Iruma-Kun: Welcome to Demon School #5

Chapter four ended with Iruma, Azz, and Clara being sent to a special "misfits" class within the school meant for troublemakers and problem children. And before you ask, no, this isn't another opposite day situation with "misfit" and "troublemaker" having positive connotations on account of them all being demons in hell. The misfit class is genuinely undesirable to be in, and is meant for those who underachieve by demonic standards.

However, despite that, being in it apparently does nothing to reduce your "rank."

So...are there actually any consequences to being in this grouping? Do they get treated differently? IDFK.

Anyway, Clara and Azz react to this news the way you'd expect given their personality and lack thereof, respectively.

And, the reception they get among the misfit class - and the characters' reactions to that reception - continue to be all over the fucking place in terms of how they fit into the world of the story. Apparently, it's Misfit Class tradition to set an array of booby traps involving blades, arrows, and various other medieval weaponry whenever new students are first sent to them.

Which sort of feels par for the course for this place. After all, Azz's reaction to being slighted by an upstart nepobaby during orientation was to challenge said nepobaby to a fireball duel and invite the entire student body to watch. And, enslaving your teacher is the kind of thing that gets you a badge of honor rather than an expulsion plus jail sentence.

So, with that in mind, Azz's reaction to this welcoming ceremony is...

It's not played as him reacting to a challenge, or engaging in a violent dick-waving contest with a rival, the way that you'd expect. Azz actually seems flabbergasted that they would be doing something like this to newcomers in the first place. Which...well, this comic really needs to either commit to this gag about demons all being accustomed to over-the-top-and-for-no-good-reason violence, or drop it.

It's especially weird coming from Azz, who periodically makes mouth noises to the effect of seeing this school as a battleground in which he intends to produce literal corpses, but hasn't acted on it since his introductory incident.

Well, anyway. Iruma was leading the way, and he has his magic dodging power that makes him untouchable by things like traps (we don't get an explanation for how Azz or Clara avoided getting hit by any projectiles that whizzed passed him, but that's okay, because I don't care about them), which impresses the other misfits.

Erm...wait a minute, hold on, are the three of them really the ONLY new students from this year to be sent to the misfit homeroom? They're not arriving with others, and all the other demon kids in the room seem to be in on the hazing tradition. It seemed like the incoming students are all being sorted at the same time, rather than piecemeal.

...and then THAT gets complicated with the introduction of a new character. This one kinda threw me for a loop on account of how unconventional he is. A towering, hypermasculine bruiser who appoints himself rival to the protagonist out of nowhere, refers to himself in the third person, and can't stop talking about how great he is for a single panel.

I'll be interested to see his effect on the story going forward. I can't think of another character even remotely like this in any manga I've seen before, so this might go in novel directions.

As for how he complicates the question of who's new to this school and who isn't, well. Sabnock seems to have just walked through the booby trapped door a few minutes before the trio. And yet, he seems like he's established himself as...eh, maybe deliberately getting hit by each and every single flying blade and just tanking it really did impress the others enough to accept him as queen bee in just the last few minutes. I guess that could make sense.

Anyway. Sabnock dickwaving about how he's just appointed himself all of their rivals and is also sure he's going to crush them all and become the demon king (because apparently that's in the cards) turns into an opportunity for exposition that...frankly, it would have been more natural to have Azz explaining this earlier instead of droning on about the meal plan system. It's not like the latter ended up being relevant to that chapter's (attempted) jokes in the end. But whatever, here it is now.

Apparently, rankings for students at this place are spread across the first ten letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Your initial rank depends on your familiar summoning outcome, along with a few other factors, and then rises and falls throughout your time at Babyls depending on your academic performance and fearsomeness and stuff. It is only from among the ranks of those who graduate in the Yud ranking that the demon kings are chosen (it's apparently not a hereditary position, despite the name), and Sabnok is determined to be an eligible candidate.

Although there apparently hasn't been a demon king in over a century. Why that is the case, we aren't yet told. But apparently if there ever is another demon king again, they're going to have to have graduated from demon high school with a Yud rank first.

Also, whoever did the translation that I'm reading decided that Sabnok's dialect should be rendered as *extremely bad* attempts at Middle English.

I dunno if this is intentional in Japanese as well, with the author intending for Sabnok to use pretentious language that he hasn't actually mastered, or if it's down to the localizer just not knowing what the fuck they were doing. It's annoying, but is it SUPPOSED TO be annoying? I'm not sure.

