Let’s just get this right out of the way. I am not the intended audience for The God of Highschool. And that’s all right. While I was watching this week’s episode, I thought to myself, my friend’s son would love this. And he’s a cool kid!
But obviously, I can only give you my thoughts from my point of view, so some things are just not going to appeal to me as they would to the majority of the audience. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it can be fun to get a different point of view. Basically what I’m saying is, there were some aspects of this episode that didn’t do it for me, but that doesn’t mean they were “wrong” or a “failure” or anything.
That sounded a bit defensive. I guess I read a few tweets that have convinced me I need to preface my opinions here.
After episode 1, I was left with a few general impressions. First that the show was at its best in full action, second that the characters were archetypes and third, that it was likely to flashback in the next few episodes to give us the background exposition it skipped over in the first one.
I stand by my first two impressions but I may have overestimate the exposition we would get. The episode basically flashed a few images to give us motivations for our main cast and that’s about it. Also Dae got some exposition via nanobots which I thought was kinda cool.
On the other hand Mia and Jin got into a very spontaneous and sort of contrived scuffle which I think was to dynamically introduce us to her background and motivation but felt like both characters were overreacting and hyper for no reason. Not that it really matters as they both got over it pretty much instantly.
So we learned that Mia is a sword master and not like other girls. The funny thing to me was that the imagery they used to get this point really obviously across were her blistered palms from practising swordplay (which was why she wasn’t comfortable getting her nails painted?). This imagery is a little cheesy but that’s not the point. If anyone had old school grandparents that punished them with housework, you would know that it’s the exact same blisters you get from sweeping all @#!!?* day! Which is traditionally a super girly thing and would not stop you from getting pretty nails. This is a petty point that has no impact on my appreciation of the episode, it was just funny to me.
The dynamic between the 3 leads reminded me a bit of Demon Slayer. It’s not a one to one equivalency, but as a group they ended up acting similar to me. Readers of the manhwa have already warned me not to expect to much in way of character development so I wonder if this is how their dynamic is going to be for the rest of the season.
Unfortunately, the episode skipped over most of the fights showing us only that all the characters we see in the OP won their first rounds. And then we got to the meat of episode 2 of God of Highschool. Prisoner guy vs closed eye guy.
I’m not being cute, I’m afraid I didn’t have the foresight to write their names down and now I honestly don’t remember them. I didn’t like the animation as much during this fight. The camera work was much more conventional, there was little use of ragdoll physics and almost no deformation. It also became rather one sided and consequently the mouvement got much slower fairly early on. The episode insisted on the painful punishment being doled out and I figure this was meant as visceral but since I have no feelings at all towards either character it was just uncomfortable for me. I figure fans that are more familiar with prisoner guy or closed eye guy got way more out of this sequence.
For me personally though, it meant that I started enjoying the episode a bit past the 18 minute mark. Or when Jin stepped into the ring with prisoner guy. That was a slightly more fun fight and I particularly appreciated Jin tripping over one of the organizer’s heads to continue fighting. The administrator’s bad*ss entry was fun to watch as well.
This said, my actual involvement with the show is still pretty minimal I liked episode 1 better than episode 2 but that’s not unusual for me. I don’t have any intention of dropping the show or anything, but I could see diminishing returns on this one depending the direction they go into. I usually like my shonen either beautiful or kind of goofy. Or you know….Hunter x Hunterish.
Regardless of my experience, I hope you are all enjoying the God of Highschool . It’s a good time to be watching good anime!
