As its name suggests, School-Live! ~Letters~ is a series of independent vignettes interwoven as characters craft letters to their friends. And while the girls are writing to each other, it’s almost like they’re writing to someone they’ve lost or their past weak self.
~Letters~ features eight chapters, and excluding the one oddball story, they all center around a key character or characters in the series. There’s the School Living Club, of course, and the volume kicks off with Yuuri and ends with Yuki. The main heroines’ chapters work well as epilogues to each protagonist’s character arcs.
That’s not to say ~Letters~ is strictly about the heroines’ post-series lives. The manga does provide some additional details about things that happened before or during the main series. Still not nearly enough if you found the Randall resolution lacking as I did, but, as I mentioned, ~Letters~ provides some beautifully emotional closures on a personal level. With peace returning and the world establishing a new normal, the characters get to finally process what they’ve lost — and what they have to look forward to. Miki’s chapter, for instance, is not titled “Miki” as you would expect but rather “Kei”, and we see a bit about the infection breaking out at the mall. The psychological elements are still strong even though the worst of the zombie apocalypse is over, which plays into this chapter’s title and elsewhere.
However, after a strong start, some of the college students take center stage. I never really cared for the college arc, and since they weren’t much involved in the ending, I’ve forgotten many of them. Putting the Degeneracy Appreciation Society and the other St. Isadore students in the middle, one after another means the book drags, especially since the strange chapter (aptly titled “???”) is featured second-to-last. I wish ~Letters~ featured four, maybe five beefed up chapters instead of the eight featured here, as I would have rather spent more time with the main heroines with whom I’m more attached to. Even besides the fact Yuki and the others have been around longer, the School-Living Club girls are generally living more eventful lives than the college girls.
Still, even in the best chapters of the book, the manga has other flaws or potential disappointments. it’s not the most exciting or surprising epilogue. Most of it can be summed up simply as “[character] is working as or training to be [blank]”. Sure, that type of ending can be found in traditional school life stories, but considering the stress everyone was under, a little more excitement could have been warranted. Chapters also run about 20 to 25 pages each, and while that’s not abnormal, between the letter-writing and glimpses of the world both past and present, the time we spend with each person or group can be brief. But I guess the length ties into why this is School-Live! ~Letters~ and not School-Live! ~Biographies~.