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Good day my baby dolls!! We have reached an amazing milestone!

1,250+ followers! Man I just wanna say thank you all so much. I am beyond blown away this au has reached so far, I love all of you dearly. I have decided to dedicate this month to a special giveaway! Since it is the month of love we are having a Valentine’s day themed giveaway as my way of saying thank you!!

What this giveaway will be:

There will be 2 winners! 1st and 2nd place!

1st place:

If you win 1st place in this giveaway you have the choice for 1 SFW or 1 NSFW drawing that is cleaned, lined and with soft colors! It can be from any fandom or OC’s. 

You also have the option of a sfw pairing to not be romantic if you so wish for it as well, I am aiming this giveaway as more focused in relationships though, this is just a side note in case! <3

2nd Place:

2nd place winner will have the choice of 1 SFW or 1 NSFW sketch of any pairing that they choose. This will be cleaned up sketches with some light coloring. Again the option is there if you wish for a non romantic pairing for sfw. <3 

Rules:

You must be a following deaf!Ren in order to participate. Do noT follow and then unfollow for this giveaway. You can either like or reblog this post. Each reblog will be another “entry” and may raise your chances in winning. :)

If you win, NSFW is an option you have if you wish for nsfw, you don’t have to choose it <3 However if you do wish for NSFW in the chance that you win this giveaway, we will discuss on what it is you wish and work from there.

***I will not draw pedo-ships, furry/scalie/mecha nsfw. No gore/abuse. And nothing too excessive in kinks.***

Some examples<3

may the odds be ever in your favor. If you have a question send an ask and ill do my best to answer you baby doll! <3

Evidence: 

even more evidence:

in a manga where everyone always wears workout clothes (looking at you, Ochako), sweatpants (Bakugou), crocs and animal prints (Kirishima), diapers (Mineta) or shirts that say “shirt” in bold print, she’s very obviously the only one who knows what fashion even is

(bonus)

she unironically wears shirts that say “dead” and I think (she’s) that’s beautiful

Medaka box! It’s the where the character in my icon Kumagawa MIsogi is from, and my favorite manga of all time. Basically it’s a shonen deconstructionist manga that basically asks the question of whether or not fighting matters in shonen manga, and also deconstructs the idea of power escalation. 

The main character of a shonen manga usually wins fights no matter what, or if they lose they’ll eventually win again. So, the author deconstructs that idea by having the main character be somebody who always wins (sort of like Saitama) but to the point it’s a deficiency of their character because they can’t understand the struggles of normal people, weak people, or losers. The way she specifically wins, learning in the middle of a fight and then overcoming is also like, a parody on how all shonen manga fights usually work. The character loses at first in the fight, and then has some kind of revelation and then wins. It makes that Medaka’s central gimmick then that she can’t lose a fight because always in the middle of fights she perfectly learns everything about the opponent’s strengths and uses it against them.

Eventually though it goes from a fighting manga to a manga that moves beyond the need for fighting by introducing characters that are so overpowered they’re basically never going to be won by fighting, and instead they’re defeated through empathy or through changing their minds. The last two arcs aren’t as thematically solid on this but the first four or so general arcs are extremely tight as to this point.

Straightforward Slice of Life Manga -> Battle Manga where the weird powers of the villains don’t matter because the main character learns them in the middle of the fight -> Battle Manga where defeating the villains won’t reform them because those villains are already used to losing and their entire worldview is about losing and their powers are also themed around loss (wounds, undoing events, avoiding damage) -> Battle manga against a literal god with a trillion powers that you’re never going to defeat so instead you have to convince her to live and that the way she views the world is wrong. It’s a pretty exciting read that gets kind of crazy in all the right ways towards the end. 

Actually, my face claim is Kumagawa. 

However, I am a Koori Ui Stan so I will accept that title as well. (This is a joke I don’t actually care what I’m called call me whatever you want). 

I’m going to talk about Kumagawa in another post so let’s just focus on the three you asked me for. Hitoyoshi, Medaka and Akune. Medaka Box is a deconstruction of shonen manga by nature, so as in with a lot of NisioIsin’s writing, just as the characters are people they’re also meant to represent certain literary tropes and ideals. 

So, there’s a lot to gain in understanding their characters by udnerstanding the tropes that went into making those characters so let’s piece those apart one by one. Where are the tropes and where is the humanity. 

