#mb meta

Kumagawa spends the entire story trying to get just one victory. His character is written around the idea that he always loses and he never wins. Kumagawa has always idealized that if he just won once, something would change. 

Kumagawa wants to win because he believes this victory will prove something, change something about himself. This win will somehow overturn the unfair balance of the world, where talented people succeed and losers like him just fail over and over again. The ugly will triumph over the beautiful, the weak will triumph over the strong. 

This is Kumagawa’s “I want to be the Hokage” it’s his central goal in the story that he like a shonen protagonist has to achieve by the end of the story. If he achieves that central goal, then something will change. Stories after all revolve around the idea of change. Naruto was the most unpopular kid in the village, and if he becomes the hokage then people will start to like him again, his circumstances will change. 

By the end of themanga Kumagawa has gotten his one goal. He won a victory over Medaka by winning a bet against her. 

There are two interesting circumstances to this first ever victory of Kumagawa’s. Number one his victory doesn’t come from winning against Medaka in a final fight.  It comes from believing in his friend. It comes from his trust that Medaka will come back alive anyway, despite looking like she’s going to die. It comes from his genuine wish for her to live, because the best part of Kumagawa has always been what he tries to give to other people, whether that be his fellow minus, his new friends on the student council. Kumagawa’s life sucks, but Kumagawa’s life is interesting because other people are in it. 

In his first fight against Medaka, ti’s shown the only difference between them is Kumagawa only cares about a small, select group of people even if he does genuinely love all the minus, while Medaka attempts to carry responsibility for more people. Medaka has opened herself up to others in a way Kumagawa hasn’t. When Kumagawa loses this fight, he doesn’t change, he isn’t saved, but he does begin opening himself up to others. 

Kumagawa’s last action we’re shown in the manga is to try to fix some of the things he’s messed up in the past in the manga. Even in this he’s denied. He doesn’t get a straightforward redemption arc, he doesn’t get the chance to fix the things he’s lost. 

Saki even says to his face she’s not even really interested in fixing their past friendship. That’s what this is, what’s gone is gone and it isn’t coming back. Saki doesn’t forgive him, and Kumagawa isn’t forgiven. This sounds utterly depressing as an ending like nothing has changed at all, but it’s not. 

Kumagawa’s final speech even repeats the same sentiment, everything he tried in the end was a failure. He not only failed both Ajimu, and Medaka the two girls he loved, he screwed things up irreparably with Saki, and feels like he accomplished nothing he set out to do.

IN SPITE OF THAT. 

Kumagawa was always still living in spite of constant failures. The central message of Kumagawa’s character has always been this. You don’t need to win, you don’t need to be a success. You don’t even need to be happy.

It reminds me of a quote uttered by Kaiki Deishuu another Nisioisin character.

“It’s not like you wanted to become a god, or become happy.” 

Kumagawa is fixated on the idea of becoming one of the happy person like that’s the only way to live. What’s changed is his perspective. He was living all along. By the end of the manga his perspective on his entire life has been flipped around to show this. 

He thought he was too weak to live. He thought he wasn’t strong enough. It’s not until his encounter with Medaka where he saw how somebody else saw him, that Kumagawa was able to believe those things about himself. Kumagawa starts the series alone, and ends up alone, the one difference being he’s allowed the perspectives of other people into his life. 

Which is also the greatest change between the Medaka and Kumagawa fight, and his interaction with Saki in the epilogue of the manga. Kumagawa during that right had almost nobody who would cheer for him, while everybody showed up to cheer for Medaka. 

Saki’s speech even reminds us of this. Kumagawa’s life circumstances haven’t really changed all that much. Winning once didn’t change everything like he thought it would. However, at the same there’s no loss Kumagawa can suffer that will mean it’s all over for him. Life’s not over. Whether he’s winning, or losing, no matter what Kumagawa will keep living. 

Kumagawa ends the manga struggling the same as he always has. However, what’s changed is his perspective. Now he knows, because of his encounters with people like Saki, and Medaka, because of the relationships built up between them. Even if those relationships ended in losses. Even if they only hurt each other in the end. THOSE RELATIONSHIPS DO NOT GO AWAY. THEY CANNOT BE UNDONE. THEY STILL MATTER. 

