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linkspooky · 4 years

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Kumagawa + Ajimu = 0

Medaka Box is a school battle manga that isn’t at all about fighting. Instead it’s about how the characters connections to other people humanize them. How abnormals, are no more than normal people when they connect with others. The greatest example of this in the manga is Medaka and Zenkichi, the superhuman girl who becomes human through her connection to her normal and everyday best friend.

Medaka and Zenkichi have been together their entire lives, to the point where they both sort of build their identity around each other. Medaka was only able to see herself as a person because Zenkichi saw her as a girl first and not a genius. In other words as Medaka says, you’re the person that made me, me. Medaka’s most formative memory is not with the people who praised her as a genius or showered her in affection, but with the one person who always treated her like normal.

However, this post isn’t about them. Instead of looking at one of the most positive relationships in the manga let’s look at one of the most negative ones.

Medaka and Zenkichi build each other up, but Ajimu and Kumagawa destroy each other. Ironically for the exact same reasons. Kumagawa and Ajimu are also the only ones who treat each other as humans, and they aer both at their most human and vulnerable when around each other, but unlike in Medaka and Zenkichi’s case this is what leads them to hurting each other.

This is because Ajimu is a shadow of Medaka, and Kumagawa a shadow to Zenkichi, and they were both built as characters to foil a more negative aspect to their counterparts, and even in their relationship to each other reflects Medaka and Zenkichi’s like a reversed and inverted image in a mirror.

Instead of talking about two good children let’s talk about two terrible brats.

1. Kumagawa and Zenkichi

Kumagawa and Zenkichi are both untalented people who want to stand out amongst the talented and special people. However, the differnce between them is not something so simple as Zenkichi works hard, and Kumagawa is lazy and always tries to take the easy way or cheat his way through.

The light novels even say so. That Kumagawa is a hard working person that always puts all of his efforts into everything he does.

When he took up the position of Student Council President, I hadn’t expected it at all from him, but unexpectedly, as if he’d had prior experience, Kumagawa-kun properly completed his Student Council President duties.

He did his work in an unpleasant, indescribable manner that could really only be described as “completed”, and it was a very unpleasant manner from the point of view of a General Affairs Manager, but even so, even if the work couldn’t be considered splendid, I couldn’t deny that Kumagawa-kun was truly a hardworking person. [x] translation by @polaristranslations

The difference between them is Zenkichi’s efforts have always led to self improvement. They get rewarded. He always progresses forward as a person. However, Kumagawa’s efforts never get rewarded. He never improves, he only gets worse, he only spirals down. Zenkichi could be given one thousand tries and make it on the 999th time. Kumagawa would go all 1,000 tries without ever winning once.

In the first place, even if you got infinite lives as Mario or as Luigi, you’re someone that still wouldn’t be able to defeat Bowser—but still, since you ended up dying anyway. [x]

Internally, the characters are almost the same person. They’re both relatively normal guys who try their hardest at whatever they do, and they both have aspirations to be among extraordinary people. Zenkichi wants to keep up with talented people because he believes that makes him worthy of Medaka. Kumagawa wants to keep up with talented people because he believes the world only allows talented people, or people who are strong to be safe and happy, and he idealizes it as an escape from the constant chaos and misery of his life, while at the same time feeling spiteful towards them because he’s left out.

This is what Kumagawa also tries to get Zenkichi to understand about him in their first fight. Zenkichi and Medaka’s views on people acting out of trauma, or bad victims are a little bit black and white, they can’t possibly udnerstand why someone would want to lash out and hurt others.

You know how a lot of people misinterpret Catcher in the Rye as the main character being unlikable, just because he presents his trauma in unlikable and not straight forward ways. Because he doesn’t directly ask for help, but rather conceals his trauma and rambles around the point. Because he at no point cries out help me like a victim? Therefore people have a difficult time seeing him as one.

That’s basically Kumagawa and Zenkichi’s entire relationship. Zenkichi cannot accept Kumagawa, because Kumagawa never asks for help in straight forward ways. he never presents himself as a beautiful victim to save. In reality thought, Kumagawa is Zenkichi, just with a lot of trauma piled onto him. Kumagawa is aware of this and tries to make Zenkichi understand, but Zenkichi just doesn’t.

