Entries from the Dead: Ansatsu Kyoushitsu

This one may ruffle some feathers.

I’ll begin with some brighter proclamations: In recent times, I’ve considered re-adding this to my watch list. There’s something about the hype surrounding the series that makes me more curious than what it once did in deterring me. The only difference with series with which I’ve had no experience is that I did, at one point, watch two episodes of this anime. According to my list, I ended up picking this up as a seasonal watch when it began airing in early 2015. After the second episode, I had seen enough and didn’t care to look back. And now the fun part of this series: Why?

Allow me to set a mood before I elaborate on my stance with this series. The time is mid-January of 2015. I am twenty-one-years-old and am in full swing of the youthful narcissist’s elitist mentality of “Everything has to be 100% practically realistic in order for me to take anything seriously. Also, simple things are dumb.” Ansatsu Kyoushitsu comes along and is neither practical in its setting/set-up nor complex at all. Most of all, it’s a… Shounen. Hissssssss…

Frankly, I’m surprised I gave it two episodes!

Essentially, it wasn’t a title for me at that time. A lot of the set-up consisted of things simply happening because why not and the entire shtick of the show, the students attempting to kill their impenetrable alien teacher under a time limit, felt like something that would get old to me very quickly. Surprisingly enough (from what I recall), it didn’t end up being as episodic or straightforward as I thought it may be from the first half of the debut episode alone. What really got me then, however, was such a trivial thing that upon looking back on it, the decision to drop it almost feels spiteful. The end of the second episode presented a cliffhanger: A new student(?), with evil eyes and a taste for cartoonish villainy, made himself known to the audience that he was coming, and he’d make quite the ruckus. This actually felt so cringeworthy to me in 2015 that I felt the need to drop it right then and there. I predicted it would go in some fashion that he’d pop up, make a ruckus, fail to do what he planned to do, then assimilate into the core group of students, only to have the anime do this again eight more times.

I won’t rag on myself too much, though. That concern is still there. Based on the course of the first two episodes, the structure of the anime felt very transparent, with predictable storylines coming to fruition based on a single cliffhanger at the end of an episode. Now, those who have seen it can feel free to tell me I’m wrong, as I very well may be, but that’s the belief I had then, and even now I can understand the decision. Just that putting it into the context of “I dropped the series because of a cheesy cliffhanger” is probably pretty amusing.

Another thing I remember quite well about the series is that I was convinced the male lead was female and was hiding his true sex. He simply looks way too feminine to me, and my suspicious mind is always on the lookout for traps. I even had someone who was watching the show update me as to whether or not the anime ever actually confirms if he was male or female. Those were fun days. This has little to do with anything, but I think it’s more amusing tidbits from my experience.

Tell me whether or not I’m right or wrong with my predictions and why I should pick this series back up if you think it will please me. As I said before, I’m still on the fence as to whether I should give it another shot. If it does get better, let me know! And as always, thanks for reading!