I'm writing this post on my Eee PC, away from any wireless hotspots (in fact, I think this place actually inadvertantly blocks out Wireless@SG due to its construction). I'm also not feeling too well (update: fever of 38.5 degrees Celsius) and thus not thinking too clearly; I've forgotten a lot of details (such as full names of characters), and while I'll try to correct the blanks later, I may miss a few (or end up not bothering in favour of medicine and sleep).

Extrange Twittered recently about Medaka Box, which I've also been coincidentally checking out. (Really; I was intrigued by the bishoujo character designs, and was hoping for some form of moe comedy.) In the manga, the titular character, one Medaka Kurokami, is a first-year high school student who gets elected to be the Student Council president, largely because she's the only member of the Student Council. In both the one-shot pilot and the first chapter of the manga proper (which restarts the story and ignores the one-shot canonically), she dragoons her childhood friend Zenkichi Hitoyoshi, who happens to be the viewpoint protagonist, into joining.

It's an interesting story. Medaka is supremely confident in her abilities to do every bit of the Student Council work, to the point where she wears the armbands of every position in the council, from president to secretary to treasurer. Considering her near-superhuman competence in just about everything she does, this is not an unjustified belief. The "box" referred to in the title is a suggestion box she set up to help solve every problem the student body sends her way. Zenkichi is only slightly less superhuman, but a lot more unmotivated as per the usual tsukkomi role.

There's a meme going around that perfect characters make for boring stories. (Good for moralizing perhaps, as in various religions and myths and Silver Age Superman stories, but not entertainment.) With Medaka's hypercompetence, it would seem that she would be some sort of all-purpose problem-solver, but as in a lot of other stories (or anime and manga, due to my personal selection bias), she's still saddled with a fair number of flaws.

"Flaws" may not be the proper way to put it. Extrange called it "tensai-dere", which sparked off the train of thought leading to this post.

I'm not going to have a lot of pictures in this post, mostly because Medaka Box, being a relatively new serialized manga, doesn't have a lot of artwork for it yet. This is why the header image is that of Ayako Takasu, which I'll mention in a bit more detail later. A quick search of imageboards shows some effort, but sadly NSFW. As it is, expect lots of pantyshots and undies under the cut.

You have been warned.

Let's take that term apart: "tensai" means "genius" (or "gifted"; genius in a general sense, rather than merely academic, although it's often used that way), and we've seen "dere" as part of "tsundere". "Tsundere" is made up of "tsun-tsun", pointy/spiky, and "dere-dere", soft/mushy. Therefore, "tensai-dere" would mean someone who is incredibly gifted, but still lovey-dovey and cute at times.

I'm not entirely sure how distinct this is from tsundere and kuudere. Going on a tangent here to explain "kuudere": it's more accurately "cool-dere", which means the sort of character who is "cool", in the ice queen sort of way. Unflappable, unemotional, coldly indifferent… except for the dere-dere parts, where she turns into a lovestruck maiden of the usual tsundere-in-dere-mode type.

I'd go further into the concept of "sunao-cool", but that's going a bit far afield. I might blog about it later, though.

Previously there was Ayako Takasu from the show with a long name that I keep remembering as Megadere (technically "Mamoru-kun something Megami something something Shukufuku wo"), who was considered a variation of the tsundere archetype at the time: she was tsun-tsun towards everyone else but the male lead, whereupon she turns all dere-dere. Hence the show's nickname, which notes that when Ayako turns dere, she turns very dere, especially when compared to her usual behaviour.

In Megadere, Ayako is famous for being the most gifted and skilled person in the school, complete with superpowers (some sort of pseudo-magical ability; it's been a while since I watched the show, so I've forgotten). She's not above heaping physical (but comedic) abuse on the other meddlesome members of the Student Council, and until she fell head over heels in love with Mamoru, she's seen to be a sort of untouchable goddess, compared to the plebeians that make up those not as gifted as her.

I think this is a part of the appeal of tensai-dere: the character is originally seen to be so far ahead of The Common People that they're no longer a person, but more like a vague ideal to either live up to or resent, depending on the amount of angst and jealousy in the narrative. And so when the tensai turns into the dere, we see that they can be just as human as the rest of us, with their own foibles, misunderstandings, and emotional responses. We put aside the question of not being able to understand how they've managed to be so far ahead of us in their skills, because we focus instead on how easily we can relate to their imperfections. Flaws are what make us human, it appears.

