Rules are meant to be followed! No, broken!
What They Say:
The Student Council has got themselves on the radar of the Disciplinary Committee. Onigase Harigane aka Onigase the American Handcuff has taken upon herself to correct the Student Councils rule breaking ways.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the slow and steady growth of the series and its cast, it’s no surprise that we’d finally get a stickler of a character. Onigase arrives here and she’s the one that doesn’t care for the freewheeling nature of the Sandbox Academy and what Medaka is doing in that there’s no consistency with uniforms, outfits and the way they all interact with each other. Even those you’d think are hewing the line properly like Kitajima are bending the rules in ways you wouldn’t expect, humorous ways that certainly gives you a chance to look at the new treasurer in a different light. Onigase is a real pill right from the start though as she does her best to whip everyone into line.
Onigase’s love of the rules is what drives her and she intends to straighten things out further at the school where since she arrived, violations have dropped heavily. At the same time, Medaka is convinced that she herself hasn’t done anything wrong and has the right approach to rules in that they’re meant to protect people, not for people to be controlled by. Medaka has no problem with Onigase herself and what she does, but she also knows how to push back against her just right. We see just how stiff Onigase is about doing the right thing that even the smallest break from what one should do sends her into a spiral. When Medaka jumps into a pool with her clothes on to search for something, you’d think Onigase would have a conniption. But it’s the kind of pushback Medaka needs to make to slowly change Onigase for the better.
Onigase ends up spending time with most of the core characters here as they make their way around the academy and she’s exposed to the different ways they all work, which is outside of the bounds of the rules in a lot of ways. It’s the kind of challenges Onigase needs to see in how Medaka works things, though she does take some solace from Zenkichi who in his own way does follow the rules a good deal of the time, though he knows how to bend them as well. There’s not much in the way of real plot here when you get down to it, but there is a good look at Onigase and what makes her tick and how she comes to understand what it is that the Disciplinary Committee is really supposed to be about. She gets a very different view of things thanks to her time spent with them, and it also shows why Medaka gets away with what she does in the end.
In Summary:
Medaka Box’s introduction of Onigase here is pretty fun, something I wasn’t expecting based off of how she came across at first, and it showcase why the series does what it does with Medaka and how she massages the situations. There’s little real story here but we do get a better view of the school as a whole and what’s going on and how Medaka and her group views the differences between disturbing the peace and real violations and just dealing with a situation to bring it to an end without further issue. It’s rather relaxed overall when you get down to it and that’s definitely part of the appeal. The series as a whole still feels pretty off, but there’s hints of something more to come with the epilogue section here after the end credits that could be interesting.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
