Genre – Sci Fi Anime
Movie Total Runtime – 18 Hour 1 Minutes
Spoilers – Yes

I don’t know if I got part of this as a blind box and bought the rest, or if I saw it and bought it based on the sheer absurdity of the premise, it’s sat around because there are roughly 18 hours of episodes and I got things to do.

So, what is that premise? A superpowered cephalopod will destroy the world in one year unless the students in the class of rejects he teaches kill him first. It’s not a “the students are secretly plotting to kill him” situation. Nope. He went “I’m going to destroy the world in one year, and in the meantime, I want to teach this class. If you don’t let me teach this class, I’ll skip right to destroying the world now. You can save the world if the students stop me, and I’ll even advise them on technique.” The students are regular humans who are the failures and misfits of their school. Having no better name for the creature, they call him Koro-Sensei. As part of the agreement, Koro-Sensei will not harm the students in any way, even as they try to kill him.

The series opens with the entire classroom opening up with a fusillade of gunfire on the arriving Koro-Sensei. This gunfire does not damage the front of the classroom, nor are there signs of friendly-fire incidents as it is soon revealed to be pretty much airsoft weapons. They’re firing projectiles designed to interact destructively with whatever it is Koro-Sensei is made of but doesn’t with normal flesh. So aside from kinetic impact, are harmless to humans. The problem is hitting him, as super-speed is the primary ability demonstrated. He does voluntarily shoot the end of one of his own tendrils to prove to the class that the projectiles work, but they just didn’t hit.

A regular bullet’s impact would be ineffective as the moon impact turned 70% of it into floating debris leaving a crescent of rock in orbit. To be fair, that stunt has probably already doomed a big chunk of the life on Earth. Since we don’t see a rain of moon rocks falling into the atmosphere, we have to assume they were ejected outwards. There’s not enough debris in orbit to account for the missing mass. But even if the moon were now a ring, the effect would be the same. Koro-Sensei has basically killed the tides. Tidal action is a major nutrient pump in the marine biosphere. Without the stirring action, the oceans are going to become a lot more sluggish as the momentum depletes. This will drastically alter both marine and surface climates with a resultant die-off of fish the likes of which greenies can only dream of. The knock on effects even before we talk about the changes to surface weather are already catastrophic. A lot of people are in for a very bad time before the opening credits roll.

But, we only care about the classroom and the deadline before Koro-Sensei smashes the Earth. The classroom is in an isolated building up a mountain from the main campus, which makes hiding the secret superpowered cephalopod from the general populace. People know the moon went boom, but not why. In the first episode, a lot gets set up, including a teaser about Koro-Sensei’s motivations behind being the best teacher the rejects and misfits ever had. Most of the time he keeps up a creepily jovial facade born of extreme confidence regarding his abilities. Though he is highly mercurial and has an awful temper. Of course, there’s the sociopathic tendencies.

The show does play fast and loose with time zones. During lunch Koro-Sensei will fly off to some other part of the globe for some activity. In Episode 2 that’s a visit to a ball game in New York. Except, there’s a Eight hour time difference between Japan and New York. If lunch is roughly noon, it’s roughly ten at night. Yet the ballpark is under a bright blue sky. Even in the dead of summer, the sun sets around 8:30 in New York.

At the start of season one, each episode focuses on one of the students and their interactions with Koro-Sensei. The usual cycle being that students attempts to take out the instructor in some manner consistent with their personality and/or problems and leads into some sort of life lesson. As a means of introducing characters it helps keep the cast straight better than the cascade of characters you often get with ensembles at the cost of being slow. But I get the impression that the gimmick of trying to take out the teacher isn’t the central story being told. The authorities are not simply relying on the students, taking steps like embedding the Ministry of Defense guy as the Physical Education Teacher, and putting a professional assassin in deep cover as the English instructor. These adults are not covered by agreement to not hurt the students.

The pro’s ambush proved my assessment of the effectiveness of real bullets to be correct. This incident also highlights her weakness of arrogance. It’s played for comedy as her usual modus operandi is unsuited to the circumstance.

At the end of Episode 5 we get teased the start of a plot with Principal Villain and the status quo. Principal Villain is just one of my nicknames. I don’t know how much he’s an antagonist for the series – but he is the principal of the school. His is the first of the plots not built around the introduction of characters. His impact also comes back in later episodes because the school can’t escape the principal. The blunt object theme of the series is the school’s use of the rejects and misfits class as a class of undesirables to keep the remaining students in line and on track. They are motivated to avoid being made members of this class, which it is acceptable to look down upon, bully, and ostracize as having no future, as they are those with the lowest grades and worst behavioral issues. The lack of faculty and facilities at the satellite campus where the “E” class is held makes returning to a regular academic track a statistical impossibility, even if the theoretical process even exists. The improvement among students among class “E” having their individual weaknesses addressed is a threat to the system for which they are intentional sacrificial fodder. Koro-Sensei does not approve of this system and strives to undermine it via improved academics.

These side plots are fairly short, as the show is largely episodic with continuity. Trying to suss out which parts are continuity from the plot of the week is a bit of a guessing game. Makes my usually running commentary style less useful for documenting.

Amidst the mess of a more comedic episode, there was the dual implication that Koro-Sensei was not originally a cephalopod, and that the MoD guy knows more than he has shared regarding the origins.

Annoyingly, as this was one of the earlier series I’d re-encoded, I lost the subtitles. I could dig the blu-rays out of whatever box they’re in and do it over, but the problem is mainly contained to Japanese text in things like signs, emails, and other paperwork. Also annoyingly, at the halfway mark of season one they are still adding new characters even as they expand on the backstory of some existing characters. This includes another engineered creation of the project which created Koro-Sensei and the tech to hurt him. The battle between the two takes up much of Episode 11, which I’d arbitrarily picked as my cutoff point for part 1 of the review – because 47 episodes is too many for one article even if it is episodic.