YMMV / Gokusen

• Ho Yay:
  • The manga can probably get away with stuff like Yankumi's students hugging each other, or eating from the same lunch because they look as gonks.
  • In one of the extra chapters, a samurai's spirit has a crush on Shin, because he is good looking (and the samurai was actually homosexual).
  • A former acquaintance of Shin from high school, who turns out to be a host, teases him (about his crush on Yankumi) and ends up teaching him the ways of "how a host has to act with a girl", while suggestively touching him.
• Padding: With hints of Leave the Camera Running and Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, the running montage in episode 7 of the anime. It lasts for over a minute and is completely unnecessary, uncomfortable, and it's straight out bizarre, since the background's song is actually that weird song that Ms. Fujiyama has her choir club singing, with out-of-tune falsetto voices.
• Retroactive Recognition: Many famous j-drama actors appeared in the live-action drama series as Kumiko's students (before their acting careers' popularity skyrocketed), such as Jun Matsumoto, Shun Oguri, Yuma Ishigaki, and Hiroki Narimiya, who all starred in the first season of Gokusen, in 2002.
• Squick: Ms. Fujiyama and Miura's taste in young male high-schoolers. Take account, that they are not only still minors, but also students in the same high school they work in. And while Ms. Fujiyama's situations get creepier if the reader doesn't know the context of them (since she doesn't do anything to them), it's Miura who has acted more straightforward towards the idea... on Shin Sawada, who becomes his obsession and threatens him in making him his "pet", as a way to get Kumiko fired.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many manga fans feel dissapointed that Shin Sawada's character is so squandered in the live action drama. He is nowhere to be seen or heard of after the first season, whereas he gets a lot of Character Development throughout the manga and starts a relationship with Kumiko after he graduates.
• Ugly Cute: Many of the gonk designs that Kozueko Morimoto came up for the series have their own charm, and although they are supposedly to be "ugly", at the same time, the characters end up as cute looking.

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