Why are the characters so obsessed with reaching class A? Just for the prestige? The show says graduates are guaranteed a job but that's a weak reason to stay at the school and no reason to care about class placements. The show dropped the ball in setting up the stakes of the class placements. As it stands the viewer should have no reason to care about this.
Ayanokoji says for most of the show that he does not care about reaching class A yet eventually starts to try more and more to do so. So why did he decline the offer to join the student council which would surely elevate him? Why does he hide his skills from others? Why does the show suggest he was engineered from birth in some way? Why were these students even put in the classes they were to begin with? Why does any of this even matter?
It doesn't and the shows hoping you don't realize that. As of season 1, the show has no answers for any of the above questions and hopes you'll consider it smart because it's "vague". It's not vague it's just failing to tell an interesting story.
I liked Ayanokoji early on. I liked that he was calm and collected and intelligent. But his soulless attempt to reach class A feels like a terrible direction to take the story in.
Classroom of the Elite attempts to seem intellectual for 3 reasons:
I didn't really believe this show was pretentious until the very end when Ayanokoji is revealed to be actually secretly trying to climb classes. Combined with the other reasons, I feel that was the moment this show tipped its hand as not just being about "intellectual" subject matter in the form of an elite school, but also attempting to be intellectual itself. I think it's pretty obvious that this show wants to be seen as a high-end show. So is it?
No, it's not. It's bad as I previously mentioned but it also just doesn't make sense. The show has a lot of quotes, both from the characters and from the openings. I think the quotes and intellectual musings could have worked and actually added to the intellectualism but there's only one problem; they have no relevance to the show. There are only vague gestures of meaning that are not brought up in the show and definitely are not themes in the show. What did Adam Smith have to do with kids in arbitrary hierarchies playing stupid games to win stupid prizes?
~~I couldn't figure it out.~~ Nothing
This show suffers from having every major plot point be extremely over-dramatized like it's an American drama tv show. This falls flat because the actual plot point that is being dramatized is ultimately stupid and contrived.
I want to stress that this show being pretentious really hurts the show, as it goes from a standard bad anime to one that embarrassingly calls itself smart and fails.
Some other issues I thought of:
This is a show I wanted to like at first but realized all it had to offer was vague gestures at being intelligent. I didn't have anything interesting to say and definitely wasn't well made. It would have been better if from the beginning it was blatantly a show about characters trying to outsmart each other rather than this on-the-nose attempt at being "smart" while the plot makes the characters engage in pointless "tests". This show as it stands is a worse version of Kakegurui, a show that is able to properly contextualize the "elites" from the "failures" while also showing characters outsmart each other in various games. Kakegurui knew that the premise was unrealistic, and leaned into that to its success. CotE didn't realize the premise was stupid and tried to legitimize children competing against each other over stupid games and stupid prizes. Maybe the light novel is better, but the anime is a waste of time and offers nothing to its viewer.
To quote a friend of mine:
The island arc of Classroom of the Elite is the worst television ever made.
I'm pretentious af so I should be the target audience right? If I found this show empty, then that should be a pretty bad sign. Really curious though why anyone likes this? There's nothing here. Classroom of the Elite doesn't mean anything and has nothing to say.
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