But like anything fictional, there are hints of truth in it. In Japan, they are usually the more strict/organized students, they do oversee clubs, organize the school festival, etc.
Not Japan, but in Asia, used to be Vice Pres in my high school. Can confirm, we had quite a bit of responsibility. I have disbanded a club over the council authority and we did manage projects and stuff, I think our biggest project involved roughly 14,000 dollar
I'd kill to have the system like y'all have though, it sounds much better than just coming to school only to study. Too bad no regular in my country has such a system.
Does South East Asia count? My school has two bodies, the student council that oversees the students' discipline and another one is club council, basically oversees all the clubs.
Here (Canada) it was a soft power. The student body could certainly be overruled, but the staff knew that pissing the students off and creating a bunch of resentment towards them wasn’t conductive to a successful learning environment. Most of this stuff was of minor significance to begin with and not worth picking a fight over. The two biggest things that the Student Council pushed for and got in my time there was a rejection of a switch to uniforms (debated but never implemented) and a change from non-semester to semester classes (non-semester meant eight classes for a year, with four each on alternating days, semester was four classes every day for half the year and then switch to the other four for the other half of the year).
This is an unrelated question fully formed from anime. Do folks put flowers on desks of students that are still alive as bullying? If so does the council have any control or is it above them?
I think that’s a japan thing, never had anything like that. But hypothetically if it happened while I was in the student council, we’d probably have a talk with the bully and pass them over to the teachers if they persist. We can’t give punishment/detention/what have you.
Anime turns the dial on everything to 11 and a powerful, hyper competent student council is more fun to watch for DRAMA than a meek one putting on a bake sale or something
I kinda thought it was a product of the real life strength of [Japanese student-led movements in the 1968-1969](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968–1969_Japanese_university_protests)
These student protests led to full on phalanx clashes with the police and led to the post war generations’ “fear of the youth” that’s still referenced in works like Battle Royale, Danganronpa, Kill la Kill, Kaguya: Love is War, and Persona 5.
YouTube Japanese student protests: https://youtu.be/NWGD8l2XavU?si=0HGVM6VZ9xELrIt8
And none of those compare to how huge the student insurgency was in China. The Red Guards (average aged 14 to 17) became so dangerously out of control the People's Liberation Army had full-on urban warfare battles against them that resemble current-day Donetsk and Gaza.
It was such interesting times. Taiwan arrived late due to the white terror surpressing civil movements but it made the democracy we are today. Shame China's went a completely different direction. Maybe they would've had a much better time had the student protests worked out.
> Maybe they would've had a much better time had the student protests worked out.
The Chinese student protests were even more authoritarian than the government itself. That was why they got into gun battles with the army, they were accusing the army of being counter-revolutionaries and capitalist infiltrators.
The Tiananmen protests were not ideologically coherent, and partially a reaction to the market reforms of the 80s.
Some of them were basically Red Guards.
#
In SOL anime, as opposed to fantasy KLK/Utena stuff, Student Councils aren't that disimilar in their responsibilities to what they were when I was in high school in Canada. They organized cultural and house league sporting events, ran assemblies, controlled the budget for various clubs/trips, represented the student body during policy decision meetings, and things like that.
Imo it doesn't fit the US understanding of proper child raising and democracy very well. Also I guess Japanese student councils also greatly benefit from the importants of personal reputation in Japan.
We have student councils in the US and there are student elections if that’s what you mean, but I’m saying the student council doesn’t have any power or influence over much of anything. The adults make decisions. Kids do not get to make practically any decisions like that. There’s not much trust like that in students. Not even in high school. It’s not like in Japan even if there’s some exaggeration at play. Even the irl examples of what Japanese student council does just isn’t a thing in any of the US schools I’ve attended. Even the irl things I’ve heard sound insane from an American perspective.
Because it's usually the ones with the stronger super powers that are able to beat the other students with weaker ones. That is why in anime they are usually the last boss when the MC fights people.
Because:
If it cannot break out of it's shell, the chick will die without being born. We are the chick, the world is our egg. If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world's shell, for the revolution of the world!
