Honestly, I enjoyed Classroom of the Elite. This light novel series intrigued me enough to complete two volumes a day. I don't usually find stories set in school enjoyable, but this was indeed a page-turner. But although engaging, is the story in its entirety good? My answer would be no. My enjoyment is, after all, subjective, and not everyone would have the same experience. Enjoyment does not equal being objectively good, and it took me a while before I decided to write a review so I could remove any bias I may have. I don't want it to look like I dislike the story (Which I don't), so I'll say this now; this review is mainly criticizing the flaws of Classroom of the Elite. Spoilers are mentioned further in the review.
The story takes place in a school ed by the Japanese government to raise students to lead the country in the imminent future. Basically, a standard school's vision but put to the extreme. They don't accept students with academic superiority alone but students who are also competent in separate fields like judgment, physical ability, and cooperativeness. So everyone has a chance to enter the school. This sets up the first flaw, which is the students present in the institution. It just seems too easy to be accepted. Each year 160 students from Japan can enter the school, meaning that 160 out of millions of students in Japan are selected to enter the country's top school. This part makes me question why students like Ike, Sakura, and many others got accepted in the first place. With the school's standards, I can understand why Sudou got in and why students like Koenji and Horikita are in class D despite their overwhelming competence. But students with straight C's and even B's in all the fields by logic should not have ed the school's standards. Mediocrity being allowed in the country's best school doesn't make sense. It's the same flaw I find with My Hero Academia, with students like Mineta and Hagakure ing UA High school and in the hero course at that. It may look like I'm nitpicking characters, but it's clear that students incompetent in all fields of ability are present in the institution.
After ing the entrance exams and the interview, these said students are assigned to a class decided by their competence. Many institutions use this method in real life, but what makes this interesting is that this is the part of the narrative where the author associated the question involving equality, but inherently, does that even matter? Are the different classes representative of hierarchy? The higher classes as a representation of those with power and the lower ones as powerless? The first scene of the story shows an exchange of words showing a brief social commentary that explains the topic. However, once the story arrives at the school, it doesn't matter anymore or, at least, fails to bring correspondence. It's just a poor attempt to use the flawed school system and characters as an analogy of society.
Yes, the school is indeed flawed. Firstly, how rich is Japan? The school gives free money to the students each month and supplies the items in each store throughout the school, including an entire mall. Not to mention that the school hired all the employees for all the stores, owns crews ship, and gives extra class points and private points given as awards for tests.
The amount of money used for the school brings up another question; is the result worth it? Using this method to create "Elites," I mean. Half of the graduates would probably just work jobs that ordinary graduates could do. With wasting millions of Yen on students' allowance, billions or even trillions on infrastructure, employment, and miscellaneous. Japan is just going to add more to its debt before any of the students here makes a change for the country's economy. A competitive school environment where students are left to their own devices isn't needed to make these elites. If anything else, the white room seems to be a better place to use that money.
Let's see, what else... A student council that has all power over the school, check; rules left with holes to be bent for the sake of the plot, check; that's about it, I suppose. Tell me if there's anything else I've missed.
Now for the characters. Firstly, Kiyotaka Ayanokouji; Arguably the only character worth criticism, but I'll still tackle the general cast later. Ayanokouji is portrayed as this super-genius, well-hung kid, but he chooses to hide his genius to fit in with the rest of the students and have an ordinary student life. In doing so, he purposely scored a half-perfect score in all subjects of the entrance exams and a few others after that. He should have at least tried to have an arbitrary set of scores for each subject so it wouldn't look painfully obvious. In addition, his scores would have been more believable if he hadn't answered the hard questions correctly while he answered wrong to some of the easy questions. In any ordinary school, his performance wouldn't have been that important. However, in his environment where competence is needed and filled, or supposed to be filled, with other geniuses, wouldn't appearing to be competent be a better way to not stand out?
Ayanokouji's initial motive was to live as an ordinary student, but this was interfered with due to being caught up in other people's business. He got the attention of highly acclaimed students and competition, and Chabashira sensei threatened him to compete for class A. Of course, this could have been avoided if he didn't stand out too much due to his test scores and going overboard on special tests like the race with Manabu. That's all my criticism for our protagonist, everything else about his character is very thought out, especially his development in connotation to his past and initial personality, from a very apathetic person to slowly developing feelings for someone and accepting his friends. However, that does render his infamous monologue in volume three irrelevant.
Now for the general cast. We have the perfect stereotypes to create a generic high school classroom. Sudo, A tuff guy who can't control his temper; Hirata, the class' heart rob and representative; Kurizawa; an annoying girl who is in a "relationship" with the said handsome class representative; Suzune Horikita, the class genius; Kushida, our yandere with big fucking tiddies; girls in the "hot girls" clique, a few introverts, and a bunch of morons who have no significant qualities (As I have already mentioned, these idiots shouldn't even be in the school, to begin with). Also, why do some high school students look like divorced fathers in their forties? While generic, that doesn't mean all of the characters are inherently bad. There are a couple of exemptions; Sudou and Kurizawa.
Sudou's character is great to show the audience of the school's standards (If it wasn't for other idiots, at least). The school's description in the light novel places high emphasis on not accepting students who are only intellectually competent. In Sudou's case, it's his athletism that got him itted. And his development on slowly improving his grades, whether having his motivation (Suzune) or not, makes him an even better character. I only have a couple of minor problems with his character, that would be that he was too dumb initially, and the other being his sudden affection for Suzune Horikita. I wish there could have been a gradual development to his feelings rather than "If Ayanokouji doesn't like her, then I'll like her instead." Kei is also a decent character, but that was only prominent after being Ayanokouji's tool. Loving someone she hated might seem like an overused cliché, but her relationship with Ayanokouji prior to the confession scene makes it work.
Despite my criticism, I would actually like to recommend this to anyone, unless they absolutely hate edgy characters and pseudo-intellectual dialogue. Yes, it's filled with flaws but, the author was able to make it engaging, especially to those fond of power fiction in the shape of an intellectually prominent setting. If you believe I may be wrong with any of these statements or if I left something out, feel free to discuss it with me as my main objective is not to hate on the story but to give voice to the minority.
