Trope Talk: Welcome to Super School!

You can just tell Red had the time of her life drawing those big crying eyes

"But while class might be sidelined, classism won't be!" Colleges for rich people summarized in a single sentence I think.

The protagonist's friend constantly having "I'm about to burst into tears" eyes is probably one of my favorite bits of this whole video. 😂

Red: says she graduated fully five years ago like that's a long time Me: starts looking for a drink

"Detention that breaks the Geneva conventions" gave me a good laugh.

Fun fact: In the owl house, the protagonist was initially never meant to enroll at the magic school and was just put there because disney wanted a school setting. From the beginning of S2 onwards, it becomes obvious the showrunner is trying to include the school as little as possible

I do enjoy how in the end the moral of the video was “School sucks so much that even fictional stories are better when the characters leave it”

I love that Red perfectly described Harry Potter several times in this video but never used it once. This is why she’s my hero

She forgot one: when the school itself is the antagonist and the students commence wacky 80s Era shenanigans.

Anyone else here usually imagine themselves as the teacher at a super school, not a student? No? Maybe this means I should get a teaching degree

One way to make sure the school aspect isn't boring is to make the teachers interesting characters too.

My grandma is 75 years old and she still has the occasional nightmare about failing a French test

I like how fiction just has a school for everything

The good news is you don't have to pay for normal school, the bad news is you can NEVER LEAVE

I can smell the tournament arc from a mile away

There's also another version, that crosses over with a genre that's rarely seen outside of Japanese media - school dramas where the MC is a teacher, rather than a student. It's been a very popular genre in Japan, where teaching is a very well regarded profession, and the teacher who really cares about their students and will go to absurd lengths for their health and wellbeing is a huge archetype. And they often deal with the sort of problem you Interestingly, it typically focuses primarily on the student's problems. Because that's the whole point of the genre: a teacher is somebody who guides and assists students. Typically, even when the teacher has their own problems to deal with, they're more as things that make it harder to help the students. They're also often more ensemble casts between the teacher and students, so you get the best of all possible words in terms of narrative - all the students dealing with problems /and/ the teacher is an active participant who facilitates, rather than a plot hijacker the writer needs to work around. And there's a whole pile of super-school versions.

The biggest enemy of the Super Students? The Super Principal!!

"I graduated fully five years ago." I haven't been stuck in a class room for close to 25 years and I still get those dreams. Often.

What I always liked about 'My Hero Academia's' U.A. High School, is while it's primarily known to cultivate professional superheroes, it has other departments for General Education (for students who are aiming for non-superhero careers), Support (for students that want to learn to develop gadgets and equipment for heroes to use out on the field), and Management (for students who are aiming for working in the business side of heroism, from hero agencies to venture capitalism). Same deal with the various settings in Magic the Gathering, where you have institutions of education such as Strixhaven, where the actual topics are fairly mundane academic subjects but are done through magic (such as studying history by using White Elemental Magic to raise spirits from the dead.) A lot of fantastical schools in fiction don't really have fairly mundane academic avenues for students to focus on if they don't want to aspire to level skyscrapers or to conjurer eldritch abominations from worlds unknown, so it's rather novel that some do as part of that settings world building.

I will be honest, I LOVE this trope. It's absolutely formulaic, but it's basically my comfort genre. One thing I'm a bit surprised you didn't touch on is the 'group project worth 90% of your grade', where the hero and like, one friend are put into a teacher-assigned group for a group project that usually involves live combat. This is often where the hero's first bully gets a redemption arc, usually by virtue of 'I have to get a good grade so I'll help you' or something similar,