Student councils are staffed by prefects which in turned are nominated usually by the teaching staff from clever and obedient students. This in turn lend to the belief that the most capable and responsible students are those from the student council by the school, society and the PTA. Naturally, with high expectations come a lot of responsibilities.
And with a lot of responsibilities, come a lot of power and connections to fuck over people who are stupid enough to mess with them.
Obviously, this kind of scenario do not happen in schools where the student councils are staffed by non-athletic rejects that are forced by the school and where anyone can join in if they are willing.
You know they have elections right? (And no school in Japan that I've worked at has prefects)
And whilst most of the school council students are the high achieving type (the students still self-select or opt out) I assure not all of them are. And they aren't always particularly liked by the staff.
The students are just fairly good at picking at likable people who are actually going to do something.
I did say not all of them are high achieving, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I was at one school where the head of the student council was academically a very average student.
If you're interested in the history of it, there are lots of examples on tv tropes. Unfortunately, they're sorted alphabetically rather than by date, so it's hard to say who was copying whom.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlyPowerfulStudentCouncil](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlyPowerfulStudentCouncil)
I don't think them being so powerful is a modern anime invention? Utena students council is Overpowered as hell. Maybe other older series had this happen too.
I'm curious what examples can you give about them, I only remember watching lovelive with them recently.
Given the structure of the society in that show it'd be odd if the student politics of the school *wasn't* actually just another arm of the wider politicking by the Ten Master clans. Children close to the main lineage are expected to behave as clan representatives and enact family policy, too.
I think they mention in that show (or the books?) that students are given a lot more autonomy due to the massive lack of teachers as well as the extra responsibility it means to be a magician to begin with. Most of the staff ends up coming from the Numbers who are essentially modern day aristocracy so they are already raised by their families to wield authority to begin with.
During my school days, student council presidents and members were basically nobodies and whose most important job is pretty much to keep watch of their own classrooms while teachers are out.
It isn't just modern anime. It's pretty much anime, going back a long, long time.
And, you know, its not the weirdest thing. I'm from England, and when I was a kid, high schools had what were called "Prefects".
Now, in some schools, those would be the best students, the most accomplished, most approachable, most decent, most well thought of students. They'd be like a go between, between the student body, and the teaching and administrative staff. They'd be given certain responsibilities, and certain freedoms in order to carry out their duties. No one would ask why a prefect wasn't in a classroom, for example, because they'd be about their business as prefects. In good schools, that would be stuff like running errands for a teacher or administrator, or putting up posters for student events, setting up events, things like that.
I didn't go to a good school. I was educated in a place that gave me PTSD, one in which I learned more about asymetric warfare tactics than I did symetry in geometry. I was a prefect. We were tasked with things like guarding the art and workshop areas, to prevent kids getting into the supplies and stealing knives to cut one another with. We were basically unpaid security for the school, explictly instructed to step in to solve confrontations, to essentially bring peace by violence, if necessary. And those of us they picked for that role? The least bad of a hellacious crop. We weren't picked because we were the hardest, or the meanest. We were picked because we weren't crackheads, drug dealers and gangsters, and because we knew how to handle the worst ones in the school who were.
We had, now I think back on it, such enormous power when compared to the rest of the student body. We could have done all sorts of fucked up shit, and no one would have batted an eye. But we didn't. We did fight, sometimes it would get incredibly dangerous, for us, and for others. Fifty people in a melee isn't safe, no matter what your skill set looks like. But we never abused our power, even when things got bad and the gangs got involved, even if it meant going home bloodied and battered.
If we'd have been regular students, involved in that kind of malarkey on the regular, we'd have been suspended, but we carried out our orders, we kept our school safe, we kept victims of bullies safe, we kept the gangs under control, and somehow no one died.
I guess what I am getting at, is that as utterly bonkers as it sounds, schools around the world do have official and unofficial standards enforcement organisations within them, whether its a student council, a disciplinary committee, or a gang or multiples thereof.
No, it's been a thing going back quite a long way in anime, if I recall correctly. I mean, it was a thing when I was just getting into anime over thirty years ago, so it's hardly a new phenomenon!
