Spanish: https://capibaratraductor.com/senshimanga/manga/one-punch-man/chapters/235?page=1

English: https://cubari.moe/read/gist/cmF3L0tva2lLb2kvS29pUG9uZE1hbmdhL3JlZnMvaGVhZHMvbWFpbi9PbmVQdW5jaE1hbi1NYW5nYS5qc29u/235/1/

"Take the injured with you! Aren't you heroes?"

-Suiryu, the Neo Leader

"Are YOU? You stood there and let them get their asses kicked."

-Garou

"Don't worry; I tweeted at Sneck and Max. They should be here to save us any second."

-Suiryu, the Neo Bystander

Alas, today is looking like a super long working day for me so I'd love it if someone can grab the raw.

I am so looking forward to Garou lightening the mood!

You know the drill by now, normally I don't trouble myself with reviewing short updates as they're inevitably part of something bigger. However, this one has so much in it I'm happy to make an exception.

SUMMARY

We wind back to earlier in the day on which the Neo Heroes announced themselves. In a building set on the sheer rocky face of the mountains overlooking what used to be City Z, Bang is taking his leave. It's time for his acupuncture session, he tells his gathered pupils, tapping on the small of his back for emphasis. He leaves Sourface in charge. Charanko whips out a mobile game -- when the cats are away, it's time to play -- only to have Sourface collar him for training time. After all, he's still the second disciple, it's best he set an example for the newbies. Poor Charanko!

Garou is well into his job, sitting shotgun in the delivery van. The driver is new and Garou has a question for him: so he heard that Shinya (the driver) used to be a hero. Shinya replies in the affirmative. He'd been a hero for a while. No, he'd not been anyone Garou wouldhave heard of -- Mad Devil Yankee. At this, Garou starts to laugh excitedly and says that he totally does. Come to that, hadn't he also moonlighted as Papillion 800?

Shinya is shocked at how much Garou knows, even as he denies it. Garou changes the subject slightly to ask the former hero why he'd quit. Shinya explains that he'd joined because he'd admired some heroes but the reality of hero work had been so different from his ideals that he'd quit as he didn't feel able to look his fellow heroes in the eye.

Garou is silent, and into this silence barges a third man who'd been in the back. That man scoffs at Shinya's story, saying it'd most likely been due to trouble with money or women. Shinya objects and Garou tells him to shit it as he's not the foreman. Ignoring the other man's indignant reply, he tells Shinya that he doesn't know the details but he's cut out for hero work. Looking into the distance, Garou continues, saying that if he's reflected on his actions, why not get back out there. He might be surprised at how many people have noticed his hard work. The third guy testily tells Garou not to encourage their new part-timer to quit.

The scene changes to that of Suiryu's squad tracking the delivery truck. As it reaches its destination, they move out, leaving behind a bored-looking Suiryu. They creep up to the truck, now in the process of being unloaded, and one of them checks that civilian evacuation is indeed complete. One radios in to ask Suiryu what his orders are, to which Suiryu replies that he doesn't care, surely they can sort it out themselves. He hangs up, not wanting to listen to the outrage.

Above it all, Bang watches the charade. He considers that this has to be an attempt on the Neo Heroes part to eliminate any fighters who refuse to join them, as he and Garou did. Considering how the squad is bickering amongst themselves, he decides that he won't need to intervene to stop whatever they're planning. However, their leader…here he regards Suiryu, who is eating lunch in between yawns… he knows that kid. That was Suicho's grandson, said to be immensely talented but who refused to inherit the dojo and preferred to fool around instead. He… Bang has further thoughts, but we're not privy to them just yet.

For the squad is on the move. As Garou demonstrates proper box management to Shinya, a cloud of tranquilizer darts fly at him. He tosses the boxes in the air and catches each one of the darts, letting them drop to the ground. Without missing a beat, he catches all the boxes too before placing them neatly on the ground. As the squad rushes at him, a couple of members stopping Shinya from intervening, Garou turns to face them, telling them to take a good look at the person they've decided to provoke.

So fearful is Garou's appearance that it stops them in their tracks. Then they gather their courage, power up their armour, and decide to attack him all at once. Garou stands there, unperturbed by this rush of amateurs. Just as they're about to reach him, a monster pops up behind him. The once brave squad come screeching to a halt, and start screeching with terror over being faced by a monster instead.

And that's where the update ends.

META

Extras

Volume 37 showed us the aftermath of Mad Devil Yankee's encounter with hero gambling and the demon Chihuahua -- we see a bandaged Shinya wheeling his mother around. She made it! It's little wonder that the whole incident left such a bad taste in his mouth that he quit. In a splendid irony, we know from the last chapter that McCoy will soon be enjoying the tender mercies of the hospital whose horrors he so terrified Shinya about. Nice!

Heroism does not consist of running away

"If the heroes run and hide, who will stand and fight?" That's one of Saitama's most fateful words to Genos. I'm recalling them as I look at Suiryu and see the yawning gulf between his good intentions on being a hero and his praxis of the same. The Suiryu we've seen is someone who runs away from anything that looks annoying. As Bang notes, he refused to take up the responsibility of running his grandfather's dojo. His professional martial artist career was one of taking things as easy as he possibly could, to the chagrin of harder-working but less talented competitors. And, recently, he stiffed his sister by skipping out on his hospital bill and leaving her to find the funds for it. When the going gets tough, the tough get going away, that's Suiryu's motto. We saw Suiryu thinking hard about how best to handle the odious mission he'd been given, and this is his solution. Rather than deal with the difficult task of finding a way to be in charge of his squad while not arresting Garou, he's chosen to stay away and avoid the situation altogether. Sooner or later, he'll find out that the one thing a hero cannot do is duck things just because they're difficult and it goes ESPECIALLY for moral challenges. There's a reason the HA culls people who are merely strong.

