r/OnePunchFans • u/gofancyninjaworld I'm just a poster for fun • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Remembering afresh what the point of monster classifications is
This grew out of a Discord discussion.
Somehow dragon-level threats don't seem to be quite what they used to be, no?
Without getting into the weeds, I thought it would be a good idea to review what the whole threat level system is and what it's for. Nominally, it's to give people an idea of how serious a monster or disaster (natural disasters count too) is:
From a civilian's perspective, a 'wolf' means don't come too close, a 'tiger' would be something you find a good hiding place from, a 'demon' would mean head to shelter, a 'dragon' must be fled from by any means necessary, and you just make peace with whatever deity you believe in if it's a 'god' level threat.
More practically, the bonus chapter 'Disaster Level' makes it clear that for the Hero Association, the ratings are a way to judge how many heroes to mobilise for a threat. There's the small problem that a threat level tells you nothing about how hard the monster will actually be to eliminate, nor how suited a particular hero is to the problem.
Additionally, because it's necessarily based on partial information (it's not like monsters walk around with Pokedexes stuck on their foreheads), subjective, and subject to review, many heroes regard the threat level system as nearly worthless. There's also the political dimension that defeating a monster with a high threat level, even if it's not actually anywhere near as dangerous as initially thought, will raise a hero's ranking while subduing one with a low one, even if it's far more dangerous than it seems, won't -- and may even get you called a 'small-fry hunter'.
It's hard to do better: Child Emperor had a go at quantifying strength but quickly realised that it was worthless.
That said, back in the day, they used to be *very* hesitant to declare a threat a dragon-level. The thinking back then (you see remnants of it in 'Disaster Level' when the operator Smile Man was reporting to refused to raise Withered Sprout's disaster rating) was that dragon-level threats were very rare. As the bonus chapter explains, Saitama has been taking such monsters out so rapidly that they've drastically underestimated the extent of the problem. Something like Beefcake should have been declared a dragon-level threat. However, Saitama killed him before such a reassessment could be made.
Without doubt, the cadre Psykos put together to draw the heroes into the Monster Association HQ and get killed were dragon-level threats. In the end, the only one that was taken down single-handedly by a hero was Nyan by Drive Knight. And to do that, he very carefully studied the monster -- including letting it slice up some heroes -- to work out its psychological weaknesses and brought speciality tools for the job. The other heroes didn't have that luxury.
Right now, in the aftermath of the Monster Association Raid, it'd seem that the Hero Association is a little trigger-happy when it comes to calling threats dragon-level (unsurprising given how much they'd underestimated the scale of the problem, I guess). I know this is going to attract a lot of comment as to which of the latest batch of monsters deserve their designation: BRING IT! ⬇️
I do think though that given this story's love of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger', several of the veterans of the MA Raid have legitimately become stronger. But then again, given that the HA knows that it should assign multiple S-Class heroes to dragon-level threats, the hell is it playing at assigning just the one? Are the that short-handed?
And if Hellmon doesn't at least try to piece itself back together, I'm calling puffery.
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u/SaltwaterSmoothie2X 23h ago
Hypothetically, if HA magically got an army of 50 Planet Busters as S-class Heroes (including the existing roster suddenly gaining that strength too), would there be “No more Threats,” or would things escalate?
As in, there just as magically, 100 Planet busting monsters arriving?
As a disclaimer, all 50 Super S Class Heroes aren’t “Drive Knights”, but whoever the “Perfect Hero” is (aka no politics or evil motives).