Revenge Classroom
No, not Assassination Classroom, though there's certainly parallels one could draw.
Revenge Classroom is... tricky for me to talk about. I liked it. I was disappointed by it. I was baffled by it. I was surprised that there was an actual overplot with a targeted ending, only where usually that would be a pleasant surprise it ended up contributing to the disappointment.
The basic premise is fairly dark and interesting: a girl has been brutally bullied by essentially her entire class (Not everyone does things to her, but everyone is complicit if only through very deliberate inaction), she tells herself she just needs to endure it and she'll get through it, and then events are kicked off when someone shoves her out into traffic; a clear attempt to kill her. She snaps, decides she's going to get revenge on all of them, and proceeds to enact dark plots to kill or ruin the lives of everyone in her classroom, not even caring if she survives.
Unusually, this is our protagonist.
There's a lot of reasons I found this interesting. While bullied protagonists are a dime a dozen, usually this is used so the protagonist can shine in the face of adversity and show off what a noble and wonderful person they are. Indeed, quite often when fiction has a bullied protagonist their noble qualities are precisely why they are bullied. Revenge Classroom's protagonist would, in most stories, be the villain. A sympathetic villain perhaps -just fast forward twenty years and make Revenge Classroom's protagonist into a vengeful spirit where unrelated people are being haunted and have to figure out how to appease her, there you go- but the antagonist regardless. Revenge Classroom also gives serious thought to the mechanics of the revenge; how does one get revenge on people when you're downtrodden, no one in your corner? Usually this kind of premise, if it did have the bullied girl as the protagonist, would be in the vein of 'and then gods/aliens/whoever come on down and give our protagonist fantastical abilities, shower them with praise, and give them the responsibility of fighting off evil or whatever... and don't really care if the protagonist uses their newfound phenomenal cosmic power to screw with their bullies'.
Not so in Revenge Classroom; Ayase has to earn her revenge, has to think about what's going on and how to win without being caught.
Unfortunately, there's missteps even quite early, and the ending doesn't 'stick the landing'. One of Ayase's earliest targets is someone who merely stood by instead of actively doing anything, with no explanation offered for what Ayase was thinking that she would choose to focus first on those complicit through inaction rather than those who personally did harm to her. This is, of course, so the story can contrive to have Ayase learn too late that her victim was not complicit-through-inaction but had actively been working to reduce how bad things were for Ayase, yadda yadda, contrived melodrama for the sake of contrived melodrama.
This was a sufficiently big misstep I considered dropping the story right there.
And unfortunately, while there's never quite so significant a moment of 'this is happening because the author wants a particular result, in contravention of sensible or interesting writing', the basic pattern of the story trying to somewhat ham-fistedly convey lessons like 'revenge is pointless and just makes things worse for everyone' even if it involves harming the integrity of the actual story doesn't actually go away. Worse, bits and pieces of interesting things that are present in the story tend to go unexplored -when Ayase contrives to acquire allies (Or tools, if you prefer) by hook or crook, her relationships with these people are essentially ignored. There's a lot of interesting things to explore there, and none of it gets touched upon even tangentially, which is frustrating because the manga was consistently at its strongest when it was exploring the process of an individual doing very hard things with very limited resources, not when it was trying to sell fable-type morals.
The ending was the most disappointing thing of all. The short version is that Ayase's bullying turns out to have been a complicated revenge plot by other people, as opposed to an organic process. The details of this plot don't really hold up to scrutiny, and it's basically the apex of the story's pattern of 'ham-fisted attempt to convey lessons about how Revenge Is Bad to the audience'. Like, sure, you can look back and see the author was trying to hint at this explanation from surprisingly early, but it doesn't really make sense, and the odd thing is it's not even used as a too-neat resolution to the story. We get the confrontation that explains this basic idea, events contrive so Ayase ends up in a coma, and the story abruptly ends with some epilogue-y notes about violence among high schoolers rising temporarily in response to people learning the basic chain of events, yadda yadda, revenge perpetuates itself. No resolution to Ayase's personal story. No resolution to any part of the story. Just 'well actually this isn't what you thought it was at all, but instead of doing anything with that the story is over'.
I've seen less abrupt and dissatisfying endings from manga that were summarily terminated without warning.
It feels like a tremendous waste. There's an interesting premise. There's an interesting protagonist, trying to do something difficult, which the story treats as difficult in a realistic way. When the story is focused on 'how does one make hard things happen when one has limited resources?' it's genuinely really really good... the problem is, the story seems to view itself as essentially a fable about how bullying is bad, but fighting back is worse. Even if I didn't find that a cringe-worthy sentiment, it's just a tremendous waste of what the creator was actually good at.
