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Read that from start to finish, very good! I'm a little confused about the final remarks in the last article though. The writer states that since the events of End of EVA make it clear that Instrumentality is actually happening (as opposed to just a way to visualize Shinji's mental struggle), it can no longer work as a metaphor for this. But why couldn't it? This is fiction. Something can still be a metaphor, even if it is actually happening in the fictional world.

 

I missed that last comment and yeah, it's an uncharacteristically closed-off comment about the intellectual possibilities of Eva's endgame. Generally, although there's not enough text to be sure, Mark Simmons seems to be a bit more superficial in his treatment of the series than Patrick Macias.

 

Because I was curious about their career after Animerica shuttered, Mark Simmons now publishes fan guides for the Gundam universe and acts as a script consultant for mecha dubs, while Patrick Macias went to become head editor at Otaku USA and is now "senior manager for new initiatives" at Crunchyroll. Weird.

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Started watching Prison School and it has a Cromartie High School aesthetic and feel to it that I'm loving. 

 

They're moments in PS that have made me laugh out loud and it's been a while since an anime has done that to me. I think the last ones to do that to me were Ouran and Princess Jellyfish.

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I missed that last comment and yeah, it's an uncharacteristically closed-off comment about the intellectual possibilities of Eva's endgame. Generally, although there's not enough text to be sure, Mark Simmons seems to be a bit more superficial in his treatment of the series than Patrick Macias.

 

Because I was curious about their career after Animerica shuttered, Mark Simmons now publishes fan guides for the Gundam universe and acts as a script consultant for mecha dubs, while Patrick Macias went to become head editor at Otaku USA and is now "senior manager for new initiatives" at Crunchyroll. Weird.

 

Well, at least they stayed in the business. It's weird and inspiring to read this. I write for a Dutch anime magazine (AniWay), which has been going on for over a decade, but it hardly reached this level of writing, I'm afraid. We deliberately keep it 'entry level', whereas this went virtually into academic-level analysis. Would love to do that in AniWay, but I fear it's too much attuned to a younger demographic.

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I just found a post that has been the object of my search for years now: a defense of Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo that is actually persuasive!

 

As a disclaimer, the author is a bit off with his assessment of the preceding movie, You Can (Not) Advance. Sure, it presents itself the shallow wish-fulfillment version of the Eva mythos, but I think that it shares the themes of You Can (Not) Redo by showing that empowering Shinji by giving him everything that he wants causes the Third Impact anyway. Otherwise, I really like his analysis of how Rebuild 2.22 sets the stage for 3.33 by calming and satiating an audience that is mostly tired of being challenged and done listening. The additions to the traditional Eva soundtrack, from Kare Kano and The Man Who Stole the Sun, even support this conclusion, since they are both explicitly tracks about things seeming normal when they're actually falling apart, perhaps beyond repair.

 

It's almost genius to me that the messiness, the incoherency, the obviousness of You Can (Not) Redo is Anno Hideaki getting sick after twenty years of problematizing anime as a medium and his fans taking the problematization as the new normal, so he gives up and uses the script to address them directly while explosions happen in the background to point out the superficiality of such things. No wonder everyone hated it, it all makes so much sense...

 

Well, at least they stayed in the business. It's weird and inspiring to read this. I write for a Dutch anime magazine (AniWay), which has been going on for over a decade, but it hardly reached this level of writing, I'm afraid. We deliberately keep it 'entry level', whereas this went virtually into academic-level analysis. Would love to do that in AniWay, but I fear it's too much attuned to a younger demographic.

 

I mean, when that's the level on which most of your readership engages anime, there's not much of an incentive to go deeper. That's probably the biggest problem with anime in the Western world today: we have Susan Napier (who introduced me to Wilhelm Reich and "muscular armor" as a wonderful way of understanding the inherent psychoanalytics of mecha anime) and a few other people doing long dives on celebrated series, while the rest of us stay on the surface, intentionally or no.

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Slowly getting back into anime. Right now I'm watching Erased, Beautiful Bones, The Perfect Insider and re-watching Dennou Coil (one of my favorites) and Serial Experiment Lain.

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the ERASED anime is at a pretty pivotal point where I hope it doesn't go too far off the rails. It's been pretty great so far, though.

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Well, I finally caught up with the entirety of One Punch Man, and I thought it was a near-perfect anime, until the final episode with the fight against Lord Boros went entirely off the rails.