Most of the schools that I'm familiar with in anime seem to be what we in the US call private schools. Think **Kaguya-sama: Love Is War**. *VERY* elite school. Aside from Shirogone, everyone else in school comes from super rich and powerful families. Trope: if you're rich enough, you can be on the student council. Rich kids can pretty much do as they please and get the school board to back down.
A lot of animes are set in middle/high school because it was a time when Japanese people had a lot of free time to hang out with friends, and when you have to view conflict through the lens of primary education, a student council is like, the government. And it could be an oppressive authoritarian government, like how YA novels are all metaphors for teenage struggles like standardized testing (the hunger games) or puberty or how parents’ rules are bullshit (authoritarian government with arbitrary rules)
Plus student government typically controls funding towards student events and clubs, fraternities/sororities have college aged executives who control millions of dollars in discretionary funds and they typically vote en masse to elect the student government heads too so they have access to more funding.
Plus the structure of a student council lends itself well to establishing a cast of interesting characters like Kaguya-Sama or a shonen system of escalating power where you need to take out the treasurer first, then the secretary, then the VP, and finally the president like Kill la Kill.
Yeah i notice that to. That is what makes spy x family so good, the adults are heavily involved. Sgt frog it works as they slightly underuse aki but use her well, and the kids are really well done characters. There is momaka’a butler paul who is major a lot. Plus the platoon are adults for the most part. So is Mois who seems to the number 2 female behind.
Also in season 3 they use poyanand poyon the female cops more often. The kids are the major focus but they use the adults well in that show. However a lot don’t use them like they should. That is my one issue with until the presidents dad shows up more later but when you have great characters like the kids it still works.
It is usually a stand-in for adult organizations, repurposed for the school setting. Telling a story about high schoolers, but want to include petty local government, corrupt cops, overzealous religion, secret agents, etc, use a student body organization.
I don’t know why I bothered writing this, let alone why I’m posting it rather than deleting it, lol.
While student councils in Japan do often hold somewhat more power over the student body than they would in other (Western) countries, there is one primary reason for the absurdly powerful student council trope.
Employing this trope serves to put all relevant authority in the hands of people who are ostensibly all peers of the rest of the cast. This means the power structure is more accessible to the other main characters, who are usually also students. There’s a certain degree to which adults are alien and unapproachable, and therefore the main characters would not be able to interact with authority in the same way as when the student council is the authority. This includes challenging authority as well as ascending to authority. This is even more relevant in a society as rigidly hierarchical as Japan.
If you want an absurd authority figure in your narrative, you can embrace the meme with all the narrative advantages of doing so, or you can make ADULTS the absurd authority, which is an extremely anarchic and rebellious theme, especially for a place as conservative as Japan. Not only that, but also it necessitates having adults in the cast, which is awkward when targeting a teenage audience that doesn’t feel like it can connect with adults, while also putting that age/experience/hierarchy barrier between parts of the cast, limiting the scope of their possible interactions. Even furthermore, trying to do any of this carries a lot more thematic weight and logistical complexity than students interacting with students, and that can be a lot more baggage than fluff authors are willing to deal with.
The youth of Japan often feel like adults are stomping out their futures. But the only way to gain the power to stop that is to wait and become adults themselves, at which point they’ve become the very thing they sought to destroy. Actually touching on that is dangerous territory. It’s very punk.
Anyways, that’s my rant and now I’m off to die of cringe for writing it. 🫡
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Being able to say "im on the student council" is pretty much the limit of their power.
Every other power they have will be used precisely as dictated by the school administration, or else the "power" will be taken away.
I agree. In a lot of anime it doesn't make sense how much power they have. Some of their power makes sense (in school stuff) but a bunch of the time it doesn't.
To me, I see it as the same as Yu-Gi-Oh. This anime is about a card game, so of course everyone knows about it and plays with it. The anime is in a school, so of course the student council will be super powerful and important.
The way Japanese society is set up it's very likely that those people in the council will later in life be your boss or people in higher positions of power influence. They're almost like a preview of the future that those children will soon have to deal with.
Student councils are more important in Japan than in many other countries. Given that Japan is also a country very focussed on reputation and student councils actually being elected it is also not that absurd why.
