#monsterisation

[gofancyninjaworld]

The OPM Manga in 2023

By the numbers:

23 updates (most 14 days apart, shortest interval: 9 days, longest: 33 days).

662 pages (range 12 - 41 pages, mean page count: 29 pages).

Volumes published: 2 (Volumes 28 and 29). 1 bonus chapter included in Volume 28 -- Olfaction.

By the story:

Psychics and Temper Tantrums (chapters 176 - 184)

Well, the Monster Association is behind us but the fallout from it is slowly beginning to settle. Most of the heroes are now back at work and some of the consequences of a world that's increasingly scared of monster attacks are beginning to show up. The first quarter of the year was taken up with Tatsumaki's temper tantrum -- and Saitama once again daring a strong person to do their worst -- it's like he didn't learn his lesson with Garou, which disappoints me. [I love Saitama, but when brains were being handed out, he was not at the front of the queue.]

That said, even though I did not care one whit for Tatsumaki throwing Saitama around (it wasn't terrible, but really it could have been condensed into 1-2 chapters), the start of the Psychic Sisters arc was fantastic, and its ending was very interesting. I made a nuisance of myself at the start of it, pestering everyone in earshot with my excitement that Tatsumaki was taking Fubuki into her confidence to try getting Psykos out rather than trying to do everything herself.

Her complex feelings of disappointment, betrayal, and the sense that she'd made a mistake were some of the most complex and nuanced we'd seen in the story. She may be paranoid and misanthropic, but she's not crazy: there's a basis for her actions, and being knocked back just when she'd taken the risk of opening up was harsh. Unfortunately, Tatsumaki's default response is rage.. and I'm not going to waste time on recounting what happened then.

I felt pain for her here.

The end as well, expanding as it did on Tatsumaki's thoughts about how she'd accidentally woken Fubuki's psychic powers by scaring her so badly and the guilt she felt at having made her sister a target, was great. Her feelings about Blast are great, as this is the first time we get what she actually thinks of him. I still want her to learn that Blast doesn't work alone -- it'll blow her mind. The session ending with her giving the Fubuki group a chance to grow stronger and prove themselves is a fantastic development.

Even when she's giving someone a chance she still has to be scary.

Schemes (chapters 184, 187 - 191)

I really love how seamlessly the Psychic Sister arc flows into the next big theme: that of schemes and threats to the Hero Association's future. ONE has done a lot of work reworking the webcomic story so that the storyline is a coherent whole rather than two-three apparently unrelated storylines. Fubuki taking advantage of the chaotic aftermath to extract Psykos while securing immunity for her sister, and Tatsumaki brazenly using the HA's need to keep the rich clients sweet to scupper an investigation into Psykos's whereabouts was all clever. However, they're just amateurs and their antics played beautifully into McCoy's hands, who leveraged the crisis to make himself appear indispensible to the HA, thus making it very hard for him to be removed, even as he works to implicate the Hero Association in scandals (many of which he's running).

You can't call McCoy hasty: this guy has played a good long game.

The Hero Association is already having issues recruiting new heroes as they're going to Neo Heroes, which is also pinching existing heroes. However, it's not 100% going McCoy's way. Something I started praising in my review of chapter 173 is the greater self-efficacy of the characters in the manga. Sekingar and Sicchi haven't just been sitting on their hands watching McCoy sell the HA down the river. They've teamed up with Child Emperor to find out what he's really up to.

I think that this is the best cover of 2023: a collection of individuals who embody heroism, whether or not they're recognised as such or work in 'regular' ways. Well, there's one impostor…

Critically, they're not assuming that the Neo Heroes are necessarily evil: they want to understand what this outfit is actually doing. After all, heroism is heroism, no matter what guise it takes. To see that Sekingar has so earned Metal Bat's respect that the latter follows him into the heart of danger did my heart good [1].

Please, my poor heart, it'll burst if things get much more awesome.

Ninjas, Ninnies, Nintendos (193 - 199, ongoing)

That Blast has some connection to the ninjas from Sonic's Ninja Village has been clear for a long time in the webcomic. [2] However, it is only here in the manga that we're getting a full explanation of what that connection is.

Yes, yes, my partner may be a monster but he's a useful monster.

The intertwined story of Blast and his attempts to reach his former partner, Empty Void, who was also running a horrifying 'school' for grooming boys into assassins, and that of Flashy Flash and Speed o' Sound Sonic isn't done yet, but it looks to be reaching at least one turning point. It's a pity that the fan translators stopped translating the cover text because that for chapter 199 was incredibly pertinent: 'Staring at the back of a friend you used to stand shoulder to shoulder with.' Sonic has so much to process.

And like that, Sonic's world has been turned upside down.

Since Blast has an ongoing relationship with Empty Void, we get troubling questions as to how long Blast had known about the Village and whether he disapproved, or had been content to ignore it as long as he had his partner by his side and found his talents indispensible. It's going to be interesting when those two meet! Also, if Blast is hoping to reverse Empty Void's monsterization, he'd better hope that the guy isn't like most people who became monsters. Most ex-human monsters *want* to be that way and there doesn't seem to be a good way to undo it. Well, maybe if you chop them up, have Phoenixman (oops, he seems to have lost his powers) resurrect them, then shock them incredibly hard, that might work. It's unlikely that anyone present can deduce what happened to Gale Wind and Hellfire Flame, much less put all the working parts of that together.

Still, they're going to try. This *is* going to be interesting. Also, potentially heartbreaking.

Reappearances

Genos: the disciple returns to his duty

Unlike the webcomic, Genos has not been completely absent. He's been quite busy: helping Saitama recover their apartment, meeting the Hero Association to discuss important matters, and also, hanging out with Saitama as a friend rather than as a disciple. It's been fun to see that he's finally ditched his flip phone for a smart one, heheh.

Nevertheless, it's not until Dr Kuseno finishes his new upgrade that Genos sets foot in Saitama's house, formally reporting for duty, so to speak. I praise Saitama's self-discipline and good sense in not breaking eye contact and in politely ignoring his disciple's new-found exhibitionism until he had the sense to put a shirt on [3].

Less positive, it's been painful to see that Genos is frustrated at how he doesn't seem to have grasped the kind of growth he's looking for and is unsure whether Saitama truly sees him. It's not been helped by Saitama trying to reassure him, pulling his best 'Reigen' face and instead made everything worse. There are two interesting shames, which will surely be built on at some point. 1: We see Saitama seeing Genos's strength but he doesn't say anything. 2: Genos is right that the strength that comes from within is different from that granted to one by upgrades. We see in another chapter from Nichirin, that having artificial parts is no hindrance to pulling out that great inner strength. The funny thing is that Genos has shown that kind of strength before, when he was fighting Elder Centipede, but he doesn't know it.

Ah, despite everything, those fools are no better at speaking to each other than they were before! It'd be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.

Rarely have the words 'open your mouth and solve your problems' been more apposite. Sadly, that's exactly what they don't do.

Garou: the other disciple tries to learn duty

Now this really threw a lot of fans for a loop -- ONE making clear that he's aware of how young Garou actually is. It was very easy to read Garou as a guy in his early twenties, but strip away the pretensions and he's really young. His over-simple understanding of what was wrong with the world and his over-large sense of responsibility to fix it are thoughts of a teen. It's just a good thing that teenagers don't have world-shattering power, and so can be extreme and wrong without hurting anyone. But it has really jarred with a lot of fans.

I may be giving Bang the side eye as he implements his idea of reformation (apparently, it involves hitting Garou over the head often), but the sense of lightness Garou feels at having a reliable mentor, the relief he undoubtedly feels at having a way to work his crimes off -- being a social outcast may seem cool in a 'reject-the-corrupt-world' way but it gets old fast -- and being able to contribute meaningfully to the dojo's re-establishment is palpable.

His life is sure to start sucking again soon, but for now, it's a joy to see him.

Let him gambol for now. Go Garou!

King: ugh

Sorry, King just irritates me some days and this was one of them. Not because he was running around trying to find someone who could help him: that was fine. But because, unlike the webcomic, once Saitama told him to work out, he's continuing to stick around and play videogames. In a world where everyone is trying their best to make sense of their world and help themselves in some way, however imperfect, the sight of this poster child for mediocre white men overpromoted for looking the part continuing to laze about just pisses me off.

Let him start helping himself and I will praise him.

He's been told what to do but he's not doing it.

GAY!

This year, ONE said: here, my children, I have brought you a pint of homo milk. Drink. What else are we to make of Fubuki triumphantly cradling Psykos as she makes a clean getaway?

This has to be the smuggest 'got the girl' face I've ever seen.