 

I thought that the whole point of One Punch Man as a concept was to problematize the habitual arc of shounen-type anime: in most instances of that genre, the solution to any obstacle is to grow stronger, so One Punch Man subverts everything by having a protagonist who is already the strongest being in existence. That puts the focus on the kinds of obstacles that cannot be overcome by growing stronger (and, in a few cases, ones that are made more difficult by strength), which is whence both the show's relatable humor and its surprising pathos springs. Saitama has no difficulty defeating anyone with a single punch, as the title goes, but being recognized and appreciated for that lack of difficulty is another (hilarious) matter entirely... as is making it to the market for triple-coupon day.

 

So I can't help but feel that it's a huge misstep to introduce a final boss in the show's finale who cannot be defeated by a single punch from Saitama. Even though the way in which he grows stronger is comically understated in both its duration and extent (from a "normal punch" to "continuous normal punches" and then a "serious punch" as a finisher over the course of roughly five minutes), it's still breaking the show's eponymous rule to suggest that even the strongest being in the galaxy can grow stronger (or, at least, use their strength more effectively). By no means is it forbidden for a seinen subversion of shounen tropes to break its own rules, but generally that's confined to moments of dramatic revelation or personal growth, where there's some manner of larger point to be made. Vash, for instance, finally kills near the end of Trigun, after two cours of outrageously exacting pacifism, and his act is a nexus of character development for the entire cast of characters, definitely not just played for spectacle like Saitama's multi-punch fight with Boros. There are some tantalizing echoes of where rule-breaking in the twelfth episode of One Punch Man could have led, in the post-credits button when our protagonist is back to defeating his adversaries with one punch. After killing the king of the underworld, Saitama shows a little frustration at having experienced a true challenge for his strength, albeit briefly, and at having overcome it so completely. Such an emotional beat has resonances with early jokes at the expense of Saitama, whose boredom at having perfected his strength so utterly that he no longer gets to use it was genuinely funny as the show's initial hook, and with the paper-thin motivation of Boros, who led an intergalactic crusade to find himself a worthy opponent, but the show's writers just aren't interested in teasing the connections between these three instances into a motif, let alone a theme.

 

And, really, I'm not even sure that the writers' reticence to do so is the wrong decision. Saitama's flat indifference to growth (which all happened to him before the first episode even took place) is such a strong pillar of the show's comedy. He is the humorously extreme end-state of a very specific set of tropes in anime, so the only way for him to grow is out of those tropes and the comedic role they've created for him, into something more serious (and, in my opinion, less interesting for being vastly less unique in the landscape of anime premises). Maybe it just would have been better for the writers to have come up with a different reason why Saitama couldn't throw a punch until the end of the fight? I don't know, I've run out of energy with this analysis.

 

Count on this coming up in the next episode of Key Frames: A Podcast About Anime!

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I'll just say that Saitama never put all of his power into anything he did. Still hasn't even in the web comic.

Disappointed you didn't even acknowledge the strongest aspect of the show. ):

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I'll just say that Saitama never put all of his power into anything he did. Still hasn't even in the web comic.

 

I guess I liked being able to sell One Punch Man as a high concept: it's about a dude who can defeat anyone with one punch and about that not solving everything. Therefore, it's disappointing to me that the decision was made to abandon that concept for no apparent benefit to the show beyond a brief rush of heightened stakes for the finale. It goes without saying that Saitama's absolute power is still functionally infinite, because he's the protagonist of a combat-focused anime, but making his effective power less than infinite at any given point in the plot is a concession to genre conventions that I had thought One Punch Man wasn't interested in making, not least because it flattens the show's narrative arc into something much more traditional and unambitious. I imagine that, from the point where the anime leaves off, events will conspire to face Saitama with stronger and stronger opponents, forcing him not to grow stronger, but just to use more of the strength that he already has, which shakes out to the same damn thing, and... Eh, been there, seen that, bought the Bleach T-shirt.

 

I'm glad the anime exists how it is, though. Like I said, near-perfect!