This is even lampshaded in an omake. That despite pretending to be the most terrible villain he can possibly be, Kumagawa’s personality is weirdly friendly and approachable once you get to know him. It’s because unlike Medaka, Kumagawa actually values the people around him as individual people. He values close connections instead of just trying to blankely love everybody. Which is what Zenkichi’s strength over Medaka is as well. They both are people that can connect to others on a personal level, they can harmonize others around them and their greatest strength is how they use that as a group rather than being individually strong on their own. Neither Kumagawa or Zenkichi actually need to be all that strong because their strength comes from empathy and their ability to understand other people.

They’re both natural support characters who think they have to be the ones fighting on the front lines. They also both lose most of the fights they get into, Zenkichi’s only real victory is against Munakata at the start of the manga. Even when he beats Nianami, he says he’s still the weakest member of the group. When he goes to the jet black birdal ceremony to save Medaka, he completely fails to save her and gets stabbed and becomes a hostage instead. Even both of them are essential to Munakata’s development, as Zenkichi becomes his first friend, and Kumagawa becomes the first person that Munakata ever killed. They both go out of their way to try to help him, but in opposite ways, Zenkichi as a friend, and Kumagawa helps him by making himself a victim to Kumagawa’s killing instinct.

They’re constantly comapred to each other in the manga, and they constantly act in opposite ways trying to accomplish the same thing at heart. Zenkichi even understands Kumagawa even when he pretends he doesn’t.

Kumagawa is obsessed with cleanliness because he sees it as a relief from the constant chaos of his life, because he thinks he’s forced to love ugly, and unpleasant things because that’s all he will ever see. Zenkichi sees through him because he shares that same obsession, he acts like an average guy who doesn’t want to be dragged into the extraordinary but he loves beatufiul people, he’s obsessed with Medaka and part of him still sees her as something above the ordinary instead of treating her 100% like a normal girl. They carry the same contradictions within each other, it’s just for Kumagawa they blow up in his face a lot harder than they ever do for Zenkichi.

They both loved Medaka. They both met Medaka when she was two years old, and tried to give her an answer to the meaning of her life so she would stop worrying.

You could even say Kumagawa is just Zenkichi without a Medaka in his life, but that’s not entirely true. Kumagawa has a Medaka, it just happens to be Ajimu who is terrible.

2. Medaka and Ajimu

Ajimu is the logical end result of Medaka’s ability to infinitely copy and gather skills. She now has quadrillions of them and is basically undefeatable. She too, like Medaka is a character that never has once lost in her life, the same way the main character of a manga never really loses. For both of them their incredible talent over others makes them feel completely inhuman and alienated from all around them, Ajimu just pushes it to an absurd extent crossing the line and becoming a “Non-human.”

They also both are trying to pursue insane goals when they meet each other. Ajimu wants to create a perfect human, and Medaka wants to make everyone happy. Not because they genuinely want those things, but because they both want to fail. Medaka wants to be human and feel like she’s equal to everybody else. Ajimu wants to fail and prove that reality is real in front of her and alsot hat she’s a part of it.

They’re both absurd girls, and absurdly lonely. They’ve lived their entire lives in almost complete isolation because no one has seen them as human. It’s just Ajimu has accepted that declaring herself a “Non-Human” whereas Medaka struggles with her desire to be a normal girl. If you think about it nobody in their lives has ever seen them for them. Medaka’s father sees her as an heir who has to take over his entire company the moment she turns eighteen, her other father saw her as a replacement for his sister, his brother obsessed over her to the point that it was creepy, every adult around her either put her on a pedestal or they thought she was terrifying and blamed her for their own inadequacies. The only person she had in her life who remotely treated her like a normal girl was Zenkichi.

Ajimu was someone who can get anybody to like her in the whole school.

「She hadn’t been such a sadistic character in the past… What happened to the kind and considerate Anshin'in-san that everybody loved…」

“……?”

He was giving off a rather timid aura, which was unusual for him. [x]

Because if everything is fake then, Ajimu can act however she wants. If they’re not real people, if they’re just programmed npcs then she can just pick the right responses to gain points with them. That’s why Ajimu is equally capable of being a very caring and loving person, but also cruel and sadistic. Neither of them are the real her, she’s equally both because she has nothing to ground her personality on, she doesn’t see other people as people.

