@Phabiohost said in I’ll Become an Elegant Villainess Vol. 2 Discussion:
Still, why would any other world make S above A. It's so dumb that it's amazing we ever let that shit slide here on earth.
I was curious, and I went down the rabbit hole with ChatGPT, and I thought it would be fun to share my findings.
Japanese bloggers all seem to point at Keirin (esssentially a specialized form of cycling in Japan), which in 1983 established the idea of a スター級 athlete, or S級 athlete for short.
https://www.keirin.jp/pc/static/beginner/more-about-keirin/history.html
The American English equivalent would be essentially singling out superstar athletes as being in a class of their own.
However, those same bloggers suspect that the abbreviation only worked because concert goers were used to thinking of S席 seats as premium seats that were better than A席 and B席 seats, and that's an interesting tangent too.
At some point, concert venues in Japan transitioned from an architectural section naming system to a numbered system (一等、二等、三等) for pricing seats at concert venues, and evidence of that exists in a description of pricing arrangements for the Imperial Theater in 1911.
https://nippon.zaidan.info/seikabutsu/2003/00693/contents/0008.htm
This description also mentions a premium 特等 seating, and if we combine that with the numbering system, we see that it was also something seen in train ticket pricing at the time.
As such, the transition to a numbered tiering with a premium 特等 tier at concert halls could be speculated to have been due to capitalism and industrialization seeing the benefits of adopting pricing systems that emerging middle class audiences were already familiar with. That's just my own unsupported speculation, though.
Some concert venues then appeared to have gone from sequential Japanese numbering to sequential English lettered tiering (A席、B席、C席) at some point after that, without any particular need to create an equivalent for premium 特等 pricing. While there is likely much earlier evidence of it, you can at least see it in a flyer for a violin recital from around 1931.
https://www.daion.ac.jp/about/anniversary/1931-1945/
I can only assume that capitalism then eventually decided that those same venues needed premium 特等 pricing, and since Japan translated those seats as SPECIAL seats rather than PREMIUM seats, the S席 pricing tier was born. Again, while there is likely much earlier evidence of it, you can see it in a flyer for an event in 1968.
https://news.1242.com/article/167889
Anyway, instead of thinking of it as S being before A logically, it's more that S is an abbreviation used to describe something exceptional; people set up a tiering system, only to realize that there were things that deserved to be categorized in a distinct class of their own, like a superstar athlete or a special seat.
In summary, giving an S rank is a concept that inherently requires a Western influenced world that uses words that begin with S that mean the same thing as 特等 or a truly exceptional athlete, and requires a linguistic culture similar to Japan that abbreviates anything and everything it can.
