The Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing School serves as the backdrop for Classroom of the Elite, a high school built on the principles of rewarding success while penalizing mediocrity and poor behavior. This is all done with an objectivist mindset, as the system encourages pupils to prioritize their personal advantage above all else. Kiyotaka Ayanokoji, our primary leader, is an aloof and disinterested kid who ended up in Class D,
which is intended for students with emotional difficulties or bad performance. Season 1 followed him as he assisted his classmate, Suzune Horikita, in her attempts to raise Class D’s standing at school. Season 1 provided short glimpses into Ayanokoji’s personality through memories or his frequent allusions to having a side hidden from others, but this came to a head in the season’s closing moment when the show ripped the rug out from under the spectator. After 12 episodes of Ayanokoji lecturing Horikita on the benefits of friends and relationships, his inner monologue reveals that he has no care for her or anyone else in his class, and that all of his activities have been motivated by a self-serving solipsistic worldview. That last twist provided a humorous recontextualization of his replies to others in a show that had only been okay. One of the most serious issues with season 2 is that it doesn’t know what to do with Ayanokoji now that the cat is out of the bag, at least for the viewer. One of the season’s primary plot aspects includes two school groups using a bullied girl as a helpful tool. Ayanokoji employs an emotionally manipulative method that is extremely unsettling to witness, even enabling some of the abuse. It’s never a good omen when the choice is between your main character and a gang of physically violent bullies is a subject that could warrant some reasonable debate.
To make matters worse, Ayanokoji mysteriously begins to build a harem during this season, which is plain terrible. The entire premise of Ayanokoji is that he is a manipulative psychopath. In the first season, a girl named Airi Sakura formed a crush on him, which was understandable given the circumstances, since he offered her support and encouragement in a time of need. Sure, he was acting selfishly, but her emotions to the circumstance made reasonable. His reactions to amorous advances, on the other hand, range from aloof to downright hostile. This is sometimes played for humor, but it is rarely entertaining and is usually unpleasant. As a result, seeing more characters fall in love with him romantically is, at best, dull, and, more often than not, uncomfortable and even disturbing. As the program has all the subtlety of a thermonuclear bomb, it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that one of the characters that begins to be interested in him is the very character who had been bullied. So the machinations of Class D make my skin crawl, but what about the quizzes and puzzles devised by the school? The program has never been adept at explaining the rules of its games, but season 2 seems to give up. The season’s first arc revolves around a complicated group task, and despite its importance in the plot’s development, the show does a poor job of explaining it. This was a problem with the point system from the island arc, but there was ample time for the spectator to figure it out. The group event that kicks off this season includes enough win/loss states to severely muddle the waters, and it only accounts for a fifth of the episodes, So there’s no time to think about it. The nicest thing I can say about the following tests is that they aren’t as vital to the plot. They suffer from the same lack of clarity, but it is less damaging because the machinations are less entangled with the internal complexity. Again, it’s not a good indicator to be able to claim, “I didn’t fully grasp the plot, but that’s okay because it didn’t matter.”