clear that the various survivor groups within Saint Isidore University don't always get along with each other. For example, the crossbowman that stops the group at bow-point when they managed to clamber over the wall onto the campus grounds is part of the group that the "Circle" (Touko and her friends) keep butting heads with. In chapter 47, the other faction begin the "choosing" since the food rations are getting low.
• All-Loving Hero: Yuki really loves her school, classmates, and her club. Unfortunately, most of everyone she knew became zombies. This may be a defensive mechanism to ease her psychological trauma.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Tankoubon extras add some additional information, particularly regarding the Randall Corporation, a massive pharmaceutical company whose funding helped build the city the story is set in, and is also the one responsible for printing out the emergency manual that was given to Megu-nee early on. They also dabble in bioweapon research, and are hinted to be the creators of the zombie virus. Resident Evil anyone?
  • Some characters' names (such as the leader of the Militants) are given only in the volumes, along with said characters' "drafts".
• And Then John Was a Zombie:
  • The fate of almost everyone outside the School Life club, including their club advisor, Megumi Sakura. Yuki tries not to let this bother her though with her imagination, though it doesn't always work.
  • Several characters suffer this fate later in the anime. Taroumaru is zombified by a zombie Megu-nee, who later also infects Kurumi due to her hesitation in attacking her former teacher. Fortunately Miki manages to find some medicine which delays zombification, turning Kurumi into a Zombie Infectee instead. And in the anime, the vaccine de-zombifies Taroumaru, but he dies shortly afterwards.
  • This also happens to the Militants members Kougami and Takashige, though in the latter's case so far it's only been implied that he became a zombie immediately after his demise, as the spot he was killed in has a giant splat of blood but no corpse, while what's very likely a zombified Takashige is standing right on the blood-splat.
  • Shiiko eventually succumbs to the airborne version of the infection.
• Ambiguously Christian: Megu-nee is implied to be Christian. She has a rosary, makes a few religious comments, and her grave is marked with a cross. In the anime, she's made the niece of an explicitly Christian minor character as well.
• Animals Hate Him: Taroumaru doesn't seem very fond of Miki, and always turns its head from her whenever they make eye contact. It turns out to be less dislike as it is distrust, stemming from when she yelled at him when her friend Kei left her in the mall and then hurt him when she physically restrained him from leaving. Despite this, Taroumaru was worried for her and barked when Yuki and the others found him, trying to bring their attention to Miki, and even rushed to help her when she was swarmed by zombies. And in episode 9, he fully forgives her and allows her to touch him and play with him again.
• Apocalyptic Log: One can be seen briefly at the beginning of episode 8. A zombie Megu-nee can also be partially seen shambling nearby as the camera focuses on the notebook, with mostly unreadable writing, though Yuki, Yuri, and Kurumi's name can be seen scrawled in there. She's also seen trying to write in the diary in episode 10.
• Apocalyptic Logistics: The school has working solar panels, clean water, a vegetable garden and at least two rooms in which the windows are left intact. As mentioned several times by the characters themselves, they could almost stay there forever if it was easier to replenish food. Megu-nee's car also never ran out of fuel while it was needed. Later deconstructed as the equipment that enables all this eventually gets destroyed by means outside their control.
• Art Evolution: The manga's art has cleaned up over time and the characters have gotten more well-proportioned, though the anime adaptation uses the original art style. The zombies have also become more realistic and graphic compared to the shaded out, cartoony zombies of earlier chapters.
• Artistic Age: Thanks to being drawn in a Moe art style, it's easy to think that the main characters are middle schoolers; they're actually in high school.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Completely averted. When Kurumi salvages a handgun from the crashed rescue helicopter, Miki immediately throws it away, pointing out that since none of them know how to use a gun, it poses a much greater threat to themselves than to the zombies.
• Artistic License – Military: Randall Corp. operators are seen boarding the USS George Washington in Chapter 72 and attempting to obtain one of the nuclear warheads stored aboard. The problem? The carrier should not actually have any nukes aboard due to a policy change by Clinton Administration way back in 1993 that removed all nuclear munitions off surface ships and placed into submarines, and the manga itself is set almost 20 years after the fact.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The manga is drawn in a Moe style, but the setting happens to be in a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Asshole Victim: Considering the various atrocities the Militants has committed (such as killing anyone in cold blood they so much as suspect of being infected, being very trigger-happy assholes in general and remorselessly killing several of their own members by leaving them outside the safe zone to preserve food for themselves), it's really hard to feel bad for the three Militants members who have died so far (Kougami, Takashige and Takahito​).
• Badass Adorable: Kurumi, Rii, Miki, and Shino.
• Balloon-Bursting Bird: In A Letter, there is a scene where the pigeon got out and popped the balloons.
• Bait-and-Switch: The anime production obviously had a lot of fun in building up the series prior to its TV premiere as a happy and fun Kirara-style Schoolgirl Series from the get-go, with zero hint that there are zombies involved at all. The anime itself lives by this trope in the first episode; the opening shows a completely untarnished school and Yuki spends the entire episode in the happy series that was marketed. It's only in the last few minutes that it's revealed she was imagining everyone outside her club, and the bright, clean school she loves so much is actually dark and dilapidated. From Episode 2 onward, the opening itself starts to show the facade slipping.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The anime's opening credits, particularly for the first episode, have adorable scenes of the main characters goofing around at school to an upbeat, peppy song, making it seem as though it's a typical light-hearted Schoolgirl Series. This belies the fact that the girls are actually trying to survive in a Zombie Apocalypse. As the anime goes on, the opening's visuals gradually change to reflect the reality of the girls' situation, such as adding shambling zombies outside and showing more of the school's dilapidated state.
• Balloon Belly: Taroumaru has this in episode 7 after eating a meal.
• Beach Episode: Episode 9, where the girls clean an artificial pond/pool in swimsuits, is the closest we'll get to this in the show.
• Believing Their Own Lies: In Yuki's mind, everything she sees looks like a normal day at school while seemingly being unaware there is a Zombie Apocalypse and except for the members of the School Life Club, she only sees the rest of the students are fine and not zombies. This is actually a defense mechanism created by Yuki to deal with the world she's now living which Megu-nee encouraged. Her death was even the catalyst. Miki, however, notes that while this delusion is a safety mechanism, and that Yuki herself might not even believe it herself, it can't last forever. In Chapter 29, Yuki's delusion temporarily breaks, and she loses her shit until it comes back.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Yuuri seems like the Cool Big Sis character, but when she doesn't approve of certain things, she'll have a very intimidating aura.
• Big Bad:
  • The zombies in general serve as this trope for a large chunk of the manga and the entirety of the anime, as their presence is what's caused the emotional and psychological turmoil that the girls go through, including killing many of their loved ones. Even with the manga later introducing other antagonists the zombies are still an important part of the story.
  • The University arc has Takahito Tougo, the leader of the Militants. He's the biggest obstacle that the girls face throughout the arc and ends up causing them all sorts of trouble before he eventually meets his demise in Chapter 54. With his death, it remains to be seen if his 2nd in command Ayaka Kamji will claim this role later down the line.
  • The series has heavily implied that the Randall Corporation is behind the zombie virus and outbreak in Japan, and they also just so happen to be an Expy of The Umbrella Corporation while also sharing the same name as Stephen King's most famous antagonist Randall Flagg. Later chapters show that Randall is not necessarily evil per se, but they aren't inclined to rescue survivors from a city they're about to drop a nuclear bomb on. When they learn about Kurumi, they're interested in recovering her for research but can care less about her friends.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Kurumi, Yuri, and Yuki do this for Miki in episode 5/chapter 11 after they realize there was still a survivor in the mall.
  • In episode 12 of the anime, Taroumaru drives away some zombies that grabbed Yuki.
  • Yuki, when she reaches the broadcasting room and sends out an announcement to thin out the zombie horde.
• Bittersweet Ending: The anime. The girls are alive, the zombies have left the school for now allowing the girls to leave the school and find a new place and survive, and another survivor has found a letter from them, implying that there's still hope for our protagonists. On the other hand, Yuki has broken out of her cheerful delusions, has come to acknowledge Megu-nee's death and resulting zombification, Megu-nee has bitten Kurumi and Taroumaru, Kurumi is okay thanks to the antidote (though that may not be a lasting thing), but Taroumaru suffered a tragic and tearful death. On top of that, Kei — Miki's friend whom she hoped to see again one day — is seen walking back to the school as a zombie.
  • In the Manga: Through hard work, determination, and empathy from others does the main surviving cast come out alive. Lots of people died to get there, but the world begins to heal itself with the zombie epidemic slowly but surely phasing out and humanity enjoying life everyday.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • In the anime, Miki is shown reading Steppen King's The Standard.
  • Kei's CD player is a Parasol brand, as is Megu-nee's instant photo camera.
  • All the games and movies in the Saint Isidore University survivor group's possession also get this treatment.
  • Some boxes used in the barricades bear the "Umazon" logo on them.
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: Yuki is basically the Boke in any given scenario, with the other three girls acting as her Tsukkomi.
• Book Ends: The story starts at the school, and the final arc has the girls returning to school to try and avert the nuclear strike on their city.
• Break the Cutie: Every girl in this series is psychologically broken one way or another, especially Yuki. It starts when Kurumi is forced to kill the boy she liked due to him zombifying.
• Breather Episode: Episode 9 has the girls fooling around in the pond/pool above the school. It almost resembles a normal day for them, at least until the very end of the episode, when Taroumaru spots a zombie Megu-nee in the basement.
• Building of Adventure: Well, the girls are holed up in the school due to a Zombie Apocalypse, so it's not like they can do much else, nor safely leave it.
• Car Fu: Kurumi hits at least one zombie in Megu-nee's car in episode 4.
• Cast of Expies: The designs for each member of the School Life Club not only match with an expected Schoolgirl Series archetype, they also suspiciously (or maybe intentionally) look like characters from other Manga Time Kirara series. To whit:
  • Yuki looks like Yuzuko from Yuyushiki.
  • Rii looks like Yuuko from A Channel.
  • Kurumi looks like Aya from Kiniro Mosaic and Rize from Is the Order a Rabbit?.
• Casting Gag: In episode 9, when Yuuri talks about her "water balloon sorceress" persona, she mentions "making a contract with a demon". Immediately after that line, Taroumaru whines. Even funnier when you know that M.A.O plays an actual demon in My Monster Secret, which airs in the same season.