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I thought that the whole point of One Punch Man as a concept was to problematize the habitual arc of shounen-type anime: in most instances of that genre, the solution to any obstacle is to grow stronger, so One Punch Man subverts everything by having a protagonist who is already the strongest being in existence. That puts the focus on the kinds of obstacles that cannot be overcome by growing stronger (and, in a few cases, ones that are made more difficult by strength), which is whence both the show's relatable humor and its surprising pathos springs. Saitama has no difficulty defeating anyone with a single punch, as the title goes, but being recognized and appreciated for that lack of difficulty is another (hilarious) matter entirely... as is making it to the market for triple-coupon day.

 

So I can't help but feel that it's a huge misstep to introduce a final boss in the show's finale who cannot be defeated by a single punch from Saitama. Even though the way in which he grows stronger is comically understated in both its duration and extent (from a "normal punch" to "continuous normal punches" and then a "serious punch" as a finisher over the course of roughly five minutes), it's still breaking the show's eponymous rule to suggest that even the strongest being in the galaxy can grow stronger (or, at least, use their strength more effectively). By no means is it forbidden for a seinen subversion of shounen tropes to break its own rules, but generally that's confined to moments of dramatic revelation or personal growth, where there's some manner of larger point to be made. Vash, for instance, finally kills near the end of Trigun, after two cours of outrageously exacting pacifism, and his act is a nexus of character development for the entire cast of characters, definitely not just played for spectacle like Saitama's multi-punch fight with Boros. There are some tantalizing echoes of where rule-breaking in the twelfth episode of One Punch Man could have led, in the post-credits button when our protagonist is back to defeating his adversaries with one punch. After killing the king of the underworld, Saitama shows a little frustration at having experienced a true challenge for his strength, albeit briefly, and at having overcome it so completely. Such an emotional beat has resonances with early jokes at the expense of Saitama, whose boredom at having perfected his strength so utterly that he no longer gets to use it was genuinely funny as the show's initial hook, and with the paper-thin motivation of Boros, who led an intergalactic crusade to find himself a worthy opponent, but the show's writers just aren't interested in teasing the connections between these three instances into a motif, let alone a theme.

 

And, really, I'm not even sure that the writers' reticence to do so is the wrong decision. Saitama's flat indifference to growth (which all happened to him before the first episode even took place) is such a strong pillar of the show's comedy. He is the humorously extreme end-state of a very specific set of tropes in anime, so the only way for him to grow is out of those tropes and the comedic role they've created for him, into something more serious (and, in my opinion, less interesting for being vastly less unique in the landscape of anime premises). Maybe it just would have been better for the writers to have come up with a different reason why Saitama couldn't throw a punch until the end of the fight? I don't know, I've run out of energy with this analysis.

 

I agree generally but 

I'm not sure if this will effects your personal read on the failing of the shows final fight in any way at all gorm, but the feeling i got from the end fight was it was basically all "were not so different after all"  trope.

That as soon as the first punch hit Saitama & Boros both knew the outcome but that neither wanted to acknowledge it, and that Saitama is trying to give Boros the sort of fight he's wanted for himself the whole series out of a weird kind of sympathy which only comes to a end when Boros basically calls him out on it, giving him a choice to either stop messing about and treat him "seriously" (even if it is just for one moment) or watch him destroy the earth, and that the "serious punch" was actually a little bit of a deliberate overkill from Saitama as a sort of apology.

Not that that changes the relevance of anything that you say, but i feel like it was maybe because it was taking aim at a specific different trope with what it did and the the problem arouse as a side effect of that rather than deviating back towards the norm of shonen fighting shows for no reason.

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I have been watching a bit of Osomatsu-san, while aware that the first chapter didn´t represent the rest of the anime, I still have mixed feelings, while there was some very good parts, other I didn´t find so fun.

 

On the other hand, Sekko Boys is just amazing, maybe because the format of shorter episodes, so they deliver the jokes and don´t overstay.

 

A nice surprise is Hai to Gensou Grimgar, a anime about normal people which are thrown in a fantasy world, but with no memories of their previous life and that focus much, as someone on twitter said, on the personal relationships and healing (not magical healing, but people recovering from traumatic stuff), there is a much greater sense of struggle, they character aren´t like Kirito like in SOA, but people which spend early episode failling to kill a single goblin and when the manage it, it is a quite scene with some impact, they have to work hard to gain some coin and buy stuff (which somehow remember me a lot of rpg games like wizardry, where there is a much higher difficult early one).