Akune Kouki 

So, Akune is presented to us as a prince. Design wise, despite being in a shonen manga he takes pretty obvious design cues from classical shojo heroes. He has long hair, feminine eyes, good looks and a princely demeanor. If I were to make a comparison for another character (I’m not saying that Akune takes direct inspiration, it’s just a connection that just happens to make them similiar). Akune’s characterization reminds me a lot of Touga Kiryuu’s. He’s somebody who perfectly plays the role of a prince, he’s talented, handsome, strong, and fights for the sake of ladies and earns their affection effortlessly. Yet at the same time despite perfectly comforting to that role it doesn’t satisfy him at all due to his own inner emptiness and because of that, while his image is that of a princess his actions and his personal motivations directly contradict the princely role that others perceive him as. 

So, to elaborate more on that and to once again reiterate this is a trope deconstruction and a character at the same time. Akune is somebody who, appeals to the broad extremes of both the shonen and the shojo genre. 

The love interests of Shojo tend to act like this, they’re extremely talented at everything they try (they’re usually super rich but with a brooding backstory), they’re effortlessly charming. 

Compare the love interest from Maid Sama! He’s a beautiful and charming, and also extremely talented, rich, top of the line man who act smooth and charismatic exactly like this and usually has the heroine tripping all over him. 

The difference of course being Akune views Medaka as his heorine, and Medaka doesn’t give him that sort of reaction at all, no matter how much he cultivates himself into being an ideal, princely man as informed to him by the shojo genre.

And even from his introduction chapters we’re given hints that the princely thing is just an act for Akune, and he can turn quite nasty when he wants to. (Boys calm down you’re both pretty). 

SO, from his introduction forward Akune’s basically a parody of this classic shojo hero. He’s prince like,he’s constantly followed by sparkles, he’s an ideal that rises to the top of everything he does unlike Zenkichi. He’s even used for fanservice to build him up as a masculine ideal the same way Medaka’s body is presented as a feminine ideal. 

Also, in a traditionally shonen setting Akune’s goals are really shojo. He doesn’t want to work hard and achieve things like Zenkichi and Medaka, he’s there to make Medaka fall for him even if it means breaking friendship and promises or whatever, he adds a shoujo element a love triangle into a what was a really classical shonen premise. And there are even characters who purposefully avoid doing this, Shiranui in the future remarks that to her love doesn’t matter and doesn’t always have to win in a shonen manga and that’s why she can let go, however for Akune it’s the opposite case.

Then, we get into Akune’s backstory and specifically why he’s driven to be like this. Why he works so hard to play at being prince, and why he wants to become Medaka’s prince more than anything else. We learn why the prince thing rings so fake with him, why it’s just an act, because in the past he put on an opposite act.

During HIgh School he’s a perfect shojo hero, but during middle school he puton an act of being a perfect shonen hero. Remember, a lot of shonen heroes are boyish, violence and rebellion are glorified in shonen heroes, and a lot of them tend to just get in fights and destroy things with little regards to the damage they cause. Akune physically looks like Yusuke Yurameshi. 

Shonen protagonists can glorify this kind of youthful rebellion, getting in aimless fights, being the strongest. If the shoujo hero is what girls think is cool in a man, then the shonen hero is what boys think is cool in a man, uncompromising violence, being the strongest, being somebody that destroys others and somebody nobody can mess with. It’s a power fantasy basically, but one that he literally was living. He also wasn’t even doing it for himself, he was doing it because it gave him something to do, and because somebody told him to do so it allowed for him to live for a purpose other than himself. 

Basically, there’s something off about Akune. It’s an idea that NisioIsin plays with a lot, that people can be born fundamentally empty and are constantly looking for something to fulfill themselves. However, on a trope level what is being said is basically this, Akune tried to craft himself twice to suit the ideals of other people. First, he played the ideal shonen protagonist, the strongest person that destroyed everythingin their path and that nobody could mess with. Then he played the ideal shojo protagonist, a charming figure, that reads like a little girl’s fantasy, talented, strong, handsome, and spends all of his time in pursuit of the lovely heroine. 

Yet, both acts of his are equally empty. Neither one of those satisfies Akune. He never resolved his internal issues, he just swapped the person who he was clinging to, and he ended up clinging to someone with slightly better intentions than middle school Kumagawa. 

