Classroom of the Elite peaked at the first chapter. Yep, you’ve read that right, literally the first chapter is the best this novel has to offer, and it only goes downhill afterwards.

It offered interesting points about ethics and morality, piquing my interest in the series. Commendably so, as it managed to have meaningful content in a scene that’s just about whether to offer your seat in public transport or not. The problem is that this chapter is set in real world, while rest of the novel isn’t. Not to be misunderstood, Classroom of the Elite isn’t some sort of isekai, what I mean is that the core setting is a controlled environment clear of outside influence with a fake “society” set up. Which in turn makes the attempted portrayal at psychology of the character and social commentary fake also, as it doesn’t relate to actual realistic society.

Now, that could still work if the story had interesting characters that could engage in some intriguing chemistry. Unfortunately that is not the case. I’d like to start with the protagonist, who is the most interesting character in this novel, but that isn’t really saying much, just that the rest is much worse off. It’s an interesting concept – a character that looks average to the observers but is in fact very capable and hiding as an average joe is part of their calculations. It’s not an original idea, sure, but sounds interesting enough. The problem with Ayanokouji is that his character seems to be crafted this way just so the readers could roleplay and imagine themselves and someone who is actually not average like the reader is in reality but super great awesome person. Yep, the plague of light novel world, the blatant self-insert is in motion once again, together with the “lone wolf” aesthetics so popularized by Oregairu.

The problem with Ayanokouji is the difference between his character setting and his actual portrayal in the story. Exhibit A: to not attract unwanted attention he poses as an average student, intentionally hiding his true abilities. To do that he answer the test literally 50% correctly and to achieve that he answers some very difficult questions correctly while also failing some easy ones. This of course brings unwanted attention to him, the opposite of desired result. One doesn’t have to be genius to think of just simulating what an average result would mean, which does not mean literally 50% correct. Another example is more of a theme carrying though the whole novel than just one instance. You see, Ayanokouji’s behaviour as not so capable regular student is supposed to be just a camouflage, while his real personality is not regular at all. This idea crashes on the novel being told from his point of the view most of the time. He should have no need to continue this act in his inner thoughts but he is actually portrayed as boring character without interesting insights in the narration with just few exceptions. Those moments where his “true” personality comes out are good, but there’s just very few of them. I’m not against the concept of unreliable narrator and the mc appearing as normal to the reader even through his own narration up to the first reveal would be good writing, but there is no need to still keep his narration uninteresting for rest of the novel. There’s also the thing of lack of description of his mental process, but more about that later.

Another illogical character is Chabashira-sensei. A person that is described by an extreme desire for her class to be succesfull, but also letting her class to get the worst start ever, effectively shooting herself in the foot for no reason other than the feeling of emergency being added to the plot. Is she clumsy? Short-sighted? Or just forced to make blunders that contradict her real goals? Who knows, her character is a mess.

Rest of the characters can be grouped together. Why have I singled out Ayanokouji and Chabashira? Because those two are the only ones whose names I remember without looking up if I’m right. And for Chabashira it’s only because I think her name sounds funny. Yes, lot of the characters just kind of… merge together. Multiple times I had to look up a name to find out who is the novel even talking about. Now, I won’t lie, I’m usually bad with remembering names, but usually I can still differ between the characters. Here, most of the characters don’t have personality interesting or individual enough to be able to be identified by different means other then their names. That is not something that’s supposed to happen. Even if the reader is bad with names (and I’m hardly the only one who is), they should still be able to tell the characters apart.

This if course ties to the ultimate problem of Classroom of the Elite which is that the characters just didn’t intrigue me enough for me to care about what is happening to them. I didn’t become invested in the story and there is no character for which I could care less as to what would happen to them. Ultimately I couldn’t find any reason to continue reading this other than my completionist compulsion.

The story itself is way too cyclic. Most the volumes are just the school making some exam with stupid rules that end with the protagonist (sometimes with help of Horitaka) causing his class to survive the ordeal. There is no sense of emergency as you know that even if everyone is fucked it’s not like the protagonist is in any actual danger at being expelled (and it’s not like I’d care even if he did, the whole cast could drop dead and I would only rejoice I don’t have to read any more of this). I’d even go as far as to say that for most volumes you could read the start and the finally, completely skipping the middle part and you wouldn’t miss out on anything important. To come back at what I hinted in the character paragraph, the problem with Ayanokouji is also that the process of creating his plans isn’t exactly… described. He just has a plan that he came up with offscreen and is revealed to the reader at the end of the volume. We don’t see him struggle with making it or even thinking about creating it, he just magically poofs it into existence because he is a genius with answer to anything. This makes me think that the author is unable to write the process and he’s pretty much reverse engineering problems to solutions he himself wrote. Such is the problem when mediocre authors attempt to write a genius character, it just isn’t believable. This novel feels pseudointellectual in a sense that it tries to appear intelligent, but it also aims at average readers as the demographics, so it only has to maintain an illusion it is something of value instead of actually having to be well written. No offense to those that enjoyed this literary work.

Just as a small side note about the setting – the system of the school doesn’t even make much sense. It’s supposed to create/recruit elite that would stimulate the country. But it keeps trying to expel people that don’t excel in every way. Why is there a need for someone who wants to the best baseball player to complete the same requirements as a talented mathematician, and vice versa? I’d expect teaching methods more focused on individual value in a so called elite school. Like, you could face being expelled if you fail a damn glorified popularity poll lmao. Sorry to break it to you fictional version of Japan, but people that excel at literally everything are quite hard to find, to the point of it being a miraculous occurrence. Good luck filling a whole class with that. Well, it works in the world of Classroom of the Elite, because the classroom isn’t actually filled with elites – most of the students are pretty much regular people that are mooching of the leaders of classes to get through the school year with the help of schemes of somebody else. Is that what the future elite of the nation is supposed to be? I don’t think so. It’s actually funny how in comparison the system Hope’s Peak Academy makes much more sense if the goal is to bring up the best of future generation and nurture their talents (however tragically that ended up). And Danganronpa even doesn’t take itself seriously all the time unlike Classroom of the Elite (and thanks for that, as it gives it its unique charm).

And as more of a footnote about the illustration, do the spreads really have to be so fanservicey? I know that illustrations sell, but reducing the characters to their racks isn’t exactly helping with portrayal of the story as something of value. No surprises here though, as other works by the artist are mostly straight out porn.

Originally I was going to give this 6/10 because, well, it’s not exactly bad, it just isn’t isn’t good either. Then I thought about how much I had to force myself through most of the volumes, how I didn’t look forward to reading more at all and how it just felt as a waste of time, so I felt it would be unfair to put it on the same level as some of the other titles I’ve rated with 6/10. So 5/10 it is. If you want to read something with intellectual battles full of scheming and outsmarting, there’s plenty of other works like that, some of them even being actually good. Death Note being the most popular one, there’s also Legend of the Galactic Heroes for which the original novel doesn’t get nearly enough attention it deservers or for example works by Fukumoto Nobuyuki in general. If you want something about a character that looks generic on the outside but is in fact highly irregular, there’s Zaregoto Circle by NisiOisiN. All those examples actually portray mind process of the protagonists, and that's how mentally gifted characters should be written. Of course, if you’re satisfied just with characters magically outsmarting everyone effortlessly because the author said that they are supposed to be smart, you can go watch Code Geass or something.