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I guess I liked being able to sell One Punch Man as a high concept: it's about a dude who can defeat anyone with one punch and about that not solving everything. Therefore, it's disappointing to me that the decision was made to abandon that concept for no apparent benefit to the show beyond a brief rush of heightened stakes for the finale. It goes without saying that Saitama's absolute power is still functionally infinite, because he's the protagonist of a combat-focused anime, but making his effective power less than infinite at any given point in the plot is a concession to genre conventions that I had thought One Punch Man wasn't interested in making, not least because it flattens the show's narrative arc into something much more traditional and unambitious. I imagine that, from the point where the anime leaves off, events will conspire to face Saitama with stronger and stronger opponents, forcing him not to grow stronger, but just to use more of the strength that he already has, which shakes out to the same damn thing, and... Eh, been there, seen that, bought the Bleach T-shirt.

 

I'm glad the anime exists how it is, though. Like I said, near-perfect!

 

I think you're missing a very important aspect of the show in your analysis. It might be a parody, but there's a lot more to it than that. Saitama is a real character, not just a throwaway joke. He makes real choices for real reasons. His choice here was "I'm not going to fight at full power", which he made both as a sign of respect to Boros and an attempt to be able to enjoy the fight. In the end, it didn't work for him. And Boros' last line before he dies explicitly points out that Saitama was never taking him seriously.

 

It's a shame that you seem to have missed out on the more subtle aspects of the show. Or at least you didn't call it out. Saitama's depression, Genos helping him open up, etc. That, to me, is the most important part of the show. And it goes a long way toward explaining why he acts the way he does, including in the fight against Boros.

 

I also just fundamentally disagree that it's making any sort of concessions at all. It's not like Saitama's ever in any real danger, so there are no stakes in this fight (at least, for him).

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I think you're missing a very important aspect of the show in your analysis. It might be a parody, but there's a lot more to it than that. Saitama is a real character, not just a throwaway joke. He makes real choices for real reasons. His choice here was "I'm not going to fight at full power", which he made both as a sign of respect to Boros and an attempt to be able to enjoy the fight. In the end, it didn't work for him. And Boros' last line before he dies explicitly points out that Saitama was never taking him seriously.

 

It's a shame that you seem to have missed out on the more subtle aspects of the show. Or at least you didn't call it out. Saitama's depression, Genos helping him open up, etc. That, to me, is the most important part of the show. And it goes a long way toward explaining why he acts the way he does, including in the fight against Boros.

 

I also just fundamentally disagree that it's making any sort of concessions at all. It's not like Saitama's ever in any real danger, so there are no stakes in this fight (at least, for him).

 

Maybe I'm missing a lot here, but ennui isn't depression. Saitama never lacks the energy to go out and get things done, and he experiences moments of genuine pleasure and happiness in every episode: making it to a sale at the market, passing his exam, finding kombu on his way home, getting treated to ramen by Mumen Rider, etc. He does seem to experience minor anxiety in his interactions with Genos, but only because he doesn't know how to be a mentor to him (and, supporting this, Saitama experiences visible relief when something he's said offhand or made up entirely satisfies Genos' desire for tutelage). If your point is that he's depressed because he gets no pleasure out of fighting, despite it being his calling, then... I guess? I don't entirely see it, and that seems to be a deliberate choice that's worth critiquing. Saitama acknowledges that Boros is the strongest opponent he's ever faced, but his only other explicit reaction is to berate him for going to other people's planets looking for a fight, like a travelling salesman. The choice to hold back is never surfaced and only ascribed to him after the fact by Boros, who is a typical shounen villain spouting typical shounen platitudes that could apply to any shounen hero. Some variation of "In the end, I was never a match for you" has literally been said multiple times to Naruto, Ichigo, and many others. I thought the whole point of One Punch Man was that Saitama had transcended such tropes and existed as his own person, outside the tired will-he-won't-he tension of your typical boss battle. You say that Saitama was never in any real danger, but why assume the trappings of an anime where the protagonist is in danger so thoroughly, then? What does it accomplish besides breaking the show's rules to show that Saitama is sometimes compassionate, which has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout the series without breaking its own rules?

