18 replies to this topic

[Siegfried1337]

Ok just here me out for a second, I'm about to blow your mind.

Zenkichi is Medaka's most trusted follower. Medaka is a god. Her "moveset" involves mars and Perseus, both of whom are gods. Zenkichi calls his moves "Devil run" (when he saves the rotting girl) and Devil eyes (really parasite seeing). Placed in the previous chapters before this arc, where Zenkichi decides to fight against Medaka, we can infer a biblical allusion.

Zenkichi is Lucifer, God's (Medaka's) most trusted angel who in the end betrays God and decides to go against him for power. He decides to go against her. God then casts Lucifer to hell (she mercilessly beats him with forbidden god mode). There he becomes Satan and obtains the skill "Devil Style".

So in conclusion, the author was hinting at this development for a long time, Zenkichi, god's agent, or the angel was bound to go against Medaka or god, and become Satan or the devil. This was foreshadowed by Zenkichi's tendency to name his moves after the devil.

Derp

[Thunder Wolf]

Why I had not read this sooner I do not know. Bravo. However, that's only one part of the symbolism in Medaka Box.

Anyways, I'm glad to see another person who uses critical thinking when reading Medaka Box.

[Siegfried1337]

Yeah that was just the most apparent one I found throughout the entire series after reading some of the previous chapters

[Pandion]

"Anyways, I'm glad to see another person who uses critical thinking when reading Medaka Box."


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
OH GOD I CAN'T BREATHE
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Is dis nigga SERIOUS?

[Hungryman]

I completely agree with Siegfried1337. It is very good of you that you've noticed all of this. I reread chapters connected with this story and found a few interesting things.
Here they are:

First of all, if you look carefully at the chapter where Ajimu Najimi asks Zenkichi to become a main character, you can notice that her appearance loosk likes as an appearance of an angel. She came down from sky in a white clothes, she has white hairs and her hands crossed on her chest. But her behaviour is more like she is a demon that tempts Zenkichi. Of course, I can't blame her because she were right, Zenkich didn't have any other options rather to fight with Medaka or to give up on her, Ajimu even helped him to win, but still she used him for her own purpose(and as I think this is how the demons do, they offer you help in the most critical moments of your life and then use and have you).

The second thing. In one of chapters Naze Uka said that Medaka has a messiah complex. But if to look at Medaka from this point of view than Zenkich might be Judas who betrays messiah but because of another reason. He loves her much more then anybody else and because of that he doesn't want Medaka to sacrifice her own happiness in order to make all other people happy. That why he betrays her and as a result releases her from duty to help every stranger. There also was part where author says that when Medaka lost to Zenkichi she felt like all people she were helping rejected her(abdicate her).
I've came up with this idea because of novel of Leonid Andreyev - "Judas Iscariot" where author is writing about his own version what had happened.

Anyway, to find any other symbols or allusion , I think it's better to search through Sinto or Buddism, and I am not strong in these areas.
And the last one thing. Nisio Isin likes to give his characters speaking-names, so I think it must be interesting to get full translation of names of all personages in manga.

Siegfried1337, thanks for your comment one more time.

Edited by Hungryman, 13 April 2012 - 03:26 PM.

[Beelz]

Its rather intresting, i saw most of this but after reading this thread i can see stuff with greater clarity i think its time to re-read and see if i can pick out some more, no point stating whats already being stated right.

[Lykyn234]

HI im new here and couldnt help but noticed this thread, there were alot of things that were mentioned here that i already noticed as well as alot i didnt notice (Anshinin devil in the form of an angel of light reference) but im posting this because i enjoy dissecting mangas that i read and thought i would share some things i noticed i am open to anymore information provided, but this is something i noticed, this manga is oddly satanic in alot of the the things mentioned and portrayed for example the emblem for the enforcers is the Pentagram most commonly associated with Satan and magic, i also noticed that in the new arc the word "Black" was used in alot of the names mentioned (Black Bunker, Jet black wedding Feast) these terms are seemingly derived from death metal artists not that im into death metal i just like researching where the ideas for these mangas come from, (black bunker, and Black feast formerly known as fallen God i think. which is ironic considering Zenkichi or Lucifer just de-throned her) also the name of the faction that sent the suitors is what caught my attention most Ge'Hyoukai its actually suspicious how "Youkai" is conveniently located in this name Geh i believe is short for Gehenna (Hell) so broken down you would have gehenna Youkai or Hell Demon or spirit and also how alot of the characters display behavioral traits that Satanists display like being outwardly nice but having a dark or evil interior (shiranui also my favorite female character) it seems there is alot of hidden satanic messages in this manga, though extremely deep and creative its very dark maybe the mangaka is a satanist? im not judging cuz i dont know them but their work would suggest so, also sorry for such a long post i just really get into analyzing mangas =) any feedback or add-ons are greatly appreciated