Which is exactly what Kumagawa calls Medaka out on, which happens immediately after he reveals how his “love story” with Ajimu ended. Both Medaka and Ajimu have a trouble seeing other people as people due to how much they have been isolated and put on a pedestal their entire lives. However, both of them are both afraid ot come down from their pedestal as well and admit they’re wrong. Their entire identity is built around being girls stronger than anyone so who else would they be if they weren’t that?

Ajimu is just the negative result of such an attitude. Medaka is preechy and looks down on other people, but it’s never treated that seriosuly as a flaw by the plot. It’s always looked on as something well intentioned and misguided, but ultimately just something she does out of ignorance. Whereas, Ajimu has full on malice for the people she doesn’t see as people.

Ajimu’s complete apathy for other people causes her to treat others terribly. She carelessly tears Medaka and Zenkichi apart, throws everything into chaos, basically because they’re her toys and she wants to play with them. The only reason Ajimu ends up not killing anybody is because Ajimu herself doesn’t really care enough about anybody to kill them.

Medaka’s ignorance of other people, becomes complete and utter apathy with Ajimu. Her inability to love someone as an individual becomes Ajimu’s complete and total inability to see people as even real, or anything other than manga characters.

They both ultimately live empty lives that leaves them some form of suicidal. Medaka wishes she had never been born, and Ajimu wants to kill herself out of boredom.

What both of them want desperately is to be equal to other people, and to stop being alone, but also neither of them can let go of the fact that they are special and they think they have to stand above others which is what creates the central conflict in both characters. It’s just that Medaka believes life is epic and keeps trying to learn how she can live, she keeps growing, whereas Ajimu like Kumagawa just spirals out of control slowly and becomes more minus, more negative.

That’s why in the end Medaka is the only one that can stop Ajimu from killing herself, because Medaka is Ajimu, she has those same suicidal feelings and can understand them.

3. Kumagawa and Ajimu

What exactly happened between Kumagawa and Ajimu in middle school is never fully revealed, despite being so formative for many of the conflicts of the plot. However, there is a lot of subtext for what their relationship was and almost none of it is pretty.

The most defining moment of their relationship is that Kumagawa ripped her face off. If you think about Medaka and Zenkichi as two people who humanize each other, who give each other their identity than Kumagawa did the opposite. The face is the sign of identity. When Kumagawa ripped it off, not only did he destroy her identity, he also made everyone else forget about her.

Another thing is Ajimu appears to talk with Kumagawa every time he dies, and this close proximity to her is something that makes him hate her as much as he loves her.

It’s a pretty clear metaphor for being trapped in a relationship that’s bad for both parties, that makes you eventually start to hate the person you love specifically because you feel trapped by them. Their relationship is something that contributes to Kumagawa’s misery, but at the same time it’s something Kumagawa cannot let go of because if he does not he’s afraid Ajimu might die.

Kumagawa was doing to Ajimu what Zenkichi did to Medaka when they first met. he was trying to give her a reason, any reason to live. However, his way of saving her life was to screw her down and steal away both her face and her freedom. That is to say he made her even less of a person that she normally is.

The general story we know is this. They met in middle school, and during that time both of them kind of experienced a “honeymoon phase” of their relationship. Kumagawa was able to feel like a normal person around her because Ajimu is just that competent at getting along with others, and at that time he basically existed to do everything she said.

Even though you’re sitting arrogantly atop the seat of Student Council President, you’re nothing more than her puppet.

You may have heard the term “puppet government” before, but right now, you’re actually making that a reality—just like our time in middle school, our time at Hakobune Middle School.

That time—that time you became the Student Council President with a zero-percent approval rating, you had basically turned into a yes-man for me, the Not Equal. [x]

Ajimu says the first time she had expectations for another person, that is the first human being she struggled to try to see them as human was Kumagawa. However, something goes wrong most likely due to Ajimu’s suicidal nature and Kumagawa’s wish for her to live.