• Cerebus Syndrome: While the series has always been pretty dark, the anime and the first half of the manga at least had plenty of lighthearted, comedic and optimistic moments to balance out the darkness. The manga's university arc however got much darker with each chapter, with the humor and lighthearted moments slowly but surely vanishing from the series and a much bleaker tone arising. Some of the darker aspects include a ruthless group of hostile survivors called the Militants, said group doing terrible things to keep themselves alive, Kurumi slowly becoming a zombie despite having been "Cured", Yuuri getting delusional to the point that she thinks a teddy bear is her dead sister, Kurumi actually killing a living person in self-defense, and the possibility that the Virus is airborne and can infect and kill even people who didn't get bit by the zombies.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the form of a literal gun at that. The Minibea P9 that Kurumi salvaged from a crashed rescue helicopter and was subsequently thrown away by Miki all the way back in Chapter 28 ends up being recovered by Rii during the final chapters, who climbs on top of the helicopter's wreckage and empties the gun into the air to draw zombies towards her and away from Yuki in the Broadcast room.
• Cliffhanger: A major one occurs in episode 10, with Miki volunteering to go down to the basement to explore it and bring back some medicine from the area. And as the zombies take shelter inside the school from the rain, they begin to attack the barricade set up by the girls. The credits begin to roll as the sound of the barricade is heard crashing down.
• Cool Car: Megu-nee's Mini Cooper S, and later, an RV that the girls find while exploring the town.
• Cooldown Hug: Yuki does one to Kurumi in episode 3's Flash Back after she was forced to kill the boy she liked due to him zombifying.
• Cope by Pretending: Yuki's way of coping with the fact that the world has entered a Zombie Apocalypse and most of her classmates are dead is to pretend that this is not the case. In this case, it's a defense mechanism.
• Costume-Test Montage: In episode 5, Yuki, Rii and Kurumi go to try out new clothes at a shop in the mall.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Despite the Zombie Apocalypse, the cast gets to live out many of the classic School Girl Series plots. Yuki's delusions are also this, with her mind outright ignoring that there was a catastrophe at all.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The covers and other official art depict the girls as doing cute things and looking fashionable. The manga is about a series of girls surviving on their own in a Zombie Apocalypse, plus they rarely change clothes. Two of the chapter covers apparently influenced the anime: One features Miki taking a picture of a puppy, which probably explains the relationship between her and Ascended Extra Taroumaru, while a cover of the girls in swimsuits is likely why the pool episode occurred.
  • Three separate chapter covers for the University arc involve the arc's entire cast (except for Aosoi) all casually hanging out together, despite them all never being together like this and the Militants being the antagonists. Chapter 51's cover in particular stands out, since by that point Kougami and Takashige died a few chapters earlier while Ruu was already revealed to be dead and Kurumi and Yuki are entirely absent from the chapter.
  • The third volume of the OST shows prominently Megu-nee and Yuki together with Megu-nee in a swimsuit. Megu-nee is dead throughout the entire series, so that one cover is completely impossible outside Yuki's delusions.
• Crapsaccharine World: Aww, look. Another cute school girls slice of life series set in a great school... but wait! Why is that class is now dirty and there are zombies as well?! WTH!
• Crazy-Prepared: Thankfully for the girls, extra materials reveal that their school was specifically designed to be self sufficient, with its own independent electrical grid, water purification system, gardens to grow food, and disaster shelters with months worth of supplies. Unfortunately, there was a very good reason for this.
  • To sum up, the school was a test ground of self preservation that span from disasters dating years before the start of the series. Meaning that it was made in advance (there’s even a manual for survival). The bad news is that it doesn’t account for certain factors. For one, it obviously needed more than four girls to maintain the grounds and supplies, the school itself isn’t impenetrable, and can’t take into account of, say, an explosion (though to be fair, that’s only because of something out of the girl’s control and some serious bad luck). On the bright side, if it was a normal highschool, then the girls would have a significantly harder time surviving.
• Credits Running Sequence: All four girls do it briefly at the beginning, then Yuki does some more throughout the credits.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • The slow and painful transformation process of zombification involves the victim getting deathly sick and weak to the point of throwing up, feeling intense pain that only gets worse as the transformation goes on, and slowly losing themselves to the virus and becoming an undead shell of their former selves. Kurumi just barely avoids this fate but still experiences the terrible pain before Miki saves her with the antidote, while Megumi, Kei and Taromaru aren't so lucky.
  • In the University arc, most of the Militants end up suffering this type of death. Kougami gets infected and turns into a zombie, while Takashige is left with nearly two dozen zombies after trying to murder Kurumi and is torn to several bloody chunks while begging her to save him, to the point that there isn't even a full corpse left of him when the zombies are done eating him. Takahito also gets infected and experiences hallucinations as he slowly turns into a zombie, and later on Ayaka pushes him into his own "Zombie Graveyard" from a big height that injures him severely and is finished​ off by being lit on fire and eaten alive by his own former zombified teammates.
• Custom Uniform: Yuki's blue skirt and blouse. What's more unusual about this is, as a third year she should have the same uniform color as Kurumi and Rii, and yet there's still no in-universe explanation given as to why her clothes are this way. Some enterprising readers however picked up on how Yuki's uniform color is simply the same green as everyone else's uniforms... except color-inverted. Rule of Symbolism much?
• Cuteness Proximity: Taroumaru greets several of the girls in this manner. Yuki in particular seems ecstatic at meeting him in episode 5.

D-G

• Darkest Hour:
  • Episode 11 in the anime. Kurumi has been infected, Rii breaks down when she realizes she can't keep her Pinky Swear given to Kurumi, Miki is trapped in the bunker with the needed vaccine, and the zombie students have broken through the barricade. Add to this the storm and the power going out, and it's looking very bad indeed.
  • Chapter 48 of the manga. Kurumi's wandered off-campus to god-knows-where, and the Militants round up the entirety of the both the Dissolution and School Life clubs. Subverted in the next chapter, as Shinou frees the School Life Club upon getting confirmation that they didn't kill Kougami, while Rise frees the Dissolution Club, who now plan on peacefully negotiating with the Militants.
  • The final act of the manga. Time is running out to find a way to cure the zombie infection AND prevent Randall from destroying the town the girls live in. Two of the girls are in no condition to defend themselves. And one lured the zombies away for the final girl to escape. While the girls managed to escape peril several times, this is THE decisive race for survival. If they fail, then it’s over.
• Dead All Along: Megu-nee has been dead for some time as the Megu-nee the reader has been seeing is actually an illusion created by Yuki.
• Dead Man Walking:
  • Kurumi. It's implied that the serum used on her isn't a permanent solution, and if she doesn't take it regularly there's a real danger that she'll relapse. The problem with this however is the cache included in the emergency shelter has less than five left (deducting the one used on her), and there's no way of replenishing their supply. This is starting to come to a head by chapter 44 as the serum seems to be wearing off, and Kurumi is already having difficulty not attacking her companions. Unless another dose of serum is found soon, it's not looking good.
  • This is also the fate of Takahito, as he's been infected with the virus despite not getting bit, and right now he's even closer to zombification then Kurumi is, to the point that he can barely even move and is deathly ill.
• Death Glare: In Ch. 12 Kei gives a hilarious one to the fellow survivor who offers her and Miki wine.
• Death of a Child:
  • Indeed, a lot of the zombies wandering around the School Life Club's stronghold happen to be their old schoolmates.
  • Later in the manga, they even go to an elementary school after finding a zombified kid with a message written on a board hanging from his neck. When they arrive, they find the place overrun.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: A rather sad version of the Genki Girl trope. Yuki is so cheerful and optimistic that her mind outright refuses to see how gloomy and depressing the situation is, to the point of hallucinating that the rest of the students are fine and there is no Zombie Apocalypse. Her cute, eccentric personality caused her to be bullied prior to the apocalypse. Her hat in particular was considered weird by others.
• Delayed Reaction: The other girls tend to have this when talking to Megu-nee after Yuki mentions her. Megu-nee then often pouts or smiles after they cut her off or thank her respectively. This is a subtle Chekhov's Gun hint that the Megu-nee we're seeing here isn't really there other than in Yuki's mind. The girls are just playing along with her to avoid her having a complete Heroic BSoD. Also, before The Reveal on episode 1, Miki has this when breaking Yuki's classes and when Taroumaro, as Yuki claimed, was disturbing a home economics class. She only apologizes when Yuki told her to.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Miki was close to crossing it before she was found by the School Life Club. Her friend Kei, who survived the initial outbreak with her however crossed it, to the point where she didn't care anymore as she walked out of their barricaded room.
  • Kurumi sics a horde of zombies on Takashige of the Militants, and is shown walking away from the University into the darkness, while sobbing. When we finally see her again in Chapter 52, she's completely given up due to both her increasing zombification and the fact that she killed Takashige, and is just wondering aimlessly among the zombie horde, waiting for the virus to kill her. Fortunately, Yuki manages to snap her out of it by motivating and cheering her up.
  • Miki actually falls to this when she encounters the zombified Kei, being unable to attack her.
• Destination Defenestration: In chapter 43, an infected Kougami is lured to his death with a working CD player hanging outside of an open window.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: A slight variation of this occurs in episode 12. The character that dies is Taroumaru, who dies sitting in Miki's lap after being given the vaccine. It seems to repress the virus, but as Yuri fears, he was zombified for too long.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Yuki hums a snippet of the theme song in episode 4 of the anime.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The opening theme, "Friend Shitai", is sung by the voice actresses of the four main characters.
• Don't Try This at Home: In episode 5, Yuki carries Taroumaru in her backpack while ascending the escalator. A brief cutscene then says that she was carrying a backpack, not a dog house.
• Doomed Hometown: After the zombies (anime)/a fire from a helicopter crash (manga) wreck various facilities in the school, the girls are forced to leave in search of a place where other survivors may have gathered.
• Double Meaning: The opening, "Friend Shitai". The word shitai could translate to "want to be" (as in, "want to be friends")... or, "corpse". The lyrics also could be taken as light schoolgirl friendship content or a call for help about their situation.
• Dramatic Irony: The show adores this trope, and Yuki's delusions offer plenty of scope for it:
  • In episode 2, Yuki teases Kurumi about being scared of ghosts. The viewer just saw Kurumi take down a zombie single-handedly, and, unlike Yuki, she doesn't escape her living nightmare by retreating into a world of delusion.