1. Medaka is Always Right

In a story, the protagonist is usually right. The story’s morality and themes are usually written that way to center around the main character’s point of view. If the main character is wrong they’ll usually find the right answer in the end. It’s like how most detective novels end with the detective solving the mystery. The main character is usually written with the audience point of view in mind, so the audience will agree with the main character. Therefore, the views of the main character are usually the right one.

Medaka takes this to its logical extreme. Her point of view is always the correct one. Despite the fact that there are clear gaps in her knowledge, she just assumes that she knows better than others. Despite the fact that she doesn’t understand most people’s circumstances, she preaches to them like she knows their own lives better than them and what she says is best for them. 

Medaka’s like fifteen so thinking she’s the center of the universe and she has life figured out is pretty much the norm. However, Medaka is so strong she can usually strong arm others and force her views on them. Which is why she’s confronted with Unzen. 

The extreme result of thinking you’re right all the time is moral absolutism. Unzen suffers from the exact same flaw as Medaka. He thinks his views are the right ones. He’s completely confident in those views. His opinions on the world are the only ones that matter. 

Not only does this show Medaka how egocentric she is, because Unzen is literally ten years old. Which means Medaka has the developed empathy and ability to see other people’s viewpoints as a ten year old. It also confronts her with what forcing her views on others looks like to others. Unzen blows up the student council room, because he thinks he is right. Unzen attacks the student council members, because he thinks he is right. 

It sure is bad to beat others up  and get into fights all the time because you think you’re better than them. Oh wait. Unzen’s moralizing crosses into zealotry, because he thinks he’s right he also thinks he has the right to punish those who are wrong. Just like Medaka thinks so, it’s his job to correct the flaws in others. He punishes people for their flaws, Medaka forces her help on other people, that’s the only difference. 

Unzen thinks that he’s standing up for justice, but it’s only his own idea of justice. Medaka thinks she loves people and therefore she’s helping them, but really just like Unzen she loves the idea of people. The idea of justice that’s in Unzen’s head is what drives him, and what Medaka thinks she sees in people which we’ve shown time and time again her ideas about people are wildly incorrect are what drive her. When people don’t meet her ideas Medaka tries to correct them as well the same way Unzen does and it’s forceful. 

2. Medaka Stands Above Others

The main character especially in a shonen manga is usually the strongest character in the story. Everyone will flock around the main character. The main character is the leader, the chosen one, etc. etc. However, a real life person who thinks about themselves this way would just have a superiority complex.

The center of Oudo’s entire character is that he thinks he’s better than other people, therefore he knows better, and has a right to control them. “Abnormal” is just a fancy term for saying he thinks he’s special. He’s better than normal people. Normal people are beneath him and meant to be his subjects. 

Oudo has this same chosen one complex that Medaka has. Because he’s special, he can’t live a normal life. He’s above ordinary run of the mill parents. He’s above friends. He sees himself as the magical chosen one meant to create a happy world for everyone else.

But it’s not actually about other people it’s always about himself. Oudo’s main character complex takes a running leap and jumps all the way into narcicissm. 

The end result of centering the entire universe around himself is that Oudo starts hurting the people around him. He does it so easily because he doesn’t see their feelings. Oudo never really wanted to help others, it was all just narcicissm on his part. Medaka too, does she genuinely from the bottom of her heart want to help people and do what’s best for them, or does she think she’s better than other people, knows better, and therefore wants to meddle in other people’s lives without really understanding who they are or what they need. 

3.  Medaka Fights for Her Friends

The main character is always surrounded by their Nakama. Kumagawa and Medaka have lots in common as character foils, but they’re united in one aspect they’re both incredibly lonely people.

They’re both an equal distance away from everybody else. You can only love everyone, or hate everyone from a distance, because it requires you to stop seeing individual people as people. They do this for opposite reasons, Kumagawa because he’s traumatized, and Medaka because she’s been spoiled all of her life. 

The main character surrounds themselves with Nakama. Medaka and Kumagawa are both people who misguidedly try to surround themselves with true companions and fight for the people around them. 