It also helps with staving off envy: human nature (at least from what I've seen) tends to resent people who came by their advantages by the luck of the draw (or just plain luck), rather than hard work. A major part of the tensai-dere is that she does not need to work at whatever she does; everything comes easily to her, Just Because. The moment we see that she needs to train as hard (or harder) than everyone else, she ceases to be "genius", and becomes "determined". (Yes, I know this is different in Real Life. I'm talking about the simplified world of fiction.)

The tensai-dere seems to overlap quite a lot with the ojou-sama archetype, specifically the haughty, queenly sorts, since the friendlier varieties have their own personality templates. I'm not entirely certain why, but there seems to be the belief that if the family is rich, they can afford to have their children take classes in just about everything, and these skills stick with them for the rest of their lives. The character is tensai not because she naturally is, but because it is expected of her by her parents or some such.

A common thread among tensai-dere is that since everything comes easily to them, there's nothing that gives them any challenge, and so they're lost in life, looking for some motivation. Even worse, sometimes they cannot truly understand that not everyone can do things as easily as they can. Just as we can't understand their seeming perfection, they can't understand how to relate to us. I don't think this is mandatory for a tensai-dere, but it's been in so many stories that I have to wonder.

Medaka approaches tensai-dere from a different direction from Ayako. In Ayako's case, she's used to being the best at everything, and thinks that it's all she's going to get out of life, but her love for Mamoru comes as an Outside Context Problem: something that is just so far out of left field that one has no context to place it all under. Therefore, Ayako becomes flustered and nervous, quite unlike her usual self-confident personality.

Whereas Medaka knows exactly what she's going for, and she has a plan of attack laid out far in advance. It's not a very good plan, but at least she's not going into it blind. The contrast here between "tensai" and "dere" is that Medaka is, in the words of the manga, "so smart she went back to being stupid". Watching her in action, one realizes how much we take common sense for granted, as well as how much we tailor our own actions to what we expect the other party to do. When Medaka directly asks a suspect in a case whether she did it (she did), despite the suspiciously specific denials, Medaka only listens to the words at face value, and accepts that suspect's innocence. Zenkichi justifies it that instead of not knowing how to doubt people, it's more like Medaka knows how to trust people.

And in the one-shot, when faced with solving the problem of the Judo Club dissolving from too few members, her solution is to get them to win an Olympic gold medal. (Leading to the club being popular, and getting a lot of new members, and so they won't be in danger of dissolving.)

It's this sort of innocence that makes Medaka a popular character, I think. The audience thinks: ah, despite all her amazing abilities and superb skills, Medaka still needs someone else to tell her that This Is Not How The World Works. Or not tell her, as the case may be; Medaka is perfectly capable of taking care of any problems that may arise from any misunderstandings her actions may cause, and so, with the consequences trivialized, tarnishing that innocence feels like a Bad Thing. The Discworld books describe Captain Carrot's immense charisma something along these lines: refusing his requests would feel like "kicking the biggest puppy in the universe".

Therefore, Medaka approaches tensai-dere through the route of sunao-cool (I promise I'll explain this in a later post), while Ayako approaches it through the more familiar tsundere. I'm not sure how far Haruhi (of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, if you have, by some freakish chance, never read any of the other posts in this blog before) can be considered to be tensai-dere: she's certainly tensai, but it seems more like an incidental part to her personality switches compared to Medaka and Ayako.

Personally, I do find Medaka charming mostly because she has no need for deception: what she says is exactly what she means. And while she's far ahead of the rest of us ability-wise, her incomprehension about our own limitations is framed in such a way that she honestly believes that if we try hard enough, we can be the same as her. Instead of resenting her for her superiority, we end up striving to fulfil her belief in us.

And then there are what aren't quite flaws, but more like quirks. Medaka really, really likes to pose, usually at the most inopportune times. It's a running gag that when someone is in the foreground making some sort of dramatic pose, Medaka has snuck up in the background, in the exact same posture. In addition, there are all sorts of sentai-esque poses that Medaka does when she's lecturing another. There doesn't seem to be any deep reason or meaning behind it; it just looks like something Medaka finds fun.

I could watch it all day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.