However, clinging to people doesn’t fulfill him, the same way clinging to roles doesn’t fulfill him. Yet, Akune genuinely tries to live his life built around the expectations of other people, and that’s why playing to genre expectations shoujo/shonen he has a complete lack of his own real personality. 

So really, the final moment of Akune’s development comes when he comes face to face with a previous fan of his, the kind of person that Akune would have changed his whole personality to appeal to in the past. 

And instead of playing the role somebody else expects from him, Akune has to unabashedly be himself. Even if he still has shaky footing and doesn’t know how to guide others and doesn’t know what he himself is or wants at this point, it’s better for him to make mistakes when acting as himself then to be the perfect mentor that she expects out of him.

It’s better for Akune to try things as himself then to force himself to live up to some ideal. Even when he screws up and has his advice totally ignored. . 

And then of course there’s the question of why Medaka never thought to reutnr Akune’s affections, and the answer is simple, because Akune is too close to Medaka and Medaka loathes herself. FUndamentally unable to become her own person, she saw Akune playing ideal and clinging to others just as she did (though Akune clung to one person and Medaka clung to the entirety of humanity) and knew that Akune would never be satsified like that. Even Akune’s special is most like The End, he as the ability to imitate near perfectly the talents of others. Medaka’s desire was to be her own person, not to be an ideal and she saw Akune was struggling with that, and he was also much closer to reaching being his own person than she was, and because of that she encouraged him to go the opposite way. She thought Akune was better because he was so much more easily able to become his own person than she was, despite being a genius of similiar caliber who could stretch his personality to become those ideals. 

and with that wrapped up we can transition to Kurokami Medaka. 

Kurokami Medaka

So, Medaka as helpfully pointed out to us by Ajimu is a deconstruction of the trope that the main character always wins.

Basically the idea that inevitably in shonen jump, the main character always wins and gets what they want, by the property of them being the main character and nothing else. Goku always gets stronger when he fights and usually wins in the end. Medaka is that idea but taken to an extreme, of course Medaka always wins because she has the most powers the most perfect powers, and the strongest abilities out of anyone. 

It basically drops the pretense that most serial manga keep up in order for their to appear that there are stakes. Usually the expectation is for the main character to win in the end no matter what, but at the same time they’re usually presented as an udnerdog. 

Medaka is never once an underdog right from the very beginning. In fact her enemies have to keep getting more and more ridiculous in order to fight her, to the point where her forms and power ups become totally meaningless.

It’s sort of like in Naruto where Naruto started out as someone with little natural talent who tries too hard, and then over time became literally the reincarnation of half of a god, had a demon sealed within him, and was given the root of all chakra magic to assist his powers. Now all of that slow escalation into getting rid of the underdog protagonist and replacing them with somebody whose basically playing in epic levels in DND and godmodding with their character, all that pretense is dropped and right from the beginning Medaka is capable of doing anything she wants to do the instant she wants to do it, because she’s the strongest, magical, chosen one, main character. 

However, in shonen manga being this powerful is always a good thing. Whereas right from the start this is presented as a flaw of Medaka’s, something that prevents her from understanding others, and in turn dehumanizes her.

In the pilot it’s even more explicit, though in the proper manga it takes Medaka a little while to get to this point. 

She’s like… 100 times more self aware in the pilot, whereas actual series Medaka lacks this self awareness, but regardless it’s a good point. Medaka has every talent in the world, but it basically means nothing to her, because she doesn’t know the fulfillment of struggle, and she also doesn’t know what it’s like to simply live as a person because barely anybody has ever treated her as one. Even her closest childhood friends views herself as a goal to reach half the time and only recognizes she’s a noral girl the other half. So, Medaka Box puts forth this statement, if there were such a person to exist who as a main character always wins and always gets what they want, it would be just as corrupting as always losing and always getting what they want.

Wanting everyone to be happy, wanting everyone to be sad, they’re both chaining themselves to a goal and both of the don’t see people as people. Kumagawa even calls this as out as much that Medaka’s unable to love others as individuals.

