It’s a part of his characterization, he wouldn’t be Kumagawa if he didn’t always lose! Actually no that’s just what you call one of them meta jokes, har-har, there’s a deep reason for that and it has to do with the archetype that Kumagawa represents.
So, if Akune is a shoujo prince and a shounen destroyer, Kurokami Medaka is a main character who always by some force of nature wins, and Hitoyoshi Zenkichi is the normal guy main character that achieves everything through effort then the archetype that Kumagawa represents is the “final boss.”
He’s introduced when one character challenging Medaka’s justice appears and refuses to be saved, activating Medaka’s anger for the first time and turning the series from slice of life to a shonen battler. His introduction has a clear purpose, this is set up for the final boss which Kurokai Medaka must face and this is merely an opening battle.
There’s also a certain special characteristic of this final boss that marks him different from every person they’ve met so far. Kumagawa MIsogi is the one person who Medaka cannot save, her good will does nothing towards him, rather he was able to provoke her and push her down to his level.
So, not only is he a final boss, he’s a final boss where the conflict revolves not around Medaka punching him and winning a victory because she easily did that in the past and drove him away, rather the conflict evolves around whether or not Medaka can save this person.
There’s also a few key things about his intro, he always loses and yet despite always losing he’s stronger than anyone. That meaning that losing to Kumagawa is not a matter of lack of strength. He’s not corrupt, evil, or wicked either, but rather he’s formless and seems to always take on the most negative aspects of others around him. His name is Kuma (Sphere) Gawa (River), so there’s a definite water motif to his psychology. That aside for now the important thing is this is an examination of Medaka’s saving people, from the first chapter of the manga its set up that Medaka doesn’t really understand why people do bad things, and doesn’t really ever see things on their flawed level. At best she can preach to people and try to raise them up to her own level and because those people see Medaka’s good will they usually respond positively to her and try to raise themselves up.
Medaka genuinely doesn’t understand that some people just can’t try as hard as she can with things. She doesn’t want to attribute her success to genius or circumstances and this is because of Medaka’s own guilt complex, she doesn’t want to be above others. Being on top of others is lonely and inhuman. If she was born just naturally better at everything that people, that means she was born to make all of their efforts go to waste. (This is a character archetype that NisioIsin plays with a lot. For example, Hanekawa Tsubasa in Monogatari gets called out for the fact that she’s naturally so good at everything because of a psychological complex she just always does the right thing because of obligation and never struggles with it because it’s a performance for her, so no wonder she’s so efficient it’s basically mechanical for her she’s not held back by the worries of other people who have to stress and feel indecision. All the way back to Zaregoto, Jun Aikawa and Kunagisa can be read as prototypes for Medaka because they’re both amazing geniuses who people flock around and worship and their geniuses tend to make non-geniuses feel useless and inferior around them and yet they both still crave human connection. At the same time II-chan, the opposite of a genius, a normal person who tries to disengage from everybody and everything and yet cannot let go of Kunagisa because he both loves and hates her, and refuses to be perceived and channels everything from nonsense and nihilism can be read as a prototype Kumagawa though the characters ended up being very different. The difference between Kumagawa and II-chan is pretty much this.)
Anyway, that tangent aside it’s important to understand Nisioisin’s intentions in playing with these tropes because he tends to use them very purposefully. Medaka is a genius who does not understand that not everything comes down to just working hard or not working hard, and that there are some times where you can’t work hard.
So, the next time Kumagawa is shown in a flashback as more build up to him as final boss once again we’re introduced to his philosophy. It’s pretty basic nihilism, Medaka at five years old feels a great amount of guilt for why she was born and why things are so easy for her when compared to other people. Kumagawa tries to comfort her by saying that there’s no reason anybody at all was born and that she should just let go from trying to find a reason, and the thing is despite how harshly Kumagawa words his nihilism he’s right. Medaka was not born for any specific reason, she doesn’t have to justify her existence, she’s just a normal girl who happened to be born smart.
