Last season I promised to release mini analyses of the running anime that piqued my interest/gave us stuff to talk about. Unfortunately life got in the way.

It's actually happening this time around. These threads will be updated regularly and may become essays.

GOD OF HS

It's...

It's fine actually.

Good even.

Huh

I saw how much people were hyping up Tower of God. It's not only not good but obviously not good from the first episode. Tower of God doesn't contextualize anything. It's not about anything. They just throw wacky situations at your main cast and hope they stick

But God of High School is competently written. The comedy works. It takes some established gags and uses them to build character. Speaking of character we spend 15 minutes getting to know and like them before launching into a high-stakes tournament arc.

The action is fantastic and the show looks amazing. I don't have much else to say. Sometimes you're just watching anime made by people who know what they're doing

At the beginning we're introduced to a world of corrupt politicians and a government controlled by corporations. Of course, as the democratically elected emperor of weeb antifa this excites me. But themes like that are easier to tease than they are to execute.

We'll have to wait and see if the show can deliver on being more than just cool action and quirky characters

Episodes 2 and 3 of God of HS are just good. Don't have much else to say. The fight choreography is outstanding and the writing is "efficient" (it gets you to care about characters by introducing just what you need to know about them).

It really is just fantastic shonen with a lot of talent, care (and money) thrown at it. Might not update this thread so often until the show does something that changes my general conclusion that this show is just really fucking good

Okay so

I'm pretty comfortable in saying The God of High School is one of the best shounen ever made, just from these 5 episodes.

If it does its political themes with any of the skill its done its character work thus far it will quite possibly be one of my favorite anime ever

The first 5 episodes of The God of High School could stand alone as their own season of shounen anime. But it's arc

fucking

one

I guess, if I wanted to, I could break down the subtles of how fantastic this writing is. How the show masterfully handles set-up and payoff, giving us only what we need to know to get invested at the time.

I could talk about how the show looks fantastic, how the martial arts do as much storytelling as the writing, the way the writing is able to play with emotional beats as well as it does comedic ones.

But sometimes you just need to sit, and watch. And experience good writing happening to you. And leave with that warm feeling in your chest when you experience a story so masterfully put together all you can really say is

"wow"

If My Hero Academia's season 2 tournament arc set the bar for good tournament arcs in modern anime, The God of High School just blew that shit out of the damn water. The God of High School is the best at what it does and it's sheer joy watching it happen

Damn has it been a month since I updated this thread? I thought it was sooner.

Okay so here's the deal, right?

I still think this show is very, very, very good. But it's no longer my favorite show this season (Deca Dence), and it's got some flaws I'd like to talk about too

The annoying thing is, God of HS seems to have generated quite the backlash to it. Manhwa fans hyped this show up to high heaven and I personally think there's no shortage of elitists looking to looking to shit on anything too new and too popular

I would even go so far as to compare God of HS to SAO in terms of how hate around it is more anime fandom culture war bullshit than actual criticisms that make sense for the show.

But God of HS is a LOT better than SAO in basically every aspect so there's that.

So the positives:

1. The show is a series of really well-done tournament arcs, and it's best when it sticks to those tournament arcs.

God of HS has a really solid rhythm where it'll introduce a character, then, in the space of a scene or two, make them feel real...

...only to have them fight our protagonists, who have also been characterized and explored. I think the writers know that a tournament arc is a simple way to get satisfying conflict and resolution, and the writing team has perfected this cycle.

2. The fights.

A lot of online critics say that GoHS is "just pretty fights" with "no story". This is reductive and borderline racist, actually.

Because the fights in GoHS aren't just bright lights and action you can find in any other show...

...the fights are culturally informed by various martial arts styles in Korea and elsewhere. The GoHS team has taken the manhwa's premise and turned it into an exploration of culture through martial arts.

Side stepping ALL of the visual work and storytelling GoHS does just because you didn't like this or that story element to give the show a 2/10 on MAL shows media illiteracy, in my opinion.

Now for the flaws:

The God of HS has a bit of a habit with using the pain of its female characters as, like, shock value.

It understands that seeing men get hurt is bad, but seeing women get hurt is EVEN WORSE so women get the brunt of the worst scenes.

Of course, the only reason why it "feels" worse to see women getting hurt is because we assume they're the weaker gender, which is why it's a bit sexist.

Second big flaw: the story outside of the tournament arcs is mediocre.

To be clear, I think it does work. There are shows this season that just fail to tell a coherent story and GoHS is not one of them. However it's not the strong suit of the show.

I get that we have Nox on one side and Park Mu-Jin on the other, and the two are like fighting for control over God. And I get Park Mu-Jin wants to awaken a Key to destroy God while Nox wants to use God to purge the degenerates from this Earth but like...

It's just not compelling? Eh.

I care about the tournament, the individual fights, and the story created in the conflict between characters. I don't care about this sacrilegious stuff as much

Like, when Nox summons God with a capital G in the middle of Seoul, is like supposed to be cool? Or intimidating?

It feels like invoking God because it's the highest power you can think of and, by definition, the highest stakes

But it ends up feeling childish

I'm much more interested in the fact that, in the same episode, Jin Mo-Ri picks up his friends' signature techniques, and he needs them to win.

Now that was cool!

God, like, the concept of a singular higher power, means different things (or even, nothing) to different people. So you can't just invoke the idea and expect it to work in a narrative about high schoolers with spicy Tae Kwon Do skills