 

Actually, I have to walk back something I said in my last post: Saitama does have one exposed moment of genuine growth, when he decides to give the other heroes credit for beating the king of the deep so that his strength doesn't obviate the societal need for other heroes. It was great! An entirely internal revelation, born out of Saitama's observations of Genos, Mumen Rider, and others, leads the former to reconceptualize his strength and his role as a hero. That's where one of the clearest moments of happiness comes, when he gets the one letter of thanks from a fellow hero, who understands his reasons completely. But then the show walks it back in the next episode, when the Tank-Top Brothers whip up a crowd against him because of his destructive deflection of the meteor and Saitama's response is to tell everyone that he doesn't give a shit about their problems and he's a hero for himself. "Okay," I thought, "Saitama has moments of exceptional charity and compassion, but they're not a pattern of behavior and a path for growth with him. Deep down, he's a cipher of a hero and that's why the show's not letting me into his head more." If the intent of the final battle, the first time ever that Saitama doesn't defeat an opponent with one punch, is to show Saitama's growing awareness of others' needs and his desire to nurture them, then that arc needs to have been exposed much more clearly: no rewinding personal growth for laughs after the fight with the king of the deep, no informed characteristics from a goofy cardboard-cutout villain, maybe Saitama setting aside his studied lack of affect for a few seconds to have a connection with the object of his compassion in the moment before the latter's death... I don't know. I'm just not seeing the emotional intricacies at all. In fact, it seems like the show's writers have mostly tried to eschew them. Maybe it's in the webcomic, which would actually be a reason for me to read it...

 

I agree generally but 

I'm not sure if this will effects your personal read on the failing of the shows final fight in any way at all gorm, but the feeling i got from the end fight was it was basically all "were not so different after all"  trope.

That as soon as the first punch hit Saitama & Boros both knew the outcome but that neither wanted to acknowledge it, and that Saitama is trying to give Boros the sort of fight he's wanted for himself the whole series out of a weird kind of sympathy which only comes to a end when Boros basically calls him out on it, giving him a choice to either stop messing about and treat him "seriously" (even if it is just for one moment) or watch him destroy the earth, and that the "serious punch" was actually a little bit of a deliberate overkill from Saitama as a sort of apology.

Not that that changes the relevance of anything that you say, but i feel like it was maybe because it was taking aim at a specific different trope with what it did and the the problem arouse as a side effect of that rather than deviating back towards the norm of shonen fighting shows for no reason.

 

Yeah, this goes back to what I was saying above: if the writers wanted this implicit pact to be the defining element of the fight, I feel like they needed to do something to bring it out, besides having the villain just talk at him about how strong he is, which is just like how every other fight went in the series. Get rid of Saitama's comic deadpan for a moment, have him actually say more than an annoyed brush-off or a one-word acknowledgement, anything would do just to start a dialogue, if the connection is meant to be there. It's frustrating to me, for all the reasons I've listed.

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I experience moments of happiness, but that doesn't mean I'm not depressed...

 

Saitama is lonely. He's bored. He has no direction in life. He wants something, anything to make him feel like he actually has meaning in his life.

 

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Then Genos comes into his life. Compare Saitama before and after that moment. He's different. He's changed. He begins as a man just going through the motions and transforms into someone who actually interacts with people on a daily basis. And it's not just Genos; he makes other friends. That moment with Licenseless Rider at the food stand, after the Sea King fight? That was a strong and important moment for Saitama. The thank you note, also from Licenseless Rider? He went from someone who would've been upset by hate mail to someone who brushed it off and found joy in even receiving one acknowledgment.

 


When he blows up at people when being harassed by the Tank Top brothers? That's Saitama making a decision to not give these people the time of the day, because they don't matter to him.

 

I don't know why you think the fact that Boros takes two punches is the show "breaking its own rules". It just doesn't make sense to me at all that you would think that. What rules? Is it just because the show's called "One Punch Man"? He could have taken Boros out in a single punch if he had wanted to. But he did otherwise. He did it precisely because of who he is. I guess it's because you don't buy into the fact that he's more than a joke? To repeat what I said before, he did it in a vain attempt to draw out the fight and hopefully find a way to enjoy it, and as a somewhat kind gesture toward Boros, who suffered the same fate as Saitama, where he was just overwhelmingly strong and unbeatable. Of course, it didn't work, as the last thing Boros says shows us. He might have said Boros was strong, but Boros knew for a fact that Saitama never went all out. If it wasn't obvious to you before then, it should have been after.

 

His character development is subtle. It's understated. But that's what makes it so strong. The show pretends to be nothing but a parody, but for the people willing to look deeper, it's so much more. That's what takes the series to the next level. Not the animation. Not the jokes. It's Saitama himself.