  • When Kurumi goes missing, both Yuki and Yuuri ask Megumi to keep her safe. They're blissfully unaware that zombie Megu-nee is responsible for biting and infecting their friend.
• Dramatic Wind: Of the "ominous wind" variety. The wind picks up at seemingly innocuous points in the first episode, such as the scene on the roof garden after Miki and Yuki leave. It coincides with puzzling tense looks on the faces of the remaining two girls. It also shows up as Miki and Yuki approach the "desk barricade" while chasing Taroumaru, which is even more confusing since they are indoors. It turns out to be a major hint that something isn't right in a literal, as well as symbolic way: the wind can be heard and felt in the corridor because, outwith Yuki's delusions, the windows of the ruined school are shattered.
• Driven to Suicide: A few examples:
  • Whoever it was that had opened up the shelter before Megu-nee was found the following chapter after they were hinted at. He hung himself.
  • The main girls entertain this thought at various points due to increasing despair at their situation, but ultimately overcome it largely due to The Power of Friendship. Kurumi in particular tries to pick up a gun for reasons implied to be related to if she ever needed to kill herself. Miki throws it away, saying as none of them have formal gun training it's a danger to them to try and use it.
  • This is implied to be the reason why Takahito was standing so close to the edge of the zombie pit, due to having lost his chance at getting a cure and already being in the process of suffering a painful death due to the virus. He ultimately decides to not go through with it, but unfortunately for him Ayaka decides to finish him off anyway.
  • When the girls manage to enter Randall Corporation through an upper floor balcony, they find an employee's shoes, folded up clothes, and security badge, heavily implying said employee jumped to his death.
• Due to the Dead: In episode 2, Kurumi places the female zombie's corpse in a fairly respectable lying position after killing it, and places said zombie's cellphone on top of her body.
• Dying Alone: This is a pervasive fear in this setting:
  • Megumi suffers such a fate as she distances herself from the girls before she turns completely.
  • Miki faces this fear in Episode 11.
  • Miki later spots a zombie who looks a lot like Kei also suggesting her friend suffered this fate after leaving the mall.
• Dying as Yourself: Occurs in episode 12, with Taroumaru, who de-zombifies with the vaccine, but is clearly not looking very healthy as he struggles to maintain his posture and eat/drink. He passes away while sitting on Miki's lap shortly afterwards.
• Dysfunction Junction: All the girls suffered trauma as a result of the hellish world they were abruptly thrown into:
  • Yuki outright refuses to believe there is a Zombie Apocalypse and her mind tricks her into believing that everything is normal as a coping mechanism.
  • Kurumi was forced to kill the upperclassman she had a crush on when he became a zombie.
  • Miki was the Sole Survivor of a mall after the outbreak and she doesn't know if her friend Kei is still alive after Kei voluntarily left their shelter.
  • Rii initially appears to be the most stable out of the girls but later chapters shows her hanging by a thin thread. She ends up having a breakdown after the helicopter crash and it's only getting worse once the group heads towards the kindergarten where her little sister was last seen.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The earlier chapters are quite different from the later ones. The overall tone is more light-hearted with some dark moments, compared to the increasingly grim tone that pops up after the girls leave the Highschool in Chapter 30. The zombies early on are drawn in a far more cartoony style, and the virus's effects are treated differently: The boy Kurumi had a crush on is implied to have turned into a zombie within a few minutes of being infected and one victim is shown being killed by zombies and reanimating, while later chapters establish that infected victims can last up to four hours before turning into a zombie, and that they have to be alive in order for the transformation process to work.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Thanks to the efforts the club, they are able to avert Randall's planned nuclear strike on their city as well as save the world by finding a cure to the zombie plague. They along with the university club members grow into adulthood and begin rebuilding society.
• Easter Egg: The anime's main website during the airing maintains a light and fluffy look to maintain the illusion that the show is similar to most Manga Time Kirara series. However, come 0:00 (midnight) JST, the website changes to a "night version", it becomes all the more ominous as the veneer is taken off, and the true nature of the series is showcased, where the school is now dark, destroyed, and mostly abandoned, the lighting is creepy, and the girls now shown wearing worn and ratty clothes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character page, where instead of everyone smiling◊, the girls are instead shown with either with their backs against the viewer◊, or very morose. The site stays this way until 4:00 AM JST, at which it shifts back to its usual version.
  • Wanna check it by yourself? JST equals to GMT+9, so you can calculate what time in your city is when in Tokyo is 00:00. Or you can use a time zone converter (TimeAndDate.com is easy to use).
  • Another option is to fire up your browser's developer console and changing the body class from "morning" to "night".
• Empathic Environment: In the anime, the weather turns dark and cloudy the same day Kurumi is infected and Taroumaru is killed. Yuuri explains that it was also raining the day Megumi died.
• Enemy Civil War: Randall Corp, whle proving initially hostile to the girls, is later shown to have split into two factions over the decision to drop a nuclear bomb on the city.
• Epic Fail:
  • In the first episode of the anime, Miki opens her arms in an attempt to rescue Taroumaru from the other girls chasing after him, and the scene is played up accordingly as if he got over his Animals Hate Him attitude of her. Instead he turns and runs in a different direction.
  • In episode 2, Megu-nee writes some stuff on the chalkboard. Yuki then attempts to answer them, prompting Megu-nee to say she's amazed. Instead of praise however, she says Yuki got every single one of them wrong.
  • In episode 6, Yuki attempts to throw a ball into the basket during the sports festival. Instead of going in, the ball hits the side, and flies right back into her forehead.
  • Kurumi's first attempt to catch a pigeon in episode 7. She simply tries to sneak up behind it, though her shadow gives her away. She misses her attempt, and the pigeon smacks her on the head as it flies off.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: In episode 2, Taroumaru seems incredibly scared about entering the library. It refuses to stay with just Miki however, so Kurumi keeps them company while Yuri and Yuki go in for some books. His reluctance is soon confirmed when a zombie shambles past Yuri, and nearly catches Yuki in the process. And in episode 9, it growls when spotting something, a zombie Megu-nee, in the basement.
• Evolving Credits: The opening credits gradually change from episode to episode as the series' true nature is revealed:
  • The opening for episode 2 has the same cheery song from the first one, but there are now zombies shambling towards the school, showing how the story is actually about living in a Zombie Apocalypse. Additionally, the scene of Yuki's silhouette shows the school looking normal within her, but everything outside of it shows the school as it really is.
  • The other characters who show up in the opening (Yuki's classmates, Miki's friend Kei, Taromaru and Megu-nee) also seem to update to reflect their current status as the episodes go on. This borders on making it a Spoiler Opening as this slow change implies that something terrible is going to eventually happen to these characters.
  • Episode 6's ending changes from the usual one shown to one with Yuki and Megu-nee interacting with each other and the other girls in various scenes seen in earlier episodes. Megu-nee then slowly fades from each of the pictures, due to the Wham Line Miki asked Yuki about who Megu-nee was, along with the revelation that the real one has been dead for quite some time. The next episode credits follows this trend, with Megu-nee's picture slowly fading away as Yuki tries to talk about the preview.
  • Episode 7 changes the title transition from teddy bears to chasing zombie arms and the pictures taken of the girls during happier parts of their life with pictures that show more despair.
  • Taroumaru is seen walking all alone through the ending credits in episode 9, he and Kurumi are also removed from the last segment when the Yuki wakes up and the girls greet her. Taromaru was bitten by zombie Megu-nee after he spotted her in the basement at the end of episode 9 and in episode 10, Kurumi has been bitten by zombie Megu-nee.
  • In the OP for episode ten, Taromaru is shown walking alone on the title screen. Also the dog bone that hits Miki isn't caught by Taromaru and his dog bowl and leash are empty and instead of Megumi's grave, we see her zombie form. At the very end of the OP Yuki's bloody hat can be spotted also. In the ending credits, Taromaru is seen walking along with Megu-nee.
  • This video compares the openings of the first seven episodes.
    • And this one shows a more direct side-by-side comparison of all the openings. It can very clearly be seen how they gradually get darker over the episodes, to Episode 12's complete lack of any opening at all.
  • Episode 12's ending has a mix of the opening title song, combined with the ending used when the girls are walking down an artificial riverbank. Except this time Megu-nee's car is seen during this sequence, and scenes from previous episodes play throughout.
  • This video shows all differences of the openings.
• The Faceless: The zombies' faces are never clearly shown, with their faces often being shaded or blacked out, with only their eyes visible. One of the few exceptions is Megu-nee, where you get a very detailed shot of her mouth.
• False Camera Effects: The film grain that bookends Megu-nee's segments in episode 3.
• Fanservice:
  • While the actual manga doesn't have much fanservice besides a brief panel of Yuuri in her underwear during the montage at the mall and a Beach Episode-esque chapter, some of the covers for the individual chapters indulge in this quite a bit.
  • The anime has some fanservice in it, with the mall montage being extended to show the girls appearing in bikini's, while Episode 9 is a Beach Episode. Both of these examples may have been inspired by one of the aforementioned manga covers, because said cover was what originally showed off the bikini's the girls ended up wearing in both of these episodes.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: The Distant Finale reveals the School Life club has all gone their separate ways, though they still write to one another.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Before the Zombie Apocalypse started, the girls were complete strangers who only went to the same highschool. Once the outbreak happened, they were the only survivors left in the school and formed the School Life Club in order to support each other and survive. By the start of the series, they have become close friends who struggle to stay alive and together.
• First-Episode Twist: The first chapter of the manga and first episode of the anime make it seem like this is a typical cute, laid-back Schoolgirl Series, but at the very end it's revealed that Yuki is delusional and the main characters are actually trying to survive in a Zombie Apocalypse. There are hints shown throughout before The Reveal at the end of the episode which should clue viewers in that things are not as it seems, such as Yuki living in the school, the piles of desks blocking part of the hallway, a brief shot of a broken window, and a grave marker in the horticulture club's gardens.
• Flash Back: Used regularly to show events that occurred earlier in the Zombie Apocalypse:
  • In episode 2, Kurumi has some about the boy she liked zombifying in front of her.
  • Megu-nee's scenes are almost entirely done in flashbacks.
  • In the anime Miki's time before she became a part of the School Live Club is done in flashbacks. In the manga they were done in real time, and Miki didn't join the club for several chapters.
• Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras:
  • In general, zombies and background characters have dark hair and brown eyes. This contrasts with the more brightly colored protagonists.