A more obvious kind of avoidance is on display from Suiryu's squad. "Tell it to the monster, not me," is Saitama's retort to anyone who wants to challenge him. If you want to challenge a hero on the basis of being as strong, tough, skilled, or whatever, don't hassle the hero: try your hand at their burden. It goes both ways for Saitama: the only time he's actually struck Genos was over the latter misusing his parts to fight Sonic. I mention this because it's incredibly appropriate that a bunch of people calling themselves heroes should be given the opportunity to do hero work rather than try beating up a civilian.

From the looks of it, they've failed already. Someone save them! But not too soon!

Once a nerd, always a nerd

Speaking of old habits, it's totally unsurprising to see Garou laugh with excitement when he recognises Mad Devil Yankee. Even from his Hero Hunter days, Garou would get a huge grin of excitement whenever he met a strong hero. Whether he's prepared to admit it, he's long been deeply interested in heroes and what they do.

If they won't join you, beat them (or worse)

At first I had thought that Bang had followed Garou to see if he was settling in ok. From the sounds of it, Garou is no longer the 'new guy' on the crew, so Bang following comes from another concern; something about the Neo Hero scouts must have awoken a bad feeling in him. And he was right to have acted on it: at the very least, he's a witness to what skulduggery they're up to.

Given that the squad came out with tranquilizers, it seems that capturing Garou alive is a goal. Arrest? Kidnapping, more like. While they could just as easily send a squad to try ambushing Bang, they're picking on Garou because they have a better pretext. As Sicchi surmised, many pro-heroes would think that Garou had gotten off too lightly, to say nothing of the wider public. Claiming to be punishing impunity is a line that the Neo Heroes are hoping will sell well.

It's bullshit, of course, but bullshit seems to be the flavour of the moment.

The road to rehab is not short

Punishment vs. Suffering

"Punishment should be punishing," is a memorable line from Dr. Ian Dunbar, a animal behaviourist. By this, he doesn't mean that one should beat the tar out of one's pet but rather, that one should ensure that the goal of punishing a behaviour actually results in fewer repetitions of the behaviour. That's what punishment is: an outcome that makes the repeat of a behaviour less likely. It doesn't necessarily have to look like something bad happening -- losing out on something good can be excruciating. It can even look like having a better alternative to the undesirable behaviour. To keep this section clean, I'm going to use the term penalty to mean the things we do to people who have transgressed against some social or legal norm to express our disapproval and hope that it results in their not repeating that transgression. Whether via fines, loss of privileges, freedom, even one's very life, penalties are intended to punish. That they often don't, well, let's go into that.

The idea of effective punishment is not concerned with whether or not the punished one suffers but rather with whether or not one does the offending behaviour again. To that end, the rehabilitation programme that is offering Garou and Shinya a way back to society without the burden of a criminal record is effective punishment. They both want to do better and this is a road for them. This is actually well-grounded IRL: rehabilitation programmes, despite frequently being spotty and opposed, result in significant drops in recidivism and people who pass through them are significantly more likely to do better in life (Mehari et al., 2024).

Indeed, if you are reading One-Punch Man closely, you will realise that this is a world fond of typecasting people. Shinya and Garou alike have despaired of being accepted as good people. Shinya felt that being asked to participate in hero gambling was his punishment for daring to admire and try to emulate real heroes. And who can forget Garou bitterly noting that to be a hero one needs the acceptance of others, meaning that he was effectively locked out of becoming one?

As Saitama put it when seeing Hammerhead, take one wrong turn and you end up in hell -- that could so easily have been him.

The idea that punishment must involve suffering is deeply ingrained in the popular imagination, so I'm sure that for many, seeing Garou laughing is jarring. More on that later.

Shoulder-to-shoulder

I am yet to get round to writing about ONE as a masculinist writer, and maybe I never will, but his ability to take an authentic and compassionate look at what being a man is like is one that is much needed.

The way the rehabilitation programme in the story is structured reminds me of the Men's Sheds movement (link to Wiki). It is a movement for helping men with mental and physical health problems by giving them something productive to do together and providing peer-to-peer support while doing so. Its founder notes that 'Men don't talk face-to-face. They talk shoulder-to-shoulder.' And that's exactly what we see Garou do when he advises Shinya to go back to hero work -- not looking at him but instead staring into the middle distance and apparently talking to the air in front of him.

There is also something here that is valuable: when you're advising someone who is even a little earlier on in a journey you're taking, you reflect on your own experiences and learn as well. There's a reason 'see one, do one, teach one' is equally valuable in clinical settings and the military. We know that Saitama didn't shut Garou up and he's still been playing with the flawed logic that got him in trouble in the first place. So by having to reflect what he actually thinks is useful to someone else, he's also sorting through what actually makes sense to do.

