17 September 2013

Scrap Teacher ~Kyoushi Saisei~ final impressions

Yes I know this is an old drama and it seems like I am missing reviews for it. But the other reviews for it do exist, as I did them when this drama was still fairly new. You can find them here and here. I never finished the drama mainly because subs only exist for the first six episodes and left the final three unsubbed. I figured that I had reviewed things without subs before so I might as well finish this series.

Honestly it did not take long to get back into the series even though I am picking it up after a few years. This is mainly due to the fact that it is a simple drama that uses a lot of the familiar tropes of school dramas. That and none of the characters are all that developed which makes it easy to jump in on just about any episode and not feel terribly lost.

For some reason I thought I remembered the B.I.Shadow members in this, Takahata Misaki, Nakajima Kento and Kikuchi Fuma, having bigger roles but it must have been more me just focusing on them more. As while they did get an episode, or more exactly Takahata had an episode that focused on him, they mostly hung out in the background until they had something to say to antagonize someone.

While I did not care much for the super junior high students at first Takasugi Toichi (Yamada Ryosuke) has grown on me. Mainly because while he is supposed to be the super cool character type he ends up failing at it as no one treats him as such. In fact all the girls like the other two and Takasugi is stuck with a train obsessed fanboy. And I think with a character like Takasugi having him fail like this is a good way to get the audience to like him, as otherwise he would just be intolerable.

And for the other two there just was so little to go off of to figure out anything about them though it did seem like Arioka Daiki tried his best with the little he had. Chinen Yuri on the other hand was mainly just there to be cute.

And then Nakajima Yuto's character seemed to exist to mainly prop up the main teacher, Sugi Toranosuke (Kamiji Yusuke), and set events in motion. So he too came off as bland as there just was nothing to go with outside of good natured.

I do wonder what the original planned episode count was as the final episode is just a mess and it seemed like the first story line it rushed through was meant to be its own episode. Then there are characters all over the place acting out of character just so things can happen and things go from cheesy to just plain sappy as it tries too hard to make you feel emotional about what is going on. But honestly if they just told a good story they would not need to try so hard.


Unless you are a big fan of the actors in this drama I would skip it. While some of the concepts are interesting they are not handled well. And there is so much that is left unexplained and many scenes that seem to exist because the writers thought it would look good instead of whether or not it made any sense. And I think I understand why I did not bother to finish this years ago.

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