The God of High School

Episode 7

Pum Kwang is a day laborer who is trying to finally attend high school at the age of 38, and though some of the local kids give him a hard time for how many times he has already failed his entrance exams already, Pum Kwang is a good guy. He's managed to mentor some young people, like his future fighting partner Gidong, out of freewheeling as wayward street toughs, for one, and he's unwilling to give up on his dream of graduating, no matter how many setbacks or how much ridicule he faces. This simple, honest strength of character is enough to inspire even the frustrated and cynical Jangmi, an aspiring kendo student who is so taken with Pum Kwang's example that she offers to tutor him. When he and Gidong end up fighting alongside each other in the national leg of the of God of High School tournament, Jangmi is right by their side.

While the flashback-within-a-flashback structure makes for awkward pacing, “anima/force” does a surprisingly good job of introducing these three latest competitors, and though the writing here isn't exactly worthy of any Tokyo Anime Awards, it's still solid enough that I wouldn't mind if Pum Kwang, Gidong, and Jangmi got bumped up in the cast list and received some more screen-time. In just this one episode, I was given enough of context for the trio and their friendship to really want to see them win, because goddammit, Pum Kwang is trying his best, and even though it's a little weird for this nearly forty-year-old man to be palling around with teenagers, he deserves that diploma.

Sadly, their opponents in the team elimination round are our actual main characters, who I somehow care even less about now than I did when they were first introduced. Daewi and Mira are as static and flat as they could possibly be seven weeks into a single season, and Mori just gets more annoying and stupid with each passing episode. GoH can't even be bothered to give Team Pum Kwang & Friends the dignity of making their inevitable loss an honorable one. Mira and Daewi's fights are at least taken seriously up until both of them quickly beat Jangmi and Pum Kwang, but poor Gidong scores his team's only win because Mori is enough of an idiot to take Nah Bongchim's chi-unblocking technique and paralyze himself with it.

The worst thing is that this anticlimactic three-round brawl, which only serves as a further reminder of how GoH has failed to make its three main characters even remotely interesting or likeable, is the closest “anima/force” gets to good. Everything else is utter nonsense, as the show seems to have finally thrown up its hands and given up on making any sense of its mangled and ridiculous plot. Q's still alive, for one thing, and his half of the episode is the worst offender, because his scenes consist entirely of his battle with his would-be murderer, Drake, and the other agents of Nox that come to Drake's rescue. Mori and Co. may make for a lame line-up of protagonists, but we at least have a basic understanding of their collective goal: Win fights. We don't care about Q, or the other Commissioners, or Nox, or whatever Mujin is up to, because none of them are real characters, nor has their presence in this story been explained in any meaningful way outside of “A bunch of people have magical powers for some reason, and other people want to do something about that.”

A single ninety-minute martial arts flick can try to get away with giving absolutely zero shits about its story, because hey, it's just one movie, and one can forgive maybe forty or fifty minutes of dumb nonsense if the fight choreography is really good. The God of High School is sitting close to the 140-minute mark, not counting credits, which means it's taken more than two-and-a-half hours for The God of High School's story to go from being “forgivably basic” to “absurd, frustrating, and pointless.” How much more of our time is this show determined to waste in its final stretch? It could be that this is one of those rare instances where you truly are better off just looking up the best fight scene clips on YouTube or something, since GoH might actually end up playing better when you just cut everything else out entirely.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• For as aggressively apathetic as I am about anything GoH has been trying to do with its story, the animation and choreography for Q's apartment fight really is excellent. It's just a shame that I would get the same exact level of excitement from watching any isolated clip from a modern Final Fantasy cutscene, or the Twitch streams of some decently talented Mortal Kombat players.

• Did I even mention the completely bugnuts sequence where one of the random guys introduced last week tries to attack another random guy with a some kind of fiery charyeok than involves him shouting out “Do Re Mi Fa So La” in a super serious voice, only to be viciously mauled by the second guy's invisible Jaws charyeok? As in, he summons an initially invisible replica of the shark from Steven Spielberg's Jaws to vivisect the first guy with his magical phantom shark teeth!? Why is any of this happening? Who the hell are these people? Just…what?

The God of High School is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.