Oh how the mighty have fallen.



That’s how I was going to start this review, but I feel as though that would be disingenuous when this episode is still above average by modern standards. We can complain about how a good sequel got shafted, but I think there are far bigger systemic problems with the anime industry that need to be fixed first. But I wont get into that here. Anyway



insert plot summary here (thats your spoiler que)



hello Reinhardt

With the animation no longer blinding me with perpetual ecstasy, the writing of OPM has taken center stage and I’m finally realizing what makes this series so simplifying great. I’m not so familiar with the lore, but I believe in OPM people gain their powers from an accentuated aspect of themselves. The essence of who they are articulated into their design, personality, motivation and superpowers. Most easily hown in this perverts licking fetish turning him into a licking hentai monster who wants to lick girls.



an endless sea of the same reaction face

A more interesting example is Saitama. His character doesn’t acknowledge pre-existing structures, and casually walks through them. Most famously shown in him beating every villain with a single punch breaking all conventional shonen fight structures. For saitama, he only wanted to become a hero for some casual fun, which wanting to be in a profession where you fight to the death for casual fun sounds naive and in of itself breaks conventional main character backstories. The implications of this on his superpowers is that since he never saw being a hero as a challenge, or even the work required to become a hero as anything short of ten pushups, he can walk straight through any challenge because he is simply unable to see a challenge. He’s that guy who farmed to max level in dark souls before fighting the first boss and thought nothing of it.



This attitude bleeds into his interactions with King, as he doesnt respect the normal way to enter somebody’s house, or that he addresses King in a way that is negligent that he is older, higher ranking, supposedly more powerful. Saitama even doesn’t respect the flow of a conversation and cuts straight to the point of asking King about his reputation.



Atleast somebody can challenge Saitama

Ofcourse, marrying character design, personality, motivation and superpower is a common writing idealogue. In my last post, I talked about how the girl’s in BokuBen had personalities that matched their subject of expertise, which I am looking forward to being explored in their character development as well.



The difference with OPM is satire. Saitama easily beating every challenge highlights how we actually want to work, struggle and even fail. His discontent that no foe can challenge him has actually taken away Saitama’s casual fun. This series is actually pretty genius, and I’m only realizing it just now lol.



I am thinking about how to apply this theory to the other characters to better understand them. King has become the seventh ranking hero out of sheer luck (or bad luck). The world sees him as super strong and respectable, but King sees himself as a weak weeaboo wimp. I wanna say this reflects playing the hero inside of a video game. The game treats you like the chosen one when in reality your just sitting there twiddling your thumbs, maybe avoiding the real world in favor of a fake one. King has chosen to live the lie instead of facing reality. I am looking forward to where his character goes, it should be good.



Genos’s character of course is a homage to the original shonen hero Astroboy. In season one his tenacity to become stronger and defeat villains has shown us how suicidal the mindset of a shonen protag can be. This episode Genos met up with his doc and they reiterated his motivation to find the cyborg that destroyed his hometown, so I’m hoping this is a que that we will be getting the conclusion to this story soon.



As for Sonic, Blizzard and Sitch, I have no ideas. Maybe next week.

I made it through the whole post without saying the word “subvert” phew

Final Verdict: Prolly just the manga, but the anime is fine.

