In Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma, the "magical high school" concept takes the form of Totsuki Academy, an elite middle and high school campus dedicated to educating the next generation of master chefs. The hero is Soma Yukihira, and he formed an intense rivalry with Takumi Aldini, among others -- albeit to lesser extents. Shonen rivalries can be a lot of fun, but some of them end up wasted.
For example, Alice Nakiri's rivalry with her partner Ryo Kurokiba. Alice is the cousin of Erina Nakiri, and she is fiercely determined to use her gastronomy expertise to one-up her famed cousin. To that end, she regularly practices against her partner Ryo Kurokiba, but compared to what Soma and Takumi have, this rivalry is undercooked, to say the least.
Alice Nakiri juggles two rivalries, and she formed the second one as a means to handle the first. As a young girl, Alice fell behind her God Tongue-bearing cousin Erina Nakiri, and she knew that she had to find another tool for victory. So, in her girlhood, she boarded a plane courtesy of Nakiri International and toured the globe, and on the coast of Denmark, she came face to face with a very special boy. Already, Nakiri International had caught wind of an aggressive, genius boy chef in the country, and Alice was dying to meet him.
She encountered Ryo Kurokiba, a lonely young chef who had learned to rely only on himself and his competitive drive to survive the world of professional cooking. Alice admired Ryo's fierce determination and sheer skill, challenging him to a duel with the stipulation that, if she won, Ryo would become her assistant. Alice won, thanks to her gastronomy knowledge and training, and she and Ryo have been feuding ever since, keeping each other sharp with regular duels. After two years of this, Ryo won his first cook-off against his new rival, and they kept it up once they entered Totsuki's middle and high schools.
The rivalry between Alice and Ryo still served a purpose in high school: to keep each other sharp and alert for when the time came for a true challenge. For the most part, though, this rivalry is used for comic effect in the episodes of Food Wars!, and it is not often shown or even mentioned, aside from a few token gag scenes or lip service. It is a far cry from the progress that Megumi Tadokoro made, for example, when she drew inspiration from Soma to become a better chef.
In contrast with Alice's modest arc, Megumi rapidly blossomed into a formidable, confident chef who made incredible strides, going from a near-dropout to a member of the Council and a competitor in the BLUE tournament. Then there's Takumi Aldini, who started off the series as complacent and boastful until he lost to Subaru Mimasaka and began to shape up. Like Megumi, Takumi made remarkable strides and covered a lot of ground, since he had a clear goal and the emotional fuel and motivation to get the job done. He, too, became a Council member and entered the BLUE tournament.
Alice, on the other hand, showed little progress. She started off as an expert on gastronomy, and she concluded the series the same way. She made few, if any clear innovations or breakthroughs, and she even failed to pass the crooked test during the end-of-year exams, while students like Soma, Megumi, Takumi and others succeeded. Alice lost to Soma in the Autumn Elections and had a moderate performance during the Moon Festival and she made a strong first impression during the weeklong training camp early on. But that was all; she had no personal growth to speak of, and she didn't seem to benefit much from her rivalry with Ryo, either.
Takumi became Council material and the genius Soma Yukihira reached even greater heights in cooking thanks to his rivalry, being able to defeat Asahi Saiba and his Noir minions as a result. But not Alice. She kept herself sharp against Ryo, evidently, but nothing more. In fact, Alice's and Ryo's respective personalities, and their cooking styles, ended up as little more than gimmicks, and the same could be said of their rivalry. But if they had gotten something more out of that rivalry and grew as chefs and as people, then they could have been culinary stars.
