The manga series was able to investigate these potential S&M aspects in much greater detail than the series can (though the closing montage works in a fair amount of nudity and chains). About the only episode which gets as wild as the manga is the first-season episode "Math and the Vampire." The story, in both manga and anime, suggests the pressure high-school students feel to excel in subjects like math, for Tsukune is briefly enslaved by evil teacher Ririko, who dresses in sexy outfits but apparently only gets turned on when her favored student mindlessly spouts mathematical theorems. Appropriately, Ririko's form is that of a Lamia, which in Greek mythology was a female creature that murdered children.
I wrote this without actually re-reading the original Akihisa Ikeda manga-story on which the anime "Math and the Vampire" was based. Now that I've reread it, I believe that the anime is actually a little wilder in its imagery than the original manga, though I stand by the overall judgment that the anime series avoids some of the S&M-themed humor that pervades the manga series as a whole.
As I thought about the two, it occurred to me that Ikeda missed a bet in his conception of a math-teacher who enspells students into endlessly reciting theorems. It's long been common knowledge that the Japanese school system places intense demands on adolescents to excel in subjects like math, since the better one's grades, the better will be the students' choices of learning institutions. Now, as I mentioned in the anime-review, the protagonist Tsukune drifts into a "high school for monsters" precisely because his middle-school grades didn't propel him to higher institutions, so the germ of pedagogical expectations appears in the series. Yet in "Teach Me," Ikeda doesn't really dovetail Tsukune's concerns for his grades with the older generation's insistence on excellence-- a demand which contemporary Americans see incarnated in the so-called "tiger moms," mothers who ruthlessly egg their children on to academic excellence.
Ikeda seems to have loosely linked this "drive to excel" with eroticism, since Ms. Ririko, a lamia (monster with a woman's body and serpent's tail), "trains" her students by using her tail to drain the pupils of emotions and instill math-formulas in them. Yet the anime makes this "projection downward" a lot more explicit than the original manga tale.
Neither story is dense enough to yield a myth-work, but as far as potential goes, this one rates as 'fair" rather than "poor."
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