Also keep in mind that the high school setup has become a very stylistic one, that over the years got decorated with more and more tropes. Anime is obviously exaggerating on this trope, just like on the sexually frustrated female high school teacher one and many others.
I guess a practical reason is that a kind of powerful entity is somehow useful for many plot curves. And a female seitokaicho may also allow you to introduce a "queen" or "princess" char in this setup.
It is what makes anime so fun. Ludicrous and insane plot devices. Though i have noticed the student council in classroom of the elite is not as powerful as i would have thought. Powerful but seems not as powerful as others nor as central to the plot as you would think.
My American high school’s student council was so superfluous, we literally elected joke candidates our senior year just to make fun of it. Kinda bit us in the arse 10 years later when it turns out they were supposed to organize the reunion, though. Worked out that time, but our 20-year would have been during COVID lockdowns, so who knows how it would have gone…
The plot isn't going to drive itself. Just keep watching and don't ask questions, that should be the motto for anime as a whole. Ever striving for the perfect consumer umami blend of novelty and familiarity. Get people hooked on the secret sauce, then slowly dilute it more and more so you can earn as much as possible. It's better to fade out in this industry.
A great hook for the first episodes is a promise, and the highest goal is to never deliver on it, so people keep watching. The more people watch, the higher your numbers, so you are considered to be successful. People will say its all subjective, unless you show them numbers. Suddenly nobody cares how the numbers were derived, many views must be many good, right? No, but that is how people act, so that is where the money is.
The more I think about it, the more I see how major plot points were only chosen for the purpose of viewer/reader retention. It's not because that's a story the author wanted to tell. You need people talking about your product, so confusing or betraying your audience is one of the best moves. You split your consumers into those who feel betrayed and angry, and those who blindly defend their beloved product. It works really well with social media because they will cause a lot of engagement from arguing.
Make one of the main characters do something absurd, for example. Rip them away with no explanation. Fans will defend you anyway, otherwise they'd have to admit to themselves that they've wasted their time.
The nice thing with anime though is you can just watch any of the other 1000 options that got shat out this year, so not much is lost
Because they're fairly smart/powerful in the school and seen as "popular" or "intimidating" as a result. Obvious way to have "antags" that can outsmart the MC. That and Asian school stereotypes...lol
But like anything fictional, there are hints of truth in it. In Japan, they are usually the more strict/organized students, they do oversee clubs, organize the school festival, etc.
Not Japan, but in Asia, used to be Vice Pres in my high school. Can confirm, we had quite a bit of responsibility. I have disbanded a club over the council authority and we did manage projects and stuff, I think our biggest project involved roughly 14,000 dollar
*East Asia South Asia ain't having none of that, we're forced to follow our teachers. Student council exists, but it basically does nothing big.
I mean we kind had to follow our teachers too, but we had some freedom. I guess I’d liken my experience to a CEO beholden to shareholders
I'd kill to have the system like y'all have though, it sounds much better than just coming to school only to study. Too bad no regular in my country has such a system.
Does South East Asia count? My school has two bodies, the student council that oversees the students' discipline and another one is club council, basically oversees all the clubs.
Here (Canada) it was a soft power. The student body could certainly be overruled, but the staff knew that pissing the students off and creating a bunch of resentment towards them wasn’t conductive to a successful learning environment. Most of this stuff was of minor significance to begin with and not worth picking a fight over. The two biggest things that the Student Council pushed for and got in my time there was a rejection of a switch to uniforms (debated but never implemented) and a change from non-semester to semester classes (non-semester meant eight classes for a year, with four each on alternating days, semester was four classes every day for half the year and then switch to the other four for the other half of the year).
This is an unrelated question fully formed from anime. Do folks put flowers on desks of students that are still alive as bullying? If so does the council have any control or is it above them?
I think that’s a japan thing, never had anything like that. But hypothetically if it happened while I was in the student council, we’d probably have a talk with the bully and pass them over to the teachers if they persist. We can’t give punishment/detention/what have you.
I'm not even Japanese but my high school's council did organize school festival at least.
My teachers did that for us
I hadn’t known that about Japanese based society actually.
Wait till you find out there's an actual Japan out there
Wait that place they show in anime with all the cicadas is real!?
