Medaka Box/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Zenkichi- A person only motivated by a Subordinate Excuse and following Medaka's justice, or a truly heroic character who simply gets stressed with the burden of helping people? Or Both?
• Anti-Sue: Class -13 and the rest of the -Abnormals; Combining Blessed with Suck with With Great Power Comes Great Insanity.
• Arc Fatigue: The fighting-manga arc has been going on pretty much nonstop since the series came close to being canceled (see Genre Shift below). They stopped for a single chapter, if only for exposition to introduce the new set of villains, then jumped right back in.
• Ass Pull: Lots. Especially with combat -- not that it was handled badly. That is, until Naze Youka being Medaka's never-mentioned-before older sister Kujira. There are hints (her eyes being the same as Medaka's and Maguro's being the main one) but only subtle ones, and it still feels like a huge stretch.
  • The 15 story research lab under the school (re-purposed as a very big gym). Which no one knew about, supposedly. The Genre Shift has not been kind to this series, although we may be seeing Writer Revolt.
• Black Hole Sue: Medaka literally contains a wad of blackness so deep it melts Oudo's arm when he tries to take some of her abnormality and so dangerous that he immediately apologizes to her.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: "GO GET HIM TIGER!"
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: All the students Hinokage helped out while he was President finally remembered him and came to cheer for him at the Vice President Battle
• Designated Protagonist Syndrome: Both Medaka, and to a lesser extent Zenkichi suffered from this
• Draco in Leather Pants: Kumagawa
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Aka Aoki. She's been in three chapters, has barely moved from one spot, and didn't even fight. There is already a whole bunch of fanart of her on pixiv. Probably because she's a nurse though...
  • Kumagawa himself. He starts out as the second Big Bad, and pretty much Medaka's Arch Enemy and complete opposite. His dissonant serenity and overall humor arguably make his character more interesting than Medaka's. And having a status change doesn't deter his status in the slightest.
    • In the second Shounen Jump popularity poll contest, Kumagawa won with almost four thousand votes. The second place holder (Medaka) did not even reach one thousand votes. And for a while he was either played as The Dreaded or the Big Bad.
    • As a prize the top ten girls go Hadaka Apron on the cover!
    • His popularity became much higher than even the main character, he's got his own one shot story, and became somewhat of a flagship character for the series. Maybe even some people who aren't into Medaka Box know him by now.Much of his success must be related to his Cool Loser and Lovable Sex Maniac traits, also.
    • Gets a lampshade hung on it in chapter 128.

Ajimu: If, for example, this world was a manga where you guys were the main characters, if there was a vote for the favorite character, someone like Kumagawa-kun might unexpectedly come out and take first place.

