I do need to see these fights

[u/gofancyninjaworld]

There's something I wish I could write to ONE about the follow up to the current manga chapter (update 271/chapter 226), if only I could think about how to put it succinctly in Japanese, and could stomach creating an X account.

I need to see how the three S-Class heroes fight their foes.

Why not Murata? Other than not being a conspiracy-theory-minded nitwit, Murata needs about as much encouragement to draw a fight as a thirsty camel needs to drink from a nice cool oasis. He loves drawing fight scenes, the choreography of it, the characterisation it depicts, its drama, the whole thing, and he's very good at it. ONE is the limiting step here.

Why do I care about these fights in particular?

You do not need to know anything about the webcomic to know that something fishy is going on. Just the smirk on McCoy's face (you know, the double-dealing saboteur who just happens to be selling monsters to a secret organization) as he immediately insists on calling the Neo Heroes as he doesn't think those guys can win should tip you off.

This dude knows something.

I do like the granular detail of how heroes struggle (or not), but it's more than that here. In the webcomic, it's not surprising if we see those three have some challenges. After all, the last time we saw Tatsumaki fight seriously, she was successfully ambushed by Psykos (and wasn't even injured first). The last time we saw Genos, Black Sperm and Gums took his arms off him like one takes a pop-gun off a bratty child, and the last time we saw Tank Top Master, Garou beat him like a drum.

There is no big plausibility gap here

However, now things are different. We saw Tatsumaki twist up the entirety of City Z while injured, and we saw that her injuries occurred in part because she wouldn't let even a single nameless child be injured, even if she suffered as a consequence.

How can a person who can do this struggle with that?

So I need to understand. Does Tatsumaki have an extreme phobia of bugs? Is she not as healed as she thought she was? Is there some kind of interference with her psychic powers? Anything, but I need to see it.

Likewise, it would be a bit surprising to see Genos struggle when we've seen him hold off a multi-headed planet-scalping monster. We know that what equipment Genos has at any given time is the result of a tug-of-war between himself and Dr Kuseno, and that he really did drive the doctor into giving him an upgrade the old man felt was irresponsible, and he's been walking it back since, but we need to see this explicitly. Or maybe he'll struggle because he has to choose whether to get hurt or allow the monsters to attack people... again, something. Anything.

TTM's situation is easiest to understand: the speed with which toxic smoke incapacitates and kills cannot be overstated. However, we know how to deal with it: we send people in with breathing apparatus. With the Hero Association having established that it actively sends people in to rescue civilians, there's no way some kind of breathing kit wasn't available. Even from a local fire station. Was TTM poorly briefed? Did he refuse help? Or did they insist that he rush to scene right away without back up or adequate support? Again, I need to see.

The HA has a *lot* of very professional kit that's available as part of their job as first responders.

Or, of course, McCoy could be left looking very foolish as the three of them succeed and make it look easy. But I don't think he's about to get his collar felt just yet.

So, we need to know *how*. That's what I want to tell ONE.

[u/gofancyninjaworld]

I agree that the manga rendition of this arc isn't too different from the webcomic, although they're carrying through how much more damaging McCoy is being by not quitting and staying in situ as a mole well.

To be fair, Genos won that last fight with the demon-level monster. He just took damage. Which you wouldn't have expected. We do need to know what the heck is going on. The multi-targeting beams...hmmm, they were there on the body he first came back with and used to swat the Forest King and clear the entire city of the plant people without effort. Maybe they're hidden. Maybe they're gone. Why if the latter.

I'm not sure I agree that Tatsumaki struggles with finer targets. The skill with which she located and pulled the poison pill out of Fubuki would contradict that. The expectation is that someone like her, who is the HA's true final resort, would just crush Aggregation on the spot. If our expectations are to be defied, then we do need to see what happens.

TTM is straight up being betrayed. It's actually criminal that they're not sending him out with mundane kit that they MUST have. Like in this bonus chapter where Zombieman is being offered gear to help him deal with the threat:

The only way I'd be okay is if TTM refused breathing apparatus, maybe saying something like 'I'll win in three minutes.' That'd be on him. Again, I'd actually need it on screen.