While she technically is on the side of good, Medaka doesn’t view herself as a person and as a result she also views others around her not as people as well, and Ajimu continually brings up how dangerous this behavior could become if Medaka were not so fight happy that she was constantly keeping her own destructive impulses in check. ANd once again the point of NisioIsin’s writing is to analyze the trope, what kind of person would actually be able to do what most shone protagonists do and actually be able to accept everybody with open arms and no reservations. it’s because they’re not individuals with rough edges, and spines that could poke her if they got close, Medaka is at a comfortable enough distance to most people that she can see them al as just a part of humanity. Even though she doesn’t extend herself that luxury. And so the plot progresses that Medaka is forced to accept more and more inhuman enemies, first the ridiculously driven Akune and Mogana, then the violently destructive public morals committee, then the abnormals who were like her in nature, then the minuses who purposefully acted as bad victims as they possibly could to lash out against society, and then a literal non-human with a quadrillion powers and Medaka was forced to see humanity in all of them until she could accept something as ridiculous as herself was human. Once again these aren’t just character archetype motivations though, they’re intrinsic ones, it comes from Medaka’s backgrund and how she was treated.

Medaka had kind older siblings,a nd she was treated well enough but she wasn’t really valued as a person, or raised as a person, but an heir and a person with talent. She was pretty much experimented on from age five. 

None of the adults around her treated her like a kid, and Medaka also started to feel guilty for her exstence because she felt like the people

And so, not treated as a person, Medaka began to loathe herself for being born because she existed to invalidate the hard work of others. She tries to escape from this self loathing, but instead what she ends up doing is rocketing between the philosophy of two boys. Kumagawa’s utter nihilism, and Zenkichi’s ideals of helping others.

However, in the end clinging to others is still clinging so even if Medaka ended up picking the slightly more positive version of the two escapes from her fundamental guilt over being born, she still was basically just clinging to others, even to the whole of humanity to escape from that guilt.

Medaka was just a human girl in th end, and it was cruel to force her to become the savior of all humanity and ignore her won feelings, just like Medaka always suppressing herself and humanity to help others was cruel to herself. 

That there were people who wanted her around because she was Medaka, not because of what service or use she could be to them. That it was better for Medaka to be herself and fumble and strive to do that, then to be the perfect savior of all mankind. That ultimately the role of main character were shackles that were holding Medaka back, and ones that needed to be destroyed because it prevented her from being a human being first and foremost. 

Hitoyoshi Zenkichi

Zenkichi, beng the deuteragonist is another deconstruction of the idea of the main character. However if Medaka is the main character that always wins, then Zenkichi is the kind of average guy main character who always gets through his fights by hard work. 

However, I will make the point that Zenkichi is a character who wins his fights not by training to be the strongest (which he often does and believes he has to force himself to do to be by Medaka’s side), but rather all his significant victories are ones of empathy.

So it’s pointed out right away that Zenkichi instead of being someone who loves all of humanity, instead likes people on a more normal basis. What wins the fight against Munakata is two fold, one that he cares about Medaka’s feelings and doesn’t want to hurt them which motivates him to stand up again. 

Two, that he was willing to take the risk and become friends with Munakata, despite the fact that it could technically get him killed at any moment. 

Which is empathy, that is struggling to see the circumstances of somebody who is not exactly like you, and sees the world differently. Munakata had to push people away to protect them from being killed by him, but Zenkichi says that Munakata is worth being friends with despite those risks. He’s able to reach past the dangers of others and accept them, even if he might be hurt by it. It’s something Zenkichi struggles to do again and again, and his victories are almost always victories of empathy, rather than beating people up by being really good at shonen fighting. Zenkichi is a character the fundamentally, tries to see the abnormal as normal, because he wants Medaka not to be left alone or treated differently just because she’s abnormal. 

What wins the first fight against brainwashed Medaka isn’t Zenkichi being stronger than her, it’s a show of empathy. “Medaka, I don’t want you to be hurt, your happiness is just as important as others.’ Zenkichi feels her pain as his own and reaches out to her. 

Even if it means his Medaka won’t come back, it’s not worth her destroying herself or paining herself over to make her happy, because there is someone whose concerned with her own happiness, just as much or even moreso than his own. 

Zenkichi’s next fight after that however, is a parallel to the fight with Munakata. Rather than becoming friends he does everything he can and trains his hardest to reject Kumagawa with every part of his being, because Kumagawa is somebody who traumatized him in the past and terrifies him. He doesn’t want to see the humanty in Kumagawa, therefore they cannot become friends. 

As a result, Zenkichi’s victory is entirely an empty one. Kumagawa just pops back up from the dead, he makes Medaka upset by nearly dying, and they end feeling no satisfaction from their victory. 