That’s another major difference between II-chan and Kumagawa, II-chan’s nihilism is pretty much a self destructive spiral, but Kumagawa’s is constructive, once again depressed nihilism vs sunglasses nihilism. Basically most people confuse Nihilism for an edgelord philosophy that just states nothing matters and everything is depressing, however what Nihilism really is, is a rejection and questioning of the common ideas that we are told are supposed to matter.
“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. […] A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”
This is pretty obviously taken directly from Nietzsche’s mouth himself.
“In other words, this is a question of ‘What is genius, and what isn’t?’ Now, being incompetent—that’s what’s best, really. To be completely obtuse. To be so oblivious as to never think for a second about one’s purpose in life, to never think about the meaning of life, to never think about the value of life. Then this world would be a paradise. Calm, peaceful, and serene. Trivial things would be major and major things trivial, and life could be lived to its fullest.”
The world is harsh to the beautiful. The world is harsh to the attentive.
The world is kind to the unkempt. The world is kind to the incompetent.
The world is kind to the corrupt. The world is kind to the oblivious.
But if you figure that out, if you realize that, it’s already over right then. It’s a problem with no solutions and no interpretation. It’s over before it’s begun, and by the time it’s over, it’s complete. I guess it’s that kind of story.
It sounds depressing and II-chan never really grasps the less depressing part of the philosophy but basically Nihilism is a step on the road to existentialism. What Nietzsche suggests is that cows live an unburdened life because they are not smart enough to be able to process information they simply accept everything as they come. Humans lived burdened with the knowledge of everything else that came before them, we’re supposed to just accept that things are right, things are just, because of the way they are. There are so many things in life we just don’t think about on a daily basis because we accept it, because we were told to accept it. If you lived like that you would be living pretty worry free, but what Nieztsche stresses is that there is no such thing as inherent meaning.
Basically every human value in human society is made up, but that’s a good thing because then they can be changed and bettered. Nihilism is a rejection of the ideas that we’re told are just inherently there, it’s a rejection of everything. However, in order to form your ideas, in order to form your own meanings, in order to reach existentialism, you must first reject what other people tell you is meaningful and what society tells you meaning is. So, life is not inherently meaningful and whatever meaning we have is just made up in our own heads, but as damning as that can be it can also be freeing because you can critically reject what others dictate as meaningful and make up your own.
Medaka Box also deconstructs this idea, first Medaka is born with a purpose and that seems to be a happy thing.
However eventually, Medaka had to reject that purpose and embrace the idea that she was born without any purpose at all because that purpose became nothing more than an idea she chained herself too and accepted uncritically. So, Kumagawa’s nihilism isn’t wrong necessarily, it’s closer to the truth then Medaka’s philosophy at the start, and it can also be freeing as Kumagawa deonstrates later in the manga. However, it is very reckless.
Also, cleverly every boss Medaka has fought up until this point reflects part of her psychology and foils her. Akune is her perfectionist self that plays roles -> Kikaijima is the part of Medaka that goes all out to achieve what she wants -> Unzen is her zealotry and her inability to see the flaws of humans -> Oudo is her egoism.
Then, I would say Kumagawa Misogi is her inability to empathize with others or communicate with them properly. That’s how he’s introduced, not necessarily good or bad but completely impossible to comprehend.
However, unlike Medakaa who tends to be adored by everybody Kumagawa is her natural and opposite extreme somebody who is hated by absolutely everybody and everyone.
His introduction shows him violating others personal space, seeming well intentioned and poor intentioned at the same time, trampling over the desires of others.
In other words nothing Kumagawa says really has meaning, nothing he does has meaning, because Kumagawa himself defies meaning and rejects all meaning recklessly. In other words, he’s trying with every fiber of his being to reject Medaka, because he does not want to be saved by her.
As we get further and further into the minus Kumagawa surrounds himself by, Kumagawa is not in fact evil for no reason but rather because of a life long of indescribable trauma and loss after loss as rendered him this way. It’s not that he’s not strong, or doesn’t win fights, but no matter what happens he’s pretty much never satisfied with his actions. He never accomplishes what he wants, he never accomplishes any lasting change, nothing he does amounts to anything, and because of that he rejects all meaning.