Or Blast continuing to call Empty Void his partner, despite everything that the guy has done, including turning into a monster? He wants him back so badly, and though he says it's strictly professional interest, we think the man doth protest too much.

And then whatever's going on with these two:

Flashy Flash, you ain't got no business calling Blast soft when you're handing Sonic tissues and smiling at him.

Fandom Follies

Do we need to do this? Yup! This year, we discovered that a lot of dudebros who have been against the idea of romance in OPM have just been shippers afraid to come out and own it. The sheer number of Saitama x Tatsumaki fans has been incredible. Nothing wrong with SaiTatsu but the obnoxiousness of fans new to shipping has been hard to tolerate. Learn some manners, folks!

Asides

[1] I think this is great foreshadowing of something Forte says later in the webcomic to paraphrase, risking your life for another hero is something you do as a favour for a friend, not because someone's declared themselves the boss of you and ordered it. It's nice to see Sekingar embodying that ideal.

[2] It's hard to believe it, but to this day (chapter 149), Blast is not yet seen in the webcomic. At this rate, he'll show up at the very end to get jobbed by God (no ID), but not before giving an over-long exposition about what he's been up to. That is, if he's not already dead, only nobody knows yet.

[3] I can see SaiGenos shippers worried that my saying that it's good that Saitama isn't taking Genos up on his obvious attraction means that I might be disapproving of the ship. That is not the case. I'm going to assume that most of us here are old enough to vote, enter into contracts, and pay taxes and so can think of things with nuance and context. A fandom that needs the reassurance of canon to decide what's permissible is a weak, timid, and pallid imitation of one, and one I want no part of. For certain, we're here to discuss the story as it exists, but please, we're also here to consider and explore scenarios and make works that cannot and often should not exist in the canon because they are FUN. Even more pertinent, ONE is on record as LOVING that fans spend their time and creativity doing things with his stories. So please, don't allow any in-universe discussions on what is helpful or unhelpful in the story affect what you draw and write! PLEASE SHIP! Gimme!

[txttletale]

youve mentioned offhand ur issues with thirsty sword lesbians, have u talked at length abt this somewhere before and if not do u want to? i want to hear ur thoughts hehe

now before i get into this i want to clarify: i like thirsty sword lesbians, overall! i think it takes some of the best stuff from monster hearts and refines it -- i think it does great and exciting things with pbta playbooks -- i think anyone making a pbta game should check it out because it's full of valuable ideas -- and i've had a lot of fun playing it!

however, i think it's just as flawed as it is brilliant. there's a few different flaws but the biggest one for me is a catastrophic clash between two things the game is trying to be. one on hand, it wants to be a catradora rpg. there's no shame in that, i love games that wear their influences on their sleeves--TSL¹ wants to be a game about kissing your rival after you've both been disarmed, about having a fraught and complicated relationship with your girl best friend who abandoned you to serve the dark lord, about having homoerotic sword duels where your blades lock and you stare into each other's eyes for just one second too long before one of you kicks the other in the chest. i think that's an admirable goal for an RPG and one that TSL hits a lot of the notes of--the fact that the move to "Figure Someone Out" has special questions you can only ask someone when you're duelling them is incredible design. the Strings system, adapted from Monsterhearts, the ability to fluster your enemies when you use the Entice move, the constant focus on what characters desire and how their actions conflict with those desires--so much of the game is working towards that!

unfortunately, the game also wants to be about queer resistance to homophobia and capitalist/imperialist hegemony. this is clear in its sample settings, with their eyerollingly on-the-nose conflicts like defending 'queertopia' and fighting the evil sorceress 'repressia'. but much more importantly, it's clear in the game. several of the playbooks are defined by their relationship to sexual hegemony--the beast is about someone who is othered and monsterised for expressing their existence and the seeker is about someone sheltered and prejudiced moving past that and discovering themselvs and others. like, it's not subtle--

and to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, either. just as i like a lot of TSL's swashbuckling girl-romancing flirting-at-swordpoint mechanics, i really appreciated how (although the game's outlook on what these forces are is predicably liberal and its tonal approach to these things is one that i personally find teeth-grindingly insufferable) these things are actually integrated into its mechanics. playbooks like the beast and the seeker (and the rest!) imply something about the world the game is set in and its sexual politics. this game is meaningfully queer in the way something like dream askew is, in that its mechanics ask you to actually explore your character's queerness specifically. this is good, and it's something that elevates it above about 90% of ttrpg stuff that sells itself as queer.

so if both these things are good, what's the problem? well, it's that they're two great (or at least--interesting) tastes that go fucking horribly together. the fundamental problem that i have with TSL and one that i think takes a lot of work to get around in your own campaigns is that it simultaneously wants you to be fighting (on the individual level) a lot of antiheroic ultimately sympathetic hot girls you can flirt with and kiss--a lot of 'i can fix her's or 'she can make me worse's--and on the broader narrative wants you to be fighting institutional queerphobia (and often, although this is nowhere near as actually supported by mechanics, a more generalized 'imperialism' or 'capitalism' or 'bigotry'). so you end up fighting 'those stupid sexy homophobes'--people who are according to the text (not just 'lore', but the rules text, the mechanics you're playing with!) simultaneously the violent enforcers of cisheteropatriarchy and a bunch of fuckable lesbians with sympathetic backstories.

& i just think those things are fundamentally at odds. the result is a game that if you try and play it at face value works at cross purposes with itself, attempting to do two perfectly valid things without considering what happens when the streams cross.

it also has a few other flaws--like many other PBTA games, its balance falls apart if you play any long campaign (my group and i had to figure out special alternative level-up rewards!) but it comes with no inbuilt way to neatly conclude a campaign or character. its tone is something that, as i often mention, i absolutely cannot fucking stand--it has a certain sense of humour that feels profoundly dated to me and was never my cup of tea when it was in vogue. this is something i try not to hold against the game bc it is very much a personal taste-level 'cringe' reaction but the game lays it on pretty fucking thick.

more to its detriment, it is profoundly, gratingly liberal in the exact way people who deploy that tone usually are. its understanding of anything outside queerphobia specifically is just a purely aesthetic & thoughtless 'imperialism is bad!'. it manages a more nuanced understanding of homophobia, but it only manages it on the individual level--for a game about queerness and about fighting systems of cisheteronormativity, it has no systemic or material understanding of these systems and no interest in establishing one.

and finally--and this is just one paragraph but it's so fucking awful i feel the need to complain about it here because i think about it often as an example of something i never want to write:

this sucks! real bad! so deeply fucking silly to reassure people in your game that you called Thirsty Sword Lesbians that it's okay if you want to be cishet. like, it would be one thing to make a game where you can neatly extract the lesbianism and have the same game, a surface-level aesthetically queer game with no actual interest in queerness except as a marketing term. it would fucking suck but this paragraph would at least describe such a game. but TSL isn't that!!! . 'thirsty sword cishets' would be a very different and much worse game! awful and self-defeating paragraph. deeply silly concern to address and give airtime to. i didn't buy a game called 'thirsty sword lesbians' to be told 'its okay to be heterosexual i pwommy'

so yea just to reiterate: i like the game overall, i think there's a lot of good valuable stuff in there designwise despite all this. but i'm very ambivalent about it--ironically, i feel a love-hate relationship with this game about love-hate relationships. i admire it and yet i despise it! i long to put it at the tip of my sword and slowly tilt its cover up so that the pages look up at me coquettishly but with burning anger in their page numbers. if this book was a person id hatefuck it, is the joke, thats the joke im making, here, in this post. thanks

¹ i call it TSL whenever i can because the name 'Thirsty Sword Lesbians' makes me cringe out of my fucking skin. genuinely horrible name. i'm sure it's funny the first time you hear it, i got a mild chuckle the first time i heard it to, but it's such an obnoxious thing ot have to say repeatedly when seriously discussing it. should have stayed a placeholder name amiguitas

[the-nysh]

I've been wracking my brain as to why yellow was chosen as the colour for the volcanic monster armour he has in the surface fight but now I reckon it might be coming from his eyes, and it's part of the reason his eye is given such focus when the armour breaks a bit. And more specifically his *left* eye, the eye that for the longest time remained untouched by monsterisation, as if it's a literal indicator that Garou's true nature, his softness, is still buried underneath it all. in this essay

🥹👍👍 I......also thought about how the glowing golden fissures kinda resembled the kintsugi effect. With him getting constantly battered and broken yet still enduring it with the determination to quite literally reconstruct himself (and armor his emotional pain) even stronger. :')) our hidden golden boy~ Also the fact that when it breaks over that eye that's when his character's real golden strength shines through~ (plus later his fists with the glowing gold bhudda theme too!)