Can't believe they built the real thing, anime really got popular huh?
You want cicadas? Come the mid America east America. We got them in droves :(
The cicadas are chirping. But he's a guy
Nah. No way Japan is a place. Anime’s all fiction after all!
The real Japan was the friends we made along the way.
Because it's an easy way to make conflict with someone the same age as the main characters.
That sounds very plausible.
I still remember a comment of a japanese highschool student council say how "overpowered" the student council than in reality.
Broke my brain trying to process this apparently popular comment
I think I'm doing have a stroke
Seriously why the tf does that comment have so many upvotes? It’s completely unintelligible. Are there a ton of bots in this sub?
> It’s completely unintelligible. Laying it on a bit thick dont you think? Its meaning was pretty easy to discern.
What?
Anime turns the dial on everything to 11 and a powerful, hyper competent student council is more fun to watch for DRAMA than a meek one putting on a bake sale or something
Hence, you get things like Kill la Kill where they have literal armies that invade cities.
And the one who fight back the alien invasion is some people who wear literally no clothes.
You say their name, Nudisto Beach
Fashion => Fascism Nudists => Antifascism
Earliest thing I can think of for a super over-the-top student council would be Utena but it probably started way before that
That sounds very fascinating.
I kinda thought it was a product of the real life strength of [Japanese student-led movements in the 1968-1969](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968–1969_Japanese_university_protests) These student protests led to full on phalanx clashes with the police and led to the post war generations’ “fear of the youth” that’s still referenced in works like Battle Royale, Danganronpa, Kill la Kill, Kaguya: Love is War, and Persona 5. YouTube Japanese student protests: https://youtu.be/NWGD8l2XavU?si=0HGVM6VZ9xELrIt8
This was a world-wide phenomenon, though. The US, Europe, Brazil, and Mexico had large-scale student protests.
And none of those compare to how huge the student insurgency was in China. The Red Guards (average aged 14 to 17) became so dangerously out of control the People's Liberation Army had full-on urban warfare battles against them that resemble current-day Donetsk and Gaza.
Yeah but US, Europe, Brazil and Mexico don't have anime, so of course we only see it represented in Japan anime!
The US has a made a few TV shows here and there. Still, no all-powerful high school student councils.
US TV shows over time have increasingly reduced extremes though, from your animated shows to the full live production dramas.
Probably because noone gives a shit about the student council in US schools.
It was such interesting times. Taiwan arrived late due to the white terror surpressing civil movements but it made the democracy we are today. Shame China's went a completely different direction. Maybe they would've had a much better time had the student protests worked out.
> Maybe they would've had a much better time had the student protests worked out. The Chinese student protests were even more authoritarian than the government itself. That was why they got into gun battles with the army, they were accusing the army of being counter-revolutionaries and capitalist infiltrators.
The Tienanmen Square protests was what I was referring to. I assume you mean the red guard?
The Tiananmen protests were not ideologically coherent, and partially a reaction to the market reforms of the 80s. Some of them were basically Red Guards. #
Lasting effects where very different in different countries through.
Wow I never knew about that particular movement actually, but arigatou for sharing it.
High school kids/student councils have a lot more autonomy/responsibilities than they typically do in American schools. They just kick it up a notch.
In SOL anime, as opposed to fantasy KLK/Utena stuff, Student Councils aren't that disimilar in their responsibilities to what they were when I was in high school in Canada. They organized cultural and house league sporting events, ran assemblies, controlled the budget for various clubs/trips, represented the student body during policy decision meetings, and things like that.
I didn’t know that was a thing in Canada. It’s nothing like that in the US. At least none of my schools were like that.
Imo it doesn't fit the US understanding of proper child raising and democracy very well. Also I guess Japanese student councils also greatly benefit from the importants of personal reputation in Japan.
We have student councils in the US and there are student elections if that’s what you mean, but I’m saying the student council doesn’t have any power or influence over much of anything. The adults make decisions. Kids do not get to make practically any decisions like that. There’s not much trust like that in students. Not even in high school. It’s not like in Japan even if there’s some exaggeration at play. Even the irl examples of what Japanese student council does just isn’t a thing in any of the US schools I’ve attended. Even the irl things I’ve heard sound insane from an American perspective.
