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.

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