Alas.
Revenge Classroom is... tricky for me to talk about. I liked it. I was disappointed by it. I was baffled by it. I was surprised that there was an actual overplot with a targeted ending, only where usually that would be a pleasant surprise it ended up contributing to the disappointment.
The basic premise is fairly dark and interesting: a girl has been brutally bullied by essentially her entire class (Not everyone does things to her, but everyone is complicit if only through very deliberate inaction), she tells herself she just needs to endure it and she'll get through it, and then events are kicked off when someone shoves her out into traffic; a clear attempt to kill her. She snaps, decides she's going to get revenge on all of them, and proceeds to enact dark plots to kill or ruin the lives of everyone in her classroom, not even caring if she survives.
Unusually, this is our protagonist.
There's a lot of reasons I found this interesting. While bullied protagonists are a dime a dozen, usually this is used so the protagonist can shine in the face of adversity and show off what a noble and wonderful person they are. Indeed, quite often when fiction has a bullied protagonist their noble qualities are precisely why they are bullied. Revenge Classroom's protagonist would, in most stories, be the villain. A sympathetic villain perhaps -just fast forward twenty years and make Revenge Classroom's protagonist into a vengeful spirit where unrelated people are being haunted and have to figure out how to appease her, there you go- but the antagonist regardless. Revenge Classroom also gives serious thought to the mechanics of the revenge; how does one get revenge on people when you're downtrodden, no one in your corner? Usually this kind of premise, if it did have the bullied girl as the protagonist, would be in the vein of 'and then gods/aliens/whoever come on down and give our protagonist fantastical abilities, shower them with praise, and give them the responsibility of fighting off evil or whatever... and don't really care if the protagonist uses their newfound phenomenal cosmic power to screw with their bullies'.
Not so in Revenge Classroom; Ayase has to earn her revenge, has to think about what's going on and how to win without being caught.
Unfortunately, there's missteps even quite early, and the ending doesn't 'stick the landing'. One of Ayase's earliest targets is someone who merely stood by instead of actively doing anything, with no explanation offered for what Ayase was thinking that she would choose to focus first on those complicit through inaction rather than those who personally did harm to her. This is, of course, so the story can contrive to have Ayase learn too late that her victim was not complicit-through-inaction but had actively been working to reduce how bad things were for Ayase, yadda yadda, contrived melodrama for the sake of contrived melodrama.
This was a sufficiently big misstep I considered dropping the story right there.
And unfortunately, while there's never quite so significant a moment of 'this is happening because the author wants a particular result, in contravention of sensible or interesting writing', the basic pattern of the story trying to somewhat ham-fistedly convey lessons like 'revenge is pointless and just makes things worse for everyone' even if it involves harming the integrity of the actual story doesn't actually go away. Worse, bits and pieces of interesting things that are present in the story tend to go unexplored -when Ayase contrives to acquire allies (Or tools, if you prefer) by hook or crook, her relationships with these people are essentially ignored. There's a lot of interesting things to explore there, and none of it gets touched upon even tangentially, which is frustrating because the manga was consistently at its strongest when it was exploring the process of an individual doing very hard things with very limited resources, not when it was trying to sell fable-type morals.
The ending was the most disappointing thing of all. The short version is that Ayase's bullying turns out to have been a complicated revenge plot by other people, as opposed to an organic process. The details of this plot don't really hold up to scrutiny, and it's basically the apex of the story's pattern of 'ham-fisted attempt to convey lessons about how Revenge Is Bad to the audience'. Like, sure, you can look back and see the author was trying to hint at this explanation from surprisingly early, but it doesn't really make sense, and the odd thing is it's not even used as a too-neat resolution to the story. We get the confrontation that explains this basic idea, events contrive so Ayase ends up in a coma, and the story abruptly ends with some epilogue-y notes about violence among high schoolers rising temporarily in response to people learning the basic chain of events, yadda yadda, revenge perpetuates itself. No resolution to Ayase's personal story. No resolution to any part of the story. Just 'well actually this isn't what you thought it was at all, but instead of doing anything with that the story is over'.
I've seen less abrupt and dissatisfying endings from manga that were summarily terminated without warning.
It feels like a tremendous waste. There's an interesting premise. There's an interesting protagonist, trying to do something difficult, which the story treats as difficult in a realistic way. When the story is focused on 'how does one make hard things happen when one has limited resources?' it's genuinely really really good... the problem is, the story seems to view itself as essentially a fable about how bullying is bad, but fighting back is worse. Even if I didn't find that a cringe-worthy sentiment, it's just a tremendous waste of what the creator was actually good at.
Alas.
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