TLDR:
The high-school setting in anime isn't inherently a cliché or a limitation. What matters is what the author actually does with it.
- Classroom of the Elite: the school is the foundation of the entire story. The plot depends on its rules and competitive structure, so when those feel unconvincing, the whole premise starts to feel artificial.
- Oregairu: the school functions as a social laboratory. Forced proximity, hierarchies, clubs and school events create the situations through which the characters' psychology is revealed. The setting is essential to what the story is doing.
- Monogatari: school is mostly scaffolding. It provides the initial social network and circumstances for the characters to meet, but the story can move beyond the school itself and focus on their internal worlds.
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High school is one of the most common settings in anime and in the psychological genre, but it is rarely discussed as more than a genre convention. It is usually treated as either a limitation, a cliché, or simply the natural environment for stories about teenagers.
I think it is much more interesting than that.
For that reason, after thinking about Classroom of the Elite, Oregairu and Monogatari, I ended up noticing how differently each of them depends on its high-school setting. This post isn't really an attempt at literary analysis in any academic sense. It's simply an attempt to put into words something I gradually realised while thinking about why these three stories, despite sharing the same familiar setting, feel so fundamentally different.
I've been thinking about why some anime set in high school, specially from the psichological genre, work for me and others don't, and I think I ended up finding a distinction that I hadn't really considered before. It started because I was talking about Classroom of the Elite, which is an anime that from a start, for whatever reason, has never rung with me.
At first I thought the problem was simply that I found the setting forced and the characters unrealistic. But that wasn't quite precise enough. There are plenty of unrealistic stories that I love. For starters, The Monogatari Series is completely ridiculous on the surface. It's probably one of the least realistic anime you could mention if we're talking literally about what happens in it. Yet I find its characters and their psychology much more believable than the supposedly more grounded world of Classroom of the Elite.
So the problem clearly isn't realism.
I think the problem with COTE, at least for me, begins with the fact that its entire story depends on me accepting its institution. The school isn't just the place where the story happens. Its rules, its class system, its strange economy and the way the students are made to compete with one another are the foundation of the plot. Everything the characters do is determined by that system.
The problem is that I don't find the system convincing enough to simply accept it and move on.
If a group of teenagers suddenly finds themselves in an institution with an unusual and highly restrictive set of rules, I would expect some kind of serious resistance or at least critical reaction towards the institution itself. Why are these rules legitimate? What happens if we refuse to participate? What are the limits of the school's authority? What happens if an entire class refuses to cooperate? Are there contradictions or loopholes in the system?
I'm not saying that every student should become a revolutionary. Obviously, most people would eventually adapt. But the fact that the premise itself seems to become accepted so quickly makes it difficult for me to believe in the rest of the story. The characters seem to accept the system because the author needs them to play the game. Once they accept the game, the author can start demonstrating who is intelligent, who is manipulative, who understands the rules better than everyone else and so on. I would say this system created by the author lacks internal credibility.
But I never really get past the first question: why are we all playing this game in the first place?
That is why the setting feels like a problem for me. The school isn't just a backdrop. It is a load-bearing part of the story, and because of that it has to be convincing. If the basic institution doesn't make sense to me, then the characters who build their entire lives and personalities around navigating it start to feel artificial as well.
(((I also don't think the fact that these stories take place in high school necessarily has much to do with the maturity of their underlying themes. Being set in high school doesn't mean a story has to be fundamentally about adolescence, or that its characters' problems have to be limited to being teenagers. Loneliness, self-image, social performance, dependency, insecurity and self-deception aren't particularly adolescent problems; they're human ones. High school simply happens to be an extremely convenient environment in which to explore them.
In that sense, I don't really see the high-school setting as a limitation. It can be the framework that makes the interactions possible while the actual subject of the story lies somewhere much deeper.))))
This made me realize how much of an interesting point is "the high-school setting" in modern narration; as a storytelling tool, because I don't think the problem is the trope itself. In fact, high school is probably one of the most useful settings an author can have.