• • Arguably Youka Naze and Kei Munakata also count as they always place in the top 10 on popularity polls despite not being main characters.
• Fandom Rivalry: Now that the anime started airing, it looks like Medaka Box is entering the Big 3 debate with One Piece, Naruto, Bleach and Fairy Tail. But there's no hint as to whether or not it will go past 12 episodes, so it's still up in the air.
• Fridge Brilliance Why does calm and rational Gagamaru explode with anger being told he only knows how to fight in childrens card games, even completely changing his normal demeanor and hairstyle? Because he reflexively shields himself from being hurt; physically, mentally, and emotionally with his Minus. The fact that Gagamaru got murderously angry is because he's unused to actually feeling hurt.
  • When Ajimu revives Zenkichi in chapter 71, she tells him that she's glad Zenkichi failed to kill Kumagawa as that means he isn't burdened with the karmic weight of Kumagawa's murder. Thirty chapters later, the reason why Ajimu wants Zenkichi to remain relatively innocent becomes obvious. This means that Ajimu may have been planning the upcoming confrontation between Zenkichi and Medaka the whole time.
• Fridge Horror: Kumagawa states that his All-Fiction won't let him truly die. The only way he could know this, and state it so confidently, is to have discovered it through experience.
  • Gagamaru goes right out and says that he's used his "Encounter" to push any mental trauma he might have had onto other people at random. Shibushi hints darkly that nobody knows what's happened to the people who had this trauma thrust upon them.
    • Gagamaru's relationship with Shibuki Shibushi becomes nightmarishly Squicktastic upon learning what his ability is, how it affects his personality, and for what reason she hangs around him.
• God Mode Sue: The titular Medaka. Interestingly enough, the story starts deconstructing the concept of a Mary Sue as it goes on. It turns out she's very good at mimicking other people's abnormalities, minus the downsides.
  • The series was largely using the entire concept for laughs even before the shift, as Medaka was often shown to be utterly clueless and ridiculously naive for all her intelligence and physical prowess, with her boundless sincerity actually more effective than her other abilities. Some readers just didn't get the memo that it was meant to be a comedy.
  • Subverted in that the entirety of the -13 class has similar, extremely bad "-Abnormalities", such as the ability to rot anything and everything they touch -- including buildings. A character even specifically states the -13 class is basically Medaka's perfect enemy, since she can't even approach some of them without absorbing mental illness or Blessed with Suck, which she would then take Up to Eleven.
  • Taken Up to Eleven with Ajimu Najimi, who has several quadrillion superpowers. It's as absurd as it sounds, intentionally so.
• I Knew It!: That Misogi would would join the student council as Vice-President.
• Jerkass Woobie: The true nature of the Minus class. To quote one Minus: "Do you know the taste of gas that your parent makes you swallow? How about the taste of licking a perverted teacher's shoe? The taste of sand that your classmates make you swallow? At least you know the taste of a newspaper that was the only food you could obtain? Of course you don't know, because you guys are the happy ones. But those kinds of tastes are just how it is for us, Class Minus 13's members. We have experienced the worst, that's why we can do the worst."
• Jumping the Shark/Growing the Beard: An amazing example due to Genre Shift. Pick one of any of these major arc-ending Shocking Swerves / arc-climaxes:
  • The unveiling of a DBZ style Super-Powered Evil Side for Medaka -- Perses Mode, which happened when the manga first started dipping into fighting manga, and the semi-realistic tone was dropped.
  • The unveiling of the Flask Plan to artificially create Mary Sues, the discovery of a 15-story government weapons research lab under their school and the start of essentially a year long fight scene against progressively more eccentric and over the top characters.
  • The arrival of the "-Abnormals" and "Class -13" -- Abnormals that aren't Mary Sue parodies - but rather, Anti-Sue parodies. At this point, all attempts at a realistic tone were completely dropped, in lieu of people who can instantly heal any wound, disintegrate entire buildings, are so awesome the brain literally cannot bear to remember them.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Hitoyoshi, arguably. He has Medaka, Shiranui, Kikaijima, Mukae, Ajimu, Naze, Akune, Kumagawa, Maguro, Munakata, and now Tsugiha.
  • Kumagawa is also shaping up to be this, sharing pretty much all of the above characters, but replacing himself with Hitoyoshi, Maguro with Gagamaru, Munakata with Shibushi, and Tsugiha with Ima. And for some reason there was a picture of him and Shiranui with Hinokage...
• Meaningful Name: Name wordgames are quite characteristic for the author according to Wikipedia. Anshin'in's name starts with Anshin, or "relieved", which is used as a pun during chapter 140.
  • Medaka is one character off from Hadaka (nude), and early in the manga it's pointed out that she has No Nudity Taboo.
  • Koga's first name means "Pain", which fits with her ability to feel twice as much pain as a normal person.
  • Kujira's name seems strange next to Medaka and Maguro, since the whale is a mammal rather than a fish. This makes sense seeing as how she's the odd sibling out.
• Moe: Subverted and parodied with Shiranui, a very manipulative example. Several other female characters also fit, but with different archetypes. Medaka herself routinely counts, freely switching from fierce and intimidating to super-cute. At one point it even prompted a translator to make a note, "Directly from fierce to super-moe? What's she trying to do, kill him?"
  • Medaka's brother contends it'd be better (for her "charisma"?) if she was a bit cuter.
• Nightmare Fuel: Kumagawa, in-universe and out. In chapter 64 he manages to make the act of eating taiyaki creepy. That's how scary he is.
  • Shiranui seems to be an extremely cute girl with an ahoge, but she has flat out said she enjoys following Zenkichi and the crew around because he keeps getting beaten up, and has tricked him into getting mauled by a giant wolf, as just one example. The look on her face when she refuses Medaka's offer of being vice president is pure Nightmare Fuel.
  • Medaka can be quite... enthusiastic when improving people.
• Satellite Character: Zenkichi is arguably a deconstruction; much of his character revolves around protecting Medaka, or his interactions with powerful characters. This comes to a head after coming in last place in the Treasure Hunt.
• The Scrappy: The majority of the fanbase hates Akune for being a direct rival to Zenkichi for being an all around perfect Bishounen.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: However, he redeems himself in later chapters as it's revealed it's actually a reformed thug who sees nothing wrong with fighting as dirty as hell (in stark contrast to Zenkichi and Medaka). It doesn't hurt that the romance themes of the series were outright dropped as the series turned into a combat-centric series.
• Ron the Death Eater: Medaka seems to be intensely hated by certain segments of the fan-base, people going so far to say that she is far more evil that Kumagawa or Anshin'in and deserves to die/be raped/be mindraped/treated like garbage/etc. for her crimes of wanting to help people and not showing Zenkichi favoritism.
• Squick: Taiyaki becomes this when Kumagawa eats it.
• True Art Is Angsty: Naze Youka, who gave up a life of luxury as one of the Kurokami children due to the theory that true genius can only come from living through hell.

IF I'M ONLY GOING TO BE HAPPY, I'M BETTER OFF DEAD

• • So she actually *didn't* like reading disturbing manga about murderous bunnies?
  • She decides to stop this attitude in exchange for helping her brother save Koga's life.
• Uncanny Valley: Misogi crawled straight out of the valley the moment he was first mentioned.
  • Ajimu Najimi is a parody of the very concept, dialed up (as everything in this series is) to absurd levels.