Medaka Box
a review by Lun4rbutterfly
a review by Lun4rbutterfly
I first read this manga back when I was 16 years old, and at the time I didn't fully understand it. I followed the discussions online, calling it this great "deconstruction" of Shonen Jump manga with its 4th wall breaks and blatant shit-talk of older titles. I identified a bit too hard with Kumagawa and his "good loser" mentality. However as a grown ass adult who pays taxes and engages in wage slavery every weekday, my reread of the manga has convinced me that this is no "deconstruction" but a full blown satire. By "satire", I mean the Jonathan Swift type, that just presents something and expects you to find it ridiculous without necessarily having to directly tell you what it's making fun of. "Deconstruction" is honestly a made up fandom term that only children and adults who think like children use to make themselves feel smart without having the substance to back it up. Medaka Box presents itself as what most shonen fans at the time would call the "ideal" shonen manga in a straight-forward manner, but this presentation is ultimately hiding a satirical critique of shonen stories.
Medaka Box is presented in a way that shonen fans would generally call well-crafted so a straight-forward reading is technically possible, even if it's inevitably not the ideal. There's plentiful creative paneling that conveys both action and the characters' emotions. In fact, the fights in general are pretty creative in their approach. They have a combination of tactics and brute force that make for an entertaining time. Akira Akatsuki shows his hentai experience with how he draws the girl characters with their hard-coded hourglass figures, cutesy (in the hentai way yes you know what I mean) faces, and constant panty-shots. I'm sure if I were a straight guy I might have enjoyed the eye candy. Characters are over the top and edgy. The plot is structured in a way that allows combat to solve all the problems, with the characters enjoying the fighting the same way they would a sport. There are plenty of twists and turns, along with flashbacks, tearjerkers, and gestures towards grand concepts and themes. Regardless of anyone's value judgements for these traits, they are present in this manga.
What makes this presentation "ideal" is related to what people wanted in their shonen during the time period. Medaka Box was serialized from 2008-2013, which was a very interesting time for shonen fandom. Here in the English speaking world, people constantly complained about how popular shonen manga would use tropes like the power of friendship and illogical plot solutions for fantasy battles because they believed that these storytelling elements somehow made any series they appeared in shallower and more childish than series that they don't appear in. However, they still ultimately wanted a shonen story at the end of the day, so instead of moving on, they complained. The people wanted their commercialized cartoons for teenage boys to have "dark", "mature", and "self-aware" concepts implemented. They would get mad at Naruto for not being like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. The word "deconstruction" got introduced into the lexicon and singlehandedly inspired anitubers to create the worst arguments known to the internet. While I don't know Japanese and am not the most familiar with Japanese anime fandoms, a number of manga and anime that prioritized shock value over all else started popping up during the time period such as Attack on Titan, Mirai Nikki, etc so I can only imagine they came to a similar conclusion. Medaka box, being serialized at the same time that this mentality was the norm in fandom spaces, fits the mold for many of these ideal traits. The characters make plenty of self-aware quips about Shonen Jump. Dark concepts like incest are present and accounted for. The edge is ramped up for many characters. These characteristics are here while executing the "shonen formula" of the time: A teenager who was born special does slice of life shit to introduce themselves and the rest of the main cast for the first arc, the series pivots to battle-centric storytelling as the cast fights against a evil-for-evil's sake villain, the cast fights an edgier yet sympathetic villain, and all of this eventually escalates to the point that the protagonist fights god. All of this with plenty of friendship speeches, last-minute power-ups, and objectified women along the way. In a nutshell, shonen fandom wanted a by-the-books shonen story, but with irony poisoning and shock value so that they wouldn't feel embarrassed for liking a children's IP.
The satire of Medaka Box lies in the fact that it delivered exactly that. If read in a straight-forward way, this is a series that presents itself as this idealized shonen story. It has all the theoretical building blocks of what people at the time wanted in their shonen, and in practice it's riddled with thematic contradictions due to having to conform to this standard.
The final product is a big nothing burger if looked at in this way!
I am of the opinion that "generic" shonen, despite whatever gripes I have with them, can still have good stories that are worth acknowledging because they are told sincerely. In the straight-forward reading, Medaka Box's attempts to conform to shonen storytelling conventions while attempting to add the desired "adult themes" and "self-awareness" of the era end up making it look shallower than its "generic" contemporaries. I am reading this as a satire though, so I consider these storytelling elements effective in conveying a message: a critique of shonen.
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