Then, compare ths to what happens when Zenkichi fights Emukae. By understanding what she’s been through and seeing the world through her eyes, he wins a much more solid victory.

Parasite vision is specifically an empathy based super power, it allows him to see the world as others does, and after gaining it he realizes that Minuses have their own ways of viewing things too and they’re not just inhumanly cruel for no reason. Only then does he gain a true victory against Kumagawa, where Kumagawa is the one shaken and thrown on the defensive, because minuses being sympathized with was the last thing any of the minuses wanted because they too in a way were embracing their own inhumanity. 

Zenkichi doesn’t train himself to get stronger to defeat Medaka-chan, he doesn’t unlock a new super power. All he does is reevaluate their relationship, and realize one that it wasn’t so healthy to always devote himself to her, and two that he loved her as a person, not as a person whose always right.

Then aftewards what Zenkichi fights for is that Medaka be free to be her own person, not be free to be his love interest, or anything else like that. He realizes first and foremost, Medaka’s emotions are important and they exist separate from his desires or anybody else’s and once again this an exercise of empathy.

Which is why the final message of Zenkichi’s character is not necessarily that hard work and shonen determination are what win the day, but rather it was because Zenkichi always strived to see the people around them as people, to humanize them that was why he was able to get along with them, and for a tropey shonen manga that’s such a beautiful message. 

It’s a part of his characterization, he wouldn’t be Kumagawa if he didn’t always lose! Actually no that’s just what you call one of them meta jokes, har-har, there’s a deep reason for that and it has to do with the archetype that Kumagawa represents. 

So, if Akune is a shoujo prince and a shounen destroyer, Kurokami Medaka is a main character who always by some force of nature wins, and Hitoyoshi Zenkichi is the normal guy main character that achieves everything through effort then the archetype that Kumagawa represents is the “final boss.” 

He’s introduced when one character challenging Medaka’s justice appears and refuses to be saved, activating Medaka’s anger for the first time and turning the series from slice of life to a shonen battler. His introduction has a clear purpose, this is set up for the final boss which Kurokai Medaka must face and this is merely an opening battle.

There’s also a certain special characteristic of this final boss that marks him different from every person they’ve met so far. Kumagawa MIsogi is the one person who Medaka cannot save, her good will does nothing towards him, rather he was able to provoke her and push her down to his level.

So, not only is he a final boss, he’s a final boss where the conflict revolves not around Medaka punching him and winning a victory because she easily did that in the past and drove him away, rather the conflict evolves around whether or not Medaka can save this person. 

There’s also a few key things about his intro, he always loses and yet despite always losing he’s stronger than anyone. That meaning that losing to Kumagawa is not a matter of lack of strength. He’s not corrupt, evil, or wicked either, but rather he’s formless and seems to always take on the most negative aspects of others around him. His name is Kuma (Sphere) Gawa (River), so there’s a definite water motif to his psychology. That aside for now the important thing is this is an examination of Medaka’s saving people, from the first chapter of the manga its set up that Medaka doesn’t really understand why people do bad things, and doesn’t really ever see things on their flawed level. At best she can preach to people and try to raise them up to her own level and because those people see Medaka’s good will they usually respond positively to her and try to raise themselves up. 

Medaka genuinely doesn’t understand that some people just can’t try as hard as she can with things. She doesn’t want to attribute her success to genius or circumstances and this is because of Medaka’s own guilt complex, she doesn’t want to be above others. Being on top of others is lonely and inhuman. If she was born just naturally better at everything that people, that means she was born to make all of their efforts go to waste. (This is a character archetype that NisioIsin plays with a lot. For example, Hanekawa Tsubasa in Monogatari gets called out for the fact that she’s naturally so good at everything because of a psychological complex she just always does the right thing because of obligation and never struggles with it because it’s a performance for her, so no wonder she’s so efficient it’s basically mechanical for her she’s not held back by the worries of other people who have to stress and feel indecision. All the way back to Zaregoto, Jun Aikawa and Kunagisa can be read as prototypes for Medaka because they’re both amazing geniuses who people flock around and worship and their geniuses tend to make non-geniuses feel useless and inferior around them and yet they both still crave human connection. At the same time II-chan, the opposite of a genius, a normal person who tries to disengage from everybody and everything and yet cannot let go of Kunagisa because he both loves and hates her, and refuses to be perceived and channels everything from nonsense and nihilism can be read as a prototype Kumagawa though the characters ended up being very different. The difference between Kumagawa and II-chan is pretty much this.)