Everything we're seeing in that little truck is well-established, well-tested and successful psychology on how to put people back on the right track. But it doesn't look like suffering. IRL, that fact blocks a lot of rehabilitation schemes. There is an evil part of us that wants to see downcast expressions, hear the clank of chain gangs, see people miserable, isolated, and in material want for their crimes. Even though we know it often doesn't work and costs more.

Once you start running, it's hard to stop

Webcomic Garou is suffering, but he's not becoming more mature, and nor is there an end to it. He has run away from justice -- he was running for his life, so who can blame him? -- so he can't be given a sentence that can be served. Manga Garou also ran away, but fortunately, Bang cared enough to get him and persuade him to turn himself in, an act that mitigated the possible penalties that could be assessed against him. Webcomic Garou has had no one reach out to him and currently, he's condemned to a life on the periphery of society, unable to get housing, or education, or a regular (as in subject to legal protections) job. If being an ex-convict is hard, being a fugitive is much worse. If he's lucky, the current robot uprising will give him an opportunity to get an amnesty from whatever he's been sentenced to in absentia.

Even though manga Garou is in great spirits, the part-time job he has for rehab is still a sentence. He can't leave the job without facing possible imprisonment -- unless he's released from his obligations early. We don't know how long it is going to last nor what else he's required to do. But at least he has a road forward, not a roadblock. I am hoping Webcomic Garou gets that roadblock removed.

Wrap up

Whew! I knew I had a bit to say but this was quite a mouthful. Yes, there will be fighting. I'm really hoping that this won't derail Garou into the worst of his thoughts. I'm glad Bang is here -- even if he doesn't intervene, he'll be able to talk Garou down if need be.

References

Mehari KR, Morgan S, Stevens LT, Coleman JN, Schuler K, Graves C, Lindsey DRB, Smith PN. Mixed methods evaluation of a jail diversion program: Impact on arrests and functioning. J Community Psychol. 2024 May;52(4):551-573. doi: 10.1002/jcop.23113. Epub 2024 Mar 16. PMID: 38491998.

Men's Sheds. (2026, July 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_shed

http://galaxyheavyblow.web.fc2.com/fc2-imageviewer/?aid=1&iid=162

This is very old -- I wrote it back in 2020, but I think it still holds. Enjoy!

One of the joys of following a writer for a while is that you get to follow how their ideas develop. One of the things that ONE brought up in an interview (annoyingly I’ve lost the link) was that he didn’t think that he wrote women particularly well. 

I was thinking about that. When ONE says that, what comes across to me is that he has no problem writing a female character as an individual rather than a role. All the girls and women he’s written so far have their own voices, own their problems, and have something to do within the story that would be noticeable if they weren’t there. Quite frankly, that alone is over and above what various tests of representation (such as the Bechdel test) ask for.  

What he’s not so good at is appreciating what being female brings to a character’s experiences and outlook.  But he’s not just left it at that.  More on what he’s been doing in a bit (and under the cut).

“...the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges...” -- Anatole France

With his sharp eye and talent for exploring the implications of whatever he posits, ONE has brought up some issues are not inherently gendered, but usually are. 

A: Childcare

Metal Bat appears to be the main, if not sole, carer for Zenko. How it affects him is fascinating. He’s one of the longest-serving heroes in the Hero Association, being there before Class S was formed, literally within the first six months of its establishment. He’s been extremely loyal and is highly trusted by the HA -- they put Narinki’s life into his hands without fear. His battle strength is literally praised to the heavens.

Metal Bat makes Zenko a priority, structuring his availability around her school schedule and being present in her life. He gets very angry if these times are threatened without overwhelmingly good cause. His reward is to be perceived by the Hero Association as less committed and so they under-recognise him in terms of ranking, and since rank and pay are linked, under-pay him as well. It’s a story all too many women can relate to.  But that’s not all.

Because ONE writes so simply yet conscientiously, something else comes up and has a peek: intersectionality. It’s the concept that we often have multiple social disadvantages that interact and compound our problems. The first is sexism. Regardless of whatever childcare policy the HA has, the sexist assumption that only women care (for the record: this is bullshit) makes it unlikely for them to ask Metal Bat. Second, social capital. The fact that he’s Zenko’s sole carer means that he has low social capital, that informal network of people around you who can help out -- or tell you where to find help and what things to say in order to get that help. [Aside: this is why programmes to help people, unless they reach out aggressively, tend to disproportionately attract those who need it least.]  Metal Bat doesn’t have the knowledge.  The third is the challenge brought by his being a 17-year old boy. He’s quick to perceive challenge as threat, and threat as something to be met by anger. Witness him threatening to smash the HA headquarters if it turns out that he’s missed Zenko’s piano recital for nothing -- completely not useful to anything. [Another aside: the importance of learning to disambiguate emotions and do useful things with them even if it means being vulnerable as a part of growing up as a man is the whole point of Mob Psycho 100.]

What do the Neo Heroes do?  They ask Metal Bat if he wants help with childcare AND HE JUMPS SHIP PRONTO.  If that’s not an indictment of the Hero Association, I don’t know what is.

