Prison School

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Out of 100 Nobles watching…
92 were impressed!
5 were not interested in the farce
3 found most characters unlikable

Once again, I’ve put off reviewing something I read a few months ago. I wasn’t ruminating on Prison School or anything, just distracted by real life. Prison School was an enjoyable read that had a much longer run than I initially anticipated. It may have been the perfect comedy to enjoy while I was bedridden with CoronaFlu. The series garnered quite the reputation and when it finished a few years back it thoroughly received the ire of its readership for what was considered a rather lackluster ending.

Frankly, I ... don’t really understand what all the fuss is about but then again maybe people for some reason interpreted Prison School as anything other than a farce. If you took the series seriously as some sort of drama or something I suppose I could see being upset by the ultimate end of the series, but to me at least, the entire series was a comedy farce and ending pointlessly on a vulgar joke was a fitting and perfect end for it in my eyes. Many characters got more closure to their storylines than I would have been led to believe by the fandom, but it does leave a lot to the imagination. Of course, being able to binge the whole series in a week makes me dull to the pains of reading a weekly or monthly serialized work. I know all to well how perspective can change when you’re slow-dripped something you care about.

Author Hiramoto Akira’s art is what drew me to Prison School. Years ago, I would see panels from the manga or magazine covers featuring his soft yet darkly shaded unusual realism. I enjoyed his plotlines and ability to bring threads sometimes dozens of chapters apart together in payoff that almost always surprises the reader. I thought plot threads could be a little long and drawn out at times but having read nothing remotely like Prison School before I really can’t complain. The series is filled with memorable meme panels that can be reposted for decades to come (though I don’t see them much these days).

Prison School was a strange one and it certainly isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Fairweather fans and tourists of Otaku culture would likely be horrified by the series. If you want the strange saga of an innocent girl who just loves Sumo, a “Submissive and his Queen”, a man who loves “The Three Kingdoms” a little too much, or some of the best Yuri ever printed to paper then maybe give it a read.

I cant even say how mad i am right now.
I watched the prison school anime and i really enjoyed it, it hit directly my humour. After i finished it i wanted to read the manga and i really enjoyed it till the last chapter. I loved the characters, the artstyle, the music (from the anime), i loved everything, it was one of my favourite mangas of all time, but the last chapter completely destroyed everything for me. The way that prison school ended was the worst ending i have ever seen in manga history. If it had ended one chapter earlier it would have been ... a 10/10.

ONE OF THE MANGA EVER MADE
"Prison School", written by Akira Hiramoto for Young Magazine, is a curious manga: it has an absurd premise and the clear intention of fusing lewdness, eroticism, humor, and tension in an interesting wrapper capable of holding the reader's attention by the exponential absurdity of the story. While using a competent comic strip technique and an artistic approach close to realism, the author consciously extrapolates common sense and scientific knowledge of human anatomy to produce extravagant moments that sustain the work and motivate reading by successfully executing the central idea of the manga - that is, a set of misadventures grounded ... in humor and sexual perversion (that almost reach pornographic levels in the display), without taking itself too seriously.

Unfortunately, and as I will outline below, the narrative and textual structures gradually decay throughout the chapters, turning a great work into an expendable manga that frustrates the reader's interest. In order to avoid spoilers, this review is focused on describing and analyzing the general foundations of the manga, without further descriptions of events.

By the way, even if there is no mention of the rumors surrounding the author's supposed dissatisfaction with his manga and the publisher's pressure to maintain the serialization, these are factors that may justify the course adopted throughout the run.

English isn't my native language, so forgive me for my mistakes and weak grammatical constructions.


A STRANGE FIRST STEP, BUT NOT IN A "PRISON SCHOOL" WAY
Preliminarily, and in order to guide first-time readers, it is important to highlight the composition and structure of the first chapter: it is a very insufficient chapter that does not do justice to the rest of the manga. As the first introductory section, with the ability to retain the audience the most, the introduction presents great difficulties in establishing and concretely defining the elements of the proposal: given the focus on Kiyoshi and his mental notes about the new environment (an orientation tool for the reader himself), the initial stage distances the other boys and does not even introduce the antagonists.

It is clear that the author's intention is not the build-up of a rivalry through characterization, but rather the presentation of attention-grabbing moments, and this conscious choice will lead to big problems in the following arcs. In case you don't know the anime version or don't hold with the promise of a romantic development between Kiyoshi and Chiyo, the first chapter, even if with an interesting visual composition (good frames and angles, complemented with an artistic style with plenty of details) and good overall structures, may drive away those interested in what "Prison School" really proposes: an absurd and graphic comedy with no commitment to common sense throughout 278 chapters.


WAIT... A SOLID START?
After a somewhat lukewarm and dysfunctional beginning, the manga starts to deliver its true nature and values already in the second chapter, and here it is valid to reinforce the general comment of this review: the manga "Prison School" does not take itself too seriously. The lack of seriousness is not only extracted from the "comedy" genre, which presupposes a good humor of the story (after all, a comedy work can present and deal with serious themes), but also from the gradual absurdity of the situations that distances the verisimilitude of the work and stretches the reader's suspension of disbelief. In other words, given the textual and visual presentation of the manga, there is no reason to treat the events and, on a general level, the manga itself with seriousness or depth.