 

I think you're just fundamentally misunderstanding who Saitama is. His growth is not an outward-facing one. He doesn't care about people who don't care about him. He's a hero for fun, not for fame, but he still likes it when people are genuinely thankful to him. He doesn't feel obligated to claim credit for all of his deeds, but he will gladly accept credit if someone acknowledges it. But most of all, he was lonely. And now he's not. And that is what triggers him opening up. He doesn't feel jealous of Genos' success (in the hero rankings, specifically), but rather encourages him to keep getting better.

 

He plays off a lot of it like he doesn't care about anything, but his actions say otherwise.

 

EDIT: Oh also, FYI.

 

I imagine that, from the point where the anime leaves off, events will conspire to face Saitama with stronger and stronger opponents, forcing him not to grow stronger, but just to use more of the strength that he already has, which shakes out to the same damn thing, and...

 

This is just a completely incorrect assumption.

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I'm glad you got something more out of it than I did, Twig. I simply did not see that emotional depth in the show's various beats, especially at the end. The idea that Saitama could have used his full strength but didn't in the final battle, out of respect, doesn't hold much water for me when Saitama is repeatedly disappointed that every other fight in the series ends with one punch. Why now? Why is this adversary, who has barely any setup, suddenly an inspiration for him to hold back? There is no groundwork laid for it, not like there is when sparring with Genos. Neither visually nor verbally is there a sense of recognition from Saitama about Lord Boros. He simply fails to defeat Boros with one punch, voices annoyance at Boros' motives, takes a bunch of hits, and then kills Boros with a combo that culminates in a "serious punch." Sure, Boros informs the audience at the end that Saitama is overwhelmingly strong and that he wasn't ever really trying, but literally every other opponent of Saitama has also informed the audience about Saitama... incorrectly. Why, now, do we take someone's word for what's going on inside him? Because it conforms with our expectations of who Saitama is, as a character? I am unsatisfied with that as a writing choice. The transition from "understated for the sake of humor" to "understated for the sake of pathos" needs to be smoother and clearer in its execution.

 

To take a different example, I liked Genos' brief moment of recognition with Sweet Mask, as similar people on different arcs. Genos, overall, is useful as a lens for looking inside the other characters, since he's established to have a strong inner monologue and an open mind about others' abilities. But he's not present at Saitama's fight with Boros, where the laconic battles the melodramatic, so we have no perspective on what's actually going on. Your interpretation is plausible but has no explicit support in the text itself, so I stand by my assessment that the finale was a misstep, if only for underplaying the show's supposed themes. It's certainly not remotely as bad as, say, the foggy mess that was the finale of My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, but it has a faint resemblance to it, again if you're correct in your reading.

 

 

EDIT: Also, to answer your question about rules, I initially understood One Punch Man as a high-concept anime about the strongest being in the universe, like Trigun is a high-concept anime about a militant pacifist who never takes even a single life. For Saitama to be holding back sometimes takes a lot of the texture away from that concept for me, like if Vash were fine with having to maim and cripple people when necessary. It's cool that the writers of One Punch Man want to do something else, but I find it much less interesting as a somewhat tepid psychological study on the loneliness of mastery, personally.

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I'm glad you got something more out of it than I did, Twig. I simply did not see that emotional depth in the show's various beats, especially at the end. The idea that Saitama could have used his full strength but didn't in the final battle, out of respect, doesn't hold much water for me when Saitama is repeatedly disappointed that every other fight in the series ends with one punch. Why now? Why is this adversary, who has barely any setup, suddenly an inspiration for him to hold back?

 

Because, like I said, he's the same as Saitama.

 

At any rate, I just completely disagree with you on basically every conclusion you're making so I guess that's that!

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Because, like I said, he's the same as Saitama.

 

He's not the same as Saitama. He's gathered a crew of thousands of aliens from all over the galaxy, including at least three powerful fighters who serve him with extreme loyalty, to support him in his quest to find the ultimate opponent. Saitama sits at home, clips coupons, and fights only when attacked or when confronted with injustice. They're completely different characters, except for the fact that they're both fighters of unparalleled strength. That's what I mean about the writers of One Punch Man making concessions to the shounen formula: "strong but bored" describes the vast majority of all characters in that genre and they all have this "brotherhood of arms" thing going on because no one has a life outside of fighting... except Saitama, who does in his own small way, but apparently he's the same as the rest, in the end. That's disappointing to me.

