Many others have written about the very similar plot structure between the high school arc and the college arc, and there has been speculation over whether the college arc will continue to mimic its predecessor or diverge into something very different. I suspect that we're going to end this arc on a more ambiguous tone than the previous one. It's theoretically possible that we're headed for a Bad End.
Think of the title of the manga: Gakkou Gurashi, which means something like "living at school." While we could go on to make our title untrue, it's also possible that we might not. If there's really an airborne strain of the infection, then any of the girls could die at any moment. Even if there isn't, though, they're all in a precarious position. Kurumi is (or believes she is) gradually becoming more and more like a zombie. Yuuri is displaying increasingly risky behaviors in the service of a teddy bear. Miki has hit a low point after all the emotional blows she's taken and seems unable to take action on her own initiative, something that makes her easy to exploit. Yuki seems more or less all right in a psychological sense, but she's prone to taking risks when trying to help people. All of her friends need help... and beyond that, being alone with Kurumi is not without its dangers these days. A TPK is not out of the question...
But I don't think this is the kind of series that would actually do that.
That said, I don't think we're getting out of here as cheerfully as the last time we left a place. Unlike Yuki, Yuuri hasn't shown a single sign of improvement from her delusions. If anything, she's getting worse. I don't think that she's going to die during this arc, but she's not going to just snap out of it in a few chapters, either. The last arc left us concerned about Kurumi's cold arm and thoughts of suicide, but she's considerably closer to the edge. I would not be surprised if we have to leave Kurumi behind--but at least she promised to say goodbye first.
I expect most of the Melee Fight Crew to be dead, zombified, or otherwise permanently removed from the plot by the end of this arc. I thought about Ayaka as an exception, someone to become a villain, but in the end I think she's going to be her own downfall in one way or another. Sino, to me, is a wild card: her possible pregnancy could be used in some interesting ways to move the plot forward, and she seems determined to live. But it would be quite possible to wrap up her character arc in the next few chapters as well. I don't really see any of the other university characters as being relevant later on, unless Aozoi has some elaborate evil plot cooking that we don't know about yet.
If we leave St. Isidore at the end of the arc (perhaps we won't, and we'll have another term of college!) and bring Kurumi with us, then we will absolutely be going on a quest to find a permanent cure for her. Either way, we will probably dedicate the next arc to finding out the exact story behind the zombie plague, and I don't really expect another arc after we have our answers.
On another note: we still don't really know why the zombies are still active at this stage. There is an extremely limited quantity of remaining prey, and their bodies should presumably continue to rot as time went on. We haven't seen them eat each other, or really any non-human food source, but that's one of very few explanations I can come up with for what's happening. At any rate, we should eventually see the population of zombies fall dramatically, and perhaps completely wipe itself out through starvation and lack of new hosts. If our girls can hold on, a much safer future is coming.
Submitted January 01, 2017 at 03:28AM by AlcyoneNight http://ift.tt/2ilg1RX
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