[webtoon-devourer]

i don't think it's necessarily the ruling opinion, but there are no doubt some people upset with the end of the Monster Association arc and how everything was "fixed" with time travel. i would like to express the level on which i disagree with this sentiment.

this dislike of the arc's conclusion likely stems from the general dislike of "it's okay, we can just go back in time!" and "it was all a dream :)" style endings, specifically the idea that these endings, under any circumstances, are cop outs. i disagree. if One Punch Man ended there, with saitama travelling back in time to stop everyone's deaths and his fight with garou, i would be immensely dissatisfied with the ending. i think that would be fair. however, vitally, it does not. those events are only the conclusion to a single arc. it brings us to a similar situation as the ending of the lord boros arc, with a city destroyed but none of the important characters dead. therefore, i would argue that such a conclusion to an arc is par for the course for One Punch Man. but there is also the vital matter of "it was all a dream :)" situations and how, in my opinion, while often used as cop outs, they are not inherently so, and dogmatic insistence against them is detrimental to good writing. having every possibility on the table is important in order to develop a plot in the way best suited to it - it's simply lazy writing which misuses these possibilities.

the vital question here is: was the time travel ending of the Monster Association arc a cop out? no, it was not. in my opinion, the events which were reversed could nearly be considered expositional. the cosmic garou vs saitama fight and the events which caused it tell us a heck of a lot about the characters. that garou retains his humanity even after becoming monsterised - when he sees takeo dead, he realises that his actions have not led the world in the direction he hoped, which was always a fairer existence. (he's really not a bad guy at all.) what saitama is capable of - man caused untold destruction during this fight without much of a care, including nearly destroying the earth if not for blast and co; on the technical side, we are shown that his power increases exponentially in response to another being even beginning to approach his level of power, leading him to easily beat a puppet channeling the power of literal GOD. that saitama actually cares a heck of a lot about genos, and clings to him for his sense of humanity, which he is barely hanging onto. it also gives us a taste of god's power, for future reference. the only reason i don't consider it expositional - that is, a "what if" scenario purely for the audience's benefit, which fleshes out the characters under otherwise inaccessible circumstances - is that genos remembers. therefore, these events actually do impact the plot through him. (there's a chance that blast and co also know, which would also affect the plot, but i'm not sure.)

the ever-increasing stakes are vital. we're still within the time frame of shibabawa's great prophecy of a god-level threat. at first, we thought it was lord boros, then garou, and now it's looking like the god-level threat might literally be god. whose power we have gotten a taste of, thanks to the cosmic garou fight. things are very much not hunky dory. there is still plenty of opportunity for things to go terribly wrong, even if it didn't happen this time. especially now that we know that saitama is barely clinging to his humanity. the deaths of everyone he knew affected him for sure, but particular emphasis was placed on the death of genos, because he's saitama's hinge to humanity. (if you deny this, i will be forced to call into question your reading skills.) this ups the stakes in a unique way. before, the concept of genos' death carried far less weight. genos fans would be upset, naturally, and saitama would be pretty sad, because it was clear before this arc that he cared at least somewhat about genos. but now? we know how saitama will react to genos' death. and it's not in a sane manner. genos' death now carries with it the stakes of the earth potentially being destroyed and saitama losing his sanity. at least personally, i will look upon any close calls genos has in future with greater anxiety. this newfound knowledge that we have only gives more ground to the idea that the final enemy might be saitama. either the final enemy of the earth, if he turns into a villain (quite possibly due to losing his mind), or the final enemy of saitama himself, as he battles his depression and struggles to stay in touch with his humanity.

the time travel ending was not a waste, nor a cop out. i encourage you to look at the bigger picture instead of allowing your instinctive reaction of "time travel clutch bad" to inform your opinions. there is still the problem of time travel now being on the table as a solution, but this can be avoided in various ways. for example, the existence of the alternate universe where everyone died and saitama fought cosmic garou as a parallel universe created by time travel, therefore not really fixing the problem, but merely rerouting it. or having time travel somehow taken off the table as a possibility. for example (this is just conjecture and not supported by canon), if god dies, perhaps time can no longer be manipulated, and saitama will have to make a decision between destroying god or saving everyone but letting god live and continue to manipulate events, a decision which he can never bypass because he ends up at the same crossroads no matter which path he takes leading up to that. i understand the concern, and am somewhat concerned myself, but i trust ONE and Murata not to end the series in a dissatisfying way. also, i think it adds another level of interest, even. if saitama's power is so great that he can manipulate time, that he can do basically anything, then hitting a single roadblock which he cannot bypass regardless of his power would undoubtedly have incredibly interesting effects on him psychologically. he could be glad to not be all-powerful, and have to actually fight for something for once, or - much like the events with cosmic garou - he might realise that finding a difficult opponent (in the form of a fighter or an impossible decision) at the expense of the people he cares about doesn't actually make him happy or excited. that perhaps he should have turned his search for feeling and a reason to live elsewhere, beyond fighting, a long time ago. idk 🤷‍♂️

[anonimusunnoan]

Me with severe depression watching sweet home: Why the fuck do they wanna live so bad if it were me I'd just monsterise!!!!

Also me with severe depression realising it may be because of the severe depression: oh...

[theomnicode]

Saitama versus Garou, the breakdown and the misdirections

Warning, this'll be a long breakdown where I get into the real meat of it.

Tl;dr: We've actually all been misled because they didn't show us some crucial details. ONE is doing some real meta level writing.

So I'm rereading the Saitama vs Garou fight from 161 onward and the way Saitama deals with Garou seems justified within his capabilities, if you think in a way that Saitama for the entire time is

a) not trying to kill Garou b) trying to gauge his powers and intent

I hypothesise that Saitama is using actual power of intuition that he relies on a lot, so nothing really bad happens even when he gets pushed into the volcano, instead bunch of people get saved. He displays that high battlefield awareness when he can see that far, into the stratosphere when Garou kills Sage centipede and immediately going after extremely dangerous Evil Ocean Water with an OHKO. Even Garou is surprised that Saitama can deduce his attempt at world peace somehow, even when he did not articulate that part specifically.

He also slaps Garou away from Tareo so there's more room for them to fight. He has a bout of amusement because Garou's actions bely his hypocricy and he shoos away the civilians because there's still a lot of large scale damage being dished out and he does not want them to get caught in the crossfire. But Saitama has always been a bit of a troll.

His intuition gets proven correct time and time again when Garou ends up saving people with his attacks, more often than not.

Only whenever he gets surprised by Garou's transformations and power increase because he can't anticipate that happening does something like Garou shifting tectonic plates on other side of the Earth occur. And even then Saitama's intuition is not incorrect, it ends up saving the plane on other side of the planet and Saitama puts a stop to that potential disaster near immediately.

Then after, he punches Garou with just enough strenght to destroy his monster form and that should've been it. The end of the fight normally. Mostly large scale but superficial and unavoidable damage because Garou does not fold that easily because he's extremely willfull, even when Saitama focuses on that part and intentionally goads him and then seemingly handles him with ease in an attempt to make Garou quit the act on his own.

"Just give up already. That's enough, right?"

Sure, he could have intuited that he could have just stopped Garou dead on his tracks by grabbing his fist and initiated table talk, but that's another timeline lol.

(maybe the redraw was actually legit meta idk, more on that later)

One thing about Saitama is that he's always taking hits and gauging his opponents because he needs some time to visualize his plan of action based on his intuition, if what Genos being the objective narrator being in the right is correct in an OVA about Genos trying to find the key to his strenght. When he actually focuses to the point of hyperfocus (Serious mode) and gets into the zone, he visualizes more efficently, intently and faster about what he actually wants to do, so he can actually use techniques he has seen done and learned before to great effect when in this state.

Rather than being a punching bag to Garou's martial arts, he becomes the martial artist.

If he didn't do his hero work and even day to day life carefully, he would end up hurting a lot of people unintentionally. Even the slightest bit of miscalculation in power could kill people. Genos got temporary amnesia because Saitama accidentally opened a bag of chips a fraction too hard. Genos is more durable than most. Saitama's reflexive reactions like sneeze in normal conditions is enough to burst a room apart.

Chances are hitting Garou to strip monsterisation was enough too and it should have ended the fight then and there. The way Saitama responds in both drawn versions of the fight is directly influenced by Garou's thought processes. When Garou feels like quitting the fight, Saitama stops him and talks with him. When Garou wants to keep going with the fight and shows no signs of quitting, Saitama hits him down. This is Saitama's intuition, the embodiment of Justice enforcement, Seigi Shikkou.

