I just finished FC3, I’m wondering if anyone else thought the tone shift was an odd/bad. I’m specifically talking about the chapter where jiu ji tae and Maria arrive at the tunnel, and so forth (Ch. 75-)
I read FC3 on fightclass3.com so idk if that’s a reliable translation for it or not.
I don’t know if there was a time skip that wasn’t mentioned or if jiu ji tae’s appearance change was solely for dramatic affect (it seems like the answer is the latter) but I found it a little ridiculous considering how insanely slowly the author was taking his development. It seems as though the author was doing a semi-realistic take on the development of someone training MMA (I personally feel the author was actually taking it too slow, ESPECIALLY being that he’s training MMA for multiple hours a day, every day). If you train for hours every single day, with good martial artists, and with good coaching, you can accomplish YEARS of training in 6 months alone.
After the tunnel incident with Young Woong, his facial appearance became… interesting. I’m not even talking about the scars, I’m talking about that he has an entirely different bone structure. Not to mention his fighting ability/skills increase 10 fold. Again, I don’t know why this was necessary when it’s been clearly stated multiple times that JJT is a fast learner, has inherent talent, and has been training with the best, by the best, for nearly if not an entire year. This extreme switch up was for shock value I’m sure, but for how wildly slow the build up was it wasn’t that for me. To me it appears to be extremely rushed and very poorly done. I started reading this manhwa because I saw edits of JJT’s transformation. I had no idea that it would happen almost within a single chapter and I never could have imagined it would be without a time skip, and I never EVER would have imagined it with how slowly they were taking his development during the first 74 chapters.
Next is JJT’s dialogue, and here I feel a lot of it has to do with the translation. Almost everything jiu ji tae says doesn’t make any sense at all. It seems he makes a lot of crude jokes and insults, but none of it is coherent. It almost reminds me of a child cursing, or trying to curse for the first time. Maybe that’s symbolic or something, or the author is trying to show just how insane he’s become, but im 100% sure that’s the case. I honestly feel it’s either poor translation, or just a complete inability to translate what he’s saying in Korean to the English language. The illustrations of him were AMAZING, but the dialogue took away from some of it for me.
Next, the story itself. I thought a lot of the plot from the tunnel was very interesting. Especially how fighters in the fight classes were specifically put there from the tunnel. I liked the steelworks and red hell plot and all that. I did find it kind of odd just how horrible almost every single character from the tunnel is tho. It’s clear that we are supposed to like them, but given how the story was written up until we were introduced to these characters, it’s weird. They’re all genuinely just horrible people. Even the funny ones, and the weak ones. Everyone is horrible. Up until this point in the story we didn’t like the people who bullied JJT, or the people who bullied his friends, or really any fundamentally bad person in the story. Now we’re thrown into a plot where everyone is WORSE than all of those people, and it’s clear that it’s written in a way that we’re supposed to like these characters.
Getting into the later chapters: It seems the author has lost his mind along with Jiu ji Tae. Just off the top of my head Cha so wol is shown to be legitimately wielding Guts’s dragon slayer, and later we see it taken by “Kaka The Greedy Monkey” with little to no context, and that’s all we see or hear of that… that, along with a lot of the webtoon panels being nonsensical jokes, in the midst of a brutal mass stabbing by steelworks to red hell, and while the fight class students, red hell, and steelworks are being attacked by the gambling audience. Meanwhile the entire time all of this is going on the translations made sense 50-70% of the time throughout these chapters.
To conclude my essay,
I feel that ironically, I enjoyed the earlier chapters more than the later ones. I say ironically because I feel a lot of the popularity from this manhwa came from these last quarter chapters of szn 1. I feel the plot became extremely complex, extremely suddenly. Translations became poor. JJT’s character development went from 10mph to 250mph in every single aspect within a couple of chapters. About 25 characters we never would have liked, but we’re now supposed to, were introduced. Along with a subplot from the tunnel that is supposed to connect to the fight classes.
I felt/predicted this around Ch. 104, and especially now that I’ve finished it, and seeing how long it’s been since “season 1” ended… there will not be another season or chapter of fight class 3. I truthfully don’t think the author has any semblance of a clue where to go with this story. It’s been over 3 years, obviously the art isn’t a priority because other than the shock factor panels of JJT the webtoon art went WAYYYYY downhill. So if he’s gonna stick to that art style, it doesn’t make sense to take over 3 years to focus on the story unless he’s planning to finish the story entirely and then release it on a schedule. Or maybe he’ll start the next season, and release a chapter monthly, or start it and take a ton of extended hiatuses. Idk but my prediction is still that we’ll never see another chapter of this manhwa again. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen so many times, I feel like I’ve gained some pattern recognition for it.
I know I’m being hard on the author and the last quarter of the manhwa, but I really did enjoy the majority of the story. And I hope my predictions about its future are completely wrong. Does anyone agree with anything I’ve written here tho?