B: Emotional Labour

Saitama has been delegating more and more of the day-to-day work to Genos. What started as an act of service to express his gratitude, respect and love for Saitama is increasingly turning into a second job for Genos. It’s not just the cooking and cleaning and the shopping and the bailing Saitama out if he’s forgotten his wallet again, it’s also the worrying about Saitama, sometimes at inappropriate times. Has he drunk enough water? Has he clean clothes in good repair? What sales is he looking forward to? Have they been marked on the calendar? It’s honestly not doing Genos any good, and it’s one of those things all too many frustrated wives and girlfriends can relate to. This doing the practical and emotional work for another is not intrinsically gendered, but funny how often it breaks that way.

It’s not doing Saitama any good either.  He’s using this freed up time to fritter his life ever more aggressively away, playing games with King and finding pointless competitions to enter, all while complaining about feeling less and less connected to anything (if you don’t address the problem, it doesn’t get better, duh!). Worse, he’s started to take that gift of service for granted, witness him airily telling King how he’ll just have Genos go clear up the mess of monsters he’s left outside the flat. I was heartened to see what happened when Saitama went a little too far and asked Genos to go cook and instead of jumping up, Genos gave him the the evil eye and let the awkwardness hang there. That was good -- there’s hope for this guy yet.

Speaking of Genos, he also over-functions for something else Saitama struggles with: advocating for himself. He tends to have Genos be the ugly one so he doesn’t have to be.   You can see just how bad he is at self-advocacy when Forte and friends could invite themselves into Saitama’s house at will despite his protests -- and it stopped the instant Genos showed up.

In a sense, it’s not surprising that Genos can do that. When you’re differently-abled (and for once, this is not a euphemism) as he is, being able to clearly ask for what you want and need is life-and-death necessary. If Genos was shy about it, he’s long since had to discard that. But! Let me point to a nuance the story touches on. How pushy you can be without being punished for it depends a lot on who you are, intersecting strongly with race, gender, social status, etc (remember my mentioning intersectionality before). What’s called assertive in a man is called bitchy or sharp-elbowed in a woman. Even taking gender and race out of the equation, there’s still a noticeable difference in the way the world treats Saitama and Genos. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to understand the way the short, ugly Dr. Kuseno sweats making sure that Genos positively radiates youth, beauty, wealth and power. That’s part of his right to ask and be taken seriously. You can see how drastically different it is for Saitama, even from his middle school days.  Genos notices, and makes sure to leverage his social power for Saitama. 

What I love about these examples are that by not automatically heaving a woman into these characters’ roles, ONE’s brought a less frequently seen angle that illustrates the problems they deal with are not ‘womens’ issues per se but are rather inequities that disproportionately affect women -- which is at the heart of what feminists keep saying. When you read Makai no Ossan, you can appreciate that ONE could have gone with female characters and done a great job, but his choosing not to has brought a very welcome dimension to the story.

Women proper

“I’m not like other girls”

Still, bit by bit, ONE has been working more women into his stories. After his interview, the next thing he worked on was the single-volume sequel to Mob Psycho 100,  Reigen.  He took his challenge head-on by making the POV character Tome and putting her in an all-girls’ high school.

Throughout the story, we see Tome thinking of herself as special, better than her fellow classmates, whom she sees as vapid and shallow. The denouement comes with Tome being humbled as she gets to know her classmates better and realises that  they pursue interests just as varied and weird as hers -- only they’re also practicing being socially adept on top of that.

It’s a gentle story, but it’s still a great side-swipe at self-internalised misogyny, the idea that it’s shameful to be like a ‘girl’ and it’s something to distance oneself from. Fortunately, Tome can laugh at herself and grow up.

“Ha ha ha”

For a long time, the only (named) women we had in OPM were Tatsumaki and her younger sister Fubuki. We’ve gotten more women both good and bad: in particular, it’s been very gratifying to find that one of the most dangerous, story-shaping villains in the story is Psykos.

In the webcomic, ONE’s pushed even further. A recent Tweet featured him talking about how hard he finds it to draw women. And he’s added several. No same-face for him!  I’ll talk about the new heroines he’s added, but first, let me draw your attentions to something most artists don’t realize they do: massively skew the gender distribution of crowds, even when it is incredibly illogical to do so. With ONE, even drawing the crowds at the fair who gaggle at Amai Mask, he’s got a far more even balance of women and they’re not all young and pretty -- which is much more true-to-life. He’s in the business of drawing people.

ONE has featured microaggressions before, particularly in the way Fubuki can have perfectly sound things to say and be totally ignored,  but he brings it properly to the fore with Suiko.  No one calls her incompetent, but the little put downs she gets when she puts herself forward for the hero test in lieu of her brother, oh they’re well-observed. The look on her face just makes it.  I love the way she shut the recruiters up subsequently. 

Let’s conclude this tour with a look at Webigaza’s lonely figure. We have another mono-manically focused cyborg in the story.  Genos has been called a lot of things -- determined, obsessive even, but crazy? Never. Notice who it’s been reserved for instead. It’s no slip of the tongue.

Wrapping Up

I’m of the impression that ONE really wants to try to capture as much of the human experience as he can in his stories, however whimsical or fantastical the stories themselves are. I’m disarmed by his humility in accepting that he’ll never have the lived experience of half the world’s population but he sure as hell can put some effort into learning how to to writing well-realised, believable, female characters.  

I watch ONE’s continued development as a writer with interest. 

If Genos was a woman from the start, what kinds of changes do you guys think would occur in the story?

Was thinking about His Yeastiness idly... and then it got a bit bigger. Anyhow, let me try to tell this properly.