Anyway, that tangent aside it’s important to understand Nisioisin’s intentions in playing with these tropes because he tends to use them very purposefully. Medaka is a genius who does not understand that not everything comes down to just working hard or not working hard, and that there are some times where you can’t work hard. 

So, the next time Kumagawa is shown in a flashback as more build up to him as final boss once again we’re introduced to his philosophy. It’s pretty basic nihilism, Medaka at five years old feels a great amount of guilt for why she was born and why things are so easy for her when compared to other people. Kumagawa tries to comfort her by saying that there’s no reason anybody at all was born and that she should just let go from trying to find a reason, and the thing is despite how harshly Kumagawa words his nihilism he’s right. Medaka was not born for any specific reason, she doesn’t have to justify her existence, she’s just a normal girl who happened to be born smart. 

That’s another major difference between II-chan and Kumagawa, II-chan’s nihilism is pretty much a self destructive spiral, but Kumagawa’s is constructive, once again depressed nihilism vs sunglasses nihilism. Basically most people confuse Nihilism for an edgelord philosophy that just states nothing matters and everything is depressing, however what Nihilism really is, is a rejection and questioning of the common ideas that we are told are supposed to matter. 

“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. […] A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”

Nietzsche

This is pretty obviously taken directly from Nietzsche’s mouth himself. 

“In other words, this is a question of ‘What is genius, and what isn’t?’ Now, being incompetent—that’s what’s best, really. To be completely obtuse. To be so oblivious as to never think for a second about one’s purpose in life, to never think about the meaning of life, to never think about the value of life. Then this world would be a paradise. Calm, peaceful, and serene. Trivial things would be major and major things trivial, and life could be lived to its fullest.”

The world is harsh to the beautiful. The world is harsh to the attentive.

The world is kind to the unkempt. The world is kind to the incompetent.

The world is kind to the corrupt. The world is kind to the oblivious.

But if you figure that out, if you realize that, it’s already over right then. It’s a problem with no solutions and no interpretation. It’s over before it’s begun, and by the time it’s over, it’s complete. I guess it’s that kind of story.

It sounds depressing and II-chan never really grasps the less depressing part of the philosophy but basically Nihilism is a step on the road to existentialism. What Nietzsche suggests is that cows live an unburdened life because they are not smart enough to be able to process information they simply accept everything as they come. Humans lived burdened with the knowledge of everything else that came before them, we’re supposed to just accept that things are right, things are just, because of the way they are. There are so many things in life we just don’t think about on a daily basis because we accept it, because we were told to accept it. If you lived like that you would be living pretty worry free, but what Nieztsche stresses is that there is no such thing as inherent meaning. 

Basically every human value in human society is made up, but that’s a good thing because then they can be changed and bettered. Nihilism is a rejection of the ideas that we’re told are just inherently there, it’s a rejection of everything. However, in order to form your ideas, in order to form your own meanings, in order to reach existentialism, you must first reject what other people tell you is meaningful and what society tells you meaning is. So, life is not inherently meaningful and whatever meaning we have is just made up in our own heads, but as damning as that can be it can also be freeing because you can critically reject what others dictate as meaningful and make up your own. 

Medaka Box also deconstructs this idea, first Medaka is born with a purpose and that seems to be a happy thing. 

However eventually, Medaka had to reject that purpose and embrace the idea that she was born without any purpose at all because that purpose became nothing more than an idea she chained herself too and accepted uncritically. So, Kumagawa’s nihilism isn’t wrong necessarily, it’s closer to the truth then Medaka’s philosophy at the start, and it can also be freeing as Kumagawa deonstrates later in the manga. However, it is very reckless. 

Also, cleverly every boss Medaka has fought up until this point reflects part of her psychology and foils her. Akune is her perfectionist self that plays roles -> Kikaijima is the part of Medaka that goes all out to achieve what she wants -> Unzen is her zealotry and her inability to see the flaws of humans -> Oudo is her egoism.

Then, I would say Kumagawa Misogi is her inability to empathize with others or communicate with them properly. That’s how he’s introduced, not necessarily good or bad but completely impossible to comprehend. 