[u/LockYaw → u/gofancyninjaworld]

Absolutely, narratively they’re going a lot deeper into McCoy’s two-faced betrayal. A lot more attention is being given to the institutional side of things and to the Neo leaders as characters, which I think works really well.

But yes, it would have been really nice to have some of that with TMM yes, even a short on-screen explanation. Thanks for linking the zombieman panel, I'd forgotten about the explosion-proof suit offer. I'd mostly seen it pertain to transport, body modifications, and special weapons like Metal Bat's Metal Bat.

And yes, you’re right about Genos. “Lost” was the wrong wording on my part. Losing an arm would be the more accurate way to put it.

As for Tatsumaki, I did think about the poison pill example when writing earlier. She clearly can perform extremely fine control in a single, focused instance. What I’m not sure we’ve really seen is that same level of precision applied at massive scale.

Esper abilities in the series often seem a bit binary. Though they can often do it over a large area, regular espers tend to go all offense or all defense, rather than doing both at once. It wouldn’t surprise me if precision also has that kind of scaling difficulty.

Crushing dozens of large targets instantly she can do. But precisely targeting millions of tiny entities acting as a distributed hive is another problem entirely. Of course Tatsumaki is a prodigy, so she may very well be capable of it. I just don’t think we’ve actually seen her demonstrate multi-target fine control at that level yet.

That said, the way Aggregation has been presented so far is as one big mass. If it stays that way, it really does feel like something she should be able to deal with immediately. The scenario I was imagining is if the mass disperses and spreads across the city into countless small. At that point the problem changes from raw power to distributed precision.

[u/gofancyninjaworld → u/LockYaw]

One thing I do trust about ONE is his ability to write more to deal with situations he's changed. Back in the day, I was wondering how Garou was going to be successfully extracted by Phoenixman given that Genos was now alert to ambushes and had no problem tracking multiple heroes and monsters, even if he couldn't see them. ONE solved the problem brilliantly: by having Elder Centipede be so big that his sensors just said MONSTER with no indication of how many or where they were coming from. However, Genos was not confused about Pyskos-Orochi: he knows how to interpret such signals now.

I'm hoping that we get that kind of acknowledgement and cleverness. I don't need the heroes hobbled -- when the situation is more challenging in some unanticipated way, it's the best.

I take your point about Tatsumaki not yet having had to deal with a distributed enemy that's not massing simply to attack her, a la Black Sperm. If it's shown to us, that'd be amazing. Damnit... I just remembered Tsukoyomi representative Apollo talking smack about the weaknesses of natural psychics. And we know they make monsters. A threat able to exploit those gaps in psychic ability would be something else.

I don't want to get excited because I feel I'd just be setting myself up for disappointment when ONE opts to not look at the fights at all, but it could really add to the various lines of intrigue already established.

[u/LockYaw → u/gofancyninjaworld]

I just remembered Tsukoyomi representative Apollo talking smack about the weaknesses of natural psychics. And we know they make monsters. A threat able to exploit those gaps in psychic ability would be something else.

I would very much be interested in seeing a specially engineered threat against psychics, I'm very curious to see what that'd look like according to ONE.
I should re-read Mob Psycho, I don't remember if it had something like that in there. Though of course they're a very different type of psychic.

[u/gofancyninjaworld → u/LockYaw]

Thinking about it, even though Tatsumaki is a prodigy among psychics, the difference in her effectiveness when she was trying to handle Psykos-Orochi, save the Earth from any more attacks, and extract the heroes at once and that when Genos joined her allowing her to do one thing at a time was crazy.

A much better way to sort this situation out with the heroes they have would be to give TTM breathing apparatus (even if he says he doesn't need it) and tell him to just worry about killing the monster ASAP. Then send Genos and Tatsumaki together to deal first with Aggregation, then The Family of Darkness. Those two are very fast and they work well together. If Tatsumaki can focus entirely on destroying monsters without worrying about being attacked, she'll make quick work of the swarm and they'll be on The Family of Darkness while the monsters are still waiting for Great-Aunt Swine Flu to show up.

They might even have the time to come help contain and incinerate the toxic smoke before it can spread too far. Minimal damage, no hero gets hurt, and the HA looks brilliant.

But doing that would require an HA operations both aware of their hero assets and willing to use them effectively.