Kumagawa just like Medaka is someone desperate to love everything about people. He accepts the flaws, the damage, and the pain of being close to other people. In a way Kumagawa’s desire to help traumatized people is much more genuine because he knows what other people’s damage looks like. Medaka is convinced everyone in the world is a suffering, starved orphan waiting to saved by her kindness. Kumagawa knows that traumatized people are messy and traumatized, and don’t really want to be saved a lot of the time because they’re too caught up in the pain and can’t imagine a life outside of it. 

However, both of their methods are wrong. They both try to help the people around them by forcing their views onto others. Kumagawa assumes that everyone just wants to stay a traumatized little mess forever like he does, and Medaka just assumes everyone wants to be fixed. 

However, the result of their misguided help is different. Kumagawa’s efforts to help his friends always blow up in his face. He always has good intentions towards others, but those good intentions always go the worst way possible because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He’s just inserting himself and needlessly meddling. 

Medaka does the same thing, she “fights” for her friends when it’s really more about herself. It’s about her own desire to not be alone. It’s just Medaka’s mistakes haven’t blown up in her face the way Kumagawa’s have, at least not yet. Kumagawa is punished over and over again, Medaka is spoiled, creating the difference between the two of them.

At the end of the minus arc, Medaka and Kumagawa are both trying to have small groups of friends, but they’re also trying to fix those friends because they don’t know how to have friends like a normal person. 

4.  Medaka is the Main Character of this World

Finally, if someone truly believes that they’re the main character of the story it means they’re applying a fictive lens to the world. They see the world as if it were a story happening in a story book, written by an author with meaning and purpose. 

However, is this world is a story and they’re the main character then what about everybody else? Unconscoiusly, other people are casted as side characters in their own story. 

That’s what Ajimu hammers in hard when she breaks down Zenkichi and Medaka’s relationship. Medaka never really asks Zenkichi what he wants. Their friendship from the start has always been about her. Zenkichi just revolves around her. 

Medaka sort of just treats him like a side kick to her story. Which Ajimu says, if Medaka treats him this way he must not be that important to her. He must be somebody Medaka can easily replace. If Medaka can treat her own closest friend like that, that goes to show just how she sees other people. 

She seems to lose all interest in Zenkichi in about fifteen seconds. Ajimu doesn’t even have to try really hard to split them up. It’s because Medaka can’t see other people, and she can’t believe her relationships with other people are going to last. She’s constantly working to earn the love of other people because she literally can’t believe someone would just give it to her. She lacks object permanency in regards to other people, like if she doesn’t give them a reason to stay they’ll just go away from her. Which is also just a symptom of her narcicissm. 

Seeing the world as just Medaka’s story makes her ignore the fact that other people exist, and therefore they have their own stories as well. Ajimu suggests something as simple as Zenkichi could be considered a main character too. 

Medaka who treats her friends like they’re all sidekicks in her story. The most extreme result of that behavior is Ajimu, who simply doesn’t see or care about other people. 

Ajimu is so far gone she simply believes the world doesn’t exist. Therefore it doesn’t matter how she treats people it’s all the same in the end. Medaka and Ajimu are both people who assume they know it all and at the end of the arc they finally learn...

They’re thinking was completely wrong. 

Medaka didn’t know anything because she didn’t know other people. She didn’t know their view points, she didn’t know their stories. It’s after this point in the story Medaka shakes off her main character complex. Instead of assuming she’s always right, that she knows better than others, that she’s like the main character in the story she comes to realize she doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. She now knows, that she knows nothing. 

 A. Defining the Trickster. 

Before we determine what a Trickster is we have to define what an Archetype is when it comes to character writing. 

In theory, Jungian archetypes refer to unclear underlying forms or the archetypes-as-such from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. History, culture and personal context shape these manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images.

In other words they are ideas and images that reoccur in stories all around the world. For example a character like Loki has several things in common with the christian idea of satan even though they come from two different mythologies, both subvert the ‘father-figure’ king of their respective heavens, and both are responsible for kickstarting the chain of events that lead to the apocalypse scenario in both religions. 

Archetypes are characters that follow certain pre-determined patterns we all recognize. Luke Skywalker is what most people would recognize as the hero of the story, Obi-Wan Kenobi is the mentor, just by thinking of ‘hero’ and ‘mentor’ you already have a pre-conceived idea of how the character is going to act in the story. This is a good guideline for analyzing the similiarities between the characters Nisioisin uses in his works. 