However, unlike Medakaa who tends to be adored by everybody Kumagawa is her natural and opposite extreme somebody who is hated by absolutely everybody and everyone. 

His introduction shows him violating others personal space, seeming well intentioned and poor intentioned at the same time, trampling over the desires of others. 

In other words nothing Kumagawa says really has meaning, nothing he does has meaning, because Kumagawa himself defies meaning and rejects all meaning recklessly. In other words, he’s trying with every fiber of his being to reject Medaka, because he does not want to be saved by her. 

As we get further and further into the minus Kumagawa surrounds himself by, Kumagawa is not in fact evil for no reason but rather because of a life long of indescribable trauma and loss after loss as rendered him this way. It’s not that he’s not strong, or doesn’t win fights, but no matter what happens he’s pretty much never satisfied with his actions. He never accomplishes what he wants, he never accomplishes any lasting change, nothing he does amounts to anything, and because of that he rejects all meaning. 

So, Medaka has finally what she wants. Genuine victims who fell off the good path because they were beaten down by life. However, the minuses are exactly the opposite of what Medaka imagines them to be. They’re not helpless people who fell off the path in life waiting to be saved. Basically, Medaka imagines all victims to be good victims but rather they’re bad victims. The minuses don’t want to get better, because they can’t perceive getting better all they’ve ever known is pain, and Kumagawa comforts them by saying it’s alright for them to simply stay in pain and lash out.

Basically, it’s lucifer’s old.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

We’re never going to be happy, we can never reach happiness, so let’s drag them down to our level instead. Let’s just learn to enjoy our misery. They have no concept of happiness, and change is a scary thing for them because it could always get worse so they choose instead to just try to enjoy the misery. Even the worldview of a minus is based around losing, Emukae sees everything as rotting away eventually, Gagamaru sees everything as being broken and fragile because he redirects damage. 

Kumagawa’s strategies are all also based around the assumption that he would lose. He assumes that he would never win in a fair way, or earn a fair victory, so he tries to cheat, use distraction, and deception to win instead. 

Kumagawa always loses, but the person who decided Kumagawa always loses is none other than Kumagawa himself. His style of fighting even when he’s about on par as strong a fighter as Medaka when it comes to raw strength is to just always take hits, when he goes seriously against Zenkichi he outfights him. He accepts losing as an inevtiability, because that is what misfortune and trauma in life have taught him up to this point, and then instead tries to find a way to win even with his loss. He threw the general affair manager’s battle on purpose and tried to break Zenkichi’s spirit, cheat by destroying the next fighters. His strategy in the secretary’s battle is to expect Shibushi to lose so he can escape the academy and remain the one person Medaka failed to save. Because remaining the one person that Medaka couldn’t save is at least a consolation prize for Kumagawa, and he can tell himself he was never taking it seriously to begin with, or he didn’t come here to face Medaka. A win that he can find inside of a loss. 

Then, Ajimu peels away his relative layers and lays it out for him after his breakdown with Mukae’s injury. 

Kumagawa despises talented and happy people, but he also loves them more than anything else. He believes that if he had talent like Medaka he would be able to make something of the nonstop chaos of his life. Everything he says about scars, damage, destruction, being beautiful is just a lie, a coping mechanism to keep himself sane.

Every minus is just a metaphor for a coping mechanism to deal with trauma and they are all faulty. Kumagawa Misogi erases all his mistakes with All Fiction, but because he doesn’t suffer the consequences of those mistakes he never learns and never improves, he always loses. Emukae doesn’t touch others because they rot away, but because she doesn’t touch others she’s lonely and becomes warped. Gagamaru redirects damage and lives as nonconfrontational as possible, but because of that he’s pushed everything else away and can’t handle any emotinos at all. They’re faulty devies of trauma, but at the same time if Kumagawa accepted every injury he had been dealt he would have died several times over so they are things necessary for survival all the same. To survive to that point Kumagawa had to tell himself that wounds were beautiful, he doesn’t really believe it, but it did do him some good at making him survive. However, he doens’t know how to live on past that trauma, he’s stuck in the stage of continually coping. 

Kumagawa’s trauma relates to the fact that anybody around him will inevitable get drawn into his twisted misfortunate life, and therefore he villainizes himself and pushes everybody away, except for the minus which he reasons won’t be happy regardless nad therefore he can be companions with because they can enjoy unhappiness just like him. He’s terrified of them being reformed because it means they’ll leave him alone, and he’ll suffer alone, and become more inhuman. The human parts of Kumagawa are all divested in the minus, and the weaklings that he protects, the same way the humans that Medaka tries to save represents her humanity.

