Another/Headscratchers

• So how does the ignored student actually get anywhere in their studies? Keep in mind that they're in their last year of middle school--a year spent doing nothing is very bad considering upcoming high school applications and how that would feed into college prospects. Since only 3-3 has to follow the charm to the letter, I assume Mei can simply bop over to the staffroom and have another teacher correct her homework or something?
  • This seems to be the case, considering that other faculty members can acknowledge them fine.
• Why not simply transfer one, randomly chosen student to another class once the school year has started? That way there would be a right number of students on the class, and no-one would have to be excluded so harshly.
  • Moving to other classrooms and changing the class's name didn't work, so presumably this would be a similar cheat. Or maybe the curse would start affecting the classroom the student transferred to. The explanation of the charm made it sound like they had tried every conceivable solution before they found the one that worked.
• Why is it that Misaki, the dead student, is suddenly a boy? In the first episode Misaki is referred to as a girl, but now the old teacher said that she was a he. I suppose it's not really that significant but it's bugging me...
  • This is just an issue of something getting Lost in Translation. In Japanese, you can easily get by with non-gendered pronouns or no pronouns at all. The Japanese script very lightly implies that Misaki was a girl, and the English translation (which is likely going on an episode-to-episode basis as opposed to really knowing the whole plot) pretty much had to run with Misaki being a "she" without realizing that there would be consequences.
  • Alternatively, outside of Class 3 the story itself may have distorted in retelling and most of the student body does think Misaki was a girl.
• Why does the curse kill so many people? If the premise behind it is that it's balancing out the uneven roster due to the Extra, shouldn't it need to only kill one person?
  • Perhaps it's trying to kill the extra specifically, but the curse is no better at figuring it out than a human...so it just kills at random, hoping to get the extra at some point.
    • It's because as long as the Extra exists, the universe is out of balance, so people keeps dying as a result of that. The phenomenon doesn't 'try' to do anything. It has no will.
      • I believe it's because the class, per the English subtitles, is "closer to death." The presence of a dead person in the class brings the clas closer to death, therefore death happens to them. The line between life and death is blurred or something, so that things that wouldn't necessarily result in death or occur, do occur and and/or result in death. Like the probability of dying is now increased.
• Why would Mei's sister Misaki be counted as a death due to the curse? Was she counted as being part of Class 3-3?
  • Family members up to two degrees of separation are affected by the curse.
• So who was the student who stabbed Reiko? I thought that it looked like Kouichi himself with hair over his eyes, but this wasn't referred to in any way after the scene. So was it just some random lunatic, or did Kouichi commit a murder that the curse prevented him from remembering?
  • Random lunatic.
  • So why did Misaki fail to report a murder that she witnessed firsthand to the police?
    • Was it said anywhere that she didn't report it? She'd only have a vague description of him and he'd have time to get away since he's on the opposite side of the river, so it's possible she reported it and he just escaped.
• So is the reason why the counter measure didn't work this year because the extra wasn't a student but a teacher/family member? Has something like this happened in other years too? Is this the reason why the counter measure only works some of the time? How does the curse know the difference?
  • It could be that the countermeasures didn't work this year for the same unknown reason that they don't work some other years. Hell, the countermeasure this year was working for a while, but stopped in April for some reason. Maybe the curse is just more persistent in getting rid of the extra person in certain years.