I’d become a fairly well-oiled machine when it came to writing seasonal reviews and keeping up with everything airing in any given season, but thanks to this unhinged alcoholic downward spiral I’ve been on these past few months, you’re going to be seeing relatively few SingleH reviews for this Summer, 2022. I know—good news for many MAL users, but I was almost able to make a comeback for an unlikely reason, and that is I got sick. Rather, I am currently sick as of time of writing. Upon first realizing this, I was so deeply relieved, thinking what fantastic timing this was. I mean, now I’d have a legitimate excuse to take time off work and make up for all the time I’d wasted drinking hundreds of dollars worth of liquor per week. Unfortunately for me, though, I’m not just “sick enough to get a work note for a few days” sick, I’m “I’m fucking bedridden with the flu” sick. Not only am I debilitated conventionally, but I’m also now on medication to recover that requires me to, as many sadly do, not consume any alcohol, not only for the days on which I take said medication, but also up to five whole days afterward. Typing this from bed; wrapped in gross, sweaty, fever-dream blankets; surrounded by nothing but a thermometer and my final, empty bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade to keep me company, I truly didn’t think my life could presently get any more physically or mentally distressing than this…then I realized it was time to watch season two of Classroom of the Elite. This series, at least to me, is the perfect embodiment of the, “Ah, I see you’ve laid out in a very detailed fashion a long list of well-argued criticism against the anime I enjoy, but I’m going to take it upon myself to not seriously address any of it and instead simply jeer at you, ‘If you don’t like it, don’t watch it lmao!’” Because I’ve seriously been dreading this for quite some while.
If I was committed to covering seasonal anime like I am now at the time season one of this series ended, then I definitely would’ve written a review for it, because Classroom of the Elite is surprisingly a lot more interesting than it looks, at least in certain ways. Actually, that isn’t true at all, but it still very much succeeded at presenting itself as if it would successfully evolve into a very specific type of show with a very specific type of gimmick that I am personally a huge sucker for. I haven’t really come up with a name for this yet, but the type of show which is told seemingly from the prospective of the protagonist to a point, which later reveals the protagonist was hiding something not only from the other characters, but from even you, the audience, and said reveal then changes the way you think about the protagonist, the antagonist(s), and the story in some profoundly different way than you had before you truly understood who the protagonist was. The classic, most perfect example I can think of is from Durarara!! Learning Mikado was in control of the Dollars from the start massively recontextualizes everything he’d said and done up until the point you learned this about him, and the series continuously does this to reframe how you would personally evaluate this character who you thought you knew well. Learning that Aoba had infiltrated the Dollars with the former Blue Squares, seeing how Mikado embraced this and used them to covertly police the gang. All these slow but firm steps forward into a deeper, darker version of himself built such a compelling character, because, despite spending most of our time with him—him still being the “main character”—he made decisions that surprised us not quite enough to think of him as being out-of-character, but more than enough for us to think he had more depth in store which we simply had to anticipate.
I suppose far less deep and interesting, yet obviously much more famous and easily referenced examples of this phenomenon could include Light Yagami, Lelouch vi Britannia, and all their like to a certain degree, but I think I’ve painted my picture quite clearly, and, no matter how cheaply it did so, season one of Classroom of the Elite concluded by making Ayanokouji out to be one such “enigma protagonist” (which is the name for this trope I think I’m going to stick with). In this show, it’s probably the only memorable scene in the entire first season, as well as its seemingly climactic finale, so I’m sure no summary need be in order. It wasn’t as dramatic as Mikado turning out to have been the boss in charge of the Dollars, but suggesting that Ayanokouji had this weird, deeper angle to his personality other than simply being deadpan harem MC No.2576773 was honestly a rather enticing prospect. We’d seen glimpses of his life as a guinea pig in some laboratory setting in episodes six, ten, and eleven, but at no point was it made clear that his time there effected his personality, let alone his worldview—goodness gracious, imagine a character in a show like this actually having an interesting worldview—so having him give this monologue about how all humans are tools and he doesn’t care about anyone whatsoever was pretty neat. I mean, the dialogue was the sort of edgy one-liners you’d expect from a fucking light novel, but it was still SOMETHING. Something, anything at all to make even a second of this shit worth it. I was probably only seduced by it because, again, I’m a real sucker for these kinds of reveals, but for it to actually be worth anything, season two had to do two things. 1) It had to capitalize on the reveal and make Ayanokouji an interesting character, and 2) it had to not be complete dog shit. Unfortunately, it utterly failed to do both.
