The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Classroom of the Elite Season 3

After putting a stop to Class C's plans, the students of Class D, now Class C, find themselves in the middle of a new exam. Meanwhile, the new student council president, Nagumo, challenges Horikita's brother, Manabu, to a personal duel during this exam with their pride on the line. Fearing that Nagumo may decide to abuse his power in the coming year, Manabu calls on a favor and enlists the help of Ayanokoji. Now, Ayanokoji once again finds himself working behind the scenes to help investigate Nagumo and guide his classmates through their latest challenge.

Classroom of the Elite Season 3 is based on a light novels of the same name by Syougo Kinugasa and Shunsaku Tomose. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

While this is far from the most exciting episode of Classroom of the Elite, that's not necessarily a bad thing. This episode subtly does a lot of heavy lifting. On one side of things, it sets up all the intrigue for the new arc of the story—with our heroes' class being split up by gender and matched with others from different grades. On the other, it reminds us of the looming threats of Kushida and Sakayanagi while, at the same time, putting their antics towards Ayanokoji on the shelf for a bit.

As for the immediate threat, the class challenge this time is an interesting one. While it looks like a team building exercise where no one looses as long as everyone works together, it's another trap when you really start to think about it. The trick here is that, should a group fail, only the leader and another of the leader's choice are expelled. Therefore, if you can manipulate things so that you're not the leader or the person the leader hates the most, you can weed out your enemies by sabotaging your own group.

Of course, as the episode is basically all setup, there is no payoff of any kind in this first episode. However, as the start of a third season where 99% of viewers are already invested in the characters and story, I think it's safe to say you have some leeway when it comes to starting out slow.

It's a new season of Classroom of the Elite, and it sure is more Classroom of the Elite. For as much as last season's cliffhanger threatened to destroy much of the show's status quo, this premiere felt pretty in line with everything the show's done up to this point. The students are caught up in a new kind of exam, this one involving putting them together in groups to accomplish an as-of-yet-explained task. Kushida remains as aggressively antagonistic towards Horikita as ever, and Ayanokoji is working through some new plan that the audience isn't yet privy to. The biggest actual change from last season is that Class D has now been bumped up to Class C, which feels like it should be a big deal, but the last time the show talked about advancement, it sounded like Ayanokoji was working on a specific plan to move Class D up, so instead it just feels like we missed something important.

Since a lot of this premiere is just set up, there's not too much to chew on, but it does set the stage for some potential future shakeups. While Sakurayagi revealing to Ayanokoji that she knows his real identity hasn't yet gone anywhere, she does suggest that Class B could be an even bigger threat and that Ichinose is potentially hiding something behind her friendly exterior. We also get a new antagonist for the season: the new student council president Nagumo, who Horikita's brother fears might have some dangerous plans in the coming school year, and ropes Ayanokoji into helping him.

Speaking of Ayanokoji, while I didn't have a particularly strong opinion of his behavior in the first season, his intentional emotional manipulation of Karuizawa throughout the second season really drove home how much of a sociopath he truly is. Thus, I feel pretty confident in saying I do not care for him, and honestly, I kind of hate his guts. With that in mind, I am curious how much of his manipulative tactics will be addressed this season. While I'm not naive enough to think he'll suffer any serious setbacks, much less punishment, it would at least be nice to see his viewpoint on human relationships get openly challenged, and maybe have him gain some semblance of empathy for others. Whatever else happens this season though, I expect these kids to engage in plenty more plotting and backstabbing, and if you're here for that, then I imagine it won't take too long for the show to deliver in spades.