There's a bunch more empty posturing between Sabnok and Azz, and some repetitive fearful blubbering from Iruma. And also a repetition of the "demons don't know what friends are" puzzler, with Azz now trying to explain the concept in turn to Sabnok (it's a *little* bit funnier this time around, on account of Azz himself not really knowing how to properly define it as he tries to explain it. Still has the same problems, but the delivery here wins it a couple more points) until the homeroom teacher finally shows up and quiets everyone down. Apparently they got all those traps set up in the short time it took for the teacher to arrive. I...guess...that this might be a boarding school after all, for at least some of the demon kiddies? That would explain the significance of them being sorted into houses despite at least many of them not living in said houses. Kids whose families live nearby just come for classes, while others stay in the dorms (which also double as homerooms) or something like that. I think. I don't know. The answer might just be "animoo school tropes, don't think about them," but I still have a tiny bit of optimism that I'm clinging onto.

Speaking of which, it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that Professor Naberius is their homeroom teacher. On account of him having been absent for the meeting where everyone else divvied up the homeroom responsibilities for the schoolyear, on account of his stupid altercation with the bookstore imp that didn't make sense. After Clara makes annoying rawr noises at him for a bit, he drags everyone (okay, so the people in this room ARE all incoming freshmen, then? I guess that means the booby trap "tradition" was just invented today then, if there are no upperclassmen present who could have passed it on...) to do the next ritual that will effect their initial ranking. I'm pretty sure we were explicitly told that this is supposed to be the first proper schoolday, but I guess not actually. Anyway, the placement test is based on a demonstration of knowledge in a variety of academic disciplines that make sense for a school with a formal coursework structure like this one to focusahahahahahahahahahaha

Hey, so, remember when I said this was a "magic fighting school" with all the associated nonsense tropes, even though nothing about teaching the students to fight was mentioned and we were told they have classroom structures with course books? Did some of you think I was reading into things and unfairly projecting things I hate into the work?

Well, guess what? I was.

I took an educated guess about how shit this comic was about to get, based on how shit it had been so far. And I was right.

...okay, I shouldn't be so smug. Is there a single one of you reading this who thought that this would be anything other than the Sonic Fighting Academy? Probably not.

So, they have to race through the Naruto forest and fight giant monster birds that will be attacking them as they try to retrieve a flag or something. I really love the detail that Naberius didn't even mention that killing too many birds would be a bad thing until Clara happened to ask about it. Like, what if nobody had asked, and they wiped out the entire bird monster population that the school relies on for its dumb commencement ritual? What then, Naberius?

Also, how many is "too many" anyway? He never quantifies it, and he sends them off on their mission immediately after the above panels.

Anyway, the chapter ends with the reveal that demons can all extend functional wings from their bodies and use them to fly. Which puts Iruma at a very severe disadvantage even before we get to the bird monster issue.

Well, luckily, Iruma still is scared to be here and is only going through with it because Sullivan guilt tripped him into it, so if he refuses to participate and drops out it isn't such a big deal-or wait, sorry, I mean that he's terrified by this dilemma and the comic plays it for legitimate stakes and tension. Please try not to remember anything that happened in the previous chapters and just watch the jingling keys, come on, we promise, it'll be really entertaining.


Two chapters and probably one post left.

This shit just...

Again. If this was trying to be a serious adventure or drama or something, I could probably make these reviews much more entertaining. Bad comedy is just the absolute worst thing to write about. It's like trying to pump water out of a salt flat.

So far, the most interesting thing I can say about this comic is that it's intriguing how we all remember it from high school. You remember that one kinda annoying weeb friend of yours, who made constant anime references that they didn't care if no one else got, and who thought they were much better at drawing than they actually were? Maybe you yourself were that friend, idk, we were all cringe in various ways back then, I won't judge you. But anyway, this friend who may have been you drew this comic. They showed it to you during lunchtime, and you pretended to like it. You tried to offer constructive criticism couched in diplomatic terms, but you could never really give them the feedback they needed without hurting their feelings, so you didn't and nothing changed. Then in senior year they either got a new hobby or started a new, less overambitious, starter project, and you forgot all about it until you read this paragraph just now.

It's this comic. Apart from a select few panels that have much better art than the rest, that shitty high school comic was Iruma-Kun: Welcome to Demon School.

I'm not sure what that comic is doing coming from a twenty-something instead of a teenager. Much less why it's being professionally published and serialized. But it's interesting to see it again regardless, in a nostalgic kind of way.

Well, one more post to go.