Collision defines much of anime. In battle shonen, good guys and bad guys smash into each other until one side knocks out the other, dies, or befriends the enemy. In shojo romance, characters sometimes physically collide as they meet and fall in love. Even hentai involves people colliding with each other.. . again and again.
Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms first appears to fit that mold. Girl meets boy. Boy-seems-to-dislike-girl. Romancing ensues. The female lead — Mona Kawai — refuses to accept she’s in love with Medaka Kuroiwa, but that’s common, too. So, at first, I thought this was just another cutesy romance. It only took a few episodes to shatter that perception.
Premises Can Be Deceiving
The overview of Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is simple. Mona Kawai is a cute girl with a perfect life, and a boy transfers into her class. This boy — Medaka Kuroiwa — doesn’t find her attractive. In fact, he glares at her. He seems to hate her. Naturally, this will not do, as Mona expects her charms to win over every person she meets. As a result of Medaka’s resistance, Mona resolves to make him want her. Collisions: optional.
If you want to learn more about Mona and why she may be the greatest waifu this season, your friend in Japan, Peter Payne, has you covered.
Expectations Collide
Mona and Medaka don’t live in the real world. They both have beliefs about how they should live that conflict with reality. However, neither realizes it until their lives become entangled, and they collide with each other’s ways of living.
A Life of Resistance
Medaka’s other world is perhaps the more obvious one. It turns out that Medaka does find Mona pretty. But his family raised him to inherit his family’s shrine and resist the temptations of the body. Therefore, he lives a life of rejection and attempted self-denial. Medaka’s feelings collide with his familiar world, so he denies his natural inclinations toward Mona. His rejections hurt Mona and him, but he fights with everything he has to maintain the world as he knows it.
A Life of Appearance
The false world Mona lives in is subtler to notice at first. Mona, like Medaka, rejects the real world, but that would mean living in one where she is perfect and everyone loves her. Through Mona’s point of view, we see how people praise her. People have wanted to be near her ever since she was a preschooler. She’s designed to be cute, so her experiences are believable. Mona isn’t faking all that appeal, nor is it all real.
Told from a young age that she was cute and lovable, Mona has embodied cuteness ever since. Where the real world collides with that self-perception, she fixes herself. This is evident in a few ways. Despite speaking standard Japanese, she thinks in an Osakan dialect, revealing voice training. She also has facial expressions and poses designed to capture hearts, but there’s no way they’re natural; she must have practiced posing. She even develops strategies to charm Medaka rather than letting nature take its course. The perfect life she lives, one where everyone loves her, isn’t real. She has practiced making her persona into reality, but it’s not. Nobody lives a perfect life. Her life is an influencer’s social media feed: beautiful and engaging but artificial in several ways. Unlike Medaka, though, Mona doesn’t acknowledge that she’s deluding herself. She has rejected reality and substituted her own.
Opposing Worlds Collide
Obviously, Medaka and Mona’s chosen worlds are at odds. In some ways, the different realities of these protagonists remind me of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, but in that franchise, its protagonists are in a symmetrical conflict. Kaguya and Miyuki want to make the other confess first and, thus, wage war. Here, Medaka and Mona have asymmetrical goals. If Mona drags Medaka into her world with love, it will ruin his reality, but falling in love with him doesn’t endanger hers. Instead, Medaka’s resistance has already collided with Mona’s world and cracked its perfection. She has self-doubt over Medaka and tries to attract him in ways she finds embarrassing, even shameless, because they don’t fit her self-image.
A Story of Transformation
Mona and Medaka may be in a battle of romance, but that’s not the main draw. These two isolated people, living by others’ expectations, have collided. And I suspect they will both undergo fundamental transformations as a result. It doesn’t even matter if they get together in the end. These characters live apart from the people around them, and I’m excited to see how they question their realities looking forward. If you like strong characterization with sympathetic protagonists, this may be the best new anime of the season for you.
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