[Hungryman]

I couldn't help but to accept that Lykyn234 was right. This manga does being filled with satanistic symbolic. In the last chapter we were finally told the truth behind the Jet black wedding Feast. So now it is looking like an allusion on a Black Mess. Another association which I got from the start, was that the name of this Wedding Fest must be a wordplay on the name of a very famous spider - the Black Widow. You see, Medaka is going to marry a girl and this girl is going to suck out Medaka's blood, just like the females of black widow do.
What I don't understand from all of this is "the blood of her blessed parents" if to cite the second suitor(What the hell she's about? Please,don't tell me her father (or mother) was kinda a Messiah who saved the world or space-alien or something) . So, if have any conjectures about it, I'll hear them with pleasure.
Another thing I want to tell you is that in 141 ch. you may see a scan where little burning people are clambering up a rope and under them is the scenery of hell. I don't remember where I here this, but there is some kind of religion in which the dead must climb from the down of hell to the heaven with his sins bounded to his legs and the main god is blowing at him.
And the last one. Not long time ago I've found out that Academia Hakonivwa can be translated like "The blooming garden Academia", so ironically Medaka wanted to turn "The blooming garden" into the blooming garden(through you may not to see it this way).

Edited by Hungryman, 06 June 2012 - 06:10 PM.

[Wolve256]

I couldn't help but to accept that Lykyn234 was right. This manga does being filled with satanistic symbolic. In the last chapter we were finally told the truth behind the Jet black wedding Feast. So now it is looking like an allusion on a Black Mess. Another association which I got from the start, was that the name of this Wedding Fest must be a wordplay on the name of a very famous spider - the Black Widow. You see, Medaka is going to marry a girl and this girl is going to suck out Medaka's blood, just like the females of black widow do.
What I don't understand from all of this is "the blood of her blessed parents" if to cite the second suitor(What the hell she's about? Please,don't tell me her father (or mother) was kinda a Messiah who saved the world or space-alien or something) . So, if have any conjectures about it, I'll hear them with pleasure.
Another thing I want to tell you is that in 141 ch. you may see a scan where little burning people are clambering up a rope and under them is the scenery of hell. I don't remember where I here this, but there is some kind of religion in which the dead must climb from the down of hell to the heaven with his sins bounded to his legs and the main god is blowing at him.
And the last one. Not long time ago I've found out that Academia Hakonivwa can be translated like "The blooming garden Academia", so ironically Medaka wanted to turn "The blooming garden" into the blooming garden(through you may not to see it this way).

How does the wedding feast now different than the wedding feast back then?

Edited by Wolve256, 07 June 2012 - 03:00 AM.

[Hungryman]

I didn't mean they are different...Okay, maybe I wrote it in the wrong way. I just meant that when you hear about this wedding stuff for the fist time, you are thinking:"Why in the hell do they need this Fest, this hugeous battleship and bunker under the South Pole? And why a girl is going to marry another girl(even if her family is extremely rich and powerful)?" But after you learn the reason behind all of this it becomes clear and so you can easily make the same associations as I did, they can be easily read in me post. Sorry, if my English wasn't good enough to express this.

[Wolve256]

I see your point thanks for the clarification.

[AlekSlayer]

Ok guys, even before making an analisis, I think you lot are making some basic and big mistakes. I'll try going step by step before making my own analisis.

