#anywayyyy people are soo boring perhaps the manga only wants to tell you the interesting stuff

[beanghostprincess]

I have seen a wild amount of people complaining about the context of Wind Breaker and how "unrealistic" it is for the characters to go to school but without any teachers or adults being shown or protecting them and... First of all, realism is not what you're going to find reading a Shonen and if you want a full-on high school experience, read another manga. It is very common to skip those details as a writer because they are not interesting in the slightest and they have confirmed multiple times that all of their grades are awful, so you won't get a silly little arc about them studying, because they directly don't. To say it is "unrealistic" is to ask for boring, pointless, plotless occurrences in a Shonen manga about fighting. Are people even hearing themselves when they complain?

But it's not only from a writer's perspective skipping what's unimportant that justifies the lack of teachers and responsible adults, but the plot itself. At first, it is confusing, but I think you only have to look a bit deeper into the cultural context of the story to understand why there aren't teachers/adults shown.

I'm around chapter 100, so I am not sure this gets explained further in the manga, but my theory as to why they behave this way is pretty simple, honestly: They are poor and in ruins, and adults with the power to change things do not care about them. Easy as that.

Whether it is real or just an exaggeration of what's actually going on, it has been shown countless times (especially in Umemiya's backstory, explaining directly how authorities don't care about the kids or anybody, really) that the whole city is made for outcasts and left to rot by the government. It is not some apocalyptic bullshit, it is stuff that happens every goddamn day in real life. They go to school but they aren't shown studying and the place itself is a mess. We only see Umemiya running the school but it is confirmed that there's staff and somebody grading them somehow, despite never being shown studying or doing anything other than patrolling. But they have shown us that the city used to be extremely problematic and chaotic and only recently have things started to change for the better. Most villains and even main characters are orphans and live on their own. There's a whole arc about a group of kids being left to rot in poverty without any means to study or live a normal life. Even our main character lives on his own in a horrendous apartment. Like--

I believe you have to be blind to not see that, if this isn't just literally some people turning their backs against poor kids in a place in ruins, it is at least an exaggeration of these things happening in real life. Because they could have classes and teachers and everything you want in the manga to make it more realistic, but this is, after all, from the perspective of teenagers who can't rely on anybody but themselves. There's only so much a teacher can do, and we know most of them do nothing for these kids. So if it is "unrealistic" perhaps you aren't aware of what damn hyperboles and metaphors are, but this is from the students' points of view, and when you live in a place like this, it doesn't matter how many teachers there are or police, because they won't help. So they are directly erased from the story to be replaced with Sakura's point of view of Umemiya running the whole place.

So I think that instead of looking for realistic interpretations of their high school experience, perhaps you should empathize a little with the actual real high school experiences of people like them.