I’ve known about “Assassination Classroom” for quite some time before I watched it. As an avid anime-watcher, I’ve known that this show is a pretty big name, so I decided to give it a try after high praise from some friends who have already seen it. After whipping through both seasons in less than two months, I can firmly say that this show is definitely worth the hype. I highly recommend watching the show in its original Japanese with English subtitles, but it’s up to you ultimately.
This show has a really cool premise. It focuses on a classroom of students at a school who are often referred to as the worst class in the school, in terms of grades and behavior, and are often isolated from the rest of the students. However, their lives change one day when an artificial lifeform capable of destroying the planet waltzes in and demands to be their teacher. The government has placed a bounty of ten billion yen on his head (almost 70 million dollars) and decides to bring the students in on a secret: this creature will destroy the planet at the end of the school year. The students’ job is to kill their teacher before the end of the year, lest the planet be destroyed. But what makes this guy so hard to kill anyways? First of all, being an ultra-powerful artificial lifeform, normal bullets and other weapons don’t work on him. The government has made special bullets and knives for the students that will work, so that problem is solved. The main difficulty here is that he has the ability to move at Mach 20 speeds, allowing him to easily dodge bullets and knives. He can even catch bullets! Truly a monster.
However, what I found most compelling in this series is the relationship between the teacher (who the students call “Koro-sensei”) and his students. At first, it’s very tense, mainly because the students realize the weight that has been put on them with this task. But as Koro-sensei starts to teach them, they start to realize that he is an incredible teacher who really cares about his students, despite his threat of global destruction. Koro-sensei even starts teaching the students about assassination and how to be a good assassin. The students start to grow attached to him, and even have debates about whether or not he should actually be killed.
This all brings up an entirely new question, something that I wondered for most of the series myself: why is this creature becoming a teacher? What’s in it for him? An excellent question indeed, and the series doesn’t provide an answer until later in the show, but once it is revealed, it makes so many things throughout the series make a lot of sense, and it provides a lot of backstory to an amazingly written character.
Which reminds me: most of the characters in this show are very well written. When I first got into this show, I was worried that I wouldn’t remember many of the characters or that they would all blend together, given that there are 20-some students in the classroom. But all of them have their own moments in the spotlight and unique traits that set them apart from the rest. The show focuses on four or five of the students who are most prominent in the story, but all of them play their own role and it’s probably one of the most unique groups of characters that I’ve ever seen.
All in all, “Assassination Classroom” is an amazing series, and one that I would recommend to anyone who likes a mostly laid-back series with some really great moments of action and tension dotted here and there. I would especially recommend this series to education majors, as it gives a really cool perspective on the bond between a teacher and student. But overall, I would rate this series a 4.5 out of five stars, with almost no complaints. “Assassination Classroom” can be found on Crunchyroll, Hulu, Apple TV, and Prime Video.