1-. Mars is in fact a god. Perseus is a demigod, just like Hercules. Medaka's mode is not Perseus but Perses. Perses was a titan (father of Hecate).
2-. Ajimu Najimi and angels : Seriously? Never saw an angel representation with arms crossed over the chest, neither white hair. I simply can't understand where this reasoning came from except trying too much to fit the pieces of the puzzle. Oh, and one more (stupid) thing, every classic representation and biblical description of angels make them genderless. Clearly genderless, in fact. I think Ansin'in has some easy to notice breasts, so she would have to be a futanari to be remotely close to "genderless". To go with the classics it should be easier to make her a pettanko in fact...
3-. Zenkichi and Judas : I don't think Zen-chan betrayed Medaka, but I'll try to go with your reasoning. Biblicallly, Judas betrayed Jesuschrist for money and now you make a comparision about betraying for love and o save a person instead of selling him/her for money and sealing their death with that. Can you really say with a straight face that that's the same treason? And about the Messiah complex, Medaka denied it herself.
4-. "Black" : Black Mases? Black Widow? Satanism? Seriously? Then, if the scanlator decided to translate Medaka's "Kurokami Phantom" as "Black God Illusion" (the kanji fit, so it would also be a correct translation) you would say Medaka's Satan herself just to mantain the theory? The "black" in those is simply part of Medaka's surname, would yoy say it's satanic to call something "The Smith Bunker" or "The Smith Wedding Feast"? Heck, that would simply sound ridiculous. Oh, and the black widows eats it's parter after sexual intercouse, it does not suck their blood. I'm not saying that I would dislike seeing Medaka fucking with another girl (altough I'd prefer Mogana for that), but I think the "inherited blood" simply refers to her genes, as we know Medaka is considered the closest to a perfect human, that would be incredibly valuable per se, and adding the control over the Kurokami enterprises... Well, you know what I mean...
5-. Ge'Hyoukai : Turn Ge'Hyoukai into Ge'Hyou Party or Ge'Hyou Association and the yokai are gone .Simply different kanji used, not much to explain
6-. Hakoniwa Gakuen : Sand Box Private High School. Literally. I can't help to think that it's kind of poetic to try transforming a sandbox (like those small children play in) into a blooming garden (the other reading, altough I have not checked if there really is the posibility to make that reading), but can't find the irony in it. Maybe I'm too blind, but if you have to connect the academy's name to something connect it to being the playground for the Flask Keikaku (keikaku means plan).

I think you guys simply are trying to explain everything using christian (even using other western mythos in some cases to support it) ideas and writings. Christianism in Japan is only the third religious belief and not with a large number of believers at that, and that's right now when being a christian in Japan does not put your life at risk... So maybe you should stop using it as your main influence to analyze manga and instead treat it as "one more myth"

Now, for some easy and simple analysis (I'll skip parts that are not in kanji, since they only have one reading)

Kurokami : Black God, Black Mind, Black Soul. I think this is easy to understand if you just remember what Oudo" saw when he tried to steal The End from Medaka with his "Unreasonable Taxation". Couldn't you say that was Medaka's inner darkness? The guy literally said it was "Dark enough to black out the sun".
Hitoyoshi Zenkichi : His name is kinda redundant, but it can be translated to "Virtuous good guy blessed with great like". You can argue if meeting Medaka while being good luck or not, even thinking of hear as the love of his life. But even if the virtous part is a bit off (he lusts over Medaka), i think the part about him having a lot of virtues and luck is very literal. He has not done anything wrong in the whole manga (the only possible exception that "treason" when he confronted Medaka and won against her). Heck, he even was able to be friends with two minuses (Kumagawa and Emukae) even after all that happened between them and altough he is just a normal, mentally at least.
Shiranui : Poor (bad) Understanding (Knowledge) Flame. And specifically Hansode : half arm, half wing (of a building or a stage). I think this refers to her as being half a minus or an incomplete one, meaning something must happen for her to be complete. A complete powerful (burning) minus unable to understand normals or even cope with them.

I think Medaka and Hansode are the classic "two sides of the same coin" characters, thus the reason they hate each other being polar opposites and at the same time seeing themselves in the other. Medaka is the potential totally perfect being, too perfect to even be human or associate with them and Shiranui is the potential totally imperfect (or defective) being, even more than Kumagawa. Even so, this makes them totally inclined to fall to the other side, as Medaka can lost her reason to rage or Hansode can help Zenkichi just because it's fun to do it.The balancing character would be Zenkichi, he sealed Medaka's darkness when they where kids and when that darkness resurfaced due to the Flask plan and Medaka went closer to being "perfect", he decided to attack not Medaka herself but her darkness. Thus, fighting against her and making her happy to erase all her negative feelings. He's also the only one able to get along with Hansode (the reason why her minus is still incomplete), so he would probably will have to make the same for her after he frees Medaka from herself and her family and makes her genuinelly happy instead of acceping her circumstances and living with that as well as she can...

Well, after all that I would like to continue discussing these matters, so feel free to refute me

[Himiska]

I think you're reading too much into this. Seriously.

It's just your typical action-pack shitty manga. At this point, it's a wonder why anyone still reads this.

[Nodos]

I think you're reading too much into this. Seriously.

It's just your typical action-pack shitty manga. At this point, it's a wonder why anyone still reads this.

Just because you have no brain doesn't mean no one else has one either. Trolls like you need to sit in the corner and be quiet.

[paraquat]

To add to Alek's post,

Christians are a huge minority in Japan. I doubt the managaka is a satanist, which would be an even smaller minority. While mangaka do use christian elements to make mangas more "exotic" (such as NGE being a good example), that doesn't mean the entire work can be assessed in Christian terms. You are basically just making a Western interpretation where it doesnt belong.

