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laylainalaska · 6 years

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Having now seen the anime (all of it there currently is, anyway) and read the manga as far as the library had (up to Vol. 10) I'm getting increasingly fascinated with how thoroughly deconstructive One Punch Man is about some of the underlying assumptions of shounen manga.

Okay, there are some parody elements too. But it’s also doing some things I think are really cool and I wanted to talk about.

*GENERAL, THOUGH VAGUE, SPOILERS FOR MOST OF THE MANGA/ANIME FOLLOW*

(Personally I think this is not really a canon that it matters a whole lot to be spoiled for. I’m an inveterate spoilerphobe, and I haven’t even been trying to avoid spoilers for the part I haven’t seen/read yet. Also, this doesn’t get into too many specifics; it’s more about the basic character arcs. As long as you don’t want to be 100% unspoiled going in, I think it’s okay to read this if you haven’t seen it. Still, I’ll put it under a readmore just in case.)

The thing about Saitama (the protagonist) is that his entire character concept is structured in such a way that it's impossible for him to have a normal shounen hero arc (the whole fighting to get better, meeting more powerful villains and powering up to defeat them, etc). Saitama is literally the most powerful person who exists. That's it, that's his whole thing, the whole premise of the manga/anime. He can't be killed, can't be hurt, and he can defeat any enemy by hitting them once. As soon as Saitama shows up, the fight is over.

Saitama's nature makes it impossible for his fights to actually be suspenseful (for the most part). So far I've found the few times that the anime or manga goes "full shounen" with Saitama's fights and actually gives us a long scene of Saitama and the boss villain pounding on each other, e.g. in the last couple episodes of the anime, it gets dead boring, because it can't really not be. He can't be hurt and he can't lose. You kinda almost feel sorry for the bad guys.

So instead of Saitama's character arc being focused on getting stronger, it's mainly about learning to find meaning in things other than sheer DBZ-style fighting-for-the-hell-of-it. At the start of the manga/anime he's a shounen protagonist who achieved his life's goal of being The Strongest. I can’t tell whether his emotionlessness and apathy is meant to be actual clinical depression vs. merely being incredibly bored and having lost his reason for existing, but to some extent, it doesn’t matter: he’s miserable and purposeless.

The main focus of Saitama's arc as a character is not getting stronger to defeat more powerful enemies (he literally can't get stronger than he is), it's expanding his life beyond a myopic obsession with getting stronger: making friends, fighting to save people instead of to be The Best, and finding competitive things he's actually not good at (e.g. video games) so he can be challenged again. He is noticeably more emotional once Genos shows up and starts dragging him into the social life of the superhero world -- I mean, in the beginning the emotion is mainly irritation, but being around people makes him feel things again, not because he can fight with them (he can’t spar with his friends, he’d crush them) but just because it gives him something outside himself to focus on.

So yeah, Saitama is an obvious deconstruction of the "Must get stronger!" typical shounen protagonist. But it took me awhile to notice that Genos (protagonist #2 aka the kinda-sorta sidekick) doesn't really have a typical shounen hero arc either, because it looks like it, but it's not. I mean, at first glance it sort of looks like the show has flipped the usual dynamic and given the main hero arc to the secondary protagonist. But that's not actually what's happening either, not really.

Genos, like your average shounen fighter-type hero, is on a quest to make himself more powerful (in his case, to be able to defeat the villain who killed his parents) and his life pretty much revolves around that; it's why he's hanging around Saitama in the first place. Except ... the thing about Genos is that he can't get stronger by training. Canon just flat-out says so: there's no point in Genos training because he's a cyborg, he’s 95% metal parts, and working out with metal doesn’t make it stronger. Initially it looks like he's doing the next best thing by adding mechanical improvements to do the shounen power-up thing and defeat more powerful enemies. That's certainly what Genos THINKS he's doing. But what actually happens is that Genos learns to fight smarter with what he's already got.

I didn't really notice this until reading the manga and getting to the first fight that Genos actually wins, the one against the G4 robot. It's a fairly typical shounen fight in the beginning, lots of splashy fight pages and so forth, but the way Genos actually wins is by trickery and smarts. At the very end of the fight, he's fighting in a way that doesn't use his strength and special skills at all. He wins by throwing a fire extinguisher at G4 to coat it in foam and then wrenching a pipe open to produce an enormous cloud of steam to block G4's lasers long enough that he can get close enough to deliver a killing blow. It ended up being a very un-shounen-ish sort of fight; you don’t usually see shounen heroes (especially someone whose power set is a brute-force one -- Genos’s focus as a fighter is punching stuff or blowing it up) sneaking around doing things like uncapping water pipes.

In the end, it wasn't a brute-force fight at all; it was a cleverness fight. G4 is arguably a stronger opponent in terms of actual heavy-hitting fighting ability, but Genos was able to out-think it.

And that's pretty much how Genos's fights seem to go from there on out: it’s about making himself stronger by learning to be smarter. Even his physical upgrades beyond the first couple aren't so much about giving him more physical strength or bigger guns; he's learning from his past defeats and adding modifications to help him avoid losing like that again. He's always getting his limbs ripped off in fights, so he adds an upgrade so his arms can attack independently and reunite with his body. He starts adding hidden sneak-attack features such as ropes and blades. His early fighting style is basically just, if it's far away, use ranged attack (fireball); if it's close, punch it. And he invariably loses because he’s going up against opponents who are physically stronger. He only starts to win because he's learning to fight smart.

One thing about One Punch Man taking this approach to the fights is that it doesn't really do the thing most fighting shounen manga does where the less powerful characters are increasingly useless in fights and eventually irrelevant to the plot as well. The thing is, compared to Saitama, they're ALL equally useless. And they know it. Most of the enemies they fight are totally out of their league. Which ends up making their level of fighting ability irrelevant in a way that I've never really seen in this type of combat-focused shounen manga before. I don't think it's possible to rank these characters in terms of power levels because their skills and abilities are all different and it actually matters. Even somebody like King, who has literally NO ability to fight and is a total coward to boot, consistently beats the pants off the physically unbeatable Saitama when they’re playing video games and even gets to score a win in the real world (against the Blizzard gang) using his video game skills.

This is also reinforced with their in-universe ranking system (their hero ratings) which at least as much to do with PR and lucky accidents as their actual fighting ability -- something that’s evident from the very beginning, with Genos starting out at a much higher level in-universe than Saitama (because he aced the written test and Saitama didn’t) while both of them know that Saitama is by far stronger in a fight. Heck, you get even more reinforcement of the sheer arbitrariness and ridiculousness of power rankings when Child Emperor’s power-meter (obviously a parody of the one in DBZ) rates unbeatable Saitama and totally-useless-in-a-fight King exactly the same: Saitama because he’s off the scale one way, King because he’s off the scale the other way (but this distinction is invisible to the person using the power meter, of course).

I can’t tell if the manga is going to be able to hold onto this long-term or if it’s going to get more typically shounen-y as it goes along. Some of the later fights in the manga with the big boss villains seem to be leaning more in the direction of playing the shounen tropes fairly straight; idk. But I like what it’s doing so far.

#one punch man #saitama #genos #meta #shounen #it's just really clever and well-done okay??#especially the Genos thing #which is so subtle I had to read up to vol. 8 or 9 before I started picking up on it

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