Medaka Box: the DECONSTRUCTION of Shonen I first read this manga back when I was 16 years old and at the time I didnt fully understand it. I followed the discussions online calling it this great deconstruction of Shonen Jump manga with its 4th wall breaks and blatant shittalk of older titles. I identified a bit too hard with Kumagawa and his good loser mentality. However as a grown ass adult who pays taxes and engages in wage slavery every weekday my reread of the manga has convinced me that this is no deconstruction but a full blown satire. By satire I mean the Jonathan Swift type that just presents something and expects you to find it ridiculous without necessarily having to directly tell you what its making fun of. Deconstruction is honestly a made up fandom term that only children and adults who think like children use to make themselves feel smart without having the substance to back it up. Medaka Box presents itself as what most shonen fans at the time would call the ideal shonen manga in a straightforward manner but this presentation is ultimately hiding a satirical critique of shonen stories. Medaka Box is presented in a way that shonen fans would generally call wellcrafted so a straightforward reading is technically possible even if its inevitably not the ideal. Theres plentiful creative paneling that conveys both action and the characters emotions. In fact the fights in general are pretty creative in their approach. They have a combination of tactics and brute force that make for an entertaining time. Akira Akatsuki shows his hentai experience with how he draws the girl characters with their hardcoded hourglass figures cutesy in the hentai way yes you know what I mean faces and constant pantyshots. Im sure if I were a straight guy I might have enjoyed the eye candy. Characters are over the top and edgy. The plot is structured in a way that allows combat to solve all the problems with the characters enjoying the fighting the same way they would a sport. There are plenty of twists and turns along with flashbacks tearjerkers and gestures towards grand concepts and themes. Regardless of anyones value judgements for these traits they are present in this manga. What makes this presentation ideal is related to what people wanted in their shonen during the time period. Medaka Box was serialized from 20082013 which was a very interesting time for shonen fandom. Here in the English speaking world people constantly complained about how popular shonen manga would use tropes like the power of friendship and illogical plot solutions for fantasy battles because they believed that these storytelling elements somehow made any series they appeared in shallower and more childish than series that they dont appear in. However they still ultimately wanted a shonen story at the end of the day so instead of moving on they complained. The people wanted their commercialized cartoons for teenage boys to have dark mature and selfaware concepts implemented. They would get mad at Naruto for not being like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. The word deconstruction got introduced into the lexicon and singlehandedly inspired anitubers to create the worst arguments known to the internet. While I dont know Japanese and am not the most familiar with Japanese anime fandoms a number of manga and anime that prioritized shock value over all else started popping up during the time period such as Attack on Titan Mirai Nikki etc so I can only imagine they came to a similar conclusion. Medaka box being serialized at the same time that this mentality was the norm in fandom spaces fits the mold for many of these ideal traits. The characters make plenty of selfaware quips about Shonen Jump. Dark concepts like incest are present and accounted for. The edge is ramped up for many characters. These characteristics are here while executing the shonen formula of the time: A teenager who was born special does slice of life shit to introduce themselves and the rest of the main cast for the first arc the series pivots to battlecentric storytelling as the cast fights against a evilforevils sake villain the cast fights an edgier yet sympathetic villain and all of this eventually escalates to the point that the protagonist fights god. All of this with plenty of friendship speeches lastminute powerups and objectified women along the way. In a nutshell shonen fandom wanted a bythebooks shonen story but with irony poisoning and shock value so that they wouldnt feel embarrassed for liking a childrens IP. The satire of Medaka Box lies in the fact that it delivered exactly that. If read in a straightforward way this is a series that presents itself as this idealized shonen story. It has all the theoretical building blocks of what people at the time wanted in their shonen and in practice its riddled with thematic contradictions due to having to conform to this standard. The final product is a big nothing burger if looked at in this way I am of the opinion that generic shonen despite whatever gripes I have with them can still have good stories that are worth acknowledging because they are told sincerely. In the straightforward reading Medaka Boxs attempts to conform to shonen storytelling conventions while attempting to add the desired adult themes and selfawareness of the era end up making it look shallower than its generic contemporaries. I am reading this as a satire though so I consider these storytelling elements effective in conveying a message: a critique of shonen.