  • Subverted in one chapter. A girl is introduced with a character design akin to a major character. It is made to look like she would become a Sixth Ranger, but she had already turned into a zombie before the others could meet her.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Several hints were shown before The Reveal that Megu-nee is not what she appears to be like how she got into the toilet that Yuki's in even though it's locked from the inside.
  • In the first episode's opening, the only time you see other students is in Yuki's parts. Additionally, once we get to the first episode itself, any student that isn't interacting directly with Yuki is white and featureless... but most anime fans would ignore that, since that's a common way to draw unimportant characters. In hindsight, you realize that it's because Yuki probably imagines the people interacting with her more vividly than those she assigns as "set dressing".
  • Also before The Reveal near the end of episode 1, several hints are shown in Miki's facial expression when interacting with Yuki when finding Taroumaro, such as forced apologies and late reactions when breaking in Yuki's class.
  • Miki, Yuki, and Taroumaro find that part of the hallway is blocked off by a stack of desks in the first episode. Could be excused as the school being low on budget for classes or blocked off of the hall for repair, but this is rather uncommon to see in schoolgirl anime. It's a barricade to keep zombies from entering their hall.
  • While on the rooftop in the first episode, there's a brief shot of a gravestone next to the plants. People have died from a disaster. We later learn that it's a makeshift grave for Megu-nee.
  • At the beginning of the first episode, Yuki's room is a classroom. Later, it's stated that this is a rule of the School Living Club, where you live at school to show your dedication to education, which feels like an Excuse Plot for a schoolgirl anime. It's because they can't go home without having to face a horde of zombies.
    • Similarly, the girls boil a bag of meat sauce so they can eat spaghetti as breakfast (this is actually a popular breakfast dish in Japan) and eat hardtack as a snack later. A bag of food you can prepare easily (such as boiling, adding water, etc.) is often encouraged to be used as emergency food, and so is hardtack. This could be excused however as the girls just being lazy and bored enough to just use whatever they can find in the school's supplies. They are using it as rations.
  • When Yuki asks Kurumi about why she's walking around with a shovel in the first episode, Kurumi goes on a rant about how a shovel is her weapon of choice and how it has been used to kill, making it seem like a quirky trait of hers. We later learn that there's a horticulture club, which seems to explain why Kurumi has a shovel. She uses it to fight zombies. After all, shovels are easy to access and are thus used often in zombie apocalypse works.
  • After catching Taroumaru at the end of episode 1, it gets noted that Taroumaru should be kept on a leash so that he doesn't get into anymore trouble. Taroumaru gets killed when he runs off without a leash the next time.
  • Taromaru was removed from the episode 9 ending credits part when Yuki wakes up. In next episode, we learn that he was bitten by Megu-nee in the basement and became a zombie.
  • The knife that Rii would have used to kill a now-infected Kurumi has always been a part of the graphics accompanying her in the opening.
  • Ruu being a teddy bear was heavily foreshadowed from the get-go, such as how only Rii usually interacted with her, the bear ears on her hoodie, and the uncomfortable reactions of the others when Rii talked about her.
• Four-Girl Ensemble: There's four girls most of the time.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The School Life Club members.
  • Sanguine: Yuki, the bright and cheerful heart of the group.
  • Choleric: Kurumi, the strong-willed and passionate muscle of the group.
  • Phlegmatic: Rii, the diligent and gentle club president.
  • Melancholic: Miki, the intellectual and cynical newcomer.
• Four Is Death: In episode seven of the anime, Yuki has a Freak Out when she realizes Megu-nee's car could only seat four people, meaning that logically one person couldn't have been there— Megu-nee.
• From Bad to Worse: Well, we already know that Randall Corp. not only engineered the virus that's causing the infection, but that they also deliberately started the outbreak in the protagonists' city. So, how much worse can it get? For one thing, we learn that the virus can also be transmitted by air, during the University arc. And then Chapter 56 drops a big one: We get an overhead shot of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington, which shows turned sailors shambling about on the flight deck, meaning it's clear that the infection has spread beyond the city the school is in.
  • You think that was bad? Well get a load of Chapter 59, where we find out that even Randall Corp. did not anticipate the virus mutating and gaining an airborne transmission vector. There's at least one room in there were someone pretty much wrote down "THERE'S NO HOPE!", which pretty much spells out how fucked everything is. And then, Randall apprently writes off the entire city and decides to clean up the mess by taking one of the nuclear warheads stored aboard the George Washington with the intention of turning it into a nuclear bomb.
  • Chapters 70 onwards ups the anti. There is absolutely no time for supplies to prepare for going back to the school and any reinforcements to help the girls is nonexistent thanks to several arcs prior since any able survivors were crazy and dead. Time to evacuate to safer ground right? WRONG! The key to humanity’s survival hinges on preserving the cure. So now the girls have to make a mad dash to the school, while simultaneously finding a way to deal with the zombies and Randall. Worst part is that they only have two days. Good luck!
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The writing on the chalkboard in episode 1 can be seen when Yuki leaves the classroom to talk to Miki. It's also a Foreshadowing of how bad things have gotten for the girls outside of Yuki's imagination.
  • Yuki has a very brief but blurry Flash Back in episode 5, right before she runs back into the mall after hearing someone yell for help. She recalls Megu-nee holding a bloodied arm as she's surrounded by zombies.
• Gave Up Too Soon: Had Miki's friend Kei just stuck around and persisted with her, she might have been inevitably rescued by the School Life Club too.
• Gecko Ending: The anime speeds things up compared to the manga, and adds events that didn't occur in the manga, such as having Taroumaru for more than a couple of scenes. Other notable differences:
  • In the anime, Miki ends up getting surrounded by zombies in the basement, and is saved by Yuki causing all the zombies to "go home" with her broadcast. In the manga Miki doesn't run into much opposition aside from zombie Megu-nee.
  • Almost every zombie is gone from the school when the girls leave in episode 12. However, in the manga they were still around and caused some other issues for them prior to escaping.
  • A crashed helicopter destroys much of the school's infrastructure in the manga. In the anime however, the zombies inadvertently do that instead.
  • Taroumaru reverts back to a regular dog after being given the vaccine, but dies shortly afterwards.
• Girlish Pigtails: Kurumi usually wears here hair like this. However she pins them in a more sensible manner (closer to her head, to keep them from being grabbed) when there's heavy shovel swinging that needs to be done...
• Girly Run: Yuri does this at the beginning of the anime op, though she's upside down when it's shown.
• Godiva Hair: Realistically played in a scene in volume 7 with Shinou undressing to check for bites; the nipple is hidden but the edges of the areola are clearly visible..
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • Used to its full effect during episode 3, where the audience is left to fill in the details with their minds on the horrific nature of what Kurumi is forced to do.
  • The manga sometimes averts it, such as Chapter 26 showing Kurumi decapitating a zombie and its bloody stump shown up close. It's still played straight during the University arc though. The readers don't get to see Takashige getting torn apart by zombies, but the aftermath is shown far in the background a few panels later. Takahito's death only gets a few glimpses, with him hitting the ground off-panel after being pushed into his own Zombie Graveyard, and his flaming body only shown from a far view with the implication that he's about to get eaten by nearby zombies.
• Government Conspiracy: Miki discovers a Government Emergency Manual for the school's staff on how to deal with the zombie outbreak which includes a map where the emergency supplies are located including medicine for anyone infected, which suggests the government knew about the zombies before the outbreak began. However, it is later subverted when it's revealed the manual was actually made by the Randall Corporation, who helped built the city the story is set in.
• Gray Rain of Depression: During the rainstorm in episode 10, Miki asks Yuuri why she seems depressed during the rain. She then relates that it was raining the day they lost Megu-nee. Surprisingly it doesn't seem to affect Yuki as much, if at all.
• Guns Akimbo: Kurumi dual wields water pistols in her match against Yuuri in episode 9. The latter comments on how doing that is Awesome, but Impractical due to wasting her shots and not being able to aim carefully with two guns.

H-L

• Halloween Episode: Chapter 68 has an art spread of the girls dressed up for Halloween. It even features Taroumaru in a little vest with bat wings.
• Happy Place: What Yuki seems live in 24/7.
• Hate Sink:
  • With the exception of Shinou Uhara, the Militants serve as this. They're a group of hostile survivors who will do anything to keep themselves alive, including deliberately and horrifically killing several of their own members by locking them outside with the zombies just so that they can preserve food for themselves. They're also major assholes who mistreat other survivors and will kill someone as soon as they suspect that person to be infected. Takahito and Ayaka are arguably the worst of the bunch, with the former being the one who leads the team and is responsible for a lot of their atrocities as well as turning out to be infected himself, meaning that he broke his own rules that he had other people killed for and sees other people only as tools to be used, while Ayaka is completly and murderously insane and sadistic. Aside from Shinou, none of them are even remotely sympathetic and are just plain despicable human beings.
  • As of later chapters, the group is finally starting to fall apart precisely because of their ruthlessness. Two of their remaining members have died horribly (with one of them having even tried to murdering Kurumi and ended up paying the price for it thanks to her zombie-immunity), while Takahito is found out to be infected and is instantly betrayed by Ayaka and Shino. Ayaka leaves but is left surrounded by zombies, and Shino makes a Heel–Face Turn, so she is now the only unambiguous survivor of the Militants.
• The Heart: Her delusions aside (or maybe because of her delusions), Yuki's unflagging cheerfulness has served to ground both Rii and Kurumi into not giving up living.
• Heel Realization: Miki points out that Yuki's speech to Randall Corp served to remind its employees that there were still survivors in the city. The realization that they would be murderers if they went through with dropping a nuclear bomb on the city is what finally convinces them to abort the attack.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Yuki suffers one in episode 5 after spotting a zombie as they're chasing Kurumi out of a theater. She has to be led away by Kurumi and Yuri as she's unable to do anything aside from staring in front of her.
  • Rii finally snaps from the pressure in the wake of the helicopter crashing outside their school, and watching Kurumi and Miki getting injured in its explosion.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Megu-nee. From the brief flashes of memory Yuki showed, she stayed outside the audio-visual studio to both serve as bait, and prevent the zombies from breaking through the door.
  • Subverted in chapter 28. Kurumi shoves an unconscious Miki into a car and faces an entire horde of zombies on her own to protect her. Right when she's about to get mowed down, a broadcast from Yuki and Rii, distracting the zombies and drawing them away from her. This renews her determination to keep fighting, and gives her plenty of opportunity to kill the zombies that are now focused on the broadcast.
