One seemingly normal day, without warning, a hole was blown through the moon. Was this done by Piccolo? Todd Ingram? Chairface Chippendale? No, it was a mysterious tentacled monster who would soon assume the name of Koro-Sensei, who happily claimed responsibility for the attack, before declaring the Earth itself was next. But before that attack could happen, the monster had one item to check off of his bucket list; He demanded the opportunity to teach a year of school for one of Japan’s most hopeless and troubled classes! Why would he want to do this? Well, I don’t know, because I’m only halfway through the season, but given the context clues we’ve received thus far, I’m going to assume someone dear to him was murdered, and he wants to destroy the world to avenge her, but teaching this class was her dying wish. That’s just my guess at this point, there are honestly several possible explanations, but I kind of don’t fucking care.

So before I go any further, this review is going to be unlike any I’ve published before, and I’d like to take a second to explain why. I was not planning to review this show. Ever. I was just going to watch it to kill time before I got into my next planned review, but I wound up with so much to say about it that within a few episodes, I knew I had to get my thoughts down on paper and send them out into the world. This is only the third review I’ve ever written where I had so much to say that I felt compelled to start writing before even finishing the series, bet you can’t guess the other two. So what I’ve decided to do is write out my thoughts on the first 11 episodes right now, and then do the second half when my binge of the season is complete. The reason this is going to be a rougher, less formal, stream of consciousness review is because this is a really popular anime, and I know for a fact that no matter how long this review is, or how much effort or structure I put into it, it’s gonna bomb and get buried by downvotes. So I might as well just go the easier and less restrictive route.

I would normally write two to three paragraphs about an anime’s production history/quality, but all I’m going to say about Assassination Classroom is that it looks really good. The animation is top notch, and the character designs are really cool and memorable. I hate Koro-Sensei as a character, but his design is easily A++, I love how he’s a monstrous, distorted and perverted take on the overused yellow happy face. I have two issues with the visuals, though. First is the occasional lack of attention to detail, the perfect example of which is when Koro-Sensei is dodging a maelstrom of bullets at the front of the class, and the wall behind him doesn't take any damage? Second is that while the students in his class are all really well designed, and none of them look generic or interchangeable, almost none of them are actually used in any meaningful way in the story. Also the English dub is really good. Casting Sonny Straight as Koro-Sensei was a good attempt to make me like him, so you know, nice try.

So this is my second attempt at watching this series. The first time was almost a decade ago, somewhere in the late 2010’s, and I didn’t make it very far. The tone immediately felt off to me, as we have this main character who wants to destroy the world... Unlike Sands of Destruction, this isn’t just some meaningless platitude, he actually has the means to do it... And not only is he supposed to be likeable and inspiring, the show feels silly over-all? The tone did not match the stakes, which isn’t a deal breaker by itself, but the characters didn’t really act like they had as much to lose as the plot said they did. I mean yeah, they’re trying to kill Koro-sensei, but the only motivation anyone expressed was a desire for the reward money, which felt unnecessary to me considering how their lives were also on the line. Yeah, remember the ending of Don’t Look Up, where a perfect plan to save the earth is ruined by financial greed?

It felt like, for some reason, the writing was trying to gloss over the actual implications of world destruction, namely the simultaneous murder of every living thing on the planet, including the cast, because it didn’t want to be bogged down by the actual gravity of such an event. Then I started episode two, where a kid tries to kill Koro-sensei with a baseball pitch, so Koro-sensei dashed to the athletic shed, grabbed a catcher’s mitt and caught the weapon, even though he could have just dodged it. He then taught the boy how to pitch better so he could follow his own path as an athlete, and I remember practically screaming at this point YOU ARE GOING TO KILL THIS BOY! WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO PREPARE HIM FOR HIS FUTURE WHEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LET HIM HAVE A FUTURE?!?!?! And it was too much for me, I couldn’t make it any farther, so I dropped the series midway through episode 2.

Now, to anyone who may be expressing disbelief that THAT was enough to set me off, yeah, I know. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine, and probably one of my biggest at that. I can’t help it, I just get irrationally upset when a piece of media just casually disregards its own internal logic. One of my issues with Up is that when Doug is introduced, it’s explained that he’s not super-intelligent, the collar just translates barks to English... Except before long, the dogs start to both express and understand more and more complex human speech, and then they grow opposable thumbs to fly little planes because fuck me I guess. Lots of people have issues with the cartoon RWBY, my biggest is how cavalier it can be about world-building, especially in the first two seasons. It’s supposed to take place in a world that’s not our own, and yet in the first episode of season 2, Ruby directly quotes several American historical figures, and there are color based names(an in-universe tradition, not just a meta design trend) whose color connections don’t make sense without real world context. Like, hey, the blue boy’s name is Neptune. Did his parents name him after the deity they shouldn’t know about, or the planet they shouldn’t know about?