That said, the first major arc of the manga is exceptionally great in almost everything: from the contrast between a more realistic artistic approach, with creative framing, and the physical absurdity of situations, you get a set of 81 chapters that are shocking and fun to follow. There are minor details that persist at this stage of the manga, such as the excessive repetition of scenes with Meiko, absence of Jouji, Reiji and Shingo for most of the arc, and the lack of closeness with the antagonists (with the exception of Hana, who is responsible for starring in an excellent sequence of 6 chapters).

In general, and even with these small signs of wear (hyper focus on the protagonist, distancing from the other characters, and a certain repetition of similar occurences), the manga manages to develop its creative events at a great pace and sense of progression, with very few tedious moments and no major commentary or thematic approaches.


THE DEFINITIVE JUSNATURALIST CRITIQUE OF THE JAPANESE PRISON SYSTEM?? NO? OKAY
After a consistently good first arc, the author tries to introduce, through transitional chapters, new environments and relationships that serve as a "reward" to all the stressful, exhausting, and physically and mentally violent scenarios that the main group have been through. These chapters are more episodic and lighter in narrative, giving a calming atmosphere to the manga and being very satisfying. In the background, a new problem to the plot is being set up: the role reversal with the antagonists - and it is at this point that the work begins to wear thin. The author spends the transition chapters and the overwhelming part of the second arc on an artificial empathy building that doesn't work immediately: because he didn't develop these characters in the first arc, the narrative feeling of reading it is that the work starts again from scratch, with new focus and circumstances, and not that there is a sense of continuity.

At this stage, the choices made by the author are questionable, to say the least: early in the arc, the reader is distanced from the more charismatic characters introduced in the first arc in favor of establishing interactions with the new characters. However, this distancing is not well justified or leveraged to the extent that the new experiences are predictable within that "empathy" context (such as the behaviors of Takehito and Reiji in the first third of the chapters). No event actually arouses the same level of interest as in the first arc.

This is the main problem: it would not be a problem if "empathy" served only as a plot tool to facilitate the reader's acceptance of the characters on screen. Instead of this, the author stretches the dramatic contexts of each character over several chapters, establishing an exaggerated dramaticity in a work that treated these episodes in a clear tragicomic tenor, with almost no seriousness. In some cases, the comicalness is maintained to a certain degree (Risa), in others it just doesn't work well (Meiko and Kate).

It is definitely a dragged out arc that fails to hold the interest until its 2/3, at which time there is the return of Kiyoshi to the spotlight, ensuring hilarious events between him, Mari and Chiyo, as well as the presence of more cooperative situations between the cores of characters (mainly in the final stages of the arc), a late fruit of the aforementioned "empathy". This slowness of pace becomes so structural that a schizoid phenomenon occurs: the "true conclusion" of the events is spread over a very long set of transitional chapters and another arc, commented in the following topic. The only element that can keep the reader interested is the interaction between the characters, fruit of the "empathy" planted in the first and second arcs.

Before moving on to the next topic, it is worth highlighting the final chapters of the transition involving the character Hana. They are possibly the best chapters of the entire work, with their monumental apex being chapter 178: the greatness of "Prison School" is condensed in this genius chapter. And again, the character Hana establishes her protagonism in the best sequences of the entire work.


IT WAS ALL A METAPHOR - WE, THE READERS, WHO ARE IN A PRISON
Finally, the arc that would conclude the problems and conflicts presented in the previous chapters begins. And, also, the decadence of "Prison School" begins. The infamous "school tournament arc" is one of the greatest atrocities ever written by modern man: there are 41 chapters in which absolutely nothing happens. Zero progression. Zero development. Zero involvement. There is no way to describe the fatigue while reading these chapters, with hours spent in endless repetition: the manga version of haruhi's endless eight. Even genuinely comical circumstances (chapter 209, for example) are spoiled due to the length and repetition of ideals.

This arc condenses all the pacing and plot problems that were growing in the previous chapters, but does not present any counterpart sufficient to remedy these defects, unlike the first arc (a gripping plot) and the second arc (good interactions). Even the sexualization scenes don't work, and the entire comic aspect is diluted in one big tedious sequence, which still has a weak conclusion without much future effect.


CONCLUSION: FREEDOM IS NOT WORTH IT - TOP 10 REASONS TO GO TO JAIL
At last the final arc, the conclusion of everything. But what is left to be solved? In reality, there is nothing left. Even the minor effects of the last arc are quickly resolved at the beginning of this final stage, which still maintains a comical content to the events. However, as the arc progresses, the lack of motivation becomes clear.

Gradually, the immense creativity that marked the first arc of the manga, the good interactions in the second arc, or the humor in the other chapters, is all lost. What is left are lengthy scenes and dialogues that lead nowhere. The erotic scenes themselves have no more creativity and no internal elements of the work have a function other than to extend the duration of a plot that should have ended 100 chapters ago. About the final events of the last chapters, there are not enough words to describe the frustration and the feeling of "well, I wasted my time".

Sadly, "Prison School" is a manga not worth the read. If you want to take a chance, I strongly recommend sticking to the anime alone: it's a great adaptation of the only arc worth following. In the end, all that was left of an initially great work was a great feeling of dissatisfaction.