But we keep forgetting that God is watching this entire time.

And God has a way of directly influencing people's egoes to inflate them. Even if he does not make direct contact. He does this to Tatsumaki and gives her delusions of grandeur and inflated sense of ego to push the drill inside the earth, so Orochi can sacrifice itself on the altar to give God more power.

The more Garou's ego flares, the more God can have influence over it. So he keeps transforming as he refuses to give in. Garou keeps attacking to the point of causing damage to the planet too. More about God's influence over people here.

God's influence is something that is impossible to intuit or anticipate and the very moment God joins the fight, Saitama is at a loss in how to deal with Garou. In one hand, Garou is still Garou but he started acting strange and opposed to what his gut is telling him. And a whooole lot stronger too, because he actually gives Saitama a nosebleed when he turns into Mode: Saitama to match his power equally. You read that right, he hurt Saitama. The intentional paneling gives it away (not to mention the power graph in 168).

Once again the sudden transformation and exponential power increase keeps surprising Saitama and God's influence over his ego makes Garou's actions very hard to intuit, but Saitama tries his best. But again, Garou became so strong so suddenly even Saitama's hero suit got shredded by nuclear fist that came out of the blue, something that Saitama's willpower, his mental energy cathexis, protects and that fact does flabbergast him as well.

"Aaah! What the hell man, you messed up my outfit!"

But still he keeps on gauging the situation to the best of his ability, but the situation is now getting worrisome, especially after Mode: Saitama got pulled out. Garou still does not make sense to him, because God's subconscious effect and subliminal messages to Garou confuse him. He can hear God's echo chamber. Garou acts very weird and not all akin to the Garou just moments before.

He does not get much time to ponder though when Garou suddenly unleases Gamma Ray Burst, something that would destroy earth and Saitama has to make a very swift plan of action because he can't redirect it without killing Garou like he did to Boros and has to angle it away from earth. Nor did have time to prep himself into emotional state to hit him with a Serious Punch. Or he did not have time to gauge if it would have also just wiped out Garou if he used the required amount of power anyway.

Yap there's a drawback. Because he needs an emotional state to do a really strong punch as it's a discharge of said emotional energy. No time for any accurate punching meter unlike with Boros and Elder Centipede or Orochi Or Evil Ocean Water, Gamma ray burst is gonna hit right now. And it hits Saitama and sends him into tons of rubble and he digs himself out in a timeline according to where Bang confronts Garou.

Saitama thus far, has tried to do everything in his power to not only spare Garou, but to end the fight against a planetary+ level threat with no casualties and no irreparable damage to the planet he's living on.

It's no small feat at all. In every sense he's being very heroic here.

But God has far too much influence over this fight, a being that does not reside in the same dimension, thus something that cannot be handled with intuition.

This is where things get messy when Saitama digs himself out of the rubble. He did not apparently fly that far from where the heroes were, he would have heard and seen Blast and nuclear fists going off in the sky and hurried towards the battle.

Garou just unleased a devastating attack that could have destroyed the planet if he did not aim it away from the surface, he would have done his best to hurry back immediately and fight with more force.

The fact that he did not speaks of inconsistency in how he dealt with Garou before and caring about people (like CE) and how the situation got a lot more urgent faster. But he was not stuck, he climbed out in time just after Garou made his speech and future Saitama appeared to punch Garou in fixed timeline.

So... what gives? He got out of the rubble in time, but he just was not there in time anyway and lot of stuff happened in between...?

And it suddenly hit me.

Time dilation.

Two possibilities:

He had touched God's cube before which Blast says had slown down time in God's chamber.

Or Gamma ray burst effect because of gravitational time dilation.

Godrou mocks Saitama for being late. Very intentionally. To shift blame to Saitama.

He knew what happened and he knows about time travel. God knows the flow of all energies in the universe and Godrou by proxy, duh.

Gamma ray burst possibly caused gravitational time dilation effect. Gamma ray Burst displays gravitational pull effects when it pulls heroes towards it.

In physics and relativity, time dilation is the difference in the elapsed time as measured by two clocks. It is either due to a relative velocity between them (special relativistic "kinetic" time dilation) or to a difference in gravitational potential between their locations (general relativistic gravitational time dilation). When unspecified, "time dilation" usually refers to the effect due to velocity. After compensating for varying signal delays due to the changing distance between an observer and a moving clock (i.e. Doppler effect), the observer will measure the moving clock as ticking slower than a clock that is at rest in the observer's own reference frame. In addition, a clock that is close to a massive body (and which therefore is at lower gravitational potential) will record less elapsed time than a clock situated further from the said massive body (and which is at a higher gravitational potential).

God interfered on the fight yet again and caused time to work against Saitama, in ways that what was only mere seconds for Saitama was minutes for Garou. The closer one would be to Garou's body with lower gravitational potential, the less time would elapse than Saitama who was knocked further away.

That or the effects of the time paradox itself slowed down time when future Saitama came back from time at this point. Timey wimey stuff happened. In order for the future to happen, the past had to be rewritten somehow to close the time loop.

Either way, God is the reason this happened. Not because Saitama dilly dallied and was too blase to care.

(redraw was maybe actually meta lmaooo)

And so, Saitama got stuck in a time dilation and could not actually make it back in time to stop Garou any more because time elapsed faster for him than others. On that point onward, what had happened in the erased future had to start in the past. Poignant that he came back in time to fix everything.

We're just not shown that he's stuck in time dilation, because to Saitama, it also did not happen, he did not feel like anything was wrong before he confronted Garou again and saw everyone dead. He felt like he just failed, his hero intuition led him completely wrong, that he made a huge error in judgement and he took his sweet time and was too indifferent to care to get there quick enough. Everything he believed in came crashing down when his sense of heroism failed him and everyone he knew died on him. He thought he did everything correctly but still his best friend and his anchor to humanity died. Nothing could be more shocking and his world got turned upside down. His self-esteem crashed down to the bottom of the pit. Everything is his fault and he did everything wrong.

Exactly what God wants him to feel, doubt himself. That in order to be more efficient, he should not rely on his intuition and ability to gauge the situation accurately; that he should just bulldoze with less care for humanity because monsters are monsters right? They are not human. And to be more efficient, it would be better to just dehumanize them and be more apathetic. In order to not make mistakes like these any longer, one should have to be perfect because if Saitama makes even a tiny error, people suffer and he has far too much room for error.

Because Saitama has so much power to end the fight instantly, he should just go for it right? Just become omnipotent. To feel like the end justifies the means. To overcompensate to achieve that perfection because he does not want to make mistakes anymore, made to feel like he lacks in heroic qualities, even when he has heroism in spades, especially when his power grows to levels where a reflexive sneeze can destroy Jupiter. But now he was made to doubt what makes him a good person and heroic.

More in depth here.

What God wants is to groom Saitama to become like him. A being with a God complex who had discarded his humanity and emotions in favour of attaining perfection and perfect judgement and morality. Because Saitama is still susceptible to God's power like everyone else is and the superiority complex rears it's head when he beats down Garou efficently like a toy, in his anger and grief that he dissociates from so it does not overwhelm him. But god was also influencing that fight and made it into ego versus ego battle.

Saitama did not let go of his humanity in this fight, but the seed is already planted. It's up to Saitama and the people he knows whether he allows that seed to grow and fester and turn him into a monster. Into a being like God.

But one thing is clear here: Saitama did not actually make a mistake in this fight.

He was not blase, he had learned better and he tried his best.

God made him feel like the worst possible person and failure on the planet so he could use him.

This is the insidious nature of God, turning humans against themselves.

Saitama is still a hero through and through.

He may overrely on his powers, that's true and it was used against him here, but if he does not trust in himself, then who can he trust? Not trusting in himself would make him lose his self and his capacity in being a hero, because he needs to trust in himself to do the right thing and to never be defeated. If he can be defeated, then he loses the fight and the world may end then.

(Hell, ONE made US READERS doubt Saitama and his true heroism. Because of tiny details that were not shown. Actually magnificent storytelling.)