Also, black is not a color associated with "evil" in Japan. In fact, it can have positive connotations (which is why Bleach features heroes in black, villains in white). So the mention of the word "black" does not convey any "Satanic" (or even any negative) meanings necessarily.

[Hungryman]

Well I avow that my interpretation was quiet wrong, according to what had happened in manga. As my friend Daru always says: "I just don't know what was with me when I was writing all of this". So manga ofcourse can't be fully interpretated from a Christian- religion sight. But still, some association possibly can be useful for understanding what mangaka is thinking. By the way, I've never claimed mangaka is a Satanist, we don't know anything about his religion anyway, so stop calling him so. So may take all my ex-theory as bunch of observation, interesting or not(it's your own business).

But now I have new theory( and it is more Eastern then previous).

[Gatari]

This is probably the only thread I have come across that analyses a manga so deeply. Not saying it's bad, just intersting different people's ideas and opinions.

[clamzoopa]

Honestly, I kind of agree with Himiska. It may have a religious theme, but don't most all mangas rely heavily on them? Naruto uses a lot of Japanese mythology, Arago used a lot of Celtic mythology, etc (sorry, I'm lazy). I see it as more of a template/reference than an allegory. Also, Lucifer rebelled from God because he was jealous of the treatment humans received. While there is a parallel with him challenging Medaka in the election and her carrying about everyone but herself (and Zenkichi), he wanted to relieve her of her responsibilities as opposed to gain power, and everything is in the motivation. Not to mention, Zenkichi wins, Lucifer does not.

Edited by clamzoopa, 02 November 2012 - 04:34 PM.

[Hungryman]

My new theory about Kumagawa:
Kumagawa is definitely a dark hero. But you won't find anything like him so easily. The only thought that always come to my mind when I'm starting to think about it is that he is an illegitimate son of Joker and a japanese woman. If to think, his and Medaka relationships are alike the one batman and Joker have - Joker always tries to drive batman crazy. And Kumagava himself said that all Jokers were his friends, didn't he? Ok. jokes aside.

I've found out by chance someone who could possibly be Kumagava's predecessor or at last he looks like Kumagawa. And I've found him... in philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His name is "The ugliest man" and look what his speaks about himself:

Art thou angry with me because I have already racked language too
long? Because I have already counselled thee? But know that it is I,
the ugliest man,
-Who have also the largest, heaviest feet. Where I have gone, the
way is bad. I tread all paths to death and destruction.
But that thou passedst me by in silence, that thou blushedst- I
saw it well: thereby did I know thee as Zarathustra.
Every one else would have thrown to me his alms, his pity, in look
and speech. But for that- I am not beggar enough: that didst thou
divine.
For that I am too rich, rich in what is great, frightful, ugliest,
most unutterable! Thy shame, O Zarathustra, honoured me!

Doesn't that sounds very Kumagawa-like? Their was also told, that The ugliest man was the one who "killed the God" because God could saw his inner thoughts and ugliness and felt compassion for hit. The ugliest man couldn't bare it and killed the God. I don't clam that something like this was in manga, but the idea itself - the old Kumagava would certainly do something like this. For all 100%. By the way, in the notes to his work Nietzsche wrote that "The ugliest man" is something like in Buddhism and that "the worse - the better". I hardly can image what he was tolking about, case I didn't found anything like Kumagawa in Buddhism.

Another Nietzsche's thought is : "you must gather everything evil inside you, case the good one in human is too weak" and this also a very minus-like way. He got a lot of phrases like that.

And not only this. It seems like Medaka was doing thins in the same way. Remember her love war and her habit to love her enemies more then friends. Another quote:

"Be at least mine enemy!"- thus speaketh the true reverence, which
doth not venture to solicit friendship.
If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage
war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an
enemy.

And there are a lot of moments in manga like this one, I don't write here a lot of other quotes, just because it will take to much time. The most Nietzsche-like moment was during Kumagava and Medaka's battle, when Kumagawa said he always loved Medaka while he always hate her, and she said practically the same about Kumagawa. This is really something you probably won't find anywhere. I can't put it in a better way but the manga just "smells" like Nietzsche's way of thinking. I have no proves than the author have read THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, but it feels so. Well, their is a possibility that he hasn't and their thoughts just match, but logically this mean than Nisio Isin is at least as good as Friedrich Nietzsche?... OMG, logic is a really strange thing...

Edited by Hungryman, 10 November 2012 - 08:42 PM.