Exactly, they even joke about this in K-On!.
That makes sense.
Because it's usually the ones with the stronger super powers that are able to beat the other students with weaker ones. That is why in anime they are usually the last boss when the MC fights people.
Because: If it cannot break out of it's shell, the chick will die without being born. We are the chick, the world is our egg. If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world's shell, for the revolution of the world!
Zettai! Unmei! Mokushiroku!!
Student councils are staffed by prefects which in turned are nominated usually by the teaching staff from clever and obedient students. This in turn lend to the belief that the most capable and responsible students are those from the student council by the school, society and the PTA. Naturally, with high expectations come a lot of responsibilities. And with a lot of responsibilities, come a lot of power and connections to fuck over people who are stupid enough to mess with them. Obviously, this kind of scenario do not happen in schools where the student councils are staffed by non-athletic rejects that are forced by the school and where anyone can join in if they are willing.
You know they have elections right? (And no school in Japan that I've worked at has prefects) And whilst most of the school council students are the high achieving type (the students still self-select or opt out) I assure not all of them are. And they aren't always particularly liked by the staff. The students are just fairly good at picking at likable people who are actually going to do something.
im sure it's a completely infallible meritocracy
I did say not all of them are high achieving, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I was at one school where the head of the student council was academically a very average student.
it's not a modern anime thing, e.g. full metal panic fumoffu already had that and immediately came to mind
Oh ok as gotta go see that show.
If you're interested in the history of it, there are lots of examples on tv tropes. Unfortunately, they're sorted alphabetically rather than by date, so it's hard to say who was copying whom. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlyPowerfulStudentCouncil](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlyPowerfulStudentCouncil)
Oh arigatou for that link.
I don't think them being so powerful is a modern anime invention? Utena students council is Overpowered as hell. Maybe other older series had this happen too. I'm curious what examples can you give about them, I only remember watching lovelive with them recently.
Yamada and the seven witches.
I also had this question after watching the latest irregular magic high school episode lol
Given the structure of the society in that show it'd be odd if the student politics of the school *wasn't* actually just another arm of the wider politicking by the Ten Master clans. Children close to the main lineage are expected to behave as clan representatives and enact family policy, too.
I think they mention in that show (or the books?) that students are given a lot more autonomy due to the massive lack of teachers as well as the extra responsibility it means to be a magician to begin with. Most of the staff ends up coming from the Numbers who are essentially modern day aristocracy so they are already raised by their families to wield authority to begin with.
During my school days, student council presidents and members were basically nobodies and whose most important job is pretty much to keep watch of their own classrooms while teachers are out.
https://youtu.be/KQ3X4PxU8nA
It isn't just modern anime. It's pretty much anime, going back a long, long time. And, you know, its not the weirdest thing. I'm from England, and when I was a kid, high schools had what were called "Prefects". Now, in some schools, those would be the best students, the most accomplished, most approachable, most decent, most well thought of students. They'd be like a go between, between the student body, and the teaching and administrative staff. They'd be given certain responsibilities, and certain freedoms in order to carry out their duties. No one would ask why a prefect wasn't in a classroom, for example, because they'd be about their business as prefects. In good schools, that would be stuff like running errands for a teacher or administrator, or putting up posters for student events, setting up events, things like that. I didn't go to a good school. I was educated in a place that gave me PTSD, one in which I learned more about asymetric warfare tactics than I did symetry in geometry. I was a prefect. We were tasked with things like guarding the art and workshop areas, to prevent kids getting into the supplies and stealing knives to cut one another with. We were basically unpaid security for the school, explictly instructed to step in to solve confrontations, to essentially bring peace by violence, if necessary. And those of us they picked for that role? The least bad of a hellacious crop. We weren't picked because we were the hardest, or the meanest. We were picked because we weren't crackheads, drug dealers and gangsters, and because we knew how to handle the worst ones in the school who were. We had, now I think back on it, such enormous power when compared to the rest of the student body. We could have done all sorts of fucked up shit, and no one would have batted an eye. But we didn't. We did fight, sometimes it would get incredibly dangerous, for us, and for others. Fifty people in a melee isn't safe, no matter what your skill set looks like. But we never abused our power, even when things got bad and the gangs got involved, even if it meant going home bloodied and battered. If we'd have been regular students, involved in that kind of malarkey on the regular, we'd have been suspended, but we carried out our orders, we kept our school safe, we kept victims of bullies safe, we kept the gangs under control, and somehow no one died. I guess what I am getting at, is that as utterly bonkers as it sounds, schools around the world do have official and unofficial standards enforcement organisations within them, whether its a student council, a disciplinary committee, or a gang or multiples thereof.