[britishraptor]

God’s Love Game is not a good infinite flow novel - the pacing is all over the place, the translation isn’t particularly good, the plot is boring and they immediately ignore how MC definitely shouldn’t adapt so quickly to being able to see, considering he was BLIND FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE

and yet it’s the only series that offers transformation/monsterisation as a legitimate strategy available to players, especially without MC harping on about something something humanity and morals. So I persist

[piracytheorist]

this is a ramble and kinda long and I am so sorry

I love how no one mentions Lisa Trevor from resident evil one remake in relation to anything. Chris/ Jill show little to no emotion when reading about her (when physically with her you're to busy trying not to let her kill you- a pain in one setting because you're in a narrow caving system and static camera makes it worse). Like someone made a video essay about the monsterisation of abused little girls or something and when I got to RE Eveline segment I was waiting for any mention of Lisa and I got nothing which made the argument they were making null and void because I kept wondering where the Lisa Trevor mention was (reminder Lisa Trevor was a child when she and her parents were taken by the Umbrella Corporation her father starved to death and her mother was executed Lisa Trevor was turned into a hideous monster so dehumanised by the people around her it is horrifying (part of the wiki "the next twenty-eight years, Lisa remained beneath the estate, and was moved into the Arklay Laboratory upon its completion. Her existence was kept a company secret, with none of the researchers at the facility knowing her name, and few even knowing she existed at all"). but nope no mention of her at all

Eveline the only way I think she could have been helped is if she had her powers removed (if it didn't kill her that is) because the kindness shown to her by the Bakers lead to their downfall like this is from the file R&D Report 1 " Auditions with infected subjects throughout the stages of infection reveal that at first, the phantom Eveline appears to be a normal young girl, sometimes desiring companionship or assistance. As time progresses, she begins making more and more extreme demans, including self-mutilation and attacks on other people. The psychological shock this induces helps to break down the mind's natural barriers to Eveline's brainwashing effect, and by the time mental control is achieved, the mutamycete infection has progressed throughout the body's cells, so the body redacted". and yeah of course the only way Evie could heal from her lonely and isolated existence is if she had someone qaulified in child hood trauma and outbreak infection. Not some random dude looking for his wife (what is with people wanting Ethan to be a therapist with years of experience to people actively trying to kill him?).

I like Eveline and feel for her but she like the lords suffer from fandom going she did nothing wrong (the people she had kidnapped and experimented on and had killed would beg to differ- it was around a 100 victims) and my personal hatred for the Bakers/ Ethan and Mia should officially adopt Eveline people because they never clarify when they're talking about like is Eveline powerless and have been in therapy for years? or has Eveline possessing them (Bakers and Mia) and forcing them to do horrible things not happened? what is the full thought process here?

Look, fandoms will always find creative ways to take a story and reform it in their own ways, by their own tastes and desires and in their own style. Redemption arcs have also always been popular with audiences, the idea that no matter how fucked up one might see themselves, they still have hope to become better and be accepted into the world.

(Continuing under the cut cause it got long)

That's the case, I think, with people taking Eveline and giving her a happy ending. It's a case of Death of the Author where fan creations and interpretations go against what the author intended and do their own thing. The narrative clearly presents Eveline as a villain that needs to be defeated, and Shadows of Rose did not help in changing that, but people see her as a victim that deserves being saved - and truly, how do we define when someone is "too far gone"? How do we decide that a person is so beyond helping that all we can do is put an end to their misery? I think that's what people who imagine a good ending for her focus on. In this case, Ethan, or Mia, or the Bakers, are not the focus; Eveline is. The others take a backseat, and necessary to the new narrative, they take the roles of the responsible caretakers that Eveline never had growing up. It's simply a shift of narrative and character roles.

And in any case of Eveline's past in those AUs, it doesn't really matter what it is, cause it's not like the people talking about canon Eveline (with all the people whose deaths she caused) would actually support such a case in real life; that's the fun with fiction, to take the worst case scenario and imagine how things could go from there, and since it's fiction no-one gets hurt so you can put literally anything, from the sweetest fluff to the worst war criminals in it. So even the people who go like "Yes Eveline possessed and killed all those people but now the Bakers/Winterses take care of her and she's fine!" are not saying that what she did was okay; they're just taking an extreme scenario and playing along with it. It's fiction. There's no harm done.

There's an endless variety in the way humans experience the world around them and the opinions they create based on them. That also applies to how we interpret fictional stories, and how we behave about them in fandom. So on one extreme you have people who scream "video games cause violence!". and on the other extreme you have people who write "My Mom Sells Me To [music band]" fanfiction, actually wish that could happen in real life and then send their fanfics to the members of the band in question. For everyone in between, we have to accept that everyone's minds work differently and what looks like an atrocity to us, to them it's a way of expression, having fun, and creativity. And it's honestly harmless.

Do I think that Ethan should have played therapist with Eveline? Fuck no. But I am a kinda person that when I experience a fictional story, one of my priorities is learn the Author's Intent; follow the Creator and understand why they wrote what they wrote and what their intention was; it's why I prefer meta and analysis over fanfiction. I also believe that Eveline deserved being saved and put with a loving family that would take care of her, mold powers or not. But Author's Intent was to tell us that Eveline was too far gone and there was nothing anyone could do; that's another reason they had Ethan "Normal Guy" Winters as the protagonist, to accentuate the fact that there was nothing we, the protagonist, the one whose shoes we play as, could do to help her. That's enough for me to conclude my opinion on the story and leave it at that, but some people like taking a story and expanding upon it. We don't have to agree with the narratives those people present and create, but it's not our job to judge them either, even if those narratives sound outlandish to us.

So to answer your question, I'm not really in a position to judge what people's thought process is in those cases. I am personally content with the story, so I don't engage with transformative fiction on it, so I don't know what their process is like - and even if I knew, it wouldn't be my place to make any assumptions based on that. It's just people having their fun. They don't make things I like, so I just scroll by, look away and focus on things I like instead.

I don't mean to sound patronizing, you're always welcome to send me messages, but honestly, what I write here are things I WISH someone had told me when I was younger, when I first entered online fandom, when I contacted people and talked about people in "opposite" sides… It's okay if you don't like what those people create, what they write, or the way they interpret the story; I don't either. But they're just having their fun, aren't hurting anyone, and I don't want to encourage fandom fights so I try to be as neutral as possible in such cases.

Again, you're welcome to come talk to me about why Ethan as the canon character did not have the responsibility to stop defending himself and try to placate a traumatized girl-turned-bioweapon's feelings and become her dad after she had attempted numerous times to kill him. As I said, I love analyzing stories - but it's a whole different story when I'm asked to focus on why other people interpret the same story in a different way. They just do. That's all I or anyone else can say, truly.

Now as of Lisa Trevor, I cannot make a full judgment because I don't know exactly how she's presented in the game (I mean, when Eveline has transformed into her final form in her boss fight and says "I just wanted a family" in her distorted voice… that fucking haunts me, it's so raw and pained that I almost cannot deal with the emotions it brings in me. Does Lisa Trevor have a similar moment in the game she appears in?) but I can make a guess that if it's Chris or Jill against her, of course people will favor those two cause they're fan favourites and long-time beloved characters of the franchise. Mia is quite hated in the fandom for not being as sexualized as fellow bioterrorist Ada Wong and half of the people who played it didn't give a shit about Ethan or started doing so after RE8. So it's easy to focus on Eveline (who is also a main role in re7, if I'm correct Lisa Trevor isn't as focused upon in her game) when her opponents aren't as reknown and beloved as Chris and Jill are. That's just a theory and what I have observed as mostly an outsider in the general Resident Evil franchise.

[onaperduamedee]

1, 2, 6, 8, 10 for any/all Star Trek :)

Hello again and thank you for your asks!

This got long so I am giving an out to my follower :

1. What originally drew me to it:

Okay, needed background here: I have tried to get into Star Trek in the past, both the original series and TNG. It didn't impress me. I didn't have time for this many men on a ship and the world itself wasn't enough to keep me invested. Here comes Discovery, with her Captain Georgiou and her First Officer Michael Burnham... Yeah, now you have my attention.

Even if Philippa didn't stay long, I was so drawn to Michael's story (and the terrible injustice she suffered, but that's for another time) it didn't really matter that the worldbuilding wasn't as compelling to me as Doctor Who or other sci-fi shows. Women fronting the show got me into Star Trek, and now I started watching Voyager and feel way more generous toward TNG.

So, whenever I see people complaining about the changes made to an adaptation or reboot that supposedly betray the author, I want to say "hello, those changes were for me. They got me into this fictional world, they helped me appreciate the greatness of these stories I had dismissed before. How can it be bad?"

2. What I like most and least about it:

I like that the show is essentially about a system that holds at its core humanism or universalism. It's about the people in this system and how human and alien and different and similar they all are. In a way, it is an office drama set in an administration, except the civil servants in this story have to fly across an asteroid field while leaking oxygen every once in a while.

