This review may contain spoilers
We Were Just Kids, and They Gave Us Guns
I thought I knew what I was walking into. A sci-fi thriller. Teen soldiers. High-stakes alien warfare. I figured it’d be tense, maybe clever. What I didn’t expect was to come out the other side hollowed out — mourning people who didn’t exist, carrying grief for something that felt far too close to real.
Duty After School: Part 1 isn’t about aliens. Not really. It’s about being young and having that youth stolen by people in power who mistake bodies for strategy. It’s about kids forced to make sense of death before they even figured out who they were. There’s a quiet kind of devastation in watching someone still learning how to live suddenly being expected to kill.
Every student mattered. That’s what wrecked me. There were no cannon-fodder side characters, no one written just to be expendable. They were scared, selfish, compassionate, petty, brave — so human. And because the story gave them space to be all of that, every loss hit harder. Every goodbye felt like something real being torn away.
The anger I felt — not at the monsters, but at the adults, the system, the normalization of sacrifice — that stayed. There was no big villain monologue, no neat justification. Just failure. Repeated, systemic, cowardly failure. And the show didn’t try to smooth that over. It let the betrayal speak for itself.
What crushed me most were the moments of kindness — those quick glances, inside jokes, the way they looked out for each other even when everything around them was falling apart. That camaraderie felt sacred. Because they knew what they were losing. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much. Not just who died, but what was taken from the ones who lived.
I didn’t cry right away. I just sat there, still. Like the air had been knocked out of me. And then it came in waves. For the promises cut short. For the joy that never had a chance to grow. For how quietly the show let everything unravel.
It didn’t ask for tears. It earned them.
This isn’t something I’ll forget. Not because of the concept. Because of the kids. Because they were never just soldiers in training. They were people. And the world treated them like numbers.
I felt every step of it. And I’m still not done feeling.
Duty After School: Part 1 isn’t about aliens. Not really. It’s about being young and having that youth stolen by people in power who mistake bodies for strategy. It’s about kids forced to make sense of death before they even figured out who they were. There’s a quiet kind of devastation in watching someone still learning how to live suddenly being expected to kill.
Every student mattered. That’s what wrecked me. There were no cannon-fodder side characters, no one written just to be expendable. They were scared, selfish, compassionate, petty, brave — so human. And because the story gave them space to be all of that, every loss hit harder. Every goodbye felt like something real being torn away.
The anger I felt — not at the monsters, but at the adults, the system, the normalization of sacrifice — that stayed. There was no big villain monologue, no neat justification. Just failure. Repeated, systemic, cowardly failure. And the show didn’t try to smooth that over. It let the betrayal speak for itself.
What crushed me most were the moments of kindness — those quick glances, inside jokes, the way they looked out for each other even when everything around them was falling apart. That camaraderie felt sacred. Because they knew what they were losing. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much. Not just who died, but what was taken from the ones who lived.
I didn’t cry right away. I just sat there, still. Like the air had been knocked out of me. And then it came in waves. For the promises cut short. For the joy that never had a chance to grow. For how quietly the show let everything unravel.
It didn’t ask for tears. It earned them.
This isn’t something I’ll forget. Not because of the concept. Because of the kids. Because they were never just soldiers in training. They were people. And the world treated them like numbers.
I felt every step of it. And I’m still not done feeling.
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