So, Medaka has finally what she wants. Genuine victims who fell off the good path because they were beaten down by life. However, the minuses are exactly the opposite of what Medaka imagines them to be. They’re not helpless people who fell off the path in life waiting to be saved. Basically, Medaka imagines all victims to be good victims but rather they’re bad victims. The minuses don’t want to get better, because they can’t perceive getting better all they’ve ever known is pain, and Kumagawa comforts them by saying it’s alright for them to simply stay in pain and lash out.
Basically, it’s lucifer’s old.
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
We’re never going to be happy, we can never reach happiness, so let’s drag them down to our level instead. Let’s just learn to enjoy our misery. They have no concept of happiness, and change is a scary thing for them because it could always get worse so they choose instead to just try to enjoy the misery. Even the worldview of a minus is based around losing, Emukae sees everything as rotting away eventually, Gagamaru sees everything as being broken and fragile because he redirects damage.
Kumagawa’s strategies are all also based around the assumption that he would lose. He assumes that he would never win in a fair way, or earn a fair victory, so he tries to cheat, use distraction, and deception to win instead.
Kumagawa always loses, but the person who decided Kumagawa always loses is none other than Kumagawa himself. His style of fighting even when he’s about on par as strong a fighter as Medaka when it comes to raw strength is to just always take hits, when he goes seriously against Zenkichi he outfights him. He accepts losing as an inevtiability, because that is what misfortune and trauma in life have taught him up to this point, and then instead tries to find a way to win even with his loss. He threw the general affair manager’s battle on purpose and tried to break Zenkichi’s spirit, cheat by destroying the next fighters. His strategy in the secretary’s battle is to expect Shibushi to lose so he can escape the academy and remain the one person Medaka failed to save. Because remaining the one person that Medaka couldn’t save is at least a consolation prize for Kumagawa, and he can tell himself he was never taking it seriously to begin with, or he didn’t come here to face Medaka. A win that he can find inside of a loss.
Then, Ajimu peels away his relative layers and lays it out for him after his breakdown with Mukae’s injury.
Kumagawa despises talented and happy people, but he also loves them more than anything else. He believes that if he had talent like Medaka he would be able to make something of the nonstop chaos of his life. Everything he says about scars, damage, destruction, being beautiful is just a lie, a coping mechanism to keep himself sane.
Every minus is just a metaphor for a coping mechanism to deal with trauma and they are all faulty. Kumagawa Misogi erases all his mistakes with All Fiction, but because he doesn’t suffer the consequences of those mistakes he never learns and never improves, he always loses. Emukae doesn’t touch others because they rot away, but because she doesn’t touch others she’s lonely and becomes warped. Gagamaru redirects damage and lives as nonconfrontational as possible, but because of that he’s pushed everything else away and can’t handle any emotinos at all. They’re faulty devies of trauma, but at the same time if Kumagawa accepted every injury he had been dealt he would have died several times over so they are things necessary for survival all the same. To survive to that point Kumagawa had to tell himself that wounds were beautiful, he doesn’t really believe it, but it did do him some good at making him survive. However, he doens’t know how to live on past that trauma, he’s stuck in the stage of continually coping.
Kumagawa’s trauma relates to the fact that anybody around him will inevitable get drawn into his twisted misfortunate life, and therefore he villainizes himself and pushes everybody away, except for the minus which he reasons won’t be happy regardless nad therefore he can be companions with because they can enjoy unhappiness just like him. He’s terrified of them being reformed because it means they’ll leave him alone, and he’ll suffer alone, and become more inhuman. The human parts of Kumagawa are all divested in the minus, and the weaklings that he protects, the same way the humans that Medaka tries to save represents her humanity.
The lowest and the highest are equally alone, but because of that Kumagawa can understand both Medaka’s inhumanity, and her desire to be human more than anyone else.