I realize this is entirely unique to me, but I can’t help it, I am who I am, and this kind of shit just grinds my gears. So, when you show me an anime where a man who’s planning to destroy the world wants to teach a class full of children first, I’m going to have some questions and expectations going in. Are his students afraid of him? Are they angry at him for planning to murder them? Are they going to try and talk him out of it? Are we going to explore the nuance of his plan and how it clashes with his actions? Instead of agreeing to learn from him, wasting their efforts towards a non-existent future, are they going to try and spend their remaining time living their lives and coming to terms with their mortalities? Unfortunately, the only answer I’ve received to any of these questions after eleven episodes is Shrug Emoji, and “Fuck you, stop trying to make us think about what we’re writing.”

This all comes around to my main issue with this series: The stakes, IE the upcoming destruction of the Earth, isn’t taken anywhere near seriously enough. Yeah, the class tries to kill Koro-sensei, but they don’t seem to show any actual emotional investment in surviving. It never feels like they’re trying to kill him out of self defense or to protect humanity. His unkillable nature is presented as a silly joke, rather than an existential nightmare. At no point has anyone tried to talk him out of destroying the Earth. At no point has anyone seriously questioned his logic. At no point have they ever tried to appeal to him emotionally about how they don’t want to fucking die. At no point does it ever feel like a single fucking character is looking at him through the lens if “THIS PERSON IS GOING TO MURDER ME.” It’s like the writers are actively trying to avoid actually addressing the implications of all this so they can sell more merch.

And I can’t just ignore any of this because there are so many fucking moments where I feel a knee jerk compulsion to say what the characters aren’t saying. When Koro-sensei threatens to kill their families if they don’t comply? “Well our families are going to die when you destroy the world anyway, so why not?” Whenever Koro-Sensei talks about their grades or their futures, “Aren’t you planning to murder them soon anyway?” When he tells one student that “No kid ever dies on my watch,” I couldn’t help but shout “Oh, you mean except for when you blow up the earth and murder them?” When he takes some students to Hawaii to see some movies he loves, “Hey, you do realize there won’t be any more movies after you blow up the Earth, right?” And even when he’s flying there, with the kids on his back, they discuss the possibility of killing him while he’s flying under them and can’t get away, they decide not to because it would kill them. “Yeah, but he’s going to kill you either way, so why not sacrifice yourself here for the sake of humanity?” I haven’t been this pissed off at a group of survivors since the main cast of Another returned from their beach vacation, despite being so briefly out of their murderer’s reach, but even THAT cast made me believe they kind of didn’t want to die.

It’s just moments like that, over and over again, that I can’t find funny or compelling because they’re constantly being undermined by the Koro’s plan for mass murder. But these kids don’t actually seem to fucking care, they like him, they identify with him and worry about him and sometimes defend him, even though he’s going to kill them. Say what you want about Beauty and the Beast, THIS is a story about Stockholm Syndrome. Every attempt they make to kill him fails, and yet they never seem too down about it, when they should be experiencing existential dread, stress and terror at their own looming demise. HE’S NOT A NICE TEACHER. HE’S GOING TO MURDER ALL OF YOU AND HE ISN’T EVEN TRYING TO HIDE IT. I can’t believe just how pissed off this all makes me. I am literally shaking while I’m writing this.

What sucks is, there is ONE change they could have made to fix all of this. Just one element they could have added to the story to make it much, much easier for me to sit through. All they had to do was have Koro-Sensei add the stipulation, “If my entire class passes the year. then I won’t destroy the Earth.” That’s it. With that one, simple change, the stakes wouldn’t feel nearly as heavy, allowing for the tone to also lighten, so the series trademark silliness wouldn’t feel so fucking unsettling to me. There would be believable motivation for the class to take their studies seriously, and while they would be able to keep trying to kill Koro, the need to do so wouldn’t feel so dire, and it could be seen as a last resort for students who don’t believe their class or even themselves have what it takes to pass the year. Koro-Sensei surviving every single attack through his bullshit Mary-Sue powers wouldn’t feel nearly as repetitive. Alas, no, we don’t get this, and if it comes up in the second half of the season, it will frankly be too late.

