2nd year of Classroom of the Elite is pretty much the same as the 2nd half of the previous novel series. Which is to say – fans won’t be disappointed, but it is still boring. It retains most of the faults that I’ve complained about in a review for the previous part, but it does improve a little. Not enough for me to give it a higher score, at least not enough yet, but the improvement is here. This is mostly about more emphasis of MCs inner thoughts and finally, more insight into his actual planning instead of a plan just popping up out of nowhere near the finale of a volume. Other than that it’s the usual pattern of “Ayanokouji saves everyone’s ass during the flavour of the week trial“.
Ironically, this is also a downside for the first volume, as it is overdone in quite wrong direction. Certainly, we now get to read the protagonists planning, but in this particular case it was absolutely annoying. He has to choose one person to pair with from over hundred people, and that person can’t be the single “spy” from White Room. Had he chosen at random, the probability of failure would be less than 1:100. Now I understand that he really doesn’t want to be expelled, but the volume is just riddled with the same though pattern all over again – “I might choose someone with xy characteristics as someone from White Room wouldn’t have such characteristic, but they could have expected me to do that and fabricate that characteristics, so I won’t choose like that”. This goes on for some time. The longer Ayanokouji takes, the less people he can choose from. The chase for 100% sure-fire way leaves him with worse and worse chances of succeeding. What is worse is that there are no repercussions for this terrible planning decision at all, as a solution just falls into his hand, almost literally.
Onto more general criticism, Classrom of the Elite commits what I consider a grave sin for books - the text is there only to describe what is happening. I know what some of you might be thinking - "But that's what it's supposed to do!". Well, yes, but that is simply the most basic requirement for it to exist. With good books, you can feel the author from the text. Maybe it's some quips, maybe it's some nuggets of personal wisdom hidden in the story, maybe it's simply some linguistic quirks, but you can feel that there is more meaning to the text than to be just a plain script describing the scene. It doesn't have to be always of course, just once in a while will do. Additionally, with books narrated by a character, the character's personality should influence how is the narration written. My favourite example of that would be Monogatari Series, where some of the volumes are narrated by different characters and you can absolutely tell the difference. But not even a hint of anything like that is happening in Classroom of the Elite. It's just a simple text rid of any literary value. And I think this is the biggiest reason why reading this series feels so painfully boring to me and that to even continue reading I have to constantly keep forcing myself to do so.
Back to some specifics. My biggest peeve about YouJitsu is how little the setting makes sense. And this only gets worse. Now let me remind you that Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School is supposed to be an elite school. I’m reminding you this fact because I myself have basically forgotten this fact, as the students seem like mostly average students with some clever ones here and there mixed in. But that’s wrong. It’s supposed to be an elite school – not just that but high shot elite school that the government is focusing and pumping in ungodly amount of money and effort to maintain. And this is the cast that ends up attending to school? It’s not even justifiable by saying “but hey it’s class D, they are supposed to be the weakest”. Yeah, weakest in comparation, the worst class in top tier elite school should still be leaps above the average, yet most of the characters still feel like regular people filler that require those few people with actual talents to lead them through the whole school exams ordeal. Mentioning the finances, this leads to another question – who the fuck is funding this? The school facilities are like a small town, and that’s not counting outside parts like islands and boats. The students are literally handed out huge amounts of money for literally just participating in school activities correctly (while some students don’t get that much, when the total amount adds up it’s a huge pile of money just being thrown at high-schoolers). We even learn in previous novel that literally every student in Japan is automatically being evaluated if they are worthy of joining the school or not. Imagine the insane amount of paperwork just for that. And what for? To supposedly nurture few supposedly talented individual. And keep in mind only one class is considered to be this. And only the students of this class that managed to not get expelled. So in return for what can’t be anything else than tanking the budget of the whole nation, you get a shocking… circa 20 talented people per year? And that’s not all, those people (apparently) get to choose their carriers, so with this much effort you can still get what, a somewhat good baseball player? All that to hand out an employment recommendations by the school. It’s such a terrible investment return it’s unreal. It’s like the worst gacha ever funded by taxpayer’s money. I realize that goverments are known for being terrible with money decisions but fuck me, how are the citizens not rioting to stop this complete waste of everything? Not to mention the fake advertising of “hurr durr 100% students find employment”. From a writing point of view, Ayanokouji did not join the school – the school was created so Ayanokouji could join it and show of, and the school makes no sense outside of the POV of ths story.
Now, I’ve already mentioned how lot of the characters don’t even seem actually talented in the first place, but this gets worse. So many characters are problem children. This isn’t an elite school, this is a delinquent detention facility. Keep in mind that this is Japanese government funding this, deliquents are like the exact opposite of what they would want for the “bright future of the country”. Enter the new batch of students. The new D class suspiciously good at scheming – despite barely entering the school they pose a formidable threat to our protagonists. Just compare to how much of a bubbling idiots “our” D class was in their place previously. This seems the case because the power leveling sucks and the writing just power-upped others to create new antagonist without thinking about how much it wouldn’t make sense for the abilities of the new characters to be set as such. This is some beginner battle shounen writing mistake.
Back to the “delinquents” theme. With the new cast addition the setting absolutely collapses. You know what you would expect at school for modern society elites? To have to study a lot and shit like that. You know what you would not expect? For the school to accept an extremely violent individual, and for this individual to literally attempt a murder and get away with it. You know how Sudou defending himself was a big deal and he could be expulsed for that? Well that is thrown out of the window, because it seems that Ayanokouji needs an antagonist he could overpower with physical strength to now show off only his mental superiority, so the story throws in a dangerous maniac and the school is suddenly like “Yeah well you guys sort those little disagreement between yourself, we don’t care”, because somehow a student council president has the power to influence school policies for whatever the fuck reasons. And don’t try to excuse it with “but he only got away with it because people didn’t report the incident"". Firstly, I refuse to believe school wouldn’t keep tabs on such a volatile individual. Secondly and most importantly, while Ayanokouji kept him non-expeled to use him to get through a certain predicament, literally nothing is stopping him from reporting the incident after already solving said predicament. Well, one thing is stopping him – the script that wants to keep this antagonist in the story. And how are people still willing to stay in school where there is a chance of being stabbed or at least beaten up should they dissplease the wrong person? All thet for a small chance at job recommendation? Unless there is an apocalypse or absolute collapse for economy where getting a guaranteed job recommendation could make a difference between life and death (and nothing at all suggests such thing), it makes no sense for so many people to be willing to deal with the bullshit the school makes them to go through. And that applies even before literal violence becomes a possible threat. Similar to how this project has a low return for the goverment, the reward for the students isn't exactly that high either. Could actually talented people really not get a job just by their own efforts without it being handed to them by a goverment? The whole setting is a seriously flawed system, and that doesn't seem to be written like that on purpose (like as a critique of goverment doing useless but ridiculously expensive things).
Some of this might sound as just nitpicking, and indeed, if isolated, it wouldn't be that much of a problem. It gets worse when all these problems accumulate in one series, and when said series doesn't offer entertainment value to compensate. After all, belief can only be suspended when you're having fun.
I would also like to point out something about my rating. It might be 4/10, but for me that simply means "it could be even worse". But if you rate based on how many good things there are, or how likely you are to recommend it to others, then the rating would be 1/10. There is no good element of this novel and I can't think of any non-ironic reason I could have to recommend it to someone.
So yeah, for a novel that seems to advertise itself as for the “intellectuals”, you need to shut down your reasoning to even be able to accept the inconsistent plot. Classroom of the Elite is not a novel for clever people, it’s a novel for people who want to feel clever by inserting as the protagonist.
