Ever wonder what happens when you try too hard at something?
Well, in the world of Japanese entertainment, you get Medaka Box. Minor spoilers ahead.
I can't even call this entertainment. It's more akin to torture; a joke gift you give to a friend. There's literally no way to read this manga that will leave you with a positive feeling when you're finally done.
Why? Let's start with the story.
STORY: 3/10
If this is your first time with any anime or manga, this story will seem innovative. If you have seen at least one anime or read at least one manga in your entire life, then you've most likely
...
witnessed a similar plot to this or better.
If you're more experienced with the medium, you'll be rolling your eyes. Set in a prestigious high school where there are seemingly no adults, first-year Kurokami Medaka wins the position of student council president by a whopping ninety-eight percent of the popular vote. How? Well, it's Medaka Box. More specifically, it's Medaka herself. She's good-looking, super smart, super strong, super persuasive, and super busty. I'd love to go on, but I'll save that for later.
As soon as she's given the position, she sets up a suggestion box (or "meyasu" box, from where the titular wordplay comes) and encourages the student body (A.K.A. the entire school) to drop in suggestions or problems, for which she offers to help 24/7/365. Having the mention of this box in the title itself would infer that it's a really important item throughout the whole story, right? Wrong. It's completely forgotten a couple dozen chapters in. Only about two to three times is the box ever brought up later. Additionally, most plot points or backstories aren't brought up until very late, usually for the sake of pure convenience or to make a gag, which always fails to extract even a mild chuckle.
Time to address the most glaring problem with Medaka Box: Until about chapter 20, I was reading it under the impression that this was a manga written with lots of effort, was meant to be taken seriously, and reflects what the author (and artist) wanted the reader to take away from it. It was not only until I did a little more research that I found out this was a satire, or parody. Upon reading that, I said out loud to myself, "what the fuck?"
That's right; this manga is meant to be a satire of every imaginable generic shounen trope. It's too bad that NisiOisiN has no idea how to do satire. Never is there a single tell or sign in the beginning that it's of that genre, and instead goes on happily assuming the reader already knows what it's doing. I had to go out of my way to have someone let me know that it was a satire, and it was only after that realisation that every attempt to subvert some trope became more and more jarring, as if it were saying, "Guys, just to let you know, this is all ironic. You know what would normally happen in a generic shounen? Well, that's what we're doing, except ironically!" It goes from being incredibly ambiguous with its purpose to having so little faith in the reader's intelligence that it feels the need to constantly point out when it's subverting something, which is about 90% of the time. Also, its attempts to cleverly break the 4th wall are played so childishly that it'd make even a fan fiction look amazing.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that Medaka Box was serialised on Weekly Shounen Jump. Constantly throughout the series we get characters saying how rudimentary and childlike manga in that magazine are, while it sets itself up to be so much more mature simply because it subverts everything. People make this out to be a taboo of criticism, but I'm not afraid to say Medaka Box is utterly pretentious. It thinks it's so much better than the rest, yet is exactly the same, if not worse.
Furthermore, how the hell would you criticise something like this? If it's always being ironic 100% of the time, then it's impossible to rate it; it's always going to be an instant 10.
Manga did some stupid shit? Hah, no worries, that's the point, it's SUPPOSED to be bad! We just set ourselves up for an impenetrable defense against criticism! A foolproof excuse for every time we may falter!
The reason it's so detrimental for Medaka Box to try to subvert literally everything (emphasis on "try") is because that's all it eventually becomes: A manga that's just pointing out typical shounen tropes and how clever the author is by announcing that it's subverting them. It does this so often that it destroys its own identity, and any later attempts to create one instantly fail. Not only that, but it's also devoid of genre. What IS Medaka Box? A slice of life? A drama? A battle shounen? A sports manga? A martial arts manga? A psychological manga? A romance? A comedy?
