Randomly thought about what common theme all the enemies Medaka ever faced shared. Of course, one would think that "born winners", "born losers", and things like that have nothing at all in common. It took a reread of Miyakonojou Odou's backstory and its implications for his clash with Medaka for everything to start clicking.
It started with Kurokami Medaka herself. She wanted dearly to connect with other people, but her own talents and uncontrollable drive to better herself created a gulf between her and others. If it weren't for her childhood friend Hitoyoshi Zenkichi and the student council members she gathered around herself, people who truly valued her as a person and reached out to her, she would've just been the beast of meaningless talent embodied by her War God Mode... and this is before we even find out that Abnormalities were a thing.
Abnormals like Oudo were all people who were being trapped by their own talents and personalities into being something less than people. Each one's true heart was, to varying degrees, becoming isolated from the world and even themselves by the respective "wins" they each lived and breathed. The members of Class 13's Flask Plan were becoming mere caricatures of their true selves; seemingly empty shells made of super abilities and shallow quirks. Miyakonojou Oudo himself best demonstrated this; he made the mistake of isolating himself into order to better control his megalomania and electromagnetic-control power out of a sincere desire to help other people, but isolating himself just made his Abnormality even worse.
Then came the Minuses. If Pluses were in danger of becoming caricatures of their respective "successes", then Minuses were becoming caricatures of their respective "defeats". They all had failings and hopelessness that isolated their hearts from people just as much as Oudo had inadvertently done to himself, with Kumagawa Misogi embodying the pure essence of what was causing it; sheer defeatism. They might've just kept on deteriorating until they finally became "nothing", never managing to become people, but thankfully, our heroes realized that the only chance of understanding Class -13 was to actually TRY to understand them, something nobody had before been able to bring themselves to do. This is what forced Kumagawa's defeatist attitude into a corner and made him seek a proper victory or defeat, something Medaka could only accomplish by first becoming the same kind of "incomplete character" as he was. It was only at that point that Kumagawa Misogi as a person could be revealed. From that point onward, even though he remained a Minus, he managed to become a quite admirable person in the eyes of others.
Then came the impartial non-human, the Not-Equal named Ajimu Najimi. Someone who hadn't been a real person for literal ages, she had already long become a mere caricature defined by all the flashy stuff about her. Her 10 quadrillion skills, her three-trillion-year lifespan, her 700 million terminals, all transformed her into a "character" whose involvement rendered winning and losing equally meaningless. Not only that, but all those supernatural qualities distracted everyone, even Medaka herself, from the REAL problem; Ajimu Najimi's inability to see reality as "real". What's more, Medaka was herself on the path of becoming just like that; her uncontrollable need to fulfill her role as "someone who lives for the sake of strangers" was now beginning to isolate her from her friends, even making it so that her enemies were more her "friends" than her actual friends were. Her "The End" upgrading to being able to complete Skills just by hearing about them, and even learning Minus Skills besides, were all an indication that Medaka would eventually become the very same kind of caricature that Ajimu Najimi was. Both of their caricatures NEEDED to be broken apart in order to save them as people; Medaka was saved when her role as an "unbeatable main character" was undone by Zenkichi, and Najimi was saved when Medaka, a part of the reality that was too absurd to be "real", pulled her back and basically said "who even cares if it's too absurd to be real!?"
Then came a trifecta of people trapped by caricature. Tsurubami Fukurou, who had once "died" from being a caricature of the "father figure" Medaka needed, then plotted to settle for varying caricatures of his sister and Medaka's mother. The Doubles of the Shiranui clan, whose entire life purpose was to become caricatures which shadow "real" people, with Shiranoi Hansode suffering enough from this fate to start considering herself a Minus. But the prime example of all is, without a doubt, Shishime Iihiko; a living message of the ancient hero of that name, immortalized by Doubles. In this form, absolutely nothing about him was a person at all. Just like Ajimu Najimi, anything about him as a person was drowned out by the flashy things, by his being unbeatable in a fight, by nothing ever recovering from his destruction. Like a game of "telephone", the true meaning, the true heart, of Shishime Iihiko was lost in the passed-down message. THAT Shishime Iihiko was the kind of "hero" that Kurokami Medaka was in danger of becoming for so long. It was only after the message himself was cancelled, his unbeatable power erased, that his goodness as a real person could finally be revealed in his remaining "echo".
"Medaka Box" isn't just a story about shounen battles themselves. It's not just about super talent, hopeless failure, unreality, or even "heroes". It's about the heart and humanity underneath all that, the core that gives such shounen battles meaning in the first place. It's about abnormally competent, insanely hopeless, absurdly detached, facade-ridden characters who are, at the end of the day, also people. |
