Great Teacher Onizuka Chapter 105 Discussion
- Thread starter SmithBrian
- Start date
- #6
The romantic high school nostalgia must be real for a gender/country that only works all day and never comes home except to barely eat a little dinner and sleep. There's a reason the romantic nostalgia is so severe. Being a salaryman is probably great for job exclusivity but it swallows your whole life, I just can't imagine living that way, only holding on for retirement and finally looking around and smelling the daisies in your sixties, and then thirty years of living off the government.
Japan is messed up, but this manga is great.
And then women stay home all day with nothing to do. It just seems psychotic, the absolute longing in a story like this, just to get away from how hectic and addicted work life is, you always get that sense from manga before the financial crisis especially.
Miyazaki had it, every creator in anime/manga had it up until the crisis changed a lot of things. The easygoingness definitely went away. Maybe some seniors still writing manga have that but modern manga has so much anxiety wrapped up in it.
It feels like a breath of fresh air in COVID times and the new Omicron surge to just sit back and enjoy life in this manga, having a jungle adventure, young love, silly times, pranks, the usual horror-island arc with a school-festival type haunted house. Boy, it just feels like my soul got a break from all that with this arc.
And it's much better than the model-agent arc from before, I found that tedious.
GTO is such a classic. Time travelling back to when times were way better around 2000 was so freaking nice. So much modern anxiety with climate change, like the EF5 in Kentucky, Omicron, the last president, globalization. This was great, peace and love for my soul.
A manga like this really goes to show what a gift writing can be for the reader even years down the line. An absolute breath of fresh fun air. So much manga is justifiably a downer these days. But circa 2000 everything felt possible and fresh and fun. I don't know what Japan's economy was specifically going through but it probably wasn't as bad as the last ten years have been.
The only problem is getting my hands on more physical volumes.
