Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfenstein
I don't know, bro. Obviously, there will always be people who enjoy Medaka's character for her traits...
But...I've never seen such a collected opinion on the fact that a character was meant to be terrible in a single fanbase.
I mean, she's definitely not supposed to be the character you cheer for. Let's type in "Medaka Box character popularity poll" on google and see what the first non-jump result yields us:
46 - Misogi(understandable)
27 - Heat(understandable)
6 - Medaka(understandable?)
5 - Others
http://forums.mangafox.me/threads/27...opularity-poll
That's a...pretty glaring disparity there. Even worst counting the fact the poor gal already lost top-three position in Japan. Maybe this was Nishio's plan. I mean, certainly could be given how his use of the character dosen't actually change much at all from the beguinning of the manga where she explicitly and undoubtedly was made the Mother of all Sue's, to later be deconstructed in the Election year(though admittedly, with very little results shown).
Maybe he's rectifying a mistake or just concluding his plan now. After all, this ending was incredibly out-of-the-blue and rushed.
What I mean is: to most, the side-characters are what makes and breaks the manga. People read Medaka Box for Misogi and Heat(the majority at least), for Naze, for Shiranui, for Tsurubami, for Ajimu, for Emukae, for Kei, and most importantly, for Nienami. I'm sure some people read the Manga singlulary for it's seeming protagonist, though, not saying those don't exist.
You kinda see what I'm getting at, don't you? She's, at the very least, not the kind of protagonist designed to be more relatable/likeable than her supporting cast.
To me, It's more like Medaka's cog, her usefulness, is that she elevates the characters near her. I can recognize and respect that she does, indeed, have a use to the story, but it's a sort of gimmicky form of story-telling that I think was never really nescessary.
Sure, it's just a hypothesis. but you must admit: it's pretty darn interesting one, when you think about it. |
What you see as a "collective opinion" is nothing but the result of confirmation bias and the insular circle-jerking developed by a simultaneously large and ignorant audience.
It's one thing to simply personally not like Medaka, but to claim that no one is meant to like Medaka because she was 'intentionally' written to be unlikeable is an impressively delusional act of mistaking opinion for fact.
Rather than taking "popularity polls" and the western fanbase as your point of reference, any analysis of Nishio's 'intentions' would be much better served by an overview of Nishio's other works themselves.
Now, Medaka herself is a more flawed and human character than many of these other characters. However, her essential role and archetype, that of an overpoweringly strong/invincible female character, is one Nishio has used many times over. You talk about "shounen tropes" and say that Medaka is meant to be hated - but then, let me ask, all of these other characters: Jun Aikawa, Yasuri Nanami, Kiss-shot Heart-under-blade, Mizukara Risuka -- to speak only of characters from Nishio's english-translated works, all of whom are just as overpowered and overpowering as Medaka -- were they meant to be hated as well? No?
The only difference between Medaka Box and those other series is that in the other stories there don't exist such bland and underwhelming male protagonists as Zenkichi for shounen-kiddies to self-insert into, leading to blind-resentment being built up once they realize that Medaka Box will not pander to their fantasies (the standard shounen setup of having a guy somehow be the strongest and most powerful character who beats up on bad guys, and then has girls tripping over themselves to chase after him).
The plain fact is just that Medaka Box in specific, and Nishio's works in general are simply conceptually above the level that the average shounen-kiddie/Shounen Jump reader can appreciate. That is not to say that Medaka Box is without faults, because there are plenty of places where Nishio's dumbing down of Medaka Box to attempt to match shounen standards has made things awkward. However, at the end of the day all of the seething resentment in the west towards Medaka herself ultimately comes down to a inability of swathes of the Medaka Box 'fandom' to grasp the fundamental nature of this series and its characters.
Medaka is meant to be an
actual character whose principle story is about becoming (seen as) human. Her core conflict is about how her overwhelming ability isolates her from other humans, and how (like Iihiko) the principle desire of people in this sort of situation is simply to connect with others and achieve communication. Medaka has an entirely meaningful character arc on her own, more important than either Zenkichi's or Kumagawa's matter of factly, and her conflict in fact represents the core subject of development in the story. It's precisely because of this that the developments of the latest chapter, despite being ridiculously rushed from several perspectives, could in fact potentially signify the ending of the series.
(This is also the reason for Medaka's historically poor performance in Jump in Japan. From the start, Medaka Box has mostly been held up by a core base of fans of Nishio's works in general, who were responsible for the volume sales and participated in discussions via forums like 2ch but did not participate in any great degree in Jump's popularity/ranking system proper. Although Kumagawa did add some mainstream appeal to the series by finally bringing in an actually interesting principle male character, Medaka nevertheless has never truly caught the main shounen audience as far as Jump is concerned. Kumagawa's introduction also brought a bump in the volume sales at the time representing increased interest from Nishio's core audience, but the stagnation/decline of the volume sales (corresponding to the lack of growth for Medaka Box amongst even Nishio's core audience) is the reason the manga is in some level of actual trouble right now.)