The correct answer would be, "everything." But a more correct answer would be, "nothing." It crams so many genres in one package and tries to pull them all off at the same time that none are ever fully realised. In trying to be a little bit of everything, Medaka Box succeds at being a whole lot of nothing.
ART: 3/10
It's difficult not to associate "art" with just the quality of the drawings; however, in manga, "art" also refers to other things like style, backgrounds, paneling, expression, and consistency.
Akatsuki Akira's art in Medaka Box is pretty detailed by itself, even though most characters have bags under their eyes all the time and a criminal case of sameface. Fortunately, in terms of quality, it's not bad. It's in everything else that the problem lies.
Character designs are exaggerated to the point of being ridiculous and downright offensive to look at, with a few exceptions. The most notable examples of this are the villains, especially ones like Miyakonojou and the generic antagonists in the first few chapters. But oh wait, they did it on purpose, so it's okay!
No it isn't.
If that was on purpose, then was the questionable paneling, disconnected movements and the artist's lack of ability to draw hands also on purpose?
Yes, the artist can't draw hands. You can see how hard he tries to hide hands in his art, whether they be out of panel or in pockets, but when they show, 90% of the time, they're all in one single position. I recommend you see for yourself and imagine that for 194 chapters.
Backgrounds are done well enough, so I have no complaints there, though it's what you'd expect in your average manga. One gripe I have with the backgrounds is that they never make anything truly stand out in the world. Everything looks just as much like everything else as, well... everything else. All in all, they're average. They do their job, but I never found myself in awe over how a certain background was drawn.
On a smaller note, it looks awful in color. Characters that would be drawn with black hair have a really ugly brown color, and Shiranui's bright blue hair gets on my nerves. And speaking of characters...
CHARACTERS: 1/10
And now, the moment of truth.
Characters can make or break a series. For Medaka Box, it's the latter. Apparently, in a satire like this, there has to exist at least one character whose sole purpose is to subvert a certain trope. I know I'm sounding like a scratched disc, but this manga absolutely LOVES drilling in the fact that they're trying to be meta right into the reader's brains.
You have your average guy who tags alongside the protagonist because he's her bitch, is average at everything, does average things, and reacts accordingly to every situation. In other words, the most boring conceivable human being. Now, later in the story, he has some basic development, but it's all so predictable that you wonder why they didn't make him like that from the start, since pretty much no other character gets any development, aside from bad guys turning good.
And it's not like the rest of the main cast is any memorable, either. Not only are they pretty much idle for the majority of the story, but they only show up when absolutely necessary, save for Kumagawa, but he comes later.
As for the rest of the cast... who the hell are these people? Their names are completely forgettable, their designs are not even worth mentioning, and they all only ever get a few lines before the manga decides it's had enough of them. As a desperate attempt from the author to convince the reader that these characters didn't just phase into existence as soon as the story saw fit, they throw in a vague, quickly mashed together backstory during a battle. Seriously, six characters were introduced in one chapter only for them to be instantly defeated in the next and never brought back. Speaking of characters, there are many. And I mean like, more than this manga knows what to do with. They're all different variations of the same generic archetypes anyway, so if you just skip every page where they appear, you'll miss out on absolutely nothing. It's a privilege to even call these soulless, concave shells, "characters," anyway, given how many times I just used the word.
But you don't want to hear about them (and frankly, neither did I); you wanna hear about our lovely, beautiful, strong, athletic, busty, generic, overpowered, conceited, arrogant bitch of a protagonist that is Kurokami Medaka.
What is the point? As in, what is the point of Medaka existing? She's perfect in every way. She can do everything right, and if she doesn't know something, she'll just learn and master it in the blink of an eye. "Mary Sue" would be an understatement for this sort of blemish on the art of writing itself. She's good at everything, she never fails, she's popular, and there's no way to defeat her. Coupled with the fact that she has about five different god modes, in what way do you ever expect any battle with her to have any sort of tension? There simply is none, because you always know she'll win. It's established from the beginning that she'll always win. You're plowing through 194 chapters simply just to see Medaka win over and over again by pulling something out of her ass or bending the rules of storytelling itself to her favor. Was she made to be this formulaic and boring by design?