  • Subverted again in chapter 63. After figuring out what Randall Corp. plans to do with their own HQ, Kurumi plans this trope and offers herself up to whoever was on the other end of the line, asking them to take her and spare the rest of the club. The plan is scuttled when, thanks to Bowman, the girls become aware that Randall Corp. is interested only in Kurumi, and considers the rest of them to be expendable.
  • In Chapter 74, A RPC operator frags his squad mates to stop them from trying to execute Miki. He succeeds at the cost of mortal wounds, though he manages with his last breath to warn Miki of Randall Corp's plans to detonate in Megurioka, in 2 days' time, the nuclear warhead they had recovered from the USS George Washington.
  • It's revealed in the final chapter that an anonymous Randall Corp employee sacrificed her life to ensure Yuki's speech would be broadcast to all of Randall Corp, which finally convinces the extremist faction to surrender and abort the nuclear attack.
• Hiding the Handicap: Yuki Takeya's delusions find plenty of ways to cover up some of the most glaring inconsistencies in what she is reacting with and who, including that she does one-on-one study sessions with Megu-nee, the only teacher who interacts with them in any meaningful way. This completely hides the fact, initally, that the Megu-nee who heads up the Club is a delusion herself, based on a slightly idealized version of her favorite teacher from when the school was open...
• Hotter and Sexier:
  • Not to an extreme degree, but the anime is noticeably more fanservicey than the manga, which aside from the occasional suggestive angle mostly limits overt fanservice to the chapter break illustrations.
  • The manga itself falls into this starting with volume 7, featuring more fanservice panels, occasional almost nude scenes, and some very buxom new characters.
• Hope Spot:
  • Anyone who thinks that Chapter 31 might be hinting at a new addition to the School Life Club is going to be very sadly disappointed.
  • Not to mention the rescue helicopter that arrives at the school. Just when it looks like the girls will be rescued, the pilot succumbs to the infection and the helicopter crashes.
  • Anime only: Taromaru is seen recovering from his zombie state in episode 12, after Miki gives him the antidote. He dies minutes later, while on Miki's lap.
  • It chapter 61 it appears that the girls will be rescued by Randal Protection Agency, however it turns out the person was lying. If anything, the characters are in more danger now.
  • Later, it's revealed that there's an organization called the Randall Committee that's willing to provide protection to the girls, but later it turns out the Randall Committee was completely fabricated by Shiiko to keep the girls' spirits up. Subverted in the final chapter when it's revealed that they actually exist, as the moderate faction within Randall Corp.
• Idiot Ball: As of chapter 44, the Militants seems to be set to catch this. They decide that the zombification of one of their members was all the Circle's fault, and plan on attacking them on the flimsiest of pretenses.
• Imaginary Friend: Megu-nee for Yuki and Ruu for Yuuri.
• The Immune: All the survivors were immune to the airborne virus, though they can still be infected by blood infections. Unfortunately for them, viruses mutate.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: As per usual for a zombie apocalypse, There are the university militants and Randall (which is pretty much an expy of Umbrella Corp). They represent the humanity that prefers to take advantage of the chaos now or the humanity that will do everything to gain rule; in the manga epilogue, there’s even humans attacking task force for whatever reason (not that we actually see this in action)….
  • Humans Are Flawed: …And yet, despite all opposition, there may just be enough people to help fix any mistakes and change for the better.
• Improbably Female Cast: There are no important male characters for dozens of chapters and the entirety of the anime. They are either nameless, such as the boy Kurumi liked who succumbed, or not important enough to even have a name, such as the group the girls run into during chapter 37. The next set of survivors they run into after that is also an all female group. Eventually, we finally have 3 male characters introduced as members of the Militants, with one of them being the group's leader. They're still out-numbered by the sheer amount of female characters, but as of Chapter 54 all of the guys are dead, leaving the cast back to being an all-female one.
• Improvised Weapon: The only tool any of the girls have to defend themselves is a common gardening shovel. And unlike the Lobos in World War Z, the shovel isn't even sharpened, but suffice to say the girls get a lot of use out of it.
• Infinite Supplies: Zigzagged throughout the series. On one hand, the School Life Club are shown twice scavenging for supplies (first being the "Test Of Courage" trip to the school store, and then when they go to the mall), and the backstory of the Militants averts this since they constantly end up running out of food due to having up to a dozen members in the group, which leads to the Militants killing most of their own team to preserve the food. On the other hand, the main characters almost never run out of food and other supplies after both scavenging trips, and never run out of gas for Megumi's car and later the RV, and the same applies to the Circle.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Megu-nee. Her full name is Sakura Megumi.
  • "Rii" for Yuuri.
  • Ruu's full name isn't stated.
  • Yuki refers to Miki as "Mii-kun".
• Instant Bandages: In episode 4, Yuki sports one on her head after Kurumi karate chops it due to her waking up the latter in the middle of the night, then saying she'll reveal her idea in the morning.
• Irony: The more standard variety, as well as Dramatic Irony, is all over the place:
  • In her flashback, Megumi is lectured about how she's not cut out to be a teacher, and "tougher" characters, like the Vice Principal and her mother, are always on her case. Turns out, she's the best teacher the girls could hope for — she's the only teacher with the luck and common sense to survive the initial outbreak, she manages to implement a scheme to preserve her students' shaky morale/sanity, and she's prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect the children in her care.
  • Megumi again, but not quite so positively this time: her decision to gather supplies for the girls while she's zombifying/zombified, while touching proof of her prioritization of the girls above everything else, leads her to be in the worst possible area she could be in when those supplies are actually needed. To get to the supplies, they need to get past her. Her need to protect the girls led to her becoming their main threat.
  • The gun they dismissed as more dangerous than the zombies? It becomes key to their survival when Yuuri needs to draw the zombie’s attention away from the school.
  • Takahito gets infected by the airborne virus and spends his last hours alive harassing the School Living Club about an antidote, thinking that they poisoned him. Given that the School Living Club does have some samples of the Cure that was used to save Kurumi, it's very likely that they would have helped Takahito if he had been level-headed and nice about wanting the cure. But his rude, paranoid, murderous and hostile attitude and no less than three attempts to murder them end up driving them away from this, and this is what would have ultimately caused his death if Ayaka hadn't gotten to him first.
• It Can Think: The girls suspect that the student zombies always seem to return to wander around the school is due to still retaining some sort of memories.
• Iyashikei: Subverted. The series looks like it's going to be one of these... until the Wham Shot at the end of the first chapter. The anime plays up the subversion even more. The first episode would be very nearly a straight example of the genre if you removed The Reveal.
• It Gets Easier: By the end of the manga and its sequel epilogue, living in the world becomes manageable… There’s still run down areas and zombies mind you, but the threat becomes small enough that society rebuilds to the point that people freely live out their days in peace and traveling almost becomes a non-issue. As a bonus, as the number of task force and volunteers combat zombies increase, said threat decreases each day to show that one day the zombie problem will eventually be eliminated.
• Kill It with Fire: This is how Randall Corp. plan on sterilizing their HQ, which the School Living Club as well as Aosoi are taking cover in, and the surrounding blocks, possibly with the use of an air-dropped incendiary munition.
• Kimodameshi: One is done in episode 2. This also gives the girls a good excuse to resupply at the school's store, as well as gather some books from the library.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • The Zombies themselves qualify, not only due to destroying any expectations that this will be a normal Iyashikei series, but also because they're played very seriously, with no comedy being in any scene that has them in it.
  • The zombified Megumi in particular is a special example, as not only is it both sad and disturbing seeing the group's Big Good and original Team Mom now rendered a frightening shell of her former self, but she also bites Kurumi (who couldn't bring herself to kill the zombified version of someone she knew and loved dearly) and very nearly kills her as a result. In fact, she still haunts the girls because Kurumi appears to still be infected and in the stages of becoming a zombie. The anime takes this up even further by having her infect Taromaru as well, while the girls' Darkest Hour begins right when Kurumi is infected, due to the zombies breaking into the school only minutes after this happens.
  • The later chapters have introduced the Militants, the first human antagonists in the manga. They're ruthless, hostile and overly paranoid survivors who will viciously kill anyone they suspect to be a threat without remorse, and Chapter 47 reveals that they've even killed several of their own members in order to preserve all the food for themselves. The chapters with heavy focus on them feature absolutly no comedy at all and further highlight how dark the series truely is. This is further exemplified with the group's leaders: Takahito is remorseless about leaving several of his own allies to die as well as the aforementioned murders the group has committed, while also viewing other survivors only as tools to be used, and also turns out to have been infected, meaning that he's had people killed for rules that he ultimately did not follow, while Ayaka is utterly psychotic and actually enjoys the Zombie Apocaylpse and all the deaths and suffering it has caused.
• Lethally Stupid: The university militants are this FOR SURE. Instead of doing anything productive with growth of numbers, their best idea is to weed out what they think is “useless.” It doesn’t help that the majority of them have serious issues way before the zombie apocalypse happened instead of, Y’know, getting more saner people to be in charge. Things get worse when paranoia and the most insane Might Makes Right attitude consume any rational thought. Just ask them end result of the incompetence… Oh wait, you can’t, THEY’RE DEAD.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: In episode 6, Yuki is showing Miki the music room, and starts up some music on a stereo player. While Yuki argues with Megu-nee, Miki looks on in confusion, the music slows, it's revealed that the stereo player is actually broken, and the music finally stops when Miki asks who Megu-nee is.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • The manga and the anime initially seem like this compared to other Zombie Apocalypse works, focusing more on the Slice of Life moments at the beginning, and the girls get along and don't compete for limited resources, and there's little zombie slaughtering, but later chapters/episodes grow darker, showing more of the physical and psychological effects on the girls, such as Kurumi violently lashing out at Miki and Yuuri's gradual breakdown, and soon the girls even lose their school shelter altogether - in the manga, an helicopter meant to rescue them crashes, while in the anime the zombies themselves eventually break through the barricades and wreck the school.
  • While the anime is still dark and horrific, it comes off as this trope when compared to the manga. There's a much bigger emphasis on the lighthearted antics of the School Living Club then in the manga, and the inner conflict between them is removed, most noticeably with Miki being far nicer and less aggressive then her manga counterpart. Certain really dark elements are also left out entirely, such as Yuuri's mental breakdown that wrecks her sanity, or any implication that the cure used on Kurumi isn't permanent.
