Episode 3:
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Gee, people really love One Punch Man...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwGwk217aCQ
Are you guys as excited as this kid?
Episode 3:
-----------------------------------
Gee, people really love One Punch Man...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwGwk217aCQ
Are you guys as excited as this kid?
Haha, did some say Berserk Mode?
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It's a bit hard to get me excited overall. At the very least, I'm not as animated and energetic as he is about all of this.Originally Posted by lelouch
By episode 2 we know to expect things to be bullshit. His whole training arc speil being normal was telegraphed a mile away so it wasn't exactly a surprise. Same with the supermarket thing.
Genos blowing up the trap tower though (which he didn't mention), that was a nice surprise. I think it's all to do with how sudden things are.
The OP animation actually looks like more like Saitama's training over 3 years.
Last edited by Buffalobiian; Sun, 10-18-2015 at 08:07 PM.
If it's not Isuzu-chan Mii~
@Buff - Good eye on EVA-01. I didn't realize it til you posted. I don't think he was colored in the manga.
Peace.
Ugh, the training regimen revelation was complete bullshit. Sucks that this series isnt interested in believably explaining its hero´s powers, instead falls back on comedic value there :/
"She's the only non-loli girl in the show, your honor!" will be my defense in court
"She's the only non-loli girl in the show, your honor!" will be my defense in court
He slapped a fissure in the clouds themselves last episode. No training is going to explain that kind of power satisfactorily. It was wiser to use the opportunity/set up for another shounen depreciating gag.
Let me say this: in OPM, everybody else plays by the rules of shounen battle manga. Saitama himself, as the outlier, creates the irony and deconstruction of shounen tropes that is the platform for the comedy. This is only possibly funny if you have watched enough shounen to know what to expect an encounter to be or how it should play out. The deadpan presentation should itself contrast with the "friendship, teamwork, and victory" that we are used to. Leading up to the punch line is the action, the other pillar of OPM, which nobody is complaining about.
The correct term is satire. And this is a brilliant example of it.
The entire conceit is that the hero of the story puts in minimal effort and is so overwhelmingly powerful that he defeats his enemies in one punch, and is horribly dissatisfied with it as a result because he never feels the thrill of battle, despite how promising things might seem. It eviscerates the clichés that plague the shonen/seinen genres.
And all the while, tension is maintained, because we the audience keep wondering if at some point...one punch might not be enough.
One thing has been made clear, repetition and dedication is key to becoming more than what you started as. Saitama worked "hard" to become superhuman, crab-guy ate too much crab and became a crab guy, Genus worked hard on his own theories and cracked the fountain of youth and genetic manipulation.
In contrast, Genos went for the shortcut and became a cyborg. He's super powerful, but didn't work for it. Correspondingly, he's been getting his ass kicked every episode so far. Those who dedicate themselves to a particular task are stronger or produce stronger underlings that he's no match for. He doesn't believe that Saitama could have achieved that level of power from basic training, and limits himself as a result.
As dumb as this series is, perhaps it is too sophisticated for you. Perhaps you'd better enjoy one of the three alarmingly-identical shonen harem series this season.
Last edited by Ryllharu; Mon, 10-19-2015 at 07:06 PM.
I can´t accept those three sentences coming from the same person. By stating the first sentence, you´re implying that OPM is better at being a shounen-series than "the others". Then you proceed to downplay the quality of other popular shounen-series. That doesn´t compute. Either, OPM is satire, or it is better shounen than "the others". And maybe I´m such a dumb fellow, but witnessing the source of a hero´s power isn´t boring, isn´t clichee or whatever, it is EXCITING. It is captivating. It creates a pull, it makes me empathize with the hero. When that weirdo Rock Lee showed up and beat the prodigy Sasuke, everybody was like "wtf!?". It was so weird. But then we got those flashbacks of his training, running around all the time, wearing absurd weights permanently. That´s what made it so great.
Finding out that Saitama did pretty much nothing to become that strong, surely works for a 100% comedy show. But it can never compete with a serious story, even if we´re just talking about the bland popular shounen shows like One Piece, Naruto, Bleach or whatever. See, even Dragon Ball, a show very much seeded in the comedy genre, too, manages to give pseudo-logical explanations for its heroes´ powers. It´s not super clever, it´s not always entirely sound, but ... it fits the story and therefore allows for excitment. Son Goku facing Freezer on Namek wouldn´t be exciting at all if we hadn´t witnessed his 100g training during his space flight to the alien planet. It wouldn´t have been exciting without him losing to Ginyu´s body-switch technique, then growing stronger after regenerating thanks to his Saiyan abilities. It was this progression that made it so exciting when he finally stood in front of the big bad guy. Imagine that Goku never trained, just appeared in front of Freezer, and won. What about it? It would be meaningless. And that´s what´s happening here in OPM: The nonsensical powers of Saitama make any confrontations meaningless. Moreover, even if we could have pondered if there might ever appear an enemy who can take more than just one punch, buy revealing that his powers came from pretty much out of nowhere, even that excitment is gone.
I´ll summarize it a bit: As a straight-forward comedy show, OPM is fine and still works. As a shounen show, it sucks. And calling it "deconstruction of shounen clichees" or whatever is giving it too much credit.
"She's the only non-loli girl in the show, your honor!" will be my defense in court
While what you said is true on many levels, and well written...what you still fail to grasp is that this series is satire, bordering on outright parody. The clear difference is that this is not parody, but absolutely satire. A key but important difference.
Unsatisfying shonen build-up (and lack thereof) is what this series is all about.
We as the viewers know Saitama will defeat his foes in a single punch. We now know that he thought he worked hard to become what he is, but no one else thinks so. He's simply absurdly strong for no rational reason.
But deep down, we watch with baited breath for the moment that one punch isn't enough.
It's no deconstruction. It is outright criticism. All the build up, all the training montages, all the near victories. This series spits in their face.
edit 2:
Just so this is abundantly clear, a parody of shonen/seinen is TTGL/Gintama. They exaggerate and play up the absurdities of the genre. OPM is a satire, it insults the hallmarks of the shonen genre by emphasizing and elevating the opposites.
Last edited by Ryllharu; Mon, 10-19-2015 at 07:43 PM.
I do not think any training can have your body withstand explosions, highspeed impacts with giant fists/walls/rocks, can have you be able to open 3cm thick metal sheets as if they were paper thin or whatever.
His latent powers are already several orders of magnitude higher than what his limbs would be able to bear as your average joe.
Reason? plausability? That's not the right angle here
All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. And then: Golf.
That's the thing. Nobody knows how the hell he got that strong. He doesn't even know. He thought it was his own training that made that happen.
Even if Bill foresaw it (he's analysing this show far too deeply if he's spending time pondering such questions before they happen), I found the scene hilarious. Like the cyborg said, it was super reasonable and realistic training and in no way enough to make somebody able to beat real monsters. Yet Saitama himself thought it was a totally gruesome and unreasonable regimen he forced himself to go through, turning him into an unstoppable killing machine.