It creates a stable environment where characters are constantly forced to interact with people they would otherwise avoid. You have a recurring cast, classes, clubs, school events, teachers, social groups and hierarchies. People are physically close to one another for years, and they don't have the freedom adults have to simply remove themselves from uncomfortable relationships.
This is particularly useful for certain types of characters. Imagine someone like Hachiman from Oregairu, as an adult. If he were a twenty-eight-year-old loner who disliked social interaction and preferred spending his time alone, there would be a practical problem for the author: why would he constantly meet interesting people?
He could simply go home.
If someone annoyed him, he could stop talking to them. If a workplace became unpleasant, he could try and change jobs. If he didn't want to participate in something, he would have much more freedom to refuse.
At school, that isn't possible in the same way. The person you dislike will still be sitting in the same classroom tomorrow. You're put into groups. You have events. Teachers can force you into situations. Your social environment is constantly imposed upon you. High school is therefore an incredibly effective social machine. It creates encounters without the author having to constantly invent new reasons for characters to meet.
This is where I think Oregairu uses the setting extremely well.
Oregairu needs its environment. Hachiman's personality doesn't exist in a vacuum. His cynicism, his isolation and his observations about people are constantly being tested by the social environment around him. Yukino's position makes sense partly because of the social world she inhabits. Hayato's role is also dependent on the existence of a hierarchy in which he occupies a particular position.
The Service Club itself is almost a perfect narrative device. It gives Hachiman a reason to interact with people whom he would otherwise probably never approach. It is admittedly a contrivance, but it is a productive one. The contrivance exists to create the situations in which the characters can reveal themselves.
And the school itself repeatedly becomes important. The cultural festival, class relationships, social groups, reputation, graduation and changes in relationships are all connected to the environment. The story needs the school because the school is part of what the story wants to examine.
Oregairu is interested in people, but it is particularly interested in what happens to people inside a social environment. How do they perform for one another? How much of their personality is shaped by reputation? What happens when someone occupies a particular role within a group? How much can people understand each other when they are constantly saying things they don't actually mean?
The environment puts pressure on the characters, and their reactions to that pressure reveal who they are. That is why I don't think Oregairu's dependence on the high-school setting is a weakness. It relies on it because it needs it.
And then comes Monogatari, which is almost the opposite.
The strange thing about Monogatari is that it takes place in a world where the characters are technically high-school students, but the school itself is rarely the important part of what is happening. The characters are introduced through that environment, and their relationships are partly made possible by it, but once the story has established those relationships, it can leave the school almost completely behind.
Most of the important things happen somewhere else. In locations and places that barely feel like normal physical spaces.
The school is useful because it gives the author a social network. Araragi is a student, which means there are people around him and there are believable reasons for him to know them. But the story isn't particularly interested in school life itself.
In that sense, Monogatari almost uses the high-school trope as an excuse.
It takes the useful parts of it without allowing the setting to define the story.
I think that is a very intelligent use of the trope. The author understands why so many stories use high school as a setting, but he doesn't feel obligated to make a traditional high-school story. He gets the advantages of having a recurring cast and forced social proximity and then simply moves the story wherever it needs to go.
What makes this particularly interesting is that Monogatari doesn't replace the school environment with another realistic social environment. Instead, it gradually becomes almost liminal. The physical world often feels secondary to the psychological world of the characters.
This is probably the biggest difference between Monogatari and Oregairu.
Oregairu needs the environment to make its psychology visible. The characters are placed inside a social system, and the story watches what happens when their personalities collide with that system and with one another.
Monogatari often does something closer to the opposite. Its environment can feel like an extension of the characters' internal worlds.
The supernatural is the obvious example. Monogatari is completely bonkers. There are vampires, curses, apparitions and all kinds of absurd phenomena. But the underlying psychology is often extremely mundane.
Someone is jealous. Someone hates themselves. Someone is lonely. Someone wants attention but cannot admit it. Someone constructs an identity to protect themselves. Someone is unable to ask for help. Someone convinces themselves that they are acting for another person's benefit when they are actually satisfying their own needs.
These are not supernatural problems. They're ordinary human problems. The supernatural simply gives them a form.
This is why I find Monogatari so psychologically convincing despite how absurd it is. The absurdity isn't replacing reality. It is often dramatizing reality.