• Limited Wardrobe: Invoked. The girls are literally wearing the clothes that were on their backs when the zombie apocalypse hit, and it is hinted that what extra clothes they use for sleepwear were scavenged at the school's store. Even more so for Megu-nee. Kind of appropriate considering she doesn't actually exist truly any more...
• Living Emotional Crutch:
  • Without Megu-nee, Yuki would have a breakdown and her delusions that she isn't in a zombie apocalypse would shatter. Megu-nee actually died a while back and Yuki is only deluding herself into believing Megu-nee is still alive.
  • Yuki herself is a subtle one to Rii, who starts becoming more mentally instable once the helicopter crash destroyed all their survival equipment. Yuki's optimistic attitude helps keep Rii (along with everyone else) going.
• Living Is More than Surviving: In episode 6, Miki realizes she and her friend Kei were only focused on surviving when they locked themselves in a storage room in a zombie-infested mall. Once she starts interacting with the School Life club, she sees they try to make the best out of their situation and organize "school activities" to have fun.
• The Load: Yuki has zero fighting ability, and what's worse her delusions make her a serious liability when things get hairy, as unless told there was something going on, she wouldn't even know that she needed to defend herself. This decreases after the helicopter crash causes the school to burn down and they're forced to leave and head into town. Even in-character it's noted by the rest of the cast that she's become more dependable and often spots trouble before anyone else.
• Loophole Abuse: In episode 4, Yuki says they should go on an school outing. Yuri says they can't leave the school grounds, but then Yuki replies that official school functions don't count as "leaving the school".
• Love Is a Weakness: Kurumi suffers this when facing zombies that were previously her loved ones. The worst has to be Megumi, which leads her to receive an injury that impedes her for the rest of the series.

M-O

• Magic Antidote: Not quite. Everything seems like the 'cure' to the zombie virus works like this, but in chapter 25 the reader gets a bone chilling quote that any zombie trope reader will recognize as very bad: "Hey, Kurumi, your hand is kinda cold." Then the chapter reveals that the 'cure' requires regular injections, by one of the rescuers needing to take a regular injection of the 'magic' cure and failing.
• Magic Skirt: The girls' main uniform consists of a short skirt that never reveals anything despite all the running, climbing and jumping they end up doing.
• Meaningful Echo: Yuki's speech at the beginning of the series (both in the anime and the manga), where she describes the reasons she likes the school, is like this, though the context and tone of its use varies between media. In the anime in particular the tone is much hopeful and positive, and is used to send the zombie students "home". However in the manga (specifically chapter 29), it instead serves to underscore the irony of Yuki's thoughts to her current situation where she is violently jolted back into sanity after encountering a zombie on her own, and her own delusions come crashing down around her.
• MegaCorp: The eponymous Randall Corporation, who while not directly named in the series itself, helped build most of the city through its funding. They're also an expy of the Umbrella Corporation, which means their research into using diseases as bioweapons helped cause the Zombie Apocalypse in the setting.
• Memory Trigger: Yuki represses the memories of zombies. For example, in the anime, she forgot what an instant camera is despite taking a photo a few days prior because she is in denial over her teacher's death. In chapter 5, Yuki triggers the memories of Megu-nee twice. The first time Kurumi reminded her of something Megu-nee told her once, but Yuki had trouble remembering it clearly. The second time she triggers herself by saying something that causes a severe headache. It's revealed to us that Megu-nee has been Dead All Along and what triggered Yuki was that she said something similar during Megu-nee's death.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: By the end, the survival rate for named female characters was 60%, while not a single male character introduced outside the final chapter lived.
• Message in a Bottle: In episode 7/chapter 6, the girls send a variation of this trope via helium balloons, and in Kurumi's case, a pigeon.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Randall didn't unleash the apocalyptic Omega virus in some terrorist attack or human testing experiment. It was just some random employee who was too lax with lab decontamination protocol and accidentally created a plague.
• Minimalist Cast: The human characters are Yuki, Kurumi, Yuuri, Megu-nee, Miki (and her friend Kei in flashbacks), Taroumaru in the anime, and that's it (and Megu-nee turns out to be Dead All Along). Other living humans aren't introduced until much later.
• Mood Dissonance: The first ending for the anime, which has a fairly upbeat and cheery sounding song, while the girls walk through the destroyed remnants of a city. They even pass by things such as a wrecked vehicle as they walk down the riverbank. The opening is likewise similar, with a cheery song while showing bits of the Zombie Apocalypse in episode 2's Evolving Credits onward.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The first chapter/episode tries its darnedest to fool you into thinking this will be another generic Slice of Life high school girl comedy show. Then reality starts setting in when we're shown what the school really looks like outside of Yuki's imagination after a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Episode 9 of the anime is a lighthearted one where they clean out the water storage tank. Then at the end of the episode, Taroumaru flees to the basement and encounters zombie Megu-nee, all backed by some creepy music.
• Never Bareheaded: Yuki always wears a cat-eared hat with its cat face pin. She only stops wearing it in the final episode as she buries it with Taroumaru, though in the manga that doesn't happen and she still wears the hat after leaving the school.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The second trailer makes the anime look like a fun, zombie-themed romp.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The leader of the mall survivors that Miki was part of hides that he got infected, which led to the deaths of the others except Miki and her friend.
  • In episode 2, Yuki runs off alone while in the library with Yuri. Unfortunately a zombie is still lurking in the area...
  • Miki finding the school's emergency survival guide is pretty much the direct cause of Kurumi getting bitten when she goes to scout the emergency shelter. Miki even admits it's partially her fault. The anime also adds Taroumaru to the mix, as he escapes from his leash, and explores the basement, where Kurumi finds him now zombified. When she later says she'll be fine on her own, and that she won't be reckless, Yuuri immediately tells her that's what Kurumi said too before getting bitten.
• No Sense of Direction: While they have a perfectly functioning sense of direction when on foot, apparently neither Kurumi nor Rii can read a map properly, which quickly gets them lost in the city while taking turns driving the car during the "school trip". Luckily for them, Yuki does. However, it doesn't help that a lot of the routes are blocked or impassable due to crashed vehicles on the road.
• Non-Residential Residence: School-Live! follows a group of high school girls who live at their school. The exact reasons for them living there form the hook for the show.
• Not a Morning Person: Yuki is late for breakfast and falls asleep in class, much to the anger of her teacher and the shock to the other students. The second example becomes subverted once we're shown that none of the other people in her class are alive any longer. Episode 3 reveals she was like that even when school was normal. A darkly humorous aspect to this happens in Episode 2, when Yuki flubs the answers to Megu-nee's questions. She can't even give herself work she can do in her fantasy school life!
• Nothing Is Scarier: Ironically, some of the more suspenseful chapters happen to be the ones where the girls don't encounter any zombies — like the one where, during the club's "school trip" they coincidentally pass by Kurumi's (abandoned) home.
• Not So Above It All: In episode 2, despite being on heightened alert, Miki sees Yuki eating a candy stick while they're at the school store. Kurumi then talks to them, and sees Miki eating one as well. The scene then switches to Yuri, who puts some money on the counter, and after she moves, Kurumi is eating one with the other two. Yuri then eats one as well as they go to the library.
• Not So Stoic: Rii loses her cool when Miki suggests they should snap Yuki out of her delusions. She loses it even more in the manga when things go From Bad to Worse after the helicopter meant to save them crashes, and the ensuing fire left the School Life Club's sanctuary uninhabitable.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Similar to Highschool of the Dead, the zombies aren't referred to as such. Instead they are called "them" or by other indirects. There are in-series implications that zombie fiction exists, so the characters are deliberately avoiding the term.
• Now, Let Me Carry You: Kurumi is The Big Girl of the club and easily carries more than her share of the club's burden. Once her infection worsens the other girls realize they need to be the ones to help Kurumi instead, including literally carrying her on a stretcher across zombie infested streets.
• Nuke 'em: As if the plan to firebomb their own HQ in Meguri-oka wasn't enough, Randall Corp. plan on levelling the entire city itself with a nuclear warhead obtained from the USS George Washington.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Near the end of the first episode in the anime, Yuki is describing someone that her classmates assume is a guy. Then she starts adding some weird details such as him jumping on her and trying to pull her skirt off, making them understandably shocked. When they finally ask, she tells him Taroumaru is a dog, prompting them to mention not leave that little detail out next time.
• Our Zombies Are Different: While at first glance they seem to be similar to your typical zombie-flick shambler, the zombies in School-Live possess residual memories, to the point where they seem to repeat the habits that they held while they were still alive. Although this is glossed upon in the manga, in the anime this becomes a plot point, explaining just why the streets of the city seem to be free of zombies when the girls leave on their "school trip"; the former-adults were at "work", and the former children and teenagers were at "school". In the anime they're also fairly content to leave the girls alone as long as they aren't startled (see how Yuki and her friends are able to run through a mall lobby filled will groups of them), and in general seem to act like people in a constant psychotic daze. Megu-nee was able to regain her humanity for a period despite very much being past the point of no return, to hide herself far from the kids so she wouldn't hurt them. Just to show how important a plot point the residual memories are in the anime, it's used in the finale to help defuse the Darkest Hour situation of the series. Yuki tells the zombie students through the PA system that school was closed, and it was time for everyone to go home. They promptly do so, emptying the place of zombies, and allowing Miki to return to the clubroom with the experimental serum for Kurumi.

P-S

• Past Experience Nightmare: Kurumi has recurring nightmares of the time the sempai she liked turned into a zombie and she had to kill him. In chapter 45, she has a nightmare of eating his zombified corpse after she had killed him.
• Pinky Swear: In episode 5, Kurumi tells Yuri not to hesitate if she gets infected, not wanting to end up like the kids she ran into in the theater earlier. Though initially hesitant, Yuri does this with Kurumi.
• Raising the Steaks: Humans are not the only ones that can be zombiefied. As Megu-nee discovered, any mammal can be infected, as evidenced by the puppy that Yuki brings home turning into a zombie.
• The Reveal: The First-Episode Twist which shows that everyone outside of the School Life Club was just a figment of Yuki's imagination, and the school is in much worse condition than seen from Yuki's point of view.
• Resist the Beast: In truly horrific fashion:
  Megu-nee:Yuki, Kurumi, Yuuri, I'm so hungry. Open the door... I love you all so Why WHY WHY WON'T YOU OPEN THE DOOR
  Yuki:Megu-nee!