If I hadn’t learned about this “twist ending” from reading through spoiler-ridden threads on /a/, I never would’ve picked this show back up after dropping it two minutes in. That whole opening scene on the bus was excruciating from start to finish. Every millisecond like nails on a fucking chalkboard, with every hallmark of every bad modern anime I’d ever seen, the likes of which I cast aside without hesitation after barely being able to stomach a few meager minutes. Opens with a pretentious Nietzsche quote which has nothing to do with anything, in German, of course, mein liebe freund; generic, lifeless, washed-out, effortless, devoid of anything resembling artistic heart or soul in its direction, animation, color design, background art, character design, settings, or music; brain-numbingly uninteresting protagonist; over-the-top side characters with wildly unrealistic and exaggerated personalities rambling about nothing, all indicative of the writing sensibilities of a middle schooler, or worse, Tow Ubukata. It was all there, and watching it even at a full 2x speed was unbearable. The episode, and the entire show afterward, proceeded to be little other than character introductions for uninteresting looking pieces of sometimes-animated cardboard, rule sets for obnoxiously convoluted games or structures which exist solely to engage those who think engaging with such makes them any more intelligent, and personal confrontations that only really spark due to a character seeing one thing one way and feeling the need to impose the way they feel about said thing upon others…in other words, pompousness and immaturity. And if that wasn’t the single most unsexy portrait of any anime you’ve ever heard, I warn you now that season two is even more visually atrocious than season one…somehow. With last season’s compositing, I really don’t know how they made this look even worse.
Season two has officially dropped any pretense of looking like an intelligent series to any passersby, as it has undergone the rather undignified, hasty transition into a full-blown harem. In season one, there were some minor hints that Kushida was starting to develop feelings for Ayanokouji, but her character is so fucking all over the place that you can’t really expect her to stick to anything emotional. It was therefore understood, at least by me, that this would be a series about whatever light novel nonsense it was going to be about, and any romantic sub-plots would be reserved exclusively for the inch-by-inch progress Ayanokouji would presumably make with Horikita over time, but season two quickly brings the teen romance shit straight to the forefront, no matter how jarring the clash is with the pre-established conflicts I thought we were going to be focusing on. The result, naturally, is completely farcical. By the end of the season, he has Horikita, who I suppose makes sense considering how all she really needed was someone emotionless enough to stomach her arrogance; he has maybe Kushida, but her character is so confusing and absurd that one episode she’s hugging him from behind and another she’s trying to ruin his life and get him expelled; he has Sakura, who likes him because he doesn’t “have scary eyes” (look at her lecherously), because if there’s one thing I know about teenage girls, it’s their universal attraction to guys who look at them like asexual robots; he has Karuizawa, who warmed up to him after he contently filmed her getting assaulted and coerced her into collaborating with him after debasing her to the point of tears; and then he has Sato, who I honestly don’t even fucking understand. She just saw him do the Devilman: Crybaby meme run during the relay race and suddenly thought, “Oh my God, I’m so wet! Please fuck me! Harder! Harder, Ayanokouji-sama!”