The Trickster, Jung says, is an aspect of the shadow archetype, at least in its negative traits (see "On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure".  Examples of the trickster are Satan, Loki, etc.)

The shadow is an archetype that consists of the sex and life instincts. The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings.

If the Hero is what everyone thinks a good guy is, then the Shadow is playfully the opposite of they. They are what everyone thinks a good guy isn’t. They represent the repressed aspect of our minds, and exist to call into question the common order. 

The trickster, obviously, deceives, often playfully, sometimes painfully.     The Fool is a shadow figure distressed by some unconscious lack of power, often driven by greed or an inordinate desire for fame (all archetypes), who projects his or her inadequacies against scapegoats as described above.  The Fool is not always negative, of course.  A relatively benevolent form of the fool is the Clown, who is more aware of his or her trickster aspect, perhaps, than is the fool.  [Source.]

The trickster is what the hero is not. They are the shadow the hero casts. While the hero’s domain is the light, the trickster often works in the dark, behind the scenes sneaking around in the shadows. The hero is often straightforward, the shadow deceives and obfuscates. The hero is conventional and the trickster unconventional. 

In mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, human, or anthropomorphisation), which exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge, and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behaviour.  he trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules. Tricksters "...violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis."

[SOURCE.]

To simplify there are four rules I am going to set as reoccuring in Nisioisin’s use of the Trickster Archetype: 

Introduced as a Villain

Subverts Expectations

Lying, Liar who Lies

Inherent themes of Nihilism

1. Introduced as a Villain

Appearances can be deceiving. It is the trickster’s goal to deceive your expectations, and in that they subvert the natural order. In most stories the hero is good and the villain is bad. Straightforward so far, yes? Nothing is straightforward when a trickster is involved. Kumagawa Misogi is someone who is introduced and built up as the ultimate enemy of Kurokami Medaka. A girl with a noble goal of trying to make everyone happy. Therefore anyone who opposes her would have to be ignoble, right?

Kurokami Medaka brings out the best in people, and Kumagawa Misogi brings out the worst. That is the simple, black and white comparison that we’re given between the two of them at the start of the manga. 

Kumagawa is so inhuman when we first meet him that for the first 52 chapters of the manga, when other characters refer to him and as he’s built up as an antagonist his face is always obscured. He’s not even seen as human in the eyes of others.

However, this simple idea is subverted by the manga itself. Medaka and Kumagawa are compared not as opposites but rather as complemtnary forces who not only have several things in common with one another, but also play into each other. 

Kumagawa is someone who can uniquely understand Medaka’s point of view in a way other people cannot. He’s not someone who opposes Medaka, but rather someone set up to oppose her. Kumagawa is not only aware to some extent that Medaka is the hero of the story, but he’s chosen to make himself the villain. 

2. Subverts Expectations

The entire point of Kumagawa’s arc is that even the absolute scariest types of people the minus, aren’t true villains of the story, even when they don’t want to be sympathized with, even when they don’t want to be saved, they are deep downs still people. 

Kumagawa’s arc intentionally sets up the idea that some characters are natural villains who don’t want to be saved, only to subvert that idea in the end. Tricksters are subversive, they exist to flip standard notions of good and evil, black and white ideas on their head. They are transversive, once they have played their role in the story it is impossible to think of things the same way again. 

Kumagawa is a character who exists to subvert what we call traditionally binary opposites. That is ideas that we think oppose each other. Winners and losers, strength and weakness, talented and untalented, all of these ideas tie strongly into Kumagawa’s character.

Ajimu brings up Kumagawa’s bitterness towards the status quo. The people who are happy are the ones who are currently in power. They are the ones who are able to work hard, they are the ones who are able to have friends, they are the ones who always win in the end. 

Kumagawa’s original goal is to flip those ideas on their head. To show that even people who are outside the power structure, outsiders like him, are able to have friends, to work hard, and to win. 

By doing this he subverts the natural order and turns it around. This is what comes to a head in his fight with Medaka. Usually it would be the winner is the strongest, but the idea is flipped in that fight it’s proven the one who loses more and climbs their way back up is the strongest one.