  Megu-nee:NO No NO! THIS ISN'T WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING! I'M HUNGRY BUT.. I'M HUNGRY BUT...! (Going towards the shelter were the medicine is stored) THANK GOODNESS IT'S OPEN... JUST A LITTLE FURTHER- YUKI, KURUMI, YUURI... I'M SORRY EVERY-ONE THIS IS AS FAR AS I GO... I WONDER IF I'LL EVER SEE THEM AGAIN...(flash forward, a now fully zombie-fied Megu-nee, meets one of the girls with tragic results.)
• Rewatch Bonus: Several hints are throughout shown in the series that can't be seen watching it once. An example is a FreezeFrame Bonus of Taroumarou's death was foreshadowed at episode 9 preview where Miki asked if what Yuki meant was ghost stories. The book was titled Taroumarou of the Dead[1]◊.
• Rule of Symbolism: The barricade constructed from "All of our hopes and Megu-nee's love" falls when a zombie Megumi attacks Kurumi, and the girls begin to despair as things go from "terrible" to "even worse."
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Rii gets progressively unstable in the wake of the helicopter crash at the school. This culminates in what might be a full breakdown once the group heads to the kindergarten where her younger sister attended. Later she's shown to be hallucinating that her sister is alive and that a teddy bear is her.
  • This is also shown to be a symptom of the Zombie Virus's effects even before the victim fully turns into a zombie, as the newly infected Megumi, Kurumi and Takahito are shown having interrupted thinking and hallucinations, with Takahito in particular seeing visions of the former Militants teammates he betrayed and killed, even imagining the zombies in his pit "talking" to him.
• School Festival: Or the best that four girls can come up with amidst a zombie-infested school campus anyway.
• School Forced Us Together: The School Life Club is a pretty standard version of this, being a club that doesn't seem to have any purpose other than an excuse for its few members to hang out and have fun. However, it turns out that the reason the club is so small and nondescript in the first place is that they're the only students in the school left alive, and its simple goal is meant to help the girls cope with their situation.
• Schoolgirl Series: Well, it's about girls at a school, at least. The first chapter/episode does its best to fool the audience into thinking it's a straight example of this genre, but at the very end it's revealed to be something else entirely.
• Scream Discretion Shot: Used in episode 10. As the Eye Catch comes on, a biting sound is heard. Said bite was from zombie Megu-nee against Kurumi, who hesitated attacking due to her bond with her former teacher.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After the school living club and Aosoi figure out that Randall Corp. is interested only in Kurumi and considers the rest of them to be expendable, they pack up and get the hell out of Randall HQ before their cleanup and retrieval teams arrive.
• Series Continuity Error: The manga has one involving Megu-nee's hair. In Yuki's delusions, she has long hair, but flashbacks depicting the real Megu-nee show her with short hair. However, when Kurumi finds zombie-fied Megu-nee, she has long hair, but then when Miki confronts her, she has short hair. The anime clarifies that after the zombie outbreak started, Megu-nee cut her hair for a more mature look, and probably for safety reasons as well.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: The Zombie Apocalypse has not been kind to the girls' psyches.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Survival Club drives around town to find the origin of a radio broadcast and hope to find someone there. They only just miss her by minutes after obstructions and small roads waste their time, the operator already sealed herself away and zombified. Kurumi has no choice but to kill her.
• Shoot the Dog:
  • In the manga, Yuki recovered a dog, and brought it back. All seemed to be well, but then it started zombifying. In the anime, it's more or less the Team Pet thanks to Spared by the Adaptation. For now at least...
  • When Kurumi discovers the zombified remains of Megu-nee, Miki takes it upon herself to be the one to deal with the situation as the one with the least emotional connection to the other person.
• Shout-Out:
  • Miki is seen reading The Stand before the Zombie Outbreak, though the anime changes it to Standard by Steppen King.
  • The Randall Corporation is a reference to a character (Randall Flagg) from the aforementioned novel.
  • Kurumi's musings during the start of their "school trip" might seem to refer to Thelma & Louise.
  • A poster of The Walking Dead Season 3 appears in a Radio Station.
  • The movie shown at the mall in episode 5 at the outbreak of the Zombie Apocalypse is called I am Destiny; the poster depicts a dog among tombstones.
  • Episode 2: "This is a ladle. It isn't a tool to hit someone◊." A mild jab to Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! perhaps? ^{Alternatively} It could be a shout-out to Dark Souls 2, an action/rpg with similar themes of survival and despair, where a ladle can be obtained as an obvious Joke Weapon.
  • Amongst the manga found in the library in chapter 3 is a Bland-Name Product version of A Channel, with its spine showing its mangaka Kuroda BB's Author Avatar as seen in that manga's afterwords and his Twitter account.
  • Chapter 3 has Yuki suggesting to do a Kimodameshi, and in her imagination she conjures a couple of Obake and a creature that is most definitely Charlotte the witch.
  • Taroumaro of the Dead shown in the preview for episode 9 is maybe a shout-out for High School Of The Dead.
  • The serum used on Kurumi turns out to be one to Dead Rising 2's Zombrex down to it being needed to be taken in regular intervals or the patient starts to relapse and eventually die and zombify.
  • When the girls reach St. Isidore, it's revealed that the girls who are camped there have video games and movies. Bland-Name Product versions of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Splatoon, [REC], The Raid, and Mad Max are all clearly seen.
• Shovel Strike: With their only reliable weapon being a gardening shovel, what else do you expect the girls to use against zombies? Kurumi becomes really good at it too.
• Social Darwinist: What Chapter 47 is about. Since rations were getting low, the warrior faction of St. Isidore begun the "choosing".
• Spared by the Adaptation: Taroumaru the dog. In the manga he was a One-Shot Character mainly meant to show that other mammals were susceptible to the zombification. However, in the anime he survived with Kei and Miki in the mall, and then runs into Yuki, Yuri, and Kurumi in episode 5. But only until episode 10 when he gets bitten by Megu-nee. He is supposedly recovering in episode 12 after being injected with the experimental serum...only to die minutes later on Miki's lap.
• Special Edition Title:
  • Episode 4, in which Kei leaves Miki to fend for herself, has credits which are more somber in tone, and has scenes of the two together in place of the usual.
  • Episode 6, where it's revealed that the current Megu-nee is a figment of Yuki's imagination and the real one is long dead, has a different credits sequence as well, with different scenes, and Megu-nee slowly fades out of every shot.
• Spirit Advisor: It transpires that Megu-nee is one, usually for Yuki. They function to guide the girls out of trouble, occasionally demonstrating knowledge that the School Living Club are not aware of (at least, not consciously). It's possible that they are a true spirit, as they are unusually helpful and more than one person has seen them, but they could also be the non-delusional part of Yuki's mind, which actually has noticed what's going on around her and takes appropriate action. The other girls may have copied this coping strategy, and see Megu-nee when they note an escape route/safety. The story has not yet clarified which theory is accurate.
• Start My Own: A Flash Back dream Yuki has in episode 7 reveals that Yuri and Megu-nee started the "School Life Club" as a way to help them cope with their current situation. It seems to have worked, as Yuki seemed quite depressed when Megu-nee was telling her about it, but for the most part seems upbeat and cheerful now, so long as she doesn't see any zombies close by.
• The Stinger: At the end of episode 12, a non-zombie woman comes upon the drawing the girls drew and sent out via balloons and pigeons. Manga readers would recognize her as Touko, one of the survivors that the girls meet once they arrive at Saint Isidore University.
• Subverted Sitcom: The first chapter/episode sets up the story as a cute, funny Schoolgirl Series about a group of teenage girls' hijinks in their beloved school club. The First-Episode Twist shows that the setting is actually a Zombie Apocalypse, the club members are survivors holed up in their school, and the whole cutesy setup was the result of Yuki's mental breakdown while trying to cope with the whole situation.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: One of the few time this trope applies outside its original context. Look the Crazy-Prepared entry in this page and tell yourself it doesn't look suspicious at all.

T-Z

• Tainted Veins: Kurumi gains these on her right arm, and the right side of her neck and face, after her close brush with zombification. The veins go away a few days after the medicine takes effect.
• Teenage Wasteland: All of the characters are teenagers, and unless one counts Megu-nee who is dead, there's no recurring adult character. Even later on the characters meet college students who may or may not be under twenty.
• Tender Tears: Done from time to time, but especially during events in episode 12, such as Taroumaru's death, and the girl's graduation ceremony.
• Tempting Fate: Yuuri's assertion that their barricade won't fall easily.
• Throwing the Distraction: After their "school trip", the girls start using cyalumes to disorient zombies while being chased.
• Title-Only Opening: Episode 12 uses this, just showing the show's title without the usual opening credits. The opening song plays at the end however.
• Took a Level in Badass: Yuki in episode 12. Though her attempt to hit a zombie with a bat doesn't do much to it, she at least shows much more courage than before, particularly as she was alone at the time.
• Tragic Monster: All of the zombies, but especially Megu-nee. We keep getting little reminders of their humanity — the zombie with the cell phone has pictures of her and her boyfriend on it, all zombies seem to have a vague sense of the timetable they used to keep (the mall is less dangerous during the week when people were less likely to be there, and the school has fewer zombies at night), and, worst of all, Megumi's thoughts are never far from the girls — even as a zombie. She somehow manages to keep herself away from them until they come blundering into the basement.
• Tragic Mistake: Somewhat downplayed. The survival manual turns out to be this. While it could be chalked down to specific orders for certain emergencies, had it been treated more seriously and used earlier to warn everyone on school grounds, there may have been more survivors.
• True Companions: The School Life Club support and protect each other as they struggle to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Unreliable Narrator: The story is portrayed at times from Yuki's perspective, including the majority of the first episode, showing a bright, cheerful school life surrounded by friendly classmates and school activities, none of which remains now that she and three friends are the only non-zombies left.
• Unsound Effect: Used many times through the manga but helium balloons making "float" sound probably tops off everything else.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: By releasing letters on helium balloons the girls basically brought the disaster onto themselves. The pilot only decided to head over to the Megurigaoka Academy because of finding one of said letters. Then they crashed, their chopper blew up setting the whole school on fire. Bet now the girls regret sending those letters, huh?
• Villainous Rescue: Yuki is saved from the zombies in episode 12 by Taroumaru. Except he's zombified now, so he attacks her shortly afterwards as well. Fortunately a base instinct in him remembering Yuki's hat saves her from getting bitten when she uses it to trap him.