The lowest and the highest are equally alone, but because of that Kumagawa can understand both Medaka’s inhumanity, and her desire to be human more than anyone else.

However, despite understanding her he can’t reach out and help her. He can only antagonize her. Which is elaborated on in his connection to Ajimu later. Kumagawa always loses because he perceives himself as the villain. Despite having the intentions of a hero, wanting to protect weak people, wanting to find companions, wanting to udnerstand the inhuman Medaka. Ajimu points it out, in the shonen manga that Kumagawa loves, characters like him who can’t work hard, who can’t improve, bad victims like him who can’t take their trauma and turn it into something good like other stronger people can are the ones who win, have friends. 

Kumagawa just cannot under any circumstances view himself as a hero, or as somebody others would sympathize with, so he pretends to be the villain instead. He rejects everything recklessly, because otherwise it would be too difficult to accept. Ajimu even explains it at a later date again, Kumagawa is the kind of final boss character that will always lose. The pre-programmed final boss at the end of final fantasy is meant to lose, to be defeated by the main character, because that’s how the game works even if you take 100 tries to defeat the boss the story is programmed in a way that the main character’s victory is inevitable.

However, that’s merely an archetype that Kumagawa is playing too. Reality is real in Medaka Box they aren’t meant to be manga characters, tropes, but real people. Kumagawa is just playing a role and because of that, he perceives himself as somebody who can never win therefore he can never win. 

It’s not a matter of winning fights, Kumagawa can win super power battles easily, however to him that doesn’t feel like a win so he’ll defeat people and then walk off muttering about how he lost again because he didn’t win in a certain way or didn’t get what he wanted. 

He lacks self control and often contradicts himself. Even when he earns victories he does not attribute them to himself. It’s self sabotage at his finest. Kumagawa despite wanting to win, his entire worldview is based around the fact that he’ll always lose, he creates situations impossible for himself to win in his strategies, he tries to instead find victory in losses. 

It works well enough, but in the end even if Kumagawa is helping other people by playing the villain, by absorbing losses for himself and giving his friends victory, he starts to let go of the idea that he himself can personally win.

At any rate, as Ajimu points out the one who ultimately decided that Kumagawa could not win was Kumagawa himself, it was his own self perception that dictated that. There’s no such things as stars, or fate, or being born to lose. 

Kumagawa refuses to see his good points, so with her last action after her death she reaffirms them. That there were people he wanted to protect, that there were people he wanted to inspire, that his good intentions were they even if he could not act on him properly. Kumagawa suppresses his good side, refuses to look at his good points, and plays the villain but ultimately it’s a role he plays and he can step away from that as he’s the one who cast himself in that role in the first place. Ultimately, what helps Kumagawa see that part of himself is his connections, his connection to Ajimu, his connection to Medaka. 

Being born under a star that dicattes his loss, was just fanciiful narration, it was a fictiious lens that Kumagawa applied to his own life to cope. He was trying to find meaning in the chaos so he pretended that things had structure, and roles like they would in a shonen manga. Even though that was ultiamtely restrictive of him as it restricted him to being the enemy of the main characters. So, Kumagawa ultimately earns his first victory against Medaka. Not by beating up Medaka, but by believing that she would win, by believing his friend would live. It’s his human connection to her that earns his first victory. 

A victory he can’t dismiss as a lost, a victory he feels completely satisfied with. And being given his one victory, Kumagawa is freed once more. At the end of the manga, just like at the beginning Kumagawa rejects all things and lives freely once more. 

Kumagawa failed at every step of the way. He could not save the suicidal Ajimu-san, he could not sympathize with or win the heart of Kurokami Medaka the same way Zenkichi could, he could not make things right with Saki, yet at the end he’s still freed from the past and able to graduate, even if he has no future in college, no job offers, even if he only earned one minor victory along the way. Kumagawa is freed from the past, and freed to atone. 

The freedom he sought at the beginning of the manga, that he recklessly lashed out against others to achieve, he’s finally able to find peace and coping with his life without having to hurt others along the way, and so he leaves and journeys to try to atone what he did along the way, living as he always did in spite of the chaos.