Needless to say at this point, season two lives up to the first in every way, and I obviously mean this to be a scathing insult. The problem with Classroom of the Elite in simple terms is that it’s terminally fucking boring and completely fails in all its attempts to endear, invest, or engage you with or towards any of its principle characters as a consequence of them being exclusively presented as one-dimensional tropes (Horikita, etc.), over-the-top cartoon characters (Kushida, etc.), in-context memes not to be taken seriously (Kouenji, etc.), or narrative cannon fodder who will never at any point or in any convincing fashion have any gravity to their presence or be of importance to any long-term conflict in the series (Hirata, etc.), however long it chooses to fucking last. Fourteen volumes, isn’t it? The novel? I shudder at the thought of how many seasons of TV anime that translates to… Anyway, it’s just more of the same. More rules, more exposition, more internally conflicting feelings of and between unreasonable teenagers, so on and so forth. I cannot reach far enough back in my own memory, unreliable as that now admittedly is, to a point in my life where I could give half a shit about the halfhearted drama and embarrassingly predictable gambits such a pseudo-intellectual series has to offer. Since the “big reveal” at the end of the last season, Ayanokouji’s presentation has changed in, as far as I can tell, exactly zero ways. We get some slightly more revealing and honest inner monologuing, but that’s about it. The entire suggestion that his personality would gain a new dimension was nothing but hollow hope, assuming said hope wasn’t entirely fabricated from within my own oddly inflated expectations, wherever in the fuck those would’ve come from. Actually, come to think of it, where in this damned to hell piece of shit series WOULD I gain any positive expectations?
Ugh—they had such a good thing with episode twelve too, and yet they still completely failed, not only to make the slog up until that point worth a damn, but to even make it feel ultimately satisfying by the end. Yes, the episode was the only one to have some decently animated sequences, but having him just waltz in, confront everything, and massacre everyone was such a simplistically bold writing choice that was genuinely satisfying to watch. But what’s the end result? The end result is the exact same monologue from the end of season one. Yes, it was much better written; yes, it was much better produced and executed; yes, it was a genuinely cool scene that actually kinda made you scared of Ayanokouji yourself. But what is he saying? Again, “All humans are nothing but tools. I have no emotions. Blah, blah.” In other words, albeit more brutal, the same shit from the end of season one. I thank the fight for being completely fucking epic and absurd, because it genuinely felt like getting wasted and watching UFC with my cousin and her friends, but does it contribute to the substance of the episode—or of the SHOW, for that matter??? No. It really doesn’t. And so I’m sadly forced to repeat my not-so rhetorical question from the end of the previous paragraph: “come to think of it, where in this damned to hell piece of shit series WOULD I gain any positive expectations?” From its cardboard characters? From its comical ridiculousness which betrays any intention of self-seriousness it could possibly hope for? From its embarrassingly uneven production quality? Please don’t tell me I’m supposed to get them from its fucking dumb, uninteresting, forced-harem waifus. And for GOD’S SAKE—PLEASE—don’t tell me I’m supposed to get them from the teenage-IQ, pretentious quotes which pop up at the start of every episode.
Honestly, how the fuck am I eight paragraphs deep into this review? Season one was horrendous, and whether it had a promising cliffhanger or not, am I really so dull these days to expect a show that had been total shit for twelve complete episodes to suddenly turn a new leaf in a new season? What the hell is wrong with me?! By season two, the art direction is physically nauseating and character models change scene by scene; this is the kind of bottom of the barrel dogshit trash I’d happily, confidently give a 2/10 after inspecting for thirty to forty seconds max. I don’t understand how I watched twelve episodes of ceaseless misery FIVE YEARS AGO, see about half a minute of promise at the very end, and at no point before building future expectations did I ever stop and think, “Hold on. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Those past twelve episodes of ceaseless misery shouldn’t really inspire confidence in the future, should they?” I then proceeded to waste more of my time watching through a second season, writing a review for it—thereby wasting your time now too—only to reach the inevitable conclusion that of-fucking-course none of this was going to pay off. I hope I never have a deep enough understanding of human psychology to fully process why I chased such pointless shadows cast by such an empty husk of an anime. I mean, I wouldn’t exactly describe this as being one of my more “passionate” or “inspired” reviews in the grand scheme of things, but I drink myself to death for nearly three months, come down to the final few weeks of the season with barely enough to time to watch, let alone WRITE for any of the anime I want to write for, and THIS is what I choose to spend my precious time on?! I’m sick for fuck’s sake! This is ridiculous. Completely unacceptable. I just took my temperature again to piss myself off, and it’s 101.2°F.
I should download Uber Eats or DoorDash or something. I am not going out to get more Gatorade and Maruchan like this…
Thank you for reading.