• Weaksauce Weakness: ~Letters~ shows that the microbes found in the local marsh not only cure the zombie infection, but also actively destroy zombies by basically melting them like acid. Combined with humanity figuring out how to culture the microbe in mass amounts, humans have devised a powerful anti-zombie weapon just by filling waterguns with microbe-laced water.
• We Need a Distraction: Something the girls have to do regularly. As their redoubt isn't a hundred percent fortified, the girls usually need to get the zombies in the school away from wherever they need to go to, like the school store or the Library. When stealth isn't possible, they make use of the music player to draw the zombies somewhere else.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 5: Megu-nee has been Dead All Along and the current Megu-nee we see is actually Yuki's imagination.
  • Chapter 18: The school was given a Government Emergency Manual on how to deal with the zombie outbreak, revealing the government knew about the zombies beforehand. Also Kurumi gets infected after she was attacked by a zombified Megu-nee!
  • Chapter 26: The search helicopter crashes in the school grounds. Kurumi and Miki go to see if there are survivors, but once they get there, Miki is convinced that there are none. Before the two are able to turn back though, the fuel leaking from the helicopter catches fire, which then causes a massive explosion that catches both girls in the blast. And as they lay stunned, burning figures can now be seen shambling out of the wreckage...
  • Chapter 35: Rii loses it, and sneaks out one night to try and find her sister in a zombie-infested kindergarten. While she returns safely at the end of the chapter with a little girl with her, the odd looks Miki and Kurumi give each other point to something very amiss. It's worth noting that the tie the little girl wears looks very much like the moustache of a certain teddy bear, and in the last panel she even seems to have bear ears on her head...
  • Episode 10 of the anime: Kurumi is bitten after looking for Taroumaru, and the zombies storm the school to get out of the rain, knocking down the barriers in the process. It's at this point where things become deadly serious.
  • Chapter 42: The crossbowman is revealed to be infected, and is starting to turn at chapter's end. In addition, the scientist in the secret lab under the university reveals to Miki that since she hasn't received any satellite or radio communications from the outside world, it is very possible that the entire world has fallen to the Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Chapter 46: Due to her worries, Yuki starts to see Megu-nee again. Also, Kurumi is attacked by one of the Militants's goons, but after leading him around leaves him to die surrounded by zombies. Shaken by the experience, she walks off into the night, away from the university's buildings.
  • Chapter 48: The ending reveals that Rii really has undergone a Sanity Slippage and that "Ruu" is a teddy bear. It also implies that the real Ruu turned into a zombie, although it is later revealed she was hit by a car and died before the apocalypse.
  • Chapter 73: After dozens of chapters a zombified Kei reappears to bite Miki.
  • Chapter 74: Miki reveals that a nuclear bomb is going to be detonated in two days.
• Wham Line:
  • One is spoken by Miki in episode 6 when Yuki is showing her the music room. Made much, much creepier as the lively music playing from the radio suddenly starts slowing down, and the nice and clean music room starts morphing from Yuki's fantasy into reality.
    Miki: "I'm a little confused. Who's Megu-nee?''
  • The manga has an off hand comment by Yuki that really sinks it in that Kurumi is not actually cured.
    Yuki: "Hey Kurumi, your hand is kinda cold."
  • Chapter 69 has a revealing line about how the infection works:
    Shiiko: "That medicine they injected Kurumi with... it was nothing more than antibiotics and vitamins."
• Wham Shot:
  • The very first chapter lifts the curtain and reveals the bleak situation only a few pages before the end. The anime likewise does it similarly, revealing how bad things have gotten once Miki comes to retrieve Yuki lest she talks to her imaginary classmates for too long while getting her backpack.
  • In episode 6 of the anime, Yuri and Kurumi explain to Miki about Yuki's unique relationship with Megu-nee. The scene then switches to Megu-nee standing out in front of a door with the three girls locked in it. She is bleeding and holding her arm while zombies surround her. Yuki's mind somehow blacked out this incident, and she acts as if this never happened, and they've been playing along with her to keep all of their sanity intact. And in the ending credits, Megu-nee slowly fades from each of the shots seen.
  • At the end of episode 9, Taroumaru goes wandering around the school after managing to free himself from his leash. He then proceeds to the basement, and sees the zombie Megu-nee down there.
  • Chapter 48 of the manga ends with a shot confirming the heavy implications that Rii's sister Ruu is in fact the stuffed bear Yuki left behind in the elementary school, meaning that Rii has become completely delusional.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • What happened to the families of the members of the School Life Club, Megu-nee included? We do see Kurumi's abandoned home, but never find a reason to go to the other homes.
  • What ever did happen to Miki's friend Kei? The assumption is that she got killed after she left their sanctuary, but the series gives no definitive answer after Miki is rescued. A special, written by the author after the anime aired, details what happens to her after she leaves the mall: she doesn't get far, and in trying to escape the zombie crowds she sprains her ankle. She manages to find shelter again, this time in a place with a working radio, but she has no food or water there, and what's more she's not sure if she was bitten. She still tries to radio for help. What happens after that is left unclear, but judging from Chapter 30 and the end of episode 12, Kei eventually succumbed. In Chapter 73, Miki encounters a zombified Kei when she returns to the school.
  • In chapter 23, the girls explore the basement and find a treasure trove of supplies in there, including some much needed food. However, Miki killed the zombie Megu-nee by the entrance where the desk was propping up the door. Due to the urgency of bringing the medicine back to Kurumi, who was currently a Zombie Infectee, it's not likely Miki had time to remove the body, clean the floor, and place her body somewhere where the other girls wouldn't have seen zombie Megu-nee. Yet they never run into her remains, even when Yuki turns on the lights into the basement. So what happened to Megu-nee's body?
  • Anime only: Taroumaru is given a motive for his reckless behavior in the final episode, as the girls discover evidence of another, smaller animal living in or near the school — probably a puppy, possibly a cat, which Taroumaru presumably went to investigate (or assist). However, despite spending a whole segment of the episode puzzling this out, the girls promptly decide that it's too risky to do anything about it...only for the closing credits to show an animal standing over Taroumaru's grave. The anime introduced a new character, only to have them left behind at the school as the girls fled. So...what happened to the little guy? And is there a reason they survived this long?.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The final chapter picks up three years after Yuki revealed the treatment to the world. Miki travels around Japan to aid in recovery efforts, Yuuri's gotten an office job, Kurumi's studying to be a doctor, and Yuki's become a teacher.
• Where It All Began: The final act of the manga involves the girls going back to the school. This time the stakes are MUCH bigger.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Episodes 4, 5, 6 spends a lot of time on what Miki was doing prior to joining the School Life club at the mall. Episode 5 then shows how she first met Yuki, Kurumi, and Yuri after they save her life. And episode 6 reveals her early interactions with the girls, along with getting used to the quirkiness Yuki has that's helped them through these tough times.
• Why Don't You Marry It?: In chapter 8, Yuki teases Kurumi about her attachment to her shovel and tells her to marry it already. Likewise, in episode 8 when Kurumi says she would like to marry after graduation, Yuki asks her if she's going to marry her shovel.
• Wish-Fulfillment: The entire arc depicted in the anime for Yuki Takeya. who has a very idealized version of her school, and especially Megumi Sakura, or Megu-nee, one of the teachers of her new school. Notable in that the few times the REAL Megumi Sakura when she was alive is shown, Yuki's portrayal is pretty much spot on, the only error being how Megumi inexplicably only has a few students she handles on a day-to-day basis.
• World Half Full: One of the biggest challenges the girls face is the cruelties and misfortune of the world they live in now. Eventually, through a lot of trauma and several test of courage, the girls slowly but surely find breakthroughs that not only leads to safety, but also finding people empathetic enough to help save the world.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: When the Randall Corp. soldiers find Miki, one of them opposes the order to execute her, despite her being bitten and infected. That soldier ends up sacrificing himself to kill his squad, sparing Miki's life.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: These girls have appalling luck — when something good finally happens, expect it to go very wrong, very quickly. To the point where they seem to be harbingers of doom, as survivors who've dodged death for months promptly turn into zombies just as the girls reach them:
  • In the manga, the girls receive a message from a helicopter pilot. Readers can see him scanning the area for survivors and holding Yuki's balloon message. At the exact moment when he would have seen them...he starts zombifying. The real kicker was that he had the antidote with him and he loses control of himself just before he can inject it — it was sheer carelessness, not a lack of means, that doomed him. There was absolutely no need for him to die (and ultimately destroy the girl's safety zone by crashing). If he'd just been a bit more vigilant, the girls could have been out of there.
  • Another manga incident: After abandoning the school, the girls hear a message over the radio. The DJ is playing upbeat music and making jokes in an attempt to communicate with other survivors. They're able to locate her fairly easily...only to find out she started turning into a zombie just before they arrived. She was nice enough to leave a note warning them of her fate, along with her minivan, though.
  • Yuuri discovers the school her younger sister (supposedly) attended. When they go to investigate, Kurumi notices that some child zombies have "help us!" messages around their neck, directing them to the school and informing them that the survivors have food and water. It looks hopeful in terms of adding to the group — possibly some of the teachers will be there too! They get in easily enough, and even have a clear run up to where the survivors are holed up...but opening the door to their hiding place reveals that there are only zombies beyond the barricade. Looks the like an infected survivor doomed the rest of the group.
  • In the anime, Taroumaru recovers from his zombie bite, and goes back to his kind, if tired, self... only to die minutes later.
• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • Initially, it seems odd that Yuki is living at school and never thinks to go home in the first episode. But once The Reveal shows that there's a Zombie Apocalypse going on, it makes perfect sense that none of the girls will ever have a normal life ever again.
  • Later on, a rescue helicopter crashes near the school, starting a fire that destroys most of the girls' supplies and survival gear. With the school no longer being a viable shelter, the girls decide to "graduate" and leave the school to find a government safe zone.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Not exactly the focus, but it informs everything that happens.
• Zombie Infectee:
  • The leader of Miki's survivor group was bitten, told no one, and turned overnight. Miki and Kei only see the aftermath, where the floor they were on was set on fire.
  • Later, Kurumi is infected, which is when we learn that there is a serum that stalls the effects of zombifying.
  • Later still, Kougami, the crossbowman stopped the group when they clambered over the wall onto the grounds of Saint Isidore University is revealed to be infected.
  • And it turns out that the Militants' leader Takahito is also infected, despite having not gotten bitten. His secret is revealed to the rest of his team, who instantly turn against him because of the zero-tolerance policy for infected people that he put out.

---