Shokugeki No Soma

That's true, but every conflict from here on is fueled by Erina's shitty ass family.

And yea, what Slim said, the supporting cast take a severe backseat after this, even the likes of Megumi.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on May 10th 2021 at 8:13:06 AM

To be fair, a lot of the supporting cast weren't that important to begin with.

Also the true horror of the final arc is actually that everyone got a bad haircut.

Edited by Arha on May 10th 2021 at 8:05:13 AM

Even so, it's kind of good to have a nice supporting cast to flesh out the setting. Part of the reason I got so bored with the manga is because Soma and Erina ceased having any real dynamic with anyone besides each other.

I get that they're the two main characters, but jeez.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on May 10th 2021 at 9:39:07 AM

Sure, and I agree. The large colorful cast did make things better. I'm just not sure they were ever balanced right. Like the Polar Star Dorm being actual good cooks is cool and all but having so much time spent on their individual curry dishes in the tournament preliminaries felt like a waste of time in hindsight that should have been spent on actually developing the character dynamics.

After that they never really did cook again, but they made a great support for Erina's character arc during the early/mid parts of Azami's whole incident. Stagiare with Hisako was also great on that front and she's still one of my favorites. I guess I just kinda feel like the cooking angle wasn't really that important to the story unless it did involve Erina, Souma, whatever antagonist they were facing and maybe one or two characters like Megumi and Alice.

That being said, I'm saying that as someone who doesn't really like cooking manga, so I'm kind of a periphery demographic here.

Granted I never liked the Polar Star dormmates, always thought they were fucking losers.

But I did like the moments that involved other chefs and them working together, like Soma asking Subaru to help him against Tendou. That was some good stuff and helped give the encounters more variety.

...there are other cooking manga?

My problem was always that the school never felt... meaningful and by extension neither did the dorm or most of the people in it.

Like, Soma enters the school already better than the vast majority of students, and while he faces challenges it never really feels like the school or curriculum itself is really helping him. Or, for that matter, most of the other really good people.

It feels more like a thin pretense for him to meet people than anything else.

Edited by LSBK on May 10th 2021 at 11:16:27 AM

Yeah, that's true now that you mention it. The only thing he gets out of the school is a chance to compete with people because there's no feeling that he's actually learning anything at school. When someone comes in and actually tries to teach cooking to the students, this is treated as the most horrible thing to ever happen to the school.

it wasnt just teaching the students it was teaching them that this one way and only this one way of cooking is the correct and end all be all way of cooking. no deviations, no spicing it up a bit follow directions exactly and dont try to add your own spin on it

yea, there's a shocking lack of world-building for the setting. It definitely feels like the author simply wanted a setting to facilitate conflict, and left it at that. Tootsuki itself isn't all that important aside from being where the story takes place.

I honestly didn't mind Polar Star Dorm, but I agree that they honestly had no role to play in the story beyond just serving as an introduction for Soma into the story. After that, they were just kind of there.

I dunno, the story was more about the conflicts within the school rather than the students actually learning anything.

Even before Central, there really wasn't much teaching at all. In fact, Soma didn't even wanna go because he felt like he had nothing else to learn...and he was right.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on May 10th 2021 at 10:30:01 AM

The classes never got much focus barring that time Soma and Megumi first worked together.

To go further, just having a thin pretense to start off a story isn't necessarily bad; the school in Jujutsu Kaisen is like that too, and it works fine.

The issue is that the story wants us to believe that Totsuki is so hard and it's a really big deal for Soma to be there, but also for us to be really impressed by him and his diner-grown skills, and didn't balance the two well at all.

Edited by LSBK on May 10th 2021 at 9:37:43 AM

His diner-skills would prolly be more impressive if he wasn’t taught by the greatest chef in the world.

Yea, it tries to have its cake and eat it too by having Soma be something of a fake underdog. With everyone in the setting underestimating and looking down on him, only for it to be shown that he's actually way more qualified than the people looking down on him.

Early on, that was a fine premise; it's actually pretty interesting to have a protagonist who already starts the series with tons of experience and uses that to his advantage. Kenshin started his series above pretty much everyone else too.

