Going to preface this by saying that this is a review that I consider impossible to write without sounding like a virgin so I would like to clarify that I am not a virgin and that this review will definitely (probably) be valuable and worthwhile to the world at large.
I watched the anime for this a while back and thoroughly enjoyed it in a way that I really do not enjoy trashy bullshit ecchi. Most are very fucking boring and not worth watching, but Nankoko (I'm gonna call it that because it's the official abbreviation and typing out Nande Koko Ni Sensei Ga or Why
...
The Hell Are You Here, Teacher each time is going to give me a stroke) flips the script by playing far more into the comedic aspect and falls more into absurdist humor, which I personally jive with quite a lot. There is an absolutely batshit sexual encounter in every single chapter, and I can safely say that maybe 5 chapters involve even one party initiating it intentionally. It's all exceedingly stupid mishaps that make the author sound absolutely veritably insane if you try to put them into words, and to me, these kept up being interesting enough that I never really got bored while reading and was able to get through the entire runtime without just pushing through a particularly bad section.
Aside from just the general structure and how that's executed, the main pull of the series is the different pairings that occur every 10 chapters. To be frank, while the comedic situations serve as the backbone and make it so that the entire series has a consistent quality no matter what pairing is up there, the level of enjoyment you can get out of the chapter sets is seriously variable on how much you enjoy the pairings. Trying to go at it objectively, though, it really depends on how strong the dynamics between the characters end up being, and how strongly their positions end up putting up a wall between them (which is a concept I think was really only seriously explored with the idol girl and her boyfriend.)
This is probably personal bias, but I think the first four pairs that feature in the anime are still the strongest, with the weakest of them being the one with the sporty girl. All have very simple but strong dynamics when put next to each other, and as those four are basically the only ones that happen at the exact same point in the timeline, I thought it was very fun to see how they overlapped with each other.
It gets a bit rockier after the first 40 chapters, in my opinion. The 5th pair with the inventor girl and Saya-obsessed boy is a big drop off in quality in my opinion, with the introduction of two love interests being undercut by the fact that there's barely any taboo involved, leading to less interesting dynamics between the three. Turns into a very basic love triangle series carried by hilarity.
The 6th couple with the poltergeist girl brings the original concept back stronger and is probably the closest to the quality of the original 4 in my eyes. Quite enjoyable with a pretty fun pairing.
The 7th couple featuring the idol girl and runner boy are serviceable but I found myself forgetting about them almost instantly. There are good twists and turns and it manages to keep interesting, but I didn't particularly care for either of them.
After chapter 70, it gets really fucky. Each pair up to this point got 10 chapters, which was a short but sweet amount of time to develop their relationships with funny moments dispersed throughout. Chapter 71 marks the start of a 30-chapter arc with a shota boy protagonist, where the first 10 chapters are made to develop his relationships with two girls, and then both get 10 extra each in a sort of route system. Shota boy is arguably the weakest protagonist in the entire series, which makes it ridiculous that he gets so much screentime, and while his character and story and other characters in his arc are more developed and interesting than other arcs, those facts alone just don't save it enough to make it worthwhile. The inventor girl has a far more interesting dynamic with him and actually manages to drop the "Nande Koko Ni Sensei Ga" line at the emotional part of her last chapter which is a feat so fucking funny and peak fiction-tier that I can't believe they didn't save that fucking banger for the last chapter of the manga in general. The other teacher is okay and less interesting but the fact that she's okay with him because his dick is the size of a pinky finger and she's scared of men because of Tanaka's monster cock is the right amount of absurdist bullshit.
The final pair (so far) involving the manga writer and editor gets points for clever use of the term Sensei which really should have been taken advantage of earlier, and they're quite cute together.
I only wrote this review because I saw that the manga was on hiatus for quite a while now, and there wasn't a review covering the entire thing up to the point it dropped off. I definitely enjoyed my time with it quite a lot and it never left me bored, even if I don't think writing a review this long was deserved for something I do not consider even that great. However, I really do love Soborou-sensei's style of comedy writing, and I'm very glad to see it back in his new series "Love & Peace," but I do hope that he eventually returns to this manga. It may be too experimental for its own good and it may not exactly be a masterpiece, but it filled the absurdist comedy hole in my Gintoki-shaped heart.
May 31, 2023
Nande Koko ni Sensei ga!?
(Manga)
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Going to preface this by saying that this is a review that I consider impossible to write without sounding like a virgin so I would like to clarify that I am not a virgin and that this review will definitely (probably) be valuable and worthwhile to the world at large.
I watched the anime for this a while back and thoroughly enjoyed it in a way that I really do not enjoy trashy bullshit ecchi. Most are very fucking boring and not worth watching, but Nankoko (I'm gonna call it that because it's the official abbreviation and typing out Nande Koko Ni Sensei Ga or Why ... |
