If you're looking for a cheap laugh and a good theme song, look no further. Otherwise, best look elsewhere.
If the key to success in a comedy anime is the comedy, you could say that this is a great success. But I don't, unfortunately. While it was, at points, hysterically funny, I don't feel that this is the above-average anime that everyone says it is. The characters are bland and get little to no development, the plot is inconsistent and ranges from flawed to utterly nonsensical, and many of the jokes can be very problematic.
First, let's look at the characters. There are only two that I
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actually like as a character: Yuuji (and the show seems to really disagree with me on this, considering the abuse it puts him through) and Toshimitsu (who gets very little screen time). The rest are either bland stereotypes, horrible people or both. Himeji is your average Moe archetype, with nothing to make her actually interesting. Minami is the same, but with the Tsundere archetype. Hideyoshi is essentially a one-off joke (and a slightly homophobic one at that) that stops being funny after the first 20 times. Akihisa is a general creep and doesn't really have anything special about him other than that. Kouta you might as well tick 'All of the above' being a general creep, a bland stereotype and a one-off joke. But by far the worst character is Shouko, who to make a long story short, is a horrible abusive, cruel and manipulative arse that the show somehow expects me to like and feel sympathy for her. It doesn't help that she constantly abuses one of the only sympathetic characters in the show in a realistically abusive relationship. It also annoys me that everyone wants her to be with Yuuji despite all this.
The plot is a mess. Being a slice-of-life anime, there's no unifying plot and most of the episodes exist separately from each other, but even then, they're pretty bad. The main plot is about Class F trying to get up the class ranks in a nonsensical battling system at a school. There's already some problems here: first, why would the school implement the battling system in the first place? Yes, it rewards good test results, but there's no reason why being beaten should take test results away. There's also no reason why it uses whole classes instead of individual people: A worse class with one good person (See: Class F) could be carried all the way to the top without most of them earning it. There's also no reason why Akihisa's avatar should be special in any way. It's completely unexplained as well.
Individual plots are bad as well. By far the worst is episode 7, where the whole of the main cast decide it's a good idea to give Yuuji and Shouko (who they know is abusive and horrible, and literally tries to kill Yuuji in the episode before, which is also a mess) a romantic Wedding experience. There is no reason why everyone would want that. Akihisa, Hideyoshi and Himeji all know well how horrible Shouko is. Muttsulini and Minami have a slight semblance of a motivation, but it still makes no sense how much effort they put into it. Then at the end of the episode, a random audience member insults Shouko's obsession with Yuuji, and then Shouko runs off crying. And we're meant to sympathise with her despite all the torture she's given Yuuji because of her obsession. The worst part is that it becomes apparent that Yuuji actually likes her, which is unforgivable.
Another problem is that the jokes can be very problematic at times, as well as just being bad. I can't count the amount of jokes that are repeated over and over again: Hideyoshi looks like a girl, Muttsulini's a creep, Akihisa's an idiot, Shouko abuses Yuuji, Minami beats people up, Himeji's cooking is terrible, and that's only some of them. If you had a drinking game based on those jokes alone, you would die by the 5th episode. There's also the problematic jokes. First off, they turn the abuse of Yuuji into a joke. Which is not cool. Second, they portray lesbians as insane, creepy stalkers, and constantly assert that heterosexuality is 'Normal'. Again, not cool. As well as that, the show as a KKK expy. I shouldn't need to explain how not cool that is. This is just to name a few. This show has a problem with political correctness, it seems, and it kills it for me.
The main good features of this show are the theme song, which is really catchy and amazing, the art, which is nice to look at, and some of the jokes, but they really don't give this show substance. The plot and characters are bad and it's extremely offensive. I would avoid this show unless you really don't care about anything other than the jokes, and even then I'd say it's not for everyone.
Apr 12, 2015
Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu
(Anime)
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If you're looking for a cheap laugh and a good theme song, look no further. Otherwise, best look elsewhere.
If the key to success in a comedy anime is the comedy, you could say that this is a great success. But I don't, unfortunately. While it was, at points, hysterically funny, I don't feel that this is the above-average anime that everyone says it is. The characters are bland and get little to no development, the plot is inconsistent and ranges from flawed to utterly nonsensical, and many of the jokes can be very problematic. First, let's look at the characters. There are only two that I ... |
