Iapitus The Impaler said:
Resurrection is impossible. I know that may sound ridicules at face value considering
Kumagawa exists, but the verse draws a clear distinction. It actually goes out of its way to distinguish itself from something like Dragon Ball, and actually calls it out by name. The only way to bring someone back from the dead in Medaka Box is to make it so they never died at all. Essentially, there is no basis to bring them back once they truly pass on
About this part, there are actually instances where they can revive, without methods that make them never have died in the vein of All Fiction.
There is Kotobuki Joutou who can revert already dead people back to life as she did to Zenkichi by reversing his body's time back to two days before. However, since this is a style and the method does consist of returning them to a time before they died, one could argue it "also makes so they never died" so I'll ignore this one. Just listing for showing of other instances and for the fact that, before Kotobuki revived him, Zenkichi was still fully aware of his existence in the Darkness.
He mentions there was "no heaven, nor hell or the world and he wasn't in the middle school classroom" either but *he* as Zenkichi was still fully aware of himself despite his body having already died so it definitely wasn't biological functions. Something more than that was still conscious, despite him admitting to being dead. He also went and heard the voices of everyone calling to him which again shows something beyond what the body functions would allow for a corpse in a purely scientifical sense.
Other than Kotobuki's Nursery Rhyme, there's also the fact that Ajimu was confirmed dead by Hanten and still, was stated she would come back once Iihiko's power stopped preventing things he destroyed from being restored upon his defeat.
Finally - if we ignore that one as well since it's about Ajimu, there's Medaka's own Five Forks. It can revive people as she specifically used it to revive her dead friends after Iihiko's defeat and they were confirmed dead here.
Five Forks does not make things go back to a state before something happened, it can inflict or heal damage/diseases taken. Aoki was specifically stated to be given this skill to prevent anyone from dying and in Kumagawa's fight against Munakata it was also said Aoki could fix him up "as long as he wasn't dead".
Thus, Medaka
did revive already dead people without making it "so they never died", with a Minus skill - she straight up revived them with Five Forks as soon as there wasn't the effect of Irreversible destruction saying "no u, what's broken stays broken just like this ability".
Coupling these facts with Medaka's encounter with her dead mother above, by Hato borrowing the space from Ajimu to meet her, Hato's owm statement about being a lost soul and how she was still there musing about her Death after Medaka had already returned to the living, I actually fully believe the verse doesn't go out of its way to see things in a purely scientifical manner or standpoint in regards to what comes after death/its spirituality.
Also as a smaaaal sidenote that isn't all that relevant for this, Iihiko fought an actual Witch once as one of his notorious opponents of the past. And Hanten refers to him as "a hero like those of fairy-tales". So while we have no info on said Witch or Iihiko's adventures
Give us a spin-off!!!, there *probably* have been magic users in his own thousands of years prior to the series, too.