However, despite understanding her he can’t reach out and help her. He can only antagonize her. Which is elaborated on in his connection to Ajimu later. Kumagawa always loses because he perceives himself as the villain. Despite having the intentions of a hero, wanting to protect weak people, wanting to find companions, wanting to udnerstand the inhuman Medaka. Ajimu points it out, in the shonen manga that Kumagawa loves, characters like him who can’t work hard, who can’t improve, bad victims like him who can’t take their trauma and turn it into something good like other stronger people can are the ones who win, have friends.
Kumagawa just cannot under any circumstances view himself as a hero, or as somebody others would sympathize with, so he pretends to be the villain instead. He rejects everything recklessly, because otherwise it would be too difficult to accept. Ajimu even explains it at a later date again, Kumagawa is the kind of final boss character that will always lose. The pre-programmed final boss at the end of final fantasy is meant to lose, to be defeated by the main character, because that’s how the game works even if you take 100 tries to defeat the boss the story is programmed in a way that the main character’s victory is inevitable.
However, that’s merely an archetype that Kumagawa is playing too. Reality is real in Medaka Box they aren’t meant to be manga characters, tropes, but real people. Kumagawa is just playing a role and because of that, he perceives himself as somebody who can never win therefore he can never win.
It’s not a matter of winning fights, Kumagawa can win super power battles easily, however to him that doesn’t feel like a win so he’ll defeat people and then walk off muttering about how he lost again because he didn’t win in a certain way or didn’t get what he wanted.
He lacks self control and often contradicts himself. Even when he earns victories he does not attribute them to himself. It’s self sabotage at his finest. Kumagawa despite wanting to win, his entire worldview is based around the fact that he’ll always lose, he creates situations impossible for himself to win in his strategies, he tries to instead find victory in losses.
It works well enough, but in the end even if Kumagawa is helping other people by playing the villain, by absorbing losses for himself and giving his friends victory, he starts to let go of the idea that he himself can personally win.
At any rate, as Ajimu points out the one who ultimately decided that Kumagawa could not win was Kumagawa himself, it was his own self perception that dictated that. There’s no such things as stars, or fate, or being born to lose.
Kumagawa refuses to see his good points, so with her last action after her death she reaffirms them. That there were people he wanted to protect, that there were people he wanted to inspire, that his good intentions were they even if he could not act on him properly. Kumagawa suppresses his good side, refuses to look at his good points, and plays the villain but ultimately it’s a role he plays and he can step away from that as he’s the one who cast himself in that role in the first place. Ultimately, what helps Kumagawa see that part of himself is his connections, his connection to Ajimu, his connection to Medaka.
Being born under a star that dicattes his loss, was just fanciiful narration, it was a fictiious lens that Kumagawa applied to his own life to cope. He was trying to find meaning in the chaos so he pretended that things had structure, and roles like they would in a shonen manga. Even though that was ultiamtely restrictive of him as it restricted him to being the enemy of the main characters. So, Kumagawa ultimately earns his first victory against Medaka. Not by beating up Medaka, but by believing that she would win, by believing his friend would live. It’s his human connection to her that earns his first victory.
A victory he can’t dismiss as a lost, a victory he feels completely satisfied with. And being given his one victory, Kumagawa is freed once more. At the end of the manga, just like at the beginning Kumagawa rejects all things and lives freely once more.
Kumagawa failed at every step of the way. He could not save the suicidal Ajimu-san, he could not sympathize with or win the heart of Kurokami Medaka the same way Zenkichi could, he could not make things right with Saki, yet at the end he’s still freed from the past and able to graduate, even if he has no future in college, no job offers, even if he only earned one minor victory along the way. Kumagawa is freed from the past, and freed to atone.
The freedom he sought at the beginning of the manga, that he recklessly lashed out against others to achieve, he’s finally able to find peace and coping with his life without having to hurt others along the way, and so he leaves and journeys to try to atone what he did along the way, living as he always did in spite of the chaos.
In essence Kumagawa loses because of his own self perceptions, viewing himself as the worst person, as someone who always loses, and by the end of the manga he’s freed from those self perceptions and once again rejects the entire world and journeys on his own to find meaning again. Even if that journey will only end in inevitable loss, he keeps crawling through that chaos.
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