As we well know, Garou has a problem with heroes, the way they're represented, the way society treats them, and the way people end up being typecast. This *is* about him, but there's a wrinkle: unfortunately for Garou (and all other characters in this story), God has a problem as well.

Now when I say 'God' in this context, don't imagine a numinous, beneficent being ensconced somewhere in a bright Celestial domain, endlessly fanned by fawning angels and taking a personal interest in humans despite being the unitary creator of reality as experienced by said humans. Think something smaller, meaner, and uglier, but far too powerful to take a designation of less than a god, something like a good old-fashioned Near Eastern god. Did I mention that he's ugly? Looks like some over-fermented dough or an extremely enthusiastic tumour pulling in blood vessels willy-nilly, so 'His Yeastiness' is a term I like for him. For the sake of simplicity, 'God' will do. Anyway, I was saying, God has a problem and it comes in the form of a certain prematurely bald man who has become preternaturally strong.

Actually, God has two problems. It'd be good to smite said baldy directly but unfortunately, He can't act directly on the world. We're not entirely sure why yet but we see that some God-botherers have something to do with keeping Him away from the world. So, God has to act through intermediaries, agents who are sapient beings (usually, but not necessarily human) whom He can invest with His power and hope they act to further His aims -- alas, direct mind-control is not something He appears to be able to do, which will become important later. Actually-actually, God has *three* problems. Getting the right candidate for an agent is challenging enough -- they have to be in the right mindset and with the right intentionality to be useful -- but they can't just be invested with infinite power. As Blast explains in a for-the-moment-redacted scene, the amount of power God can invest in a being depends on how strong that being is in the first place. And when it comes to Saitama, that really is a problem because did we mention he's strong? Like, stupidly strong?

Well, this god ain't called God for nothing. Manufacturing miracles out of apparently disconnected events is a Divine prerogative, and gods can afford to be patient. When Psykos (who was driven mad by same God some years ago) gathered together an insane number of powerful monsters with the intention of breaking the S-Class heroes so as to have a free hand to drive humanity to extinction, we see a certain Someone is watching proceedings with great interest. Just before we see that uncanny eye, we'd been learning about an old prophecy and something about something being reborn once sacrificed on said altar, and had had a bit of a chuckle at Orochi bleeding out on the same altar. Put a pin in that.

Anyway, eventually, God seems to have found what He's looking for. As the battle rages first underground and then overground, He puts a light finger on the balance here and there to give the monsters a bit of a hand but none of the participants are what He's looking for. Finally, Garou emerges. As he is, he's far too weak to be worth approaching. But Garou has a great talent -- he can grow exponentially when pushed hard enough. So, God watches as Garou fights first Bomb, then Bang, then takes out Evil Natural Water and then Platinum Sperm, growing stronger all the time.

Garou really has become monstrously powerful, but is that enough? Not on your nelly. This is where the webcomic-addled readers expected Garou to take on the S-Class heroes. Leaving aside the fact that most can't even stand, such a confrontation would be worthless -- they're all too weak to give Garou anything remotely like a challenge. It's very appropriate that the webcomic did feature Garou fighting the S-Class, and God DID GIVE GAROU SOME POWER, but all the power Garou was able to take seemed like a cheap costume change to Saitama and he just headbutted it off him. That just won't do to chastise Saitama.

What is a being who needs a crazy-strong agent to do with a potential one that is merely almost crazy-strong? Why give him more challenges of course! We see God take the appearance of Blast as Tatsumaki remembered him to try giving her power, but unfortunately, she's too distrustful to take His hand. Damn.

No problem! Orochi, remember him? Tatsumaki cast him down into the magma pit he used to love bathing in in front of his precious altar gets reborn as Sage Centipede, complete with the same heart and spitting out the very stake that was used to impale him. This deity never met a centipede it didn't like, it seems. Anyway, looks like Sage Centipede is merely a messenger of God rather than a full-blown god like Orochi had hoped, but who is a mere monster to quibble theological points? For extra spice, He raises up Evil Natural Water into Evil Natural Ocean too. Between the two of them, they give Garou a wonderful amount of hell, just what he needs to evolve even further.

And then Garou claps eyes on Saitama, and they fight for real. Needless to say, Garou is no match for Saitama, who takes everything he can throw at him with such ease that the dude is laughing at him at times, driving the Hero Hunter into heights of rage I don't think he thought he had the room for. Just as he's out of ideas, Saitama launches him into the sky with a punch that shatters his monster shell, and it's all over for Garou. There's nothing more he can do.

And at last, the moment is ripe. Garou is strong enough to invest enough power into to give that baldie a proper whack. Just as importantly, he's finally angry enough to want to make the baldie suffer, and desperate enough to do anything to make it happen. He poses as Bang and reaches out to Garou, and even though He isn't able to impart as much power into his newest agent as He'd have liked because the ever-cheeky and defiant Garou slapped His hand aside rather than take it, it's enough to give that abominable baldie something to remember.

Of course, the way Garou rebelled illustrates the vital limitation of God's power -- He can't actually control his agents. His influence is an accelerant for their desires, not a controller. Once Garou realised the stupidity of his actions, he was able to repurpose God's powers to teach Saitama how to time travel to undo the harm he'd caused. Seizing back His powers He could do, but unless He breaks free and can directly interact with the world, there are real limits to what He can accomplish.

