Like its spiritual predecessor Great Teacher Onizuka, Assassination Classroom is a classroom drama about kids who have been failed by the oppressive education system that seeks to keep them out of an otherwise idyllic place of learning, and how an outsider teacher brings both his experience and a true empathy for his students to them, becoming indispensable to their lives in a clumsy yet heartwarming way.
Well, that doesn’t fully cover it, but there are other comparisons to be made. Like its spiritual predecessor Danganronpa, Assassination Classroom is a thriller set in a high school where the young, desperate students must hone their assassination skills in an attempt to escape the oppressive atmosphere set by their brutal teacher, who has given them the ultimatum of kill or be killed.
That’s not it either. Both elements are there, but of course you can’t have a simple heartwarming classroom drama with an alien teacher threatening to blow up the earth if his students don’t kill him, and you can’t have a thriller where every episode is geared towards the maturation of the kids as students, friends, and people, with everyone smiling as the credits begin to roll. The feeling is certainly that of Onizuka, but one look at the sci-fi world filled with extremists, and Danganronpa springs to mind. What gives?
The students of E class are certainly segregated, and not by simple rumors of a “problem class” or “delinquency”, but by a physical system that relegates them to a broken building on the outskirts of campus, and by clear and blatant discrimination from both the administration and the student body at large, to the point where they look more like an allegory of racial segregation than a simple student ranking. So why does a supernatural talking octopus, having just destroyed most of the moon and turned his sights on earth, decide to teach them math and kanji? Well, for one it seems to like teaching. And clearly if there was ever a place to teach in secret, and to see the effects of both its academic teaching and its maturation coaching, Assassination Classroom has convinced me pretty well that this class is the place to do it.
But of course no supernatural being who poses a credible threat to the earth is going to just waltz into a classroom and start teaching. There’s killing to be done. With a 10 billion yen reward on its head, it welcomes the challenge of assassination with open arms; rather than letting clumsy nuclear missiles and obvious snipers handle the job, however, it poses assassination as the ultimate goal of his classroom, that if it dies it will be at his students’ hands, and if they graduate first, then the earth is gone. And so go their initial clumsy attempts at killing a being that can move at Mach 20, which basically go the route of shooting when it’s not looking, or stabbing at it from all directions. New students come in, schemes are laid, new superpowers come out as their teacher reliably survives to grin another day.
And yet every assassination comes with a lesson, every student with both backstory and credible trauma, waiting for anyone, even a killer octopus, to heal them. The students all develop in different ways academically and as assassins, and as they come together to build more intricate, foolproof plans while relying on one another for the first time as a class, they also come forward as mature and intelligent students, who can challenge the school system that has oppressed them so long just as a diversion from the goal of killing their teacher. I spent a while at first puzzling why the author chose to mix the Onizuka style of humanist student dramady with assassination of all things, but it’s true that the school that seemed so overwhelming at the start of the show slowly loses its potency as the students risk life and limb in their crummy building in the woods trying to kill a supernatural machine of unprecedented destructive power. On top of that, even with all the superpowers the teacher pulls out of its seemingly infinite bag of tricks, even as we in the audience start to question the possibility of anything on earth having a conceivable chance of killing it, the students come close by preying on the faults in its lifestyle and its care for them as its students. Every once in a while a journal pops up in the corner as they discover its weaknesses, and by weaknesses I mean “metal ring puzzles freak it out”, “can’t handle hot food”, “prone to motion sickness”, etc. This could be seen as a running gag, but this is the sort of intelligence-gathering that lends their attempts credibility.
What's interesting about Assassination Classroom is the way in which the students grow past their trauma, not simply because of what the teacher says, but rather because the teacher sets the stage for them to grow of their own volition, many times being centrally supported by their friends in the class. It takes a very direct approach to teaching: the teacher is a catalyst, who uses their experience to nudge the students in the right directions as they grow, but does not force the growth from the outside.
While the show has ended, there is clearly much more to go before the story is over, including the slight allusions to the teacher’s backstory that unfortunately had no time to come to fruition. I'm conflicted about what direction the story can take from here on out. Now that almost every student has received their share of maturation, the last few arcs seem to take the route of putting new challenges in the way of this batch of students from forces completely outside the microcosm of their classroom, which allows them to demonstrate their newly honed skills but still feels a bit inorganic to the story. There is plenty left to say from the plot perspective, but between the satisfying comedy and the heights the students achieve, I’m not sure there’s really that much more to hear.