The God of Highschool ep. 5 – Roller Coaster

So The God of Highschool is a bit all over the place, isn’t it? I mean tonally but also in pacing. I read the corresponding chapters of the manhwa just out of curiosity and technically the tonal and pacing shifts are present in the source (although not identical) but it just works much better in webtoon form. As an anime, it’s giving me a bit of whiplash.

This said, I have had fans of the original warn me that these types of issues existed so I guess it’s at least expected.

I’ve changed my picture ratio and I can’t get it quite right… Oh well.

so nothing really unexpected happened this week, except that it seems I had declared Dae’s friend dead a week early. Has Dae been having these violent freak outs every time his friend had a set back?

The basic outline of the episode is that it’s Dae and Jin’s turn in the ring. Jin is still mad about how cruelly Dae beat Mira (although I’m not sure how else it could have gone. It’s a fight till one goes down tournament…) and Dae is still in a real dark place cause his friend is sick.

Early on Jin visits Mira in the hospital and she’s actually pretty o.k. with everything that went down. She looks like she has a huge cold. I’m less bothered by the red noses than some but it’s still a distraction. Especially as they are so inconsistent about it. Anyways, Mira being the mature young lady that she is and perfectly capable of making decisions for herself… tells Jin to not get to worked up about things and just fight like he always does. I’m paraphrasing but it sounds like it could have been the actual lines. Jin doesn’t listen cause he’s a shonen protagonist.

This was followed up by a flashback giving us a taste of Dae and… wait I’ll look up his name cause just calling him hospital guy or something seems super insensitive… I’m back and I found it, it’s Woo Seung-Tae. I would not have remembered that! Let’s call him Woo.

So flashback to how Dae and Woo became friends and although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it touching (it is possible that I have no heart, it’s all good if you found it touching) it was at least rather sweet and did add some emotional resonance to the episode. Also finding out that Dae use to be a thug really puts his personality and actions into perspective. I had decided he was the stoic reliable type and I occasional found his actions to not quite match up to that. Now I know why and I think it works. I like him as a delinquent type who looks like a class prez. It’s not a character we see that much.

And then we delved into the Jin and Dae fight!

Now I like the fights in The God of Hischool At least in theory. Fact is, there were a few action scenes that I tough were super enjoyable to watch, a few that were ok and a few that were average. To me, the difference between a good and bad episode of this show, relies heavily on how much I appreciated the visual impact of the fights. And this week was great.

There were a few artistic flourishes to keep things interesting, the super fast action paired with forced perspectives and super deformed models. It really was just fun and that’s all I want from this show.

I was a bit disappointed that the awful line “I never considered us friends” made it to the final cut. In the webtoon it would have been spoken during the events of the last episode and I was really happy last week when I thought it was cut. At least moving it to mid fight instead of right after Mira’s defeat made it sound more cheesy and less angsty. That’s a step up in my book.

You know what’s a step down? Trading Woo for Jin. Don’t get me wrong, I like Jin cause he seems like a doofus and I like doofuses. Hmmm, this review is revealing more about me than about the show… But Jin also seems like he would be exhausting to hang out with.

I’m really curious if fans of the source material are still as enthusiastic about the anime as they were at first. Thoughts?