There is strength in weakness and weakness in strength and these ideas never play in the straightforward ways we think they will. That’s why Kumagawa who identifies as weaker than anyone else, is able to easily subvert the balance of power tip it in his favor and overcome strong people. 

3. Lying, Liar who Lies

Basically Kumagawa lies as compulsively.. He says everything in [brackets like this] and it's like always speaking and using airquotes after everything you say. It makes everything he says sound completely insincere. It’s also a pun for ‘To Show Off’ meaning he exaggerates everything he says in order to look cool. 

Kumagawa will just blantantly lie at times for no reason other than to lie. One of his habits is to claim things aren't his fault when they obviously are. His introduction is screwing everyone to a wall, and then standing there covered in their blood go [I'm not the one who did this, it's not my fault.] His introduction is him rattling off lies mainly to confuse people and make himself impossible to read. 

The key word is once again these expectations. The trickster uses lies as a mean of controlling the expectations of others, playing around with them and he gains some measure of power over this. A trickster is often not very traditionally powerful and has to rely on his wits to get by. 

Kumagawa's life is pure chaos and basically everything ever will go wrong for him, so he tells lies to have some kind of illusion of control over that chaos. People who see life as a story do so to give themselves agency, to trick themsleves into believing they’re the ones telling that story. 

Kumagawa pretending that the world is a manga, gives him the illusion that he can read, and anticipate the world like he would a weekly shonen jump manga. When in reality the world is what it’s always been, complete chaos. Kumagawa tells himself that lie to obfuscate himself because he finds safety in those lies, in no one knowing who he truly is. 

He finds his identity in those lies, which is why he intentionally plays the role of the villain when he could be a hero. Kumagawa will lie about his identity, first to be a bad victim, to be an ugly victim, he pretends these things have value because it's all he has. He only has negative experience of the world and the trauma he’s asquired so far and that’s what he finds familiarity in. Kumagawa finds identity in being the world's biggest loser. 

4. Themes of Nihilism

Kumagawa is a character who directly confronts Medaka’s assertion that she was ‘born for a reason’, by asserting the opposite. That there’s no goal in life, no point to being alive, and therefore humans are born for no reason. 

While that seems like a wholly negative statement at first, the point of Nihilism is to question established ideas and power structures. It’s to dismantle what we are told matters, and what we are told has meaning and instead come to understand our own meaning. 

If Medaka is an existence desperately trying to give meaning to life, then Kumagawa is trying to reject the assertion that life has meaning. It’s understandable why. The values that are said to hold true for everybody else have never once held true for Kumagawa. If you work hard you’ll win. Bad people are the only ones that suffer. If you ask for help you’ll get saved. Kumagawa has witnessed all those things he is told should be true about the world proven as falsehoods, and because of that his response is one of rebellion against the order. 

Nihilism is a step on the way to existentialism. 

In the most basic terms possible it's like. Rejection of societal meanings and values that you are told about -> Rejecting everything which leads to moral nihilism (nothing has meaning boo hoo) -> Realization that if everything is just made up value you can make up your own, and that you're not freed from society's obligations and can pursue what you want (sunglasses nihilism, party time).

Kumagawa as a character is firmly in the middle step. He’s a character who rejects everything, because he finds his identity in his rebellion against traditionally held notions. 

Kumagawa is a character trying to reject what everyone else tells him is meaningful, and instead trying to create his own meaning. He’s trying to find the positives in a life that’s literally nothing but suffering. That’s the point of his whole complex about minuses, that people who have everything go wrong for them still have a reason to smile. 

 Basically Kumagawa's philosophy becomes, if I can endure all of this and still keep on laughing and smiling, then you can too. Even living the worst life possible where you can't accmplish a single thing, and can't amount to anything, you can still find something to laugh and smile about.

It’s a philosophy unique to him, and one that he could only come to by challenging the established norm. Not only does Kumagawa’s nihilism help the minuses, but he also ends up helping Medaka herself as she’s the one who has to let go of the ‘reason that she was born’.

Just like Kumagawa, Medaka has to go and seek out her own reason. As in the end the two of them as a pair, hero and villain, are not opposites but rather two sides of the same coin. They are complentary forces that contain parts of each other. 

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.