My guess is that on that “day” we never got to learn the details of, Ajimu threatened suicide first and Kumagawa retaliated. Or, Kumagawa knew she was suicidal all along and he was terrified of losing her and over the course of two years those negative feelings built up until Kumagawa finally broke and acted up.

At which point they both broke each other irrepably. They started being terrible to one another. Kumagawa is specifically referred to as having trauma that outweighs all the other trauma in his life and it’s triggered when Emukae takes both of the exploding bracelets and almost commits suicide right in front of him to save him. In other words he had trauma with girls he loves comitting suicide. It’s also the one thing he’s afraid of, like when he asks Gagamaru to kill him because he’s too afraid to just jump off the roof on his own.

When Kumagawa is describing all the negative things he has to accept in his life, he says it’s like accepting a lover. Which indicates a very unhealthy view when it comes to accepting the flaws of a lover in any relationship that you’re in.

Like some of the examples he lists are just, stuff that would happen in a relationship gone wrong.

The reason it went wrong being in the end, Kumagawa and Ajimu unlike Zenkichi and Medaka are too similiar, they’re both too afraid of being human. It’s even implied they both hold the same kind of cynicism and minus forms of views which is why the understand each other so well.

They both see the world as an inescapable reality that’s not for them, where they don’t belong. Kumagawa because he is too weak, and Ajimu because she is too strong. They are on complete opposite sides of the spectrum, but that is how they connect with each other, because the world is not for them, it’s like they’re the only two people in the whole world.

It’s Ajimu and Kumagawa who make all the metafiction jokes, about treating real life like it’s a manga. And that’s a form of using fiction as escapism. Ajimu believes everything is fake, because the reality is that everything is unbearably lonely for her. Kumagawa uses fiction to escape, because the reality is life isn’t like shonen manga and tragedy upon tragedy is going to keep happening to him and it doesn’t matter if he’s strong or week.

They both have this desire to become human the same way everyone else is. They both feel left out from other people’s happiness. However, they also both have the desire to escape, to run away, because things are too painful, too lonely for them and they can’t handle it.

Which is why ultimately both Kumagawa and Ajimu can’t work together, because neither of them wants to be human because being human is vulnerable. Zenkichi even comments this, Kumagawa doesn’t want to be understood, not really, or at least not the way he presents himself. He tries everything possible to make others fail to understand him.

Ajimu too, distances herself from reality as much as possible. She even calls herself a ‘non-human’ all the time, not because she’s some weird space alien, but because she does not want to be human. Neither of them wants to get hurt, to feel pain the same way that humans do.

Which is why they can’t work around each other. When they’re together, they both know each other so well, they both fit so naturally together, that both of them become vulnerable in a way that neither of them can handle. Kumagawa even says as much, though he presents the notion in the most warped and twisted way possible. That he saw through the fact that Ajimu was just pretending to be kind and to get along with other people, and none of that was her real self, and he tried to see through the mask. It worried him that he didn’t get to know the real Ajimu. Kumagawa at least at one point didn’t want to love the Ajimu that was kind to others, he wanted to love the real her.

But in the end Kumagawa has no idea if his feelings reached or even mattered to her. When he says as much it’s the one time Kumagawa looks genuinely sad during this entire conversation, and the panel hides his expression.

Which is why in the end they’re relationship is so important and formative to one another. They, just like Medaka and Zenkcihi are basically the ones who humanize each other. They make up each other’s identities. But at the same time both of them are so afraid of being humans they go out of their way to dehumanize and destroy each other.

Ajimu even admits this on the final note of their relationship together. That Kumagawa in the end was the only real person to her, the only person she could show any bias towards. That’s why she’s able to hate him and love him, because she actually sees him as a person.

In the same light, Kumagawa only starts to believe it’s possible for him to win when Ajimu tells him he can.

That’s how formative for Kumagawa Ajimu is. He cannot accept the idea that he could win, until Ajimu finally accepted and embraced him as a person.

That’s what it means to be close, you are equally as capable of hurting each other as you are helping each other. That’s why Medaka Box so beautfiully illustrates the power but also the vulnerability of human connection.

#mb meta #kumagawa misogi #medaka kurokami #hitoyoshi zenkichi #ajimu najimi #medaka box

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