I don't like the veiled military propaganda and how globalised the vision sometimes feels. It isn't always the case, but it does at times feel like an American utopia where the US expanded and unified an infinity of worlds under the Federation. It's probably a bit difficult to explain to North Americans, but it's a franchise that feels very American and it can be at odds with the proclaimed universal ideals.

6. A character I'd like to frame and hang on my wall and admire like a work of art:

MICHAEL BURNHAM

I used to want to know so much more about her and the way she ticks, how she is the way she is, what she is? She has always been layered and fascinating, but these past seasons she let go of so much guilt burdening her. Seeing her blossom as captain has truly been the most joyous experience, to the point where I could almost (but not quite) forgive the show for the hoops it made her go through. She is a joy of a character, both because she is incredibly entertaining (adrenaline addict much?) and because she is an endless source of questions and mental essays to me. Also, she's played by Sonequa Martin Green.

8. The character with the greatest wasted/unexplored potential:

Philippa, both prime and mirror, always and forever. I still can't believe the show had Philippa Prime and went "nah, this one's boring alive." Mirrorgiou is another matter since what we got was extremely enjoyable and I thought we were getting more, yet I am not holding my hopes up for a Mirrorgiou spin-off anymore. I fear a morally dubious Asian queer ex-spy in her sixties does not seem marketable enough to the higher-ups.

10. A ship I would gladly go down with... and then become Davey Jones, so I can continue to captain said ship for eternity

Milippa, both prime and mirror/prime.

A gift of a ship, with a dream of a blend, mixing duty, remorse, familiarity, devotion and banter, with a delicious twist of monsterisation when Philippa comes back as the Emperor. What do you do when the person who was your safe place, your rock, you blueprint for seven years comes back as something twisted and cruel? Do you kill her? Do you let her run free and tarnish the legacy of your beloved? Do you resent her? Pity her? Do you despise yourself for still feeling so much for her? If Philippa is Michael's Patroclus, Mirrorgiou is her undead Eurydice and I am here for that. The thing is, while both are completely different dynamics, they feed of each other so deliciously. It's like a perpetual angst machine.

[gofancyninjaworld]

OPM Manga Update 232 Review: Butterfly and Back

Story: Place Yer Bets!

The chapter opens with Murata casually flexing his rendering skills with a hand-drawn bicycle. This man!

The story opens to a defeated looking hero with incongruously-small butterfly wings on his back. Wondering why he's doing this. McCoy calls to ask if he's ready, and soon, he's on the trail of a monster for the benefit of a select group of punters.

The 'demon'-level monster turns out to be a giant, terrified monsterised chihuahua, which advances down the road uncertain of what to do. It's a planted Wolf-Level monster, intended to give the falsely-badged C-Class hero the appearance of a tough win against the odds.

But life turns out differently. Under the stressor of its most feared situation (being outdoors), Shiverhuahua blows up into a genuine demon-level monster, and soon, 'Papillion 800' is locked in a real life-or-death battle, all while McCoy thinks that he's acting to perfection.

As the odds lengthen, Mad Devil Yankee (the real identity of the hero) forces himself to face the monster, driven by the twin imperatives of wanting to save his mother from whatever harm McCoy has planned for her, and the desire to live up to the example of his hero, Mumen Rider.

Just as it gets hopeless, with characteristic timing, Saitama comes in and blows the monster away.

The major donor looking forward to an upset win is furious, and McCoy storms onto the scene to tell Saitama and Genos off for interfering.

Saitama may ask himself who cares about credit. Genos does, when it comes to making sure his master is recognised for his work. McCoy is about to find out why the Demon Cyborg lives up to his moniker...

.... but luckily for him, and for his role as bad-guy fixer, Child Emperor interrupts to mock him for having his rigged game upset. McCoy excuses himself quickly. Child Emperor explains the hero gambling ruse (more on that to follow). I'm just going to step out a bit to note that it's quite heart-warming to see that when Genos asks why the kid is giving them this information and Child Emperor admits to having been the one who'd been suspicious of Genos, Genos doesn't blow up but lets it slide. I like his little reassuring smiles.

After finding out what this is all about, we see Saitama sleepless in bed, furious at the idea of being thought so ill of as to deserve a x20 rating. However, he also smells opportunity.

The next morning sees him discussing with Genos the possibility of betting on himself to make money. He starts to portray it as a way to teach the Hero Association a lesson but Genos sensibly points out that it makes no actual difference to the house, which puts him on the spot. Luckily for Saitama, the odds start rolling again, meaning the game's afoot again. Saitama runs out the door, Genos following in hot pursuit.

They overtake the heroes assigned to the monster, and Saitama is just about to place his bet (his multiplier having risen to x25) when there is a scream: someone's purse has been snatched by a race-car driver! For a moment, Saitama is torn as to what to do, then...

... the lady is overcome with gratitude for having her family jewels saved. Saitama is also overcome with emotion, but it is not gratitude. At least he's getting a better public image!

However, he's then overwhelmed with a blackness. His depression is back, fuelled by his realising how close he came to the edge of becoming a corrupt money-grubber.

Temptation is never far away, and the lady offers him a diamond ring as a reward. After a long struggle, Saitama refuses it, saying he's not doing this for money.

Well done, Saitama.

Lots to say under the cut.

Meta: A Tawdry Affair

Method in the madness

A race car to snatch purses? Man, it seems anything can happen in this story! Still, when I look at how unsurprised the public is that Saitama caught the driver, I think there's method in the madness. Heroes are really super humans. Even your regular C-Class hero is impossible to out-pace on foot or on a push-bike. Modern problems call for modern solutions.

A world in which people are not surprised that the no-name hero catches a race car is a scary world.

Dirty laundry

The first thing I have to say about this is that it's tawdry. Not a great crime that leaves a giant stain to be dealt with but rather dirt, grubbiness, an all-pervading grubbiness that greys the entire fabric so that no amount of washing can make it look clean. Let's dig into this pile of dirty laundry, shall we?

Nothing wrong with aspiring to be more

I've got to give it to Mad Devil Yankee. In a world where people are often typecast for life (see Garou's despair at being considered a monster), his being able to turn his life around is testament to some serious mental fortitude. Furthermore, he's B-Class Rank 4, all without having joined the Blizzard Group: that takes serious strength.

If you remember nothing about the story, you might think that a high-ranking B-Class hero working independently is no big deal. If you do, you know this guy is the real deal: Fubuki is a hero-crushing asshole.

Turning heroism into bloodsport

It's inevitable that people would bet on heroes. Heroes are very much public figures, and the monsters are an unpredictable lot, so that makes for a highly exciting spectacle. As we can see, a lot of the people watching Papillion 800's predicament aren't anything to do with the HA.

The Hero Association getting a cut of the action is morally reprehensible. And as we see, it leads to moral conflicts. McCoy may be organising it, but the HA is facilitating it. As long as the money's coming in, look the other way.

Like a rotten apple, McCoy being allowed to operate unchecked taints everyone by association.

Unforgivable is what this betting did to Mad Devil Yankee. In a world where people often feel typecast for life (like Garou), turning one's life around in two months from infamous ne'er-do-well to hero has taken an incredible amount of mental fortitude as well as physical prowess. Additionally, as B-Class Rank 4 and yet not press-ganged into the Blizzard Group, this guy is really something in toughness. He's admired Mumen Rider, but his work ethic is all his. And for him to have nearly tossed this all away, thinking himself unworthy to think of himself as a hero, that's a crime.

Getting a guy to think that he deserved to die for making the best of an impossible situation? God, that's ugly.

McCoy bet that Mad Devil would not be psychopathic enough to bet his mother's life and dare him to threaten his mother's health. Even though he'd been coerced, he thought that a true hero wouldn't have taken up such an impossible task under any circumstance. And yet he hung in there and did his best to fight.

Threatening peoples' families is truly the lowest of actions. Using the very benefits given to heroes as leverage digs a basement under that cesspit.

It was good that Mumen Rider put it in perspective for him: no matter what had happened, he'd been faced with a very strong monster, and he'd stood up to it anyway, knowing that it was unlikely to end well for him. That's the stuff a hero is made of. I'm glad that Mad Devil looks to stay a hero, but for him to have been brought this close to despairing over his life and choices, is unforgivable.

Mumen may not have the best muscles, but he has the best words. Often imitated, but never equalled.

Take one wrong step...

Speaking of corruption, it's scary how easy it is to try to play the odds if there's money to be made. Saitama realising how close he'd come to actually participating in the hero betting game for profit was a salutatory reminder that this shit is easy to do and dangerous. If he'd chosen a little differently, he could be several hundred thousand yen up, but he'd have sold his soul to the worst of human impulses.