But it gets extremely ridiculous by the last arc where the story is STILL trying to sell the idea that Soma is an underdog in spite of the fact that he's literally the top seated student in the academy. That's pretty much when the premise imploded on itself.

That never bothered me much because I never really cared about the cooking barring a few exceptions like when there were actual personality issues you could kind of pull out of people's style or when their fundamental approach needed to be reworked. Like Alice not even following the assignment because she's busy showing off, Souma realizing he has no goddamn clue how to cook a multiple course meal or even Subaru falling into the same trap as his opponents when he decided what he had was good enough. Even though I absolutely still think the reason he lost was stupid and Souma just got lucky.

It's when you get to something like, I dunno, Ryou vs Megumi that I just don't care. We didn't learn anything new about them.

Edited by Arha on May 10th 2021 at 10:58:25 AM

Somewhat related to that, I still feel like Alice standing up to Azami would have hit a lot harder if she were actually the won to do the Shokugeki with Rentaro or whatever the hell his name was.

It's made out to be this big thing, but the point is completely undermined by the fact that she was just going to originally give up the club because she didn't care, and the only reason Ryo made the challenge was because he was being petty.

Hilarious how neither competed in the final battle because they both got their asses beat beforehand. God Alice wrote the biggest check ever and she couldn't cash it.

Ryo really just shouldn't have existed except as a means to make Megumi, an actual character the audience can get invested in, look better. Like it's way more interesting to see Megumi beat this wild ass crazy person who's rubbing shoulders with a Nakiri, then go on and tie with the one person in the school Soma had yet to beat to earn her way into an unprecedented 3 way final match.

Sane with Alice and Rentaro Kusunoki. Have Ryo lose at this won specialty to establish the threat, then show Alice's Character Development from from Fall Classic loss by defeating Rentaro using the lessons she learned.

It wouldn't save the manga from sucking later, nothing would, but at least these three would be better served (ha) characters.

Megumi beating Ryou but losing to Hayama could have worked. Only issue is that there's nothing thematically interesting about Hayama vs Megumi. Though I'm not sure Ryou vs Hayama was any better.

Ryou vs Hayama was only worth it for the Yu Gi Oh references. Also that matelote looked damn scrumptious.

The Tootsuki Academy curriculum simply sucks. I remember Shinomiya expelling someone in the training camp because he was wearing inappropriate perfume. Ridiculous. The author seemed to only have thought of how to explain away competitive cooking, and didn’t care about ironing out the finer details.

It's been a while since I've read the manga but I didn't get the impression that Souma didn't learn anything from the school? I seem to him learning new things to overcome some of the school-set challenges and the stagiares also teaching him stuff

I think they meant he didn't learn anything from the classes. The stagiare was more like a final exam than a class.

Well, I know what I meant, anyway. We only see him take like a single class and he doesn't really give the impression he's taking it seriously or that he learned anything from it.

^^ The weird thing about Shinomiya doing that is that the school board actually backed him up on that. Yup, go ahead and fail people at will and make exams that ensures failure for at least a certain percentage of the students no matter how good they are.

Edited by Arha on May 11th 2021 at 4:38:11 AM

Yeah that's fair

I think the problem is that the series zig-zags on the school being both an evil dicktatorial conservative institution that must be revolutioned by the outsider, lower-class protagonist, and an environment that actually promotes growth and nurtures talent.

Instead of finding a middle ground or showing moral ambiguity, the school is portrayed as cartoonishly evil as long as Soma is the outsider, then it suddenly must be protected from the even-more-cartoonishly evil Azami.

Having Megumi best Ryou and then losing to Hayama would have streamlined the story a bit, but I don't think it would have necessarily been better.

Especially since the tournament already had the "main character's friend loses and he avenges them" plot point with Subaru and Takumi.

Now if you want the tournament to be as straightforward as possible; Takumi beats Subaru so he and Soma can settle their score, and Megumi beats Ryou and loses to Hayama to set up the final match with him and Soma.