Of course. Medaka is singlehandedly a worse protagonist than even Amagiri Ayato or Kirito, because they at least have a personality. Medaka has nothing. She does things for the sake of people. For the sake of the reader. She does what the reader wants her to do all the time. The entire concept of this character is so inoffensive; so formulaic; so safe, that you never expect anything out of her than what you always would. Medaka will always win, whether you like it or not. She'll never do anything stupid, or screw up, or say anything out of character. She exists for the sake of filling in the protagonist slot.
Oh yeah, Kumagawa.
Kumagawa Misogi could be considered the saving grace involuntarily stuck between this trainwreck. His role in the story is that of "the loser," and in no lighthearted way. He serves the purpose of being the person who is always destined, or cursed, to lose. He can never beat the main character or anyone simply because he's the bad guy and not the protagonist. He's come to terms with this fate and puts himself down with those who are weak to study them in order to strenghten himself. That sounds great. If only the author didn't make him talk about how it's all so different from a stereotypical Shounen Jump manga, then I'd like his concept even more. On top of his power being cool--though not properly used most of the time--his design doesn't give you eye sores, which is always a plus in Medaka Box, saddening as it may be. Unfortunately, he's not our main character, but he's still redeemable and memorable enough to stick in your mind even after the PTSD has worn off.
ENJOYMENT: 1/10
What is there to be taken away from this manga? All that's visible is a perfect example of how not to write anything ever. In fact, this series would be more informative than anything if read from that perspective. There's just nothing enjoyable about this. The characters are bad, the interaction is bad, the art leaves much to be desired, and the story is dreadful and just keeps going. As soon as you think it's reached a satisfactory conclusion, it suddenly keeps going, immediately jumping into a new worthless arc that by the third time would make anyone go, "there's more...?" The more the story goes on, the more you want to see Medaka dead and everyone else doing something with their lives. What you've seen here you can see anywhere else, and done better. Please do not waste your time on Medaka Box, even if by mere curiosity.
A 1 might seem harsh, though. After all, I just mentioned some redeeming aspects that would save it from the title of absolute worst.
However, this isn't a review that tries to appeal to a general audience; it's one that expresses an opinion. If there was no such thing as perfection to the mind, the 10 on a rating scale wouldn't exist, making the highest score a 9, and since a 9 would be highest, an 8, so on and so forth. The same applies for the 1. Simply having some redeeming factors doesn't mean one can't think something isn't absolutely bad, and vice versa. The nice animation in Sword Art Online alone doesn't make a person want to keep watching for forty-eight episodes; similarly, okay art and one good character don't make a person want to read through the entirety of this mistake.
OVERALL: 1/10
This manga is not fun. This manga is not interesting. This manga is not engaging. Please, by all means, stay away from Medaka Box. Please, don't watch the anime thinking it'll be better. And if you ignore all of this, then at least don't raise your expectations too high, otherwise you'll be as criminally disappointed as I was. I wanted to like this series. I went into it thinking, and hoping it would be good. But by chapter 12, I simply couldn't continue. I gave up on that notion. As soon as that happened, everything fell right into place exactly how I thought it would. It's predictable, it's degrading, and it's insulting. Not just to the reader, but to itself. I wish Kumagawa could make this manga have "never happened."
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Feb 10, 2017
Medaka Box
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Ever wonder what happens when you try too hard at something?
Well, in the world of Japanese entertainment, you get Medaka Box. Minor spoilers ahead. I can't even call this entertainment. It's more akin to torture; a joke gift you give to a friend. There's literally no way to read this manga that will leave you with a positive feeling when you're finally done. Why? Let's start with the story. STORY: 3/10 If this is your first time with any anime or manga, this story will seem innovative. If you have seen at least one anime or read at least one manga in your entire life, then you've most likely ... |