It's as Saitama said in a much earlier chapter, take one wrong step, and you're in hell.

Came real close to selling your soul there, didn't ya?

It's one of the things that has most endeared me to Saitama. His recognition that no matter how hard he works, there's still a lot of chance in how things have turned out for him and he remembers this when he looks leniently on people like Hammerhead, who he sees as not too different from him. Just one or two bad choices and that could have been him. That kind of wisdom and humility serves him well.

With friends like this...

I'd love to say that Genos would stop him, but damn, that guy… It's a pity he's a cocksucker has such a narrow viewpoint. Every so often, Genos reminds me that he's far more observant and intelligent than he usually gives out. He's noticed the odd rankings and monster disaster levels, and it made sense to him that it was a gambling ploy. So did he investigate the oddities? No man, he filters everything through the metric of 'does this threaten my access to Saitama sensei?' and if the answer is no, he doesn't give a shit. Seriously.

Yeah, yeah, corruption and problems at the Hero Association, but does it actually affect anything *I* care about?

Also, seeing him see what's wrong with Saitama's proposal to gamble but following Saitama to see what happens anyway… no, man, this fixation of yours is wrong. A healthy reminder of why King is so necessary. He'll not just point out what's wrong, but he won't go along with it.

Genos sees clean through Saitama's scam but stop him? Hell no! He's coming along to see what happens.

The Grab Bag of Pop Culture is Back, Baby!

This story reminds me of what's at the heart of One-Punch Man: its love of finding and referencing popular works while making them something of its own. If you know Squid Game, the rich guys betting on human lives will feel very unpleasantly familiar. If you don't, that's fine too: it's self-contained enough to not need familiarity with its references to work. It's true that a lore-heavy story such as this would often be put in an extra chapter, but because what's happening here is exceptionally germane to what happens next, it's here as a main chapter. I liked it quite a bit.

I am VERY GLAD not to see Narinki as one of the major donors betting. I would like to believe that he appreciates too much the actual sacrifices made by heroes to want to bet on their lives.

More on Monsters

I also liked a lot the fact that the HA has had to raise Saitama's ranking to maintain their fiction of a demon-level monster otherwise, it'd create more problems. Heh heh, suck it, fools. Although as it turns out, it was accurate.

Something else about monsters. When you see a monster, you see a monster. They're living creatures, and they don't rampage all the time under all circumstances, not even the newly-transformed ones. Given that most monsters (including the late Shiverhuahua) gain the power of human speech, they could have just talked to it to understand it better. It's a problem because I'm sure that Shiverhuahua was a very inoffensive monster indoors -- just looking at its sweet look and trustingly wagging tail as it was faced with a guy with a handgun and an electrified prong gives me a nasty pang -- but under the right circumstances, many a monster can blow up into a true terror.

Under the right circumstances, this monster would never have hurt a person

And so it happened here. To the end, the thing was terrified and confused. The nasty human habit of exploiting monsters is perhaps inevitable -- where anything occurs, humans will find a way to exploit it -- but the short-sightedness and failure to understand the beings they are exploiting just adds to the outrageousness of it all.

Where is this going?

So what's this leading up to? Not too sure. Saitama might have another bad night if he thinks about how close to the edge he danced, but he's not the reflective sort of guy. Oh yeah, he really didn't like the idea of being thought of as trash. Now imagine how your disciple feels. It's interesting to see that Child Emperor is continuing to dig. Naturally, this isn't the first of the wrong doings.

Come to that, if Child Emperor moves over to the Neo Heroes, he's going to have a nasty shock to find McCoy there too. That's going to be something worth seeing.

I digress. Back to what this is all leading to. There's going to have to be some precipitating event that starts giving heroes a push in a big way, and that brings the Neo Heroes out. Looks like it's going to be a target-rich environment whenever that happens.

[wordsonly]

Monsteriser.

The over-stimulated nerve misfires

Morse contracting

Muscle fibres.

A torso, limbs

Needled

Pinned

Electro-convulsive treats

Switch in

Lobes jerk in the unsheltered brain

Stitching

Super-human blame.

The snow-moon’s malady,

Effectuates spasticity

Paralysing lips, jaw, tongue

Wide-eyed words

That cannot come

Lamented moans and stifled screams

Begging, helpless, whimpered pleas

As stomach flutters

Eyes cocoon

Defensive mutterings

Resume

Vanished to the gaping lack

Sink hole of the deepest black

Strapped into the Monsteriser

The fear defined de-youtheniser Romanticised (It’s alive)

Wretched Loony goon

Terrorised (its alive)

Thunderbolt buffoon

Table cranked, electrode caged

Gears creak

Power craves;

Quartz programmed

Super-bass

X sequalised

Ferrous-oxide ape

With raging obsoleted scream

Rips free it’s master’s grief machine

Press play to start, button down

Hard

Upon the cuboid crown

Push-in

On

Dolly

Directing passion

Camera, Speed

Seductive action

Gushing

Seminal fluid

Thin

In sweaty efforts

To pass

Or win

Same.

Stain

Come Again.

Scrambled neurological pain

Bowing lower, in lowed repent

High-volume

Opportunities

Referred,

Spent.

Perhaps mis-spent ?

or simply missed ?

A thousand erroneous turns n twists

Points in an irresolute decree

Capitalised energy to infinity

White wired hairs

Cling to mastery

Fencing secrets in,

Defensively.

Demarcating obstructively

Within blood daubed mind and boundary.

To gift wisdom freely,

Is accordingly proscribed to be

A crime against the sweat

and upset

Of self-made productivity.

So under weight of souvenirs consumed

The master paints himself into a room

Old colour codes, violently shaken

‘Flamingo tears’ ‘Rose faced’ ‘Awaken’

Such

Vanity

Projects,

Case by case

The Pink-red sun

Exacerbates

Afloat above the halophilic thalassics

Of tears and arterial perquisites.

Transformed brute

Stares out

or in.

At distant iron imaginings

For this and that, and so and so

Sunken eyes watch memories go

In oh so, slowed

So-so

Slow-mo.

On the misted horizon

In containers levitating

Vessels shed

Dinghies and a sun-bleached

Life-ring

Moving imperceptibly across the distance, bleak

Til lost

To the esoteric

Heavy-mentalised deep

Strapped into the Monsteriser

Fear defined de-youtheniser Electrified, de-vitalised (in the name of God)

Monsterised (it’s alive) Sad n hulking mass of want

(Bridge)

No gift to give

No short-cut

No nepotistic lift

No leg-up

For the re-assembled

baby face

Esconded

In its cut-out place

Alone and sat converting leads

Coveting nubile Nubian genes;

A being supreme

A perfect ten.

Ogled by oil tanned leather head

High U.V non P.C inappropriate lech

Exhaling stale tobacco breathe

on a face, younfilled

Flawless

Her perfectly beautified brand messaging

A smiling goddess shining

Straight teeth’d insincere compliments

Lips flick pity

Upon cantankerous incompetence

A home with old insight and tools

Sensing redundancy

A gatekeeping fool

Her disdainful pupils burn

It is feeling the twitch return.

With eyes too sore to open,

To read the thrills or entertain

The lie of ecstasy

A natural human

Chained

To a deep bed of stratigraphic sheets

Hard chrono-blocks of cooled molten sleep

Where heavy anchor rots

Strapped into the Monsteriser

Fear defined de-youtheniser

Terrified. (it’s alive)

Monsterised (it’s alive).

[the-nysh]

Garou hanging from the ledge staring down at Rover is easily in my top 10 Garou panels. The look of defiance and anger after achieving yet another level from his monsterisation is so good!

It's a good one of his silent focus after learning, adapting and now preparing to deal the final blow. So rather than 'monsterization' or anger per se I see it more as a mark of his truly impressive tenacity, endurance, and adaptability (which are natural/innate traits of his character) for him to have dodged & tanked so many nukes point blank (which he thought he wouldn't survive from; what doesn't kill him only makes him evolve stronger~) only to come out so calmly unfazed and unimpressed! (Also literally steaming aha.) At this point he's had enough of Rover's 'playing' rampage - Garou's locked on target from a higher vantage point and is ready to discipline an unruly mutt from getting too carried away! Like a nocturnal hunter with precision effortless grace and style.

[brutalcore]

⅋   DO   YOU   WANNA   SEE   THE WEST WITH ME   (      . . .      )   a    selective,    writing    blog    for    “    𝙰𝚁𝙻𝙾    𝙴𝚅𝙴𝚁𝙴𝚃𝚃    𝙲𝙰𝙸𝙽    ”    local    boy    hero    monsterised    into    god’s    favourite    revival.    situated    within    the    southern    gothic    genre,    stitched    together    with    original    lore    &    inspired    by    other    mythologies.    dark    themes    ahead,    viewer    discretion    is    advised. 