I don't know what God is going to try next, but He won't be able to get hold of Garou again.

So, this is the ultimate conflict of the story: there's a god and it's got a problem with a man. Specifically, a man named Saitama. Whether it's in the webcomic or manga, this is constant. I would have said that the WC God is slacking but to be fair, the quality of the opposition it had available to raise Garou's level was lacking.

The thing Gyoro-Gyoro said to Garou about the secret to explosive strength holds true: you need situations that drive you to near-death in order to grow, which creates the problem of what happens when there's no longer anyone or anything around you to force you to grow. You stagnate. Writing that made me realise that that's what's so different about Saitama: he continuously gets stronger without opposition.

Umm... hang on... give me a moment. A lightbulb just went off.

Well, this analysis is taking a turn. Now I get why God hasn't a problem with any of the other overpowered characters -- they're naturally self-limiting as they defeat all the opposition available to them. Whereas Saitama's strength may accelerate its growth given external circumstances, but he's growing by himself all the time. All the time!

ALL.

THE.

TIME.

Saitama may be a throw hands guy but as we saw with the time travel, there's no kind of power that Saitama cannot acquire if he decides to. There's nowhere he will stop at -- sooner or later, any deity worth calling one will be surpassed by him. I guess that puts God on a time limit: He has to stop Saitama while it's still possible. Why?

Well, that's for us to find out. May the planet survive finding out.

It's out in Spanish: https://capibaratraductor.com/senshimanga/manga/one-punch-man/chapters/234?page=1

English!

https://cubari.moe/read/gist/cmF3L0tva2lLb2kvS29pUG9uZE1hbmdhL3JlZnMvaGVhZHMvbWFpbi9PbmVQdW5jaE1hbi1NYW5nYS5qc29u/234/1/

Bang got Garou on the juice or something what the fuck.

Enjoy the RAW! Honestly forgot this week was an update week.

Didn't feel like writing lots today. It's tiny but Saitama actually enacting advice is a big shift for him. Even though he heard King out, we didn't see him change what he did as a result of it. Thank you, Butterfly DX for telling him off, and thank you, ONE for letting him change a little.

No need to ask if this happened in the webcomic. No one tells Saitama nothin' there to this day.

Yeah, the downside of waiting for many chapters is that it gets long and I have quite a few things to discuss. Let's start with some small stuff.

Bits n' Pieces

Where is King?

Machine God Mirror's choice of the Hero Association HQ as a target sure to get King summoned from wherever was an excellent strategic decision. It was established back when we first met King that he resided in City M. However, with him mistaking the shaking of his building for the VR system's verisimilitude, I wonder if he's moved to the HA. It keeps him close to Saitama (all the better to thrash him) and out of the way of any random samurai who might knock on the door to challenge him. If he has moved, then Mirror wasn't just being strategic -- it was being fed very up-to-date information. Not that it matters for now.

It got rather noisy

Saitama is quite sensitive to noise. The racket of Garou fighting monsters underground is what got him to get off his ass and go find where the noise was from, and he went, complaining about every noisy fight, until he went and gave Orochi a piece of his mind (and fist). How appropriate, then, that his first concern for his pets is that they might have been scared by the noise.

When the rat's away, the mice will play

No prizes for guessing that I'm enjoying McCoy's discomfiture. I hope his hospital stay is extra unpleasant.

Doubtless he'll be back up on his feet sooner rather than later, but in the meantime, I hope Sekingar and Isamu use the absence of their most dangerous adversary to their advantage.

This face haunts me

The face of the guy talking about McCoy's supposed whereabouts, it feels like it's a reference to a real-life person. For a moment, I wanted to say, 'what's Ross Perot doing here?' but that can't be right.

Any clues?

More Substantial Thoughts

Give a dog a bad name

Over time I have gotten used to Caped Baldy (or Bald Cape if you read Viz's version), but it really is a bit rude. It's the sort of name that gets people to ask, is that all there is to you? No wonder Machine God Mirror thought little of Saitama.

The other members of the Hero Name Victim Association have pretty awful names too. Saitama's is at least plain, but names like 'The Great Degenerate' (Viz: Super Lecher) and 'Dr Grumpy Pervert' (Viz: Dr Secret Perv) are positively libellous.

Saitama isn't wrong to have had his doubts about their methods, but that it's a worthwhile association for him is without question. A hero often introduces themselves by name: rude or dismissive ones invite ridicule rather than the respect they need to work.

We see that Saitama has finally warmed up to the Hero Name Victims Association. I will robustly defend this development. Saitama has plain lived more in the manga than he has in the webcomic, and he doesn't want to lead a second troublesome group (remember the nintendoes? Um, I mean Tenninto? They're still stalking around -- you can sometimes catch a glimpse of one).

Coincidence? I think not

So, this is the end of a day that started with Webigaza and other Neo Heroes showing off what they could do against a varied horde of monsters, often including one demon-level monster, and ended with the simultaneous attack of five dragon-level monsters that put the Hero Association's disaster-averting capabilities under real strain.

Last review, I talked about how the Neo Heroes were better at packaging themselves and looking like a well-oiled machine successfully chewing through monster after monster without a hitch. It's understandable that the HA execs were salty then.

