ThatAnimeSnob

Medaka Box is a deconstruction of school comedies, so get ready to be triggered because of it. It starts as a goofy school council president helping out students and then changes to a fighting shonen about ridiculously overpowered teenagers. Said school council president is able to defeat everyone with a single punch from the very beginning, making this One Punch Man all over again, but with a girl. You might as well call it One Punch Woman, or since she loves running around in her panties, One Pantsu Woman.

Despite that, Medaka Box is not super famous or highly praised for being a deconstruction, because that word has lost its meaning and is now used only when someone wants to convince himself he is not reading garbage. This includes everything made by Nisio Isin, the guy who can only write softporn and has every pretentious overthinker making him sound like a genius for being meta as fuck.

And by meta, I mean having the entire manga taking place in a school, where the only things you never see are parents, teachers, adults, or any form of education. Meaning there is nothing school-like happening inside a school, because the setting has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. It’s just there as a cheap and lazy way to have teenagers being in one place so any shit you want to see happen, will happen. Which is why buildings are constantly blown up, psychotic teenagers are constantly sexually molesting each other, people are constantly being severely injured, and not a single police officer ever comes to check out what the hell is going on.

So basically, it’s another one of those chuuni stories where the entire planet is a generic high school full of oversexualized teenagers who are constantly fighting each other with cool superpowers they gained simply because they really wanted them. There is absolutely no realism whatsoever, and thus becomes pretentious when it tries to have a serious theme going on somewhere in there. The heroine for example is the definition of a Mary Sue. Perfect at everything, always on a higher moral ground, and always trying to help out everyone.

She is obnoxious for her constant smug and boring for never struggling to defeat someone. How do you expect any semblance of theme exploration to be taken seriously when your protagonist is always trying to reform the bad guys into good guys with the power of friendship, and a way of thinking that never goes beyond treating everything as either black or white?

Ah, but wait, there is a catch, she is intentionally written to be unsympathetic, as part of making the point more clear. It goes for a Mob Psycho 100 approach, poking fun at overpowered characters, who despite being perfect at everything, they are pressured psychologically because they don’t feel they are human next to everybody else. This is why Medaka constantly needs weaker people around her. Not because she needs assistance in defeating the bad guys, since that is something she can easily do by breezing through the school’s problems in her underwear, but because she doesn’t want to lose her touch with humanity.

The way I describe it makes it sound like excellent material for pretentious overthinkers. So why isn’t it super popular or analyzed to death like One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100, when it’s essentially the exact same thing? It’s definitely not because it didn’t have an anime adaptation to promote it. It was adapted, by Gainax of all studios, where it bombed horribly despite the bouncing boob physics. It’s also not because it wasn’t made by the super famous author who made the masterpiece of harem deconstructions that is the Monogatari franchise. It should have worked by mentioning his name alone.

Despite these credentials, nobody cares about it because down to it, no matter how subversive they try to make it seem, most people dropped it right away because of the unsympathetic Mary Sue. Most of the rest lost interest soon afterwards, because there is not much going on in terms of theme exploration. You get everything the story has to offer in twenty chapters, with the rest just regurgitating the exact same story structure for every new character that is introduced. He is psychotically evil, he has some strange power, Medaka and her friends kick the crap out of him, he becomes good, then another character appears and the cycle starts anew.

If you compare it to something like Neon Genesis, a show made by the same studio, which also had an unsympathetic protagonist, you see how you were always kept engaged there because something new was happening on every episode, which was far more than learning about the special power and backdrop story of someone who will not matter after a couple of pages. Neon Genesis also had fan service but even that was kept to a reasonable amount, wasn’t ever present, and was way more creative than the done to death way it’s done in Medaka Box.

There is nothing of interest in it once you have read enough titles to stop giving a damn about the premise or how meta the jokes are. It’s a case of not hitting any of the right buttons, despite having good ideas.

In summary:
- Unsympathetic Mary Sue
- No tension because she is undefeatable
- Runs out of juice very fast
- Ruined theme exploration because of done to death sex jokes you can find on every ecchi comedy