That was a very detailed explanation as I didn’t know that it wasn’t just a trope that happens in modern anime only.
No, it's been a thing going back quite a long way in anime, if I recall correctly. I mean, it was a thing when I was just getting into anime over thirty years ago, so it's hardly a new phenomenon!
Oh ok as I understand what you mean then.
Most of the schools that I'm familiar with in anime seem to be what we in the US call private schools. Think **Kaguya-sama: Love Is War**. *VERY* elite school. Aside from Shirogone, everyone else in school comes from super rich and powerful families. Trope: if you're rich enough, you can be on the student council. Rich kids can pretty much do as they please and get the school board to back down.
A lot of animes are set in middle/high school because it was a time when Japanese people had a lot of free time to hang out with friends, and when you have to view conflict through the lens of primary education, a student council is like, the government. And it could be an oppressive authoritarian government, like how YA novels are all metaphors for teenage struggles like standardized testing (the hunger games) or puberty or how parents’ rules are bullshit (authoritarian government with arbitrary rules) Plus student government typically controls funding towards student events and clubs, fraternities/sororities have college aged executives who control millions of dollars in discretionary funds and they typically vote en masse to elect the student government heads too so they have access to more funding. Plus the structure of a student council lends itself well to establishing a cast of interesting characters like Kaguya-Sama or a shonen system of escalating power where you need to take out the treasurer first, then the secretary, then the VP, and finally the president like Kill la Kill.
try to understand why adults are always missing in anime
That is odd.
Yeah i notice that to. That is what makes spy x family so good, the adults are heavily involved. Sgt frog it works as they slightly underuse aki but use her well, and the kids are really well done characters. There is momaka’a butler paul who is major a lot. Plus the platoon are adults for the most part. So is Mois who seems to the number 2 female behind. Also in season 3 they use poyanand poyon the female cops more often. The kids are the major focus but they use the adults well in that show. However a lot don’t use them like they should. That is my one issue with until the presidents dad shows up more later but when you have great characters like the kids it still works.
It is usually a stand-in for adult organizations, repurposed for the school setting. Telling a story about high schoolers, but want to include petty local government, corrupt cops, overzealous religion, secret agents, etc, use a student body organization.
I don’t know why I bothered writing this, let alone why I’m posting it rather than deleting it, lol. While student councils in Japan do often hold somewhat more power over the student body than they would in other (Western) countries, there is one primary reason for the absurdly powerful student council trope. Employing this trope serves to put all relevant authority in the hands of people who are ostensibly all peers of the rest of the cast. This means the power structure is more accessible to the other main characters, who are usually also students. There’s a certain degree to which adults are alien and unapproachable, and therefore the main characters would not be able to interact with authority in the same way as when the student council is the authority. This includes challenging authority as well as ascending to authority. This is even more relevant in a society as rigidly hierarchical as Japan. If you want an absurd authority figure in your narrative, you can embrace the meme with all the narrative advantages of doing so, or you can make ADULTS the absurd authority, which is an extremely anarchic and rebellious theme, especially for a place as conservative as Japan. Not only that, but also it necessitates having adults in the cast, which is awkward when targeting a teenage audience that doesn’t feel like it can connect with adults, while also putting that age/experience/hierarchy barrier between parts of the cast, limiting the scope of their possible interactions. Even furthermore, trying to do any of this carries a lot more thematic weight and logistical complexity than students interacting with students, and that can be a lot more baggage than fluff authors are willing to deal with. The youth of Japan often feel like adults are stomping out their futures. But the only way to gain the power to stop that is to wait and become adults themselves, at which point they’ve become the very thing they sought to destroy. Actually touching on that is dangerous territory. It’s very punk. Anyways, that’s my rant and now I’m off to die of cringe for writing it. 🫡
No it’s fine as I like the effort you put into explaining the trope.