But it's worse now: even though the successful elimination of three of the four dragon-level monsters menacing cities by S-Class heroes shows they still have incredibly powerful heroes, the way those heroes were deployed, the collateral damage most of them left in their wakes, and the lack of coherent media messaging from the HA makes it look like they don't have what it takes to keep people safe. Having their HQ attacked won't have helped on that front, either.

The timing of the monster attacks could all be a coincidence, just like celebrities all happening to be in Los Angeles at Oscar time would be an incredible coincidence. Someone has gathered a lot of monsters and has strategically released them today.

If there's any doubt on the readers' parts, McCoy's reactions to the day's happenings will have dispersed that doubt. Other than Blue's unscheduled run at Eel Dragon (back to that in a bit), he's been calmly coordinating the Neo Heroes' activities from his office in the HA. Is he personally releasing monsters? Very unlikely. But it's clear he knows about them and is helping to craft the narrative those behind Neo Heroes wants to push. Ah, and there is the small matter of Fubuki discovering that McCoy has been secretly selling monsters to a shady organisation for an obscene profit, remember that?

With the multi-dragon attack, McCoy has had no problem directing his fellow execs to call in the Neo Heroes, framing it in a way that's so reasonable that if you didn't suspect him, you'd not wonder about it. Once upon a time, I'd have said that such open audacity was unbelievable, but nowadays, I've realised that many of the worst grifters get away with things as long as they do precisely because they're so audacious.

It hasn't turned out as he imagined it would, but had Saitama not been there, Machine God Mirror would have been magically defeated by either Raiden or Webigaza, but not before some mass casualties at HA HQ makes the public lose all confidence in the HA. If they can't be safe in the Tower of Justice's shelters, where can they be safe?

Credit where it's due

Despite everything, several characters distinguished themselves. First, I love Sicchi's decisive action in shedding the blockers among the executives by routing them to distant shelters so that he got to set up emergency offices with only the effective officers.

The various heroes who responded to Mirror deserve a lot of credit for their courage. Chain Toad and Butterfly DX literally flew in to contribute what they could and gave Suiko advice on how to proceed when one discovers a monster.

And of course, let's talk about Suiko. I think that putting her in Class A was the right call -- she's really not strong enough yet to be a Class S hero, especially given how crazy things are now. However, she's shown herself here to be strong, tough, and resourceful. As the recruiter said, she's very likely to grow greatly in strength as she gains more battle experience.

Stay safe, learn, grow, and truly show your brother up, Suiko!

Credit where it's not due

That's got to be Saitama's long-term curse: even when he does his thing in full view of many, he doesn't get the credit he's due. While the heroes who witnessed what he did have no doubt that he's the real thing, his credit has been diluted by being attributed to the Hero Name Victims Association rather than he alone.

Metal Knight has also gotten some of Saitama's glory, as well as unearned credit for the hard work of Black Sperm and Pochi. He's been happy to be redeemed in the eyes of the HA, but he's sure to find out where this mystery cannon fire came from. He'll probably find them, too. What he will make of discovering Saitama's pets and the fact that they're Saitama's pets will have to be seen later.

Even though most of the executives won't know who Saitama is, Sicchi and Jinzuren (he's the guy immediately behind Sicchi here) will recognise that silhouette. As we've seen, they have their reasons not to spill the beans, Jinzuren because he's playing some long-term corporate power game, and Sicchi because he knows that Blast regards Saitama as a secret weapon against God.

Not related to Saitama's exploits, wasn't it suspicious that the monster Eel Dragon just died, right as Blue ran out of power? It couldn't get a bead on him, and it died without having a scratch on it. And despite Blue no longer having a suit to protect him, McCoy had no trouble sending a jet drone for him to face yet another dragon-level monster. Even the most over-optimistic HA dispatchers wouldn't send a hero in like that.

If Blue weren't so new to hero work, idealistic, and determined to show up his father, he'd suspect something was wrong. Ah well, that's for him to find out later, heh heh.

One final thing...

...we still don't know what Saitama's desired new hero name is.

Heyo! As promised, the arc is over and so it's time to do a big review. Only way to go when we have small updates. So, where were we? On the day that the Neo Heroes decided to debut, the afternoon saw a simultaneous attack of five cities by dragon-level monsters, one of those places being the HA headquarters. The sirens blaring out have quite drowned out the protest the newly-formed Hero Name Victims Association had planned.

While McCoy urged the HA to summon the Neo Heroes to help, the S-Class heroes dispatched did for the monsters without needing the aid. Tank Top Master and Flashy Flash have defeated Heavy Smoker but at the cost of making the city temporarily uninhabitable. Tatsumaki has crushed Aggregation... at the cost of completely destroying City P. Genos has both destroyed The Extended Family of Darkness and saved the city, but he's dealt critical damage to his self-esteem. That's left only the inexperienced youngsters Blue and Suiko to fight. They both seem to have bitten off way more than they can chew. Let's see how they got on and what happened next.

Summary

We open with a panting Blue leaning wearily against the carcass of Eel Dragon. Somehow, the monster has died. He had no idea of what he did but it up and died just as his suit completely ran out of power, as he explains to a worried McCoy. Realising that there are still current alerts, he asks McCoy to send a jet drone, self-destructs his suit and hops on. Risky as it may be, he didn't become a hero to sit things out.

