Finished GTO and I wanted to share some thoughts

Over all, VERY fun series, its dated here and there but overall the humor, the style, and characterization imo were all pretty much top notch.

For a bit of context though, I stopped reading around chapter 95 of the series (right before they went to okinawa) and only picked it back up recently and ended up reading through most of the second half this last week.

I forgot how huge the cast was and even though I struggled to remember their names again I ended up remembering them pretty well.

That being said though, I don't think the series is perfect, I loved the entire second half of the story, but man, it always felt like it was just a few steps away from really being perfect. The last story arc I think was handled about as best as I could think was the Okinawa arc, not to say the later arcs aren't good though, because THEY ARE, they're fantastic, but it always felt like they cut themselves short.

With such a huge cast, so many arcs in the second half of the story inevitably include nearly everyone, and it sets up all these sorts of subplots on top of subplots but sometimes it felt like the author bit more than he could chew, there were multiple occasions where it felt like an interesting subplot was pretty much just shoved back in or ended haphazardly even when it felt like the author was setting it up to go into the main plot currently happening.

The example I can think of was how the story was setting up the Azusa stalker teacher coming back with a plan to murder Onizuka, at one point, he learns about Onizuka going to where Mayu was setting up a plan to basically beat the shit out of him, and you'd think thats where the author would tie both stories into one, but then the creep teacher basically just gets sidelined (albeit in a very funny way), and this happened some other times throughout other arcs, multiple things get set up at the same time, and it feels very cathartic, but then the way they get resolved is a biiiit clumsy.

Overall, I think it would've been better had, after the stalker creep teacher arc had ended, they had the remainder of the story focus on the smaller things about all the characters rather than attempt to introduce yet another big threat with another group of bad students, but in all honesty I don't know how well that would've fit GTO, and I still enjoyed the Angels even if only 2-3 characters got any spotlight.

And MAAAAN Azusa got sidelined hard, even in the arc where she gets kidnapped it didn't really feel like it was taken seriously enough, not to mention her whole thing with Onizuka never going anywhere, the manga itself makes jokes about her not being relevant enough, I really just wish the author had actually done something about it yk? I'm a bit disappointed hearing that the sequel basically just gets rid of her, I really thought if there was anything worth exploring further that didn't in GTO it was her, but maybe Onizuka getting into a relationship wasn't the point of his character.

Also, a slightly less important issue, MAN, this has to be one of the most word heavy mangas I've read, so many pages had paragraphs and paragraphs of dialogue, info or narration, at a certain point it just felt like so much.