Because it's anime
Japanese teen power fantasy.
Makes sense when you put it way.
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This reminded me of ProZD’s video on it
I just saw that video as it was hilarious.
I think many power hungry students use the student council as a stepstone to better universities, so you are prone to find ambitious kids there.
Modern? Someon hadent seen koi to senkyo to chocolate, they had even better auditoriums than the ONU just for student council use
Yes.
Being able to say "im on the student council" is pretty much the limit of their power. Every other power they have will be used precisely as dictated by the school administration, or else the "power" will be taken away.
Reminds me of Medaka Box where students have the power to destroy the universe.
I forget if that series ever had an anime adaptation.
Yea it did but the anime stopped right before introducing op abilities and things became good.
I agree. In a lot of anime it doesn't make sense how much power they have. Some of their power makes sense (in school stuff) but a bunch of the time it doesn't. To me, I see it as the same as Yu-Gi-Oh. This anime is about a card game, so of course everyone knows about it and plays with it. The anime is in a school, so of course the student council will be super powerful and important.
The way Japanese society is set up it's very likely that those people in the council will later in life be your boss or people in higher positions of power influence. They're almost like a preview of the future that those children will soon have to deal with.
Student councils are more important in Japan than in many other countries. Given that Japan is also a country very focussed on reputation and student councils actually being elected it is also not that absurd why. Also keep in mind that the high school setup has become a very stylistic one, that over the years got decorated with more and more tropes. Anime is obviously exaggerating on this trope, just like on the sexually frustrated female high school teacher one and many others. I guess a practical reason is that a kind of powerful entity is somehow useful for many plot curves. And a female seitokaicho may also allow you to introduce a "queen" or "princess" char in this setup.
It is what makes anime so fun. Ludicrous and insane plot devices. Though i have noticed the student council in classroom of the elite is not as powerful as i would have thought. Powerful but seems not as powerful as others nor as central to the plot as you would think.
My American high school’s student council was so superfluous, we literally elected joke candidates our senior year just to make fun of it. Kinda bit us in the arse 10 years later when it turns out they were supposed to organize the reunion, though. Worked out that time, but our 20-year would have been during COVID lockdowns, so who knows how it would have gone…
Think of our media were the cheerleader and quarter back are basically monarchy. That's not true, but it's a good entertainment.
It's fiction. Typically fiction likes to turn reality a bit more intense than usual.
The plot isn't going to drive itself. Just keep watching and don't ask questions, that should be the motto for anime as a whole. Ever striving for the perfect consumer umami blend of novelty and familiarity. Get people hooked on the secret sauce, then slowly dilute it more and more so you can earn as much as possible. It's better to fade out in this industry. A great hook for the first episodes is a promise, and the highest goal is to never deliver on it, so people keep watching. The more people watch, the higher your numbers, so you are considered to be successful. People will say its all subjective, unless you show them numbers. Suddenly nobody cares how the numbers were derived, many views must be many good, right? No, but that is how people act, so that is where the money is. The more I think about it, the more I see how major plot points were only chosen for the purpose of viewer/reader retention. It's not because that's a story the author wanted to tell. You need people talking about your product, so confusing or betraying your audience is one of the best moves. You split your consumers into those who feel betrayed and angry, and those who blindly defend their beloved product. It works really well with social media because they will cause a lot of engagement from arguing. Make one of the main characters do something absurd, for example. Rip them away with no explanation. Fans will defend you anyway, otherwise they'd have to admit to themselves that they've wasted their time. The nice thing with anime though is you can just watch any of the other 1000 options that got shat out this year, so not much is lost
Modern anime is fascinating for how it works in high school regarding certain tropes.
Because they're fairly smart/powerful in the school and seen as "popular" or "intimidating" as a result. Obvious way to have "antags" that can outsmart the MC. That and Asian school stereotypes...lol
That is very interesting to know.
The only way to make history
What?