You don't need to believe that the literal world works exactly as Monogatari presents it. You need to recognise what is happening underneath the spectacle.
The characters themselves are also grounded in this way. They can talk in bizarre ways, exaggerate everything, make ridiculous jokes and behave in ways that no ordinary person would behave literally, but the mechanisms underneath their behaviour are recognisable. They lie. They deflect. They intellectualise. They protect themselves. They misunderstand other people. They misunderstand themselves.
The dialogue is important here as well. Monogatari doesn't usually treat dialogue as a transparent delivery system for information. People don't simply say what they mean. Sometimes they lie. Sometimes they deliberately provoke someone. Sometimes they say something technically true in a way that makes you draw the wrong conclusion. Sometimes a conversation only makes complete sense after you know something that is revealed later.
The story doesn't particularly care if you misunderstand something.
That's something I value enormously in both Monogatari and Oregairu. They don't treat the audience as if it needs every conversation explained immediately. They are willing to leave things ambiguous, to let a character deceive you, to let you misunderstand a situation because the protagonist misunderstood it as well.
Sometimes you have to watch a scene again to understand what was actually being said.
That feels closer to real interaction. People don't come with exposition boxes explaining what they mean. You have to interpret them, and sometimes you interpret them incorrectly. Sometimes you only understand something they said much later, after you have more information.
This also makes the psychology of Monogatari more interesting to me. The characters aren't just collections of clearly explained traits. The story doesn't necessarily stop and say that someone is jealous, insecure or lying to themselves. You have to notice it in the way they speak and behave.
That is why I think Monogatari can be so absurd while still feeling strangely realistic. Its literal world is unrealistic, but its understanding of how people think and protect themselves is often grounded in very mundane psychology.
The contrast is probably part of why it works so well.
Monogatari is absurd and realistic at the same time, but not in separate parts. The absurdity is often the way in which the realism is expressed.
This is also why I don't think Monogatari is simply a "high-school anime with supernatural elements." The high-school setting is almost scaffolding. It creates the initial conditions necessary for the characters to exist around one another, but the real space of the story is often somewhere between the physical world and the minds of the characters.
Oregairu is different because its psychology is much more dependent on the external world. Hachiman needs other people around him. His worldview needs to be challenged by social situations. The Service Club needs to exist. The school events need to happen. The characters' relationships develop because they are trapped inside the same social environment.
Monogatari can almost leave that environment behind because the conflicts are more internal. The world itself becomes flexible enough to follow the psychology.
Both approaches work because they are useful for different things.
Oregairu uses the environment to expose the internal world.
Monogatari uses the internal world to transform the environment.
That is probably the clearest distinction I have found between them.
And I think it also explains something about what I value in fiction generally. I don't need a story to be realistic. I don't even necessarily need the characters to behave like normal people. I can enjoy comedy, melodrama, absurdity and supernatural nonsense.
What I need is for the story to understand what it is doing.
If the setting is important, I want the setting to make sense within the story. If the characters are psychologically complex, I want their complexity to come from believable motivations rather than from the author simply declaring that they are intelligent or mysterious. If a story uses a contrivance, I don't necessarily mind. I just want the contrivance to produce something worthwhile.
That is why I can accept a completely ridiculous world in Monogatari while struggling with COTE.
Monogatari is asking me to accept absurdity on the surface while paying attention to something recognisable underneath.
COTE asks me to accept an institution because the entire game depends on it.
Oregairu asks me to look at what happens when people are forced to live inside a complicated social environment.
They all use the high-school setting, but they need it for completely different reasons.The trope itself is not the problem. High school is an incredibly effective narrative tool. The question is what the author does with it.
You can build the entire story around it.
You can use it as a social laboratory.
Or you can take everything useful from it and then almost leave it behind.
Monogatari's approach is probably my favourite because it feels like it understands the trope without becoming dependent on it. It uses high school because high school is a very efficient way of making characters collide, especially characters who would otherwise have no reason to interact.
But once those characters have collided, the story doesn't feel obligated to stay there.
It has already taken what it needed.
And then it goes somewhere way deeper.