I do have two other issues... First, the effort that the mangaka put into the designs of Koro’s students kinda goes to waste when you realize just how few fucks the narrative gives about them. One thing this show does often is it will bring in a new character who has some kind of advantage over Koro-Sensei, only for him to win them over and transition them into the main cast, where they will go on to upstage and outshine all the pre-existing students except for Nagisa. By the way, that’s something you’re only supposed to do when you’ve run out of ideas. It took The Fairly Oddparents multiple seasons to introduce, use up and discard as many new characters as Assassination Classroom has in just eleven episodes. My second issue is with the character Miss Yelovic, who is a twenty year old woman, and she has sexually assaulted a fifteen year old boy twice thus far. I dunno, I figure that’s one of those Double Standard things where if the genders were reversed, I wouldn’t be the only one complaining. It’s not funny/sexy when grooming, assault and other forms of pedophilia happens to boys, fuck this show.

And for now, that’s gonna be my thesis statement... Fuck this show. There is absolutely nothing I like about it. Yeah, I acknowledge that the animation is good, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it on a personal level. Eleven episodes in, I haven’t experienced a single positive emotion, from joy to laughter, I can’t stand this show. I’ve had unpopular opinions before, and I’ve never been shy about being contrarian, but I don’t think I’ve ever faced such a massive disconnect between my feelings on an anime and everyone else’s. I don’t remember ever hating an anime this much when it was this fucking popular before, but I’m committed, I’m not going to give up here, it’s time to watch the second half and see how I feel.

So let me just start off by saying that splitting up my review like this had an unintended side effect: It calmed me the fuck down. Getting my issues down on paper when I did allowed me to get them off my mind, at least enough to approach the rest of the season from a more neutral perspective, so hey, maybe I should do this more often? Anyway, the second half was easier to get through than the first half, which might not be the loftiest praise in the world, but you’re just going to have to take what you can get from me.

First off, how did the show get better? Well, for one, they stopped gumming things up with new characters, and actually took the fucking time to utilize the pre-existing cast, which was a great choice. Obviously they weren’t going to be able to flesh out all of them, at least not THIS season, but what I saw of them, even from the ones that only got the spotlight occasionally, was pretty cool. One design that kept catching my eye in the first half was the fox-eyed girl with the orange pigtails, named Hayami, and I liked seeing her utilized as one of the two skilled sharpshooters. I would honestly say the best thing about this show is its array of character designs, so it made a world of difference to see them featured more prominently.

Generally speaking, most of the episodes in this half were okay, with the worst one revolving around some complete joke of an asshole gym coach. He was basically over-written to be as unlikeable as possible with no redeeming factors, probably to make Koro-Sensei seem more likeable in comparison? Koro-sensei didn’t like how this meanie kept punching the children Koro was planning to murder, how dare he. The best episode, which I actually really liked, was episode 16, where the class takes their finals. Not only is the actual test taking artistically represented through the awesome metaphor of an arena battle against giant minotaurs, but the scene where the results of the test were announced was genuinely well written, and I liked the level of variety in those results.

Let’s see, this half was actually a little funny once in a while... I chuckled maybe a half dozen times, where in the first half I never once came close to finding anything amusing... And Miss Yelovic doesn’t molest any more minors. She gets a couple of good moments. The class actually gets one big badass coordinated attempt on Koro-Sensei’s life. And that’s all the improvements. Where it remains the same is that Koro-Sensei’s threat on their lives still hangs over the writing as an inescapable damper over any kind of real joy that I could have possibly derived from it. One student does fire back at the others for getting along with Koro-sensei, calling him a monster, but he doesn't go as far as to point out their teacher's murderous intent, because God forbid he be allowed to have a good point. I still hate Koro-Sensei and want him to die. And finally, the only way it gets worse is that the story introduces a big bad evil guy who is a complete joke.

It's so frustrating how little self-awareness this show has in regard to it's own plot. I mean look, like I said before, I don't need to know why Koro-Sensei's doing anything that he's doing. I honestly don't care, he might as well not even have any motives as far as I'm concerned. What bothers me is that none of the characters in the show care about these details any more than I do. Admit it, if you were sentenced to die in less than a year, it wouldn't take you very long to ask "Why?" I swear to God, if I were a student in his class, the very least I would do is at some point say "Hey, you know, maybe don't do that." When you tell a story that introduces a supernatural or alien element to the real world, that element can behave however the hell you want it to, but it only works if the real world itself responds believably to that element.

Anyway, I didn’t hate the second half, it didn’t piss me off or upset me like the first half did, but is that really a high bar to clear? Yeah, it gets a little better, but it doesn’t get better enough to wash the rancid taste of its first impression out of my mouth, and it doesn’t get better enough to make me want to watch season two, or at least not yet anyway. I might revisit that decision when Re:Solution 2026 comes around. Either way, I’m tired, and I'm ready to move onto something else. I hope you enjoyed this informal stream of consciousness review, and if so, I might consider doing another one in the future.

I give Assassination Classroom a 3/10~~~~~~