╰    †    𝐚    𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲    𝐢𝐧    :    graveyard    dirt    perpetually    stuck    underneath    fingernails,    martyrdom    fractured    like    a    bullet    through    a    church    window,    off    road    𝙜𝙖𝙨    𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨    &    𝙝𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙬𝙖𝙮    ⁶⁶    as    halfway    homes,    love’s    held    like    a    dead    animal    in    your    petrified    hands,    reticent    behind    god’s    shadow    the    way    brothers    would,    a    nervous    dog    with    a    terrible    bite:    you’ll    always    find    yourself    back    at    his    doorstep    waiting ...

                                      carrd.    pinterest.    tracklist.

[infamousmonkey-cat]

jekyll referring to hyde as "an object marked out for observation" reminds me of dracula saying "I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, ‘Ha, ha! a stranger!’". something something monsterisation of the neuroqueer, something something masking. ALSO! let's not forget rls was just a little guy, chronically ill and kind of a social outcast, especially when he was young (he was probably not queer but his presentation was flamboyant and gay men loved him). like it seems pretty apparent that hyde is closer to the author than jekyll is, at least in terms of physical appearance and social standing. and so much of these monster stories is about the attempt to blend into polite society (actually this is literally jekyll's whole issue: he's trapped in a prison of respectability and he wants to create an alter ego to enjoy his illicit pleasures, whatever they are. he actually blends in too well, but he doesn't want to sacrifice his reputation). i haven't figured out exactly how hannibal fits into all this but i'm gonna get there

[fluffazoidpsychosis]

self-monsterisation of emotional intensity

[theomnicode]

OPM chapter 167 prediction vr2

I've actually done a bazillion different theories by now, but imma post my latest revision of prediction again.

Saitama will overpower Garou's punch with his own easily and Garou's hand will shatter from the power and the force travels through Garou's body and nearly breaks him and it's only through regeneration and deflecting the Serious punch with a copy that he's even still alive. He internally wonders what kind of monster is this guy.

Saitama stops his assault when Garou can't seem to move anymore and Saitama looks around with dead eyes.

“Is this what you wanted? Becoming Absolute Evil? I thought you were just playing monster before, but now I’m not so sure. You wanted to have witnesses to see how evil you’ve become, but…who are you showing off for?”

"Everyone around you is dead, Garou."

Manako catches all of their attention by dragging around Tareo's corpse and Garou notices her and crawls towards Tareo, calls his name in confusion and then yells at him to wake up. But Tareo doesn't wake up.

The realisation that he truly killed all the people around him and Tareo breaks an eye-hole in his monsterisation and he kneels in realisation and shock. Saitama watches from afar with dull, dead expression and slowly walks to Genos' corpse.

Saitama approaches Genos body, gently turns it around and there's only half of the head left and a gooey mess of brain and Saitama slowly inserts the core of Genos back and holds his hand there.

Saitama starts talking about all of Genos good qualities such as how amazing Genos was and how brave and other things, then Saitama breaks down and starts weeping, tears dripping down on the core.

"I'm sorry Genos-kun, I'm a shitty teacher."

-

Garou meanwhile, cries tears made out of stars and human tears, but he doesn't get much time to dwell on this when tiny monster phoenixman chick suddenly jumps at him from below ground and startles him.

Garou reacts with "what the fuck" and "who the fuck are you" and Phoenixman is gonna be really irritated that Garou doesnt even recognice him and Garou is like wait you're that monster who took him to monster association and wonders how this tiny monster didn't actually die to all these heroes and Phoenixman retorts that he would just revive himself anyway but thats why he's in this tiny chick form.

Garou locks onto that comment about revival and demands phoenixman show it to him and phoenixman is like ok calm down dude. OR straight up just murders him to test this theory because Phoenixman is a monster and rly annoying one and he has a beef with him and Phoenixman actually rebirths from an egg and yells at him what's the big deal.

Garou realises then that he finally has a chance to change the world if he makes a choice.

Meanwhile, Saitama and Blast are checking on rest of the heroes and Saitama still has tears on his face/red eyes when he also says goodbye to King and Blast looks pained when he looks at Tatsumaki and the heroes he couldn't save and the nuclear fallout. But then they notice Garou walking up to them.

Saitama retorts "Haven't you done enough? Just leave..."

Garou insists that he will then fix everything. He concentrates, refines the power copied from phoenixman and directs the flow of energy outwards. He would use the power granted to him for something far better. He refused to be used like a puppet and he would use his own power to change everything.

-

MODE: PHOENIXMAN

ALL-LIFE REJUVENATION FIST

-

The ground burst into flames when Garou slams his hands to the ground and burns everything in large vicinity in ethereal flames, Saitama and Blast yelping but the flames don't actually burn them but then he can see that all the heroes like magic, are being healed of their wounds and both Blast and Saitama watch in awe.

Genos suddenly jolts awake and the emergency power supply and barrier protection for his brain from his earrings activates with a glow and he remembers actually dying, but now he's confused.

Saitama then looks behind him and he sees Genos, actually alive and moving and Saitama sprints to him and Genos calls out "Sens-" but gets interrupted by Saitama tackle hugging him. Genos is going to be confused even further because Saitama is crying again and hugging him, but Saitama just says he's so glad Genos is alive.

Garou finishes all life rejuvenation fist, looks around his handiwork and looks down at Tareo's alive form and Bang starting to get back up again and makes peace with himself and finally breaks the monsterised form of his and has to sit down because he's exhausted.

Saitama walks up to him and says "Nice work, kid. I knew you had some good hero instincts. You should consider a career change."

Garou is going to get irritated and tells Saitama off with "Fuck off baldy, don't tell me what do do."

Saitama is going to grab Garou by the front of his costume and looks really threathening and says "Don't make me punch you again, punk. You're barely off the hook, don't test your luck."

Garou has nervous sweat and thinks 'Fuck this guy is really scary'

Saitama then notices something behind Garou and asks if that thing is the one who gave Garou power and points behind Garou.

Garou gets confused, turns behind him and sees God's feet. In all it's magnificent and menacing glory, as tall as a skyscraper and his eyes widen in recognition.

"Yea, that's definitely him..."

Everyone else is starting to wake up properly and Garou decides that he's just gonna bail, he's not interested in staying and explaining himself to all these heroes and runs. Saitama let's him.

Saitama cracks his knuckles and mutters darkly about how it's time to destress and walks pointedly towards God. Blast notices and asks where he is going.

Saitama points at God and tells Blast "I'm gonna go punch that thing over there, he's the reason for this."

Blast sputters and exclaims "Wait, you can see God? HOW!?" and Saitama's going to answer "The what now?"

Blast offers some tidbits of information and that his team is trying to handle keeping god from advancing to their dimensional plane but its not going so well because God has already breached the plane and they dont have the means to dislodge him.

Saitama starts to saunter towards God and tells Blast to leave it to him and Blast gets a whiplash.

Saitama runs full speed towards god while Blast tells him to wait and Sai rears up a Serious punch and punches. God's foot breaks and it immediately closes the portal on his foot to prevent further destruction.

Blast is completely awed that Saitama can actually see God somehow and destroyed one of his feet already and maybe they can succeed.

But Blast watches longer and he sees Saitama flail his arms around ineffectively, hit empty spaces, yelling at the sky that God should come down and fight him properly and God is a chicken and sweatdrops.

'Oh, maybe he can't see God after all...'

Blast yells at Saitama that he can portal him to God's location and he only needs to punch straight ahead and Saitama acknowledges this and jumps into a portal that Blast makes, comes out of the other side and punches God's other feet and god has to close that portal as well and gets repelled.

Rest of the heroes are now awake and watch bewildered why this B-class hero is punching at empty air and thunderclouds and someone remarks that it's really unsafe to be at the sea during thunderstorms.

Extra:

(I am not too sure how blast will react to defeated garou) (will he attempt to get rid of god's powers from garou completely? offer him advice? try to kill garou?)

No clue about WC dialogue so I can't adapt it here.

It would be nice if Garou's rebirth skillset could actually cleanse the radiation too, because phoenixes in mythos also purify stuff.

Genos core scene is basically a funeral where Saitama gives eulogy. ;_;

Edit: I realised I want Saitama to finally use honorific Genos-kun just like he uses in cd drama for more emotional and personal scene and the want to close the gap between Genos and his own self, paralleling garou wanting to distance himself from tareo and his self. I'm calling it here.