Disclaimer: I wrote this out way back when I was catching up with UnOrdinary (just never got around to proof-reading it). Iirc Season 1 had just concluded and all the hate Arlo got over the overwhelming majority of its runtime was still fresh in my head. Please bear that in mind when reading.
So. UnOrdinary. There's two people I want to really talk about, or rather, how incredibly toxic the social environment in this world is for everyone involved in it and the two characters that show this most blatantly: Arlo and John.
I never really understood all the hate Arlo got. I'm talking about back when the comments on the Webtoon chapters would consist of 90% "Asslo"-shaming. I feel like that happened because we, the audience, failed to understand what it was like being a royal. And not because Uru-chan didn't hint at it enough or explain it badly or something, no, we simply didn't want to admit that John's view of Arlo was skewed. Badly skewed.
The way this world is set up, you have basically three "types" of people, classified through the ranking system, and based on estimates of where you will end up in the system, kids are educated in very different ways:
High Tiers are taught one thing and one thing only: they're to lead, keep everyone else in check, make sure everyone behaves. Anyone who doesn't is their personal responsibility, fault and and direct consequence of their failure to do their duty. Also that ends always justify the means, no matter what. See Arlo, Remi, Sera before meeting John and rebelling.
Mid Tiers are directly or indirectly taught to feel inferior to High Tiers. To compensate for that, they are also explicitly taught to feel that Low Tiers are second-rate (or rather, third-rate) humans. Worthless. The story doesn't really feature focus characters from this group as of now, which might be why I can't think of a named character in this group off the top of my head. But these are the aggressive side characters that have Low Tiers do their homework, the kind that default to ranking battles whenever they feel questioned or that group that kidnapped Sera when it first got out that she had lost her ability.
Low Tiers grow up being taught they're the dregs of society. No matter what they accomplish in life, they will never measure up to High Tiers or even just Mid Tiers. Take the beating, keep your head low and move on. Keep yourself in the shadows, a life of being ignored is the best you can hope for. High Tiers rule and get whatever they want, by force or right of birth, Mid Tiers take the spoils, you live off the waste.
So when Arlo and John first clashed, it was destined to end badly.
What Arlo saw was a dude systematically rebelling against the order he had worked his fucking ass off on restoring for what he felt was everyone's safety and best interest. Arlo didn't see the institutional racism and bullying this was enabling. Why would he? All he's ever been taught to believe was that this order was the only thing keeping everyone from killing each other, and his experience with his role as King when Rei graduated and everything went off the rails only reinforced that belief. What he saw was a person risking to instigate what basically amounts to a school-internal civil war, and for no reason at all. Of course he'd look into it. Of course he'd try to stop it, by any means necessary. Remember, "the ends justify the means" and it's HIS responsibility to keep the status quo intact, HIS job as the King to keep everyone in their place, HIS fault if something goes wrong.
Meanwhile John was born as and lived a lot of his formative years at school as even less than a Low Tier. He was a cripple. Basically a punching bag ready for anyone to let their frustrations out on. All he saw was people with even the slightest sliver of power forcing their will on those below them. All he saw was authorities not only protecting this system, but enforcing it. All he saw was a a selfish world where everyone would use whatever power they had to get what they want. And then he became King. By this point, all he had ever known was force, so that's what he turned to. He was only in middle school, but his heart was bitter, angry and cold. He turned to what he knew and failed to see behind the curtains. He was (and still is) a child, how could we expect him to? So when he got expelled and forced to attend that "re-education class" he was in a very bad place. He was a kid that had only known hate and violence from the world, an angry kid incapable of seeing beyond his (for very little of his own fault) skewed world view, a lost kid in desperate help of help, guidance, and love; but what he got was even more hate and violence. And this time, it was very specific and targeted hate, violence with a purpose. No wonder the poor kid seems to have two separate personalities, they were literally BEATEN INTO HIM. Make no mistake, what he went through in that "re-education" class is torture, gaslighting and brainwashing. And I don't use these terms lightly. John is obviously showing an extreme trauma response and likely already had some form of PTSD (I am not a licensed professional, I am only going off of what little I read for my own interest) from being put into the position of King with no clue of how to actually fulfill the duties of what those duties even are (no wonder everything went to shit), and that asshole from the authorities used those cracks to completely break the kid.
Tl;dr: Season 1 John and Arlo are amazing antagonistic character foils to each other, John being the Lancer to Arlo's Leader if we're going by the 5-man-band dynamics, and the only reasons Arlo got as much hate as he did is the somewhat unusual choice of making the Lancer the sympathetic POV character and the Webtoon comment system being EXTREMELY polarising and detrimental as FUCK for any actual discussion for the chapter at hand. It's the Twitter of media discussion if we're being honest.
