#and i love comments about how much various funny or silly or earnest stories mean to people

[crimeronan]

every time i get an ao3 comment on a horror fic along the lines of “jesus fucking christ. this is so vile what the FUCK what the FUCKING FUCK THIS IS SO FUCKED UP” i hug my laptop to my chest and kick my feet and roll around in bed giggling like a schoolgirl who just got a love letter from her crush. omg you got physically nauseous.....? eeee

[gofancyninjaworld]

I've been really annoyed at a lot of takes I see on Reddit and couldn't put my finger on why, but today I realized it's because they have a lot of snobbery towards shounen and assume ONE is making fun of every element of it. which I don't think is true. he pokes fun for sure, but I see a lot of "he's deconstructing the shallow shounen trope of blah blah and ridiculing it" which feels excessively mean. Most of the time someone presents the trope being "deconstructed," it's something shounen already handles with nuance. So it's extra annoying because it sounds like people who don't actually read shounen and just assume everything in OPM is ridiculing it. OPM is definitely subversive, but idk. It reminds me of how people who read "real literature" scoff at YA fiction as if there's no way it could ever tackle nuanced themes. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I guess I just dont wanna think of ONE as being so petty and snobby. What do you think? Maybe i'm too sensitive

Talk about a late, late reply. Sorry!

It's a good observation. I'm not the right person to talk about shonen in detail because I tend to dip in and out of individual titles so there's a lot of nuance I do miss, but you're right, people who dislike a genre tend to lump all its tropes together into an undifferentiated mass.

A slight digression as I introduce you to Boulet, a fantastic French comic strip artist, has a splendid comic collection online (https://english.bouletcorp.com/). Sadly, I'm unable to find the specific strip I have in mind but in it he's imagining how vastly different films would feel if you just kept the camera rolling a little longer. So we get to the aftermath of the Ewoks's victory and see these cute critters dragging the corpses of the Stormtroopers away, mocking some of them... really changes the feel of it. The thing that's different about ONE's handling of shonen tropes in One-Punch Man isn't that he deconstructs them per say -- he loves shonen stories and really has put a lot of thought into how they work -- it's that he keeps the camera rolling. What happens then? So what? What happens as a result? And then? That's what makes it feel like a deconstruction and also serves as the springboard for its seinen genre...

More seriously though, One-Punch Man isn't a parody at its heart: it has a lot of parodic elements but its focus isn't a genre -- it's got bigger things to tackle. ONE does remind me of Terry Pratchett in a way: the Discworld series may have started out as parodies of common fantasy tropes but they quickly outgrew that purpose and the stories became much richer explorations of various aspects of human nature, all while staying fantastic and funny.

I tend to say that ONE parodies heroes -- he loves the weird, contradictory, earnest people who step forward when everyone else avoids trouble and there's a lot of affection for them even as he pokes fun at some of the silliness the superhero genre has thrown up. He satirises corporate culture, and there's a lot of horror that's just put out there without comment for the smart reader to notice and piece together.

It does get annoying when there's fans who claim it can all be understood at a high level and that it needs must be a zero-sum game: if you like OPM, you must disparage the 'standard shonen'. Fortunately, one can simply... ignore the fools. I know I do!

Life is short. You won't stay young forever -- unproductive discourse is something to cut hard and early out of one's life!