Medaka Rox.
Medaka Box is a shonen manga from the distant faraway year of 2009, that ran for four years in Shonen Jump and has maintained a relatively small cult following. Having read it myself a few times now, I can honestly say that Medaka Box is one of the dumbest, strange and awkwardly-written manga I've seen... yet I kinda love it.
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| Kumagawa is the best. And yes, he could beat Goku. |
The premise of Medaka Box is deceptively simple, on first impressions. There's an elite high school (because of course there is) and our main character is Medaka Kurokami, who has just recently taken on the role of Student Council President with a staggering 98% of the vote. She basically strongarms her best friend Zenkichi Hitoyoshi to join the council as her General Affairs Manager, and the two undertake tasks given to them from a suggestion box, known as the "Medaka Box".
Sounds easy enough, right? A friendly manga with some comedic shenanigans, power of friendship and romance prevails, and there's a drop of fanservice to keep the manga relevant for the teenage crowd.
Except, that's not really what happens.
For the first 15 chapters, sure. Medaka meets some wacky characters, including Zenkichi's rival, some overly-dramatic swimmers, and a rules-obsessed nitwit, but then a character called Myouri Unzen appears and commits near-murder, turning the series from an over-the-top slice of life series, to a full shonen action manga with attack names, impossible feats and literal transformations. This isn't too uncommon, and thankfully the pacing is tight enough right now that the series made the genre transition without any issues.
During the next arc, the series goes as balls-to-the-walls shonen as you expect, even with the limitations of high school students. As I watch a character literally control a person's body and mind by using lightning skills, I can't help but remember when the series originally started with Medaka's biggest issue being she can't pet a puppy, which was actually a terrifying hunting dog, so it was up to Zenkichi to figure out how to tame it. This isn't like Dragon Ball Z, where the transition took years and hundreds of chapters to go to space. Medaka Box is already one step away from a Raditz reveal and we're only in the second arc!
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| References! |
Interestingly though, this is when the series nearly got cancelled. We're only 50 chapters in, and people are bored. So the author, Nisio Isin, decided to shoot his plans up further and introduce the character known as Kumagawa Misogi.
To be blunt, Kumagawa is one of my all-time favourite characters in any manga/anime.
And honestly, Kumagawa is a perfect example of what I love about this series. He's like the embodiment of Nisio Isin's writing at it's best, being an unpredictable wild card that can never seem to make up his mind on what he wants to do, winging it when needed, and abandoning ideas with very little fanfare. Wisely, Kumagawa would remain a constant throughout the series and elevate every scene he's in, even after his arc is over. He saved the series from cancellation, and it's no wonder he won the top spot in popularity polls almost every single time.
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| Dude... too far. |
But okay, we've got a weird character. How does that make this series as messy as I claim it does?
Well, that's because his character, and indeed his entire arc, gently introduces another character that is absolutely batshit insane to me; Ashin'in.
And without a single warning, Ashin'in turns the series from an action story into a romance story... while also talking about how she's living in a manga, how the series needs to be cancelled by her power, how Zenkichi has to defeat the "protagonist" Medaka by becoming the protagonist herself. She's literally a broken overpowered character concept taken to the most ridiculous and cartoonishly laughable of heights, with a motivation as stupid as it is impossible. She herself even states she has 12,858,051,967,633,865 abilities! How much more of a joke can this be? This series started with Medaka tracking down a culprit for abusing shoes, and now we're at the level of... this?!
Yeah, I wasn't exaggerating with that number I gave you. "This is but a taste of my power."
There's a lot of little things as well that often comes across like the writer is making it up as they go along. Medaka goes through new transformations like they're Tiktok videos, scrolling past them without care, there's an entire mini-arc where Kumagawa tries to enlist a bunch of elites onto his side by winning a card game that goes nowhere, the final boss of the series is a random Satan-looking asshole who uses Japanese wordplay to break bones, and he's practically defeated by a random character who literally joined the group because... she doesn't even know, she was just kinda tagging along for lols?
If Medaka Box isn't for you, not only do I understand, I can't even argue with you on it. It's stupid, it's weird, the character development of Medaka is so confusing that at one point, even the series itself turns against her (no I'm not kidding). And yet, it has a scrappy charm to it that makes it so appealing to me to read. It's like when you buy an indie game by three people instead of a big AAA budget game, and instead of lasting 200 hours, you only get 5 hours of gameplay and you play as... I don't know... a mariachi frog that needs to invade the moon. Sure, the other one is probably better and you'll have a great time, but the mariachi frog is so ridiculous and worth talking about that I can't help but admire it.
I hope I've kept this article spoiler-free enough for you to understand my point, and maybe check it out for yourself if you have the free time. Just don't come crying to me about what the differences between Minus, Plus, Abnormal, Not-Equal and whatever bloody other term they use actually are. I don't know, and I doubt the writers did either.
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