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"except for the fact that they're both fighters of unparalleled strength"

 

This is why they're the same. This is what Saitama sees. I mean I spelled exactly this out earlier. If you don't like it, you don't like it. I completely disagree with you. I see no "concessions" made even once.

 

(Also there's only one writer. It's ONE. http://galaxyheavyblow.web.fc2.com/)

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"except for the fact that they're both fighters of unparalleled strength"

 

This is why they're the same. This is what Saitama sees. I mean I spelled exactly this out earlier. If you don't like it, you don't like it. I completely disagree with you. I see no "concessions" made even once.

 

If two characters don't act or think the same in the vast majority of circumstances, but are still proclaimed to be "the same" because of some non-totalizing aspect of their character, then I think that is lazy writing and a needless concession to genre conventions in an otherwise tightly-written show. I'm sorry that you can't see my point of view here.

 

 

EDIT: Yes, I know that ONE wrote the webcomic, but it was adapted by Murata Yusuke into a manga and that's a source that Suzuki Tomohiro and Natsume Shingo also used for the anime. "Writers" seemed like a succinct way to address all of these cooks in the kitchen.

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Saitama is a simple person. He respects strength, because he is strong. But the kind of strength he respects isn't just of the physical sort. That's why he so admires, for example, Licenseless Rider. That is a strength of spirit, a strength of will. A determined strength.

 

In Boros, he obviously respects the physical strength, and also pities Boros because he suffers the same fate as Saitama: being too strong.

 

I don't really know how to explain it in any other way. It's even clearly spelled out in the things Boros says. I don't really know how to explain it any other way.

 

EDIT: Yes, I know that ONE wrote the webcomic, but it was adapted by Murata Yusuke into a manga and that's a source that Suzuki Tomohiro and Natsume Shingo also used for the anime. "Writers" seemed like a succinct way to address all of these cooks in the kitchen.

 

As someone who's experienced all three version, the anime pretty much follows the webcomic's story beat for beat. It shifts some minor things around (like Handsomely Masked Sweet Mask being introduced as early as he was), but the entire Boros fight is exactly the same. They even removed most (all?) of the extra stuff Murata wrote (i.e., ONE wrote and Murata drew original content for the manga version) when adapting it into the anime.

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I don't really know how to explain it in any other way. It's even clearly spelled out in the things Boros says. I don't really know how to explain it any other way.

 

Again, why should I take the word of Boros for anything that Boros says about Saitama? Why must I rely on informed characteristics from a protagonist's opponent, in a show where previous opponents have repeatedly and systematically misjudged said protagonist, for the basics of that protagonist's character motivation in the series' climax? Why is this one opponent right about Saitama's fundamental being when all the others were wrong? Because they're both really strong this time?

 

Like I said, the only emotions that Saitama expresses, besides boredom, are annoyance at Boros' arrival on the planet and resignation that he has to hit Boros harder. I must be stupid, because the "respect" about which you keep treating as obvious was not shown to me. You've extrapolated a bunch of stuff from a few offhand comments that are delivered in stereotypical shounen style, but to me they feel like fan theories about the last scenes of Taxi Driver being a dying hallucination by Travis Bickle: plausible and even interesting, but not explicitly supported in the text, so not a very satisfactory explanation to me about what the whole thing is about.

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Well, I wasn't responding to that point when I was talking about Boros' words. I was responding to the idea that Saitama and Boros are not the same.

 

That said, why not?

 

I don't have an answer for you. It's pretty obvious in the way that Saitama still looks bored the whole time. Boros' words only confirm what's already been shown, rather than revealing new information.

 

I don't know, I don't have any major revelations. I'm only saying what I found to be super obvious. If you don't like it, oh well.

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I don't have an answer for you. It's pretty obvious in the way that Saitama still looks bored the whole time. Boros' words only confirm what's already been shown, rather than revealing new information.

 

Saitama always looks bored, man. There's nothing in the series that keeps him from being bored, not for more than a few seconds. It's a pillar of his character, the whole "greatest samurai lets his sword rust in its scabbard" thing. Dude's bored even when he's on the moon.

 

I know, I should just disengage. I'm not seeing it and this isn't helping me.

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He's not bored when he's hanging out with his friends.

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