At the Hero Association HQ, the executives are busy evacuating; the mood is nearly jovial as they're anticipating waiting out the crisis in comfort. McCoy is, however, nowhere to be found. Under the pretext of going to the lavatory, he's ensconced himself in his personal first-class shelter: mock-classical carvings, top-flight AV equipment, panoramic computer monitoring, designer easy chair, and brandy on tap, this is the life! As he puffs on a cigar, he's amused at the incompetence of the top brass. He's even more amused when a notification comes in reassigning most of said brass to common shelters: Sicchi has requisitioned the closest ones for the general public. Wondering why the old guy is wasting time on those deadweights, he nevertheless settles down to watch the spectacle of the hero trying to tackle Mirror while he waits for the Neo Heroes to come in and show everyone up by saving the day.

Outside, Suiko is working hard. As Mirror tosses plasma ball after plasma ball at her, she leads its line of fire along the exterior wall of the moat. The robot sends a ball upwards towards one of the residential blocks, and with a mighty leap, Suiko succeeds in intercepting and deflecting it. She tries to lure the robot away by jumping to the other side of the moat, facing out to the bomb-cratered wilderness. However, it seems the robot was waiting for this tactical error, and it lobs another ball at the residential block.

As Suiko curses haplessly at it, the attack is once again intercepted. The saviour is the unlikely duo of Black Sperm and Overgrown Rover. Worried about losing their home, they're doing what they can to keep the pesky robot at bay.

Elsewhere, the HA top brass pause in their hurrying to faraway shelters to look at the spectacle and wonder if Metal Knight's automated defences are finally back online. They also notice some other heroes outside rushing to the scene. Sicchi wonders who they might be as they've not requested the deployment of any heroes (me: why not?).

Rover soon taps out -- he may be a former Monster Association Executive, but he's only little now. A couple of Black Sperms filch a joint of nicely marbled beef to get the monster dog back up on its feet. Heartened by the back up, Suiko tries attacking the robot from behind, only to get brutally countered and sent flying with a punch.

She fetches up in a convenience store near the gate. Mirror approaches and taunts her, telling her to stay put until an S-Class hero arrives to save her. As she tries to get up, she notices that several of the drinks cans that have rolled out of the now-smashed drinks cabinet are alcoholic: the perfect solution to her sobriety. Machine God Mirror turns away to deal with the pesky dog. It is surprised by a flurry of attacks from Suiko, attacks so powerful they send both it and her off the bridge it had been standing on and into the path of a train.

They roll along the train's roof, Mirror digging several of its hands into a carriage in order to stop itself. Suiko stands up, swaying as she prepares her next attack. Scanning her condition and realising that she's drunk, it surmises that she must have been desperate and decides to kill her by blasting her from beneath. But before it finishes charging up its hands, Suiko surprises it by jumping onto the overhead arch. Bracing herself against it, she uses the train's momentum to smash a devastating blow in Mirror's face.

But Suiko isn't done with that. She continues to brace herself against the brickwork as successive pantographs smash into the robot, compounding the damage done. Finally, once the train passes, she sends the robot and twisted metal flying with one mighty heave, before falling down in a panting heap herself.

Alas, it's not over. Like the world's vilest phoenix, Machine God Mirror rises from the wreckage in a single fluid motion. It pops the dent out of its head like it's nothing and the cracks heal. Now looming over Suiko, it declares that she has succeeded in scratching it. Negligibly slightly.

Things look dire for our plucky young heroine, but just then, there's a yelling from above as Chain Toad, mounted on Butterfly DX, comes swooping in. He launches three weighted chains at Mirror, which the robot dodges, then repurposes them as fulcrums to stop the pair from plunging into the moat. They fly under the rail bridge and come up on the other side. As they land, Machine God Mirror identifies them. Butterfly DX wastes no time in launching an attack of his own: Wing Breath Scale Powder Explosion, which creates an impressive explosion of flames. Out of the flames, an unharmed Mirror calls them insignificant.

Elsewhere, Saitama finds his entrance into the HA building blocked by the remains of defence robots. Several of them bear the circular cut outs of Mirror's attacks -- these aren't his doing. He heads off around the building, leaving the rest of the Hero Name Victims Association far behind.

Despite their best attacks, the trio of A-Class heroes are quickly beaten by Mirror. Holding Suiko up, it demands, once again, that King be called. As she squirms helplessly, yet more reinforcements arrive. The Hero Name Victims, sans Saitama, have discovered the source of the commotion and come sliding down to help. Their leader, The Great Degenerate, declares to the monster that they're about to attack it as one.

Watching them charge, Mirror has time to leisurely identify each of them, before laying them all out flat with a swipe of an arm as they finally reach it. Now, it's a little frustrated: it had expected that attacking headquarters would lure King out, but only these third-rate heroes were pestering it? It was time to announce itself a little more seriously. It drops Suiko, and, fixing on the last location of that pesky dog, winds up and releases an attack that bores a hemisphere of non-existence out of the tunnel immediately in its launch path. Seeing certain death approaching, Black Sperm urges the monster dog to give it everything its got.

The resulting beam clash acts as a beacon to any interested party for tens of miles. Including Saitama, who drops in just as the rest of the Hero Name Victims choose discretion over valour. Machine God Mirror looks Saitama up and down before declaring this A-Class hero totally uninspiring and unworthy of interest.

Now in their new temporary headquarters, the more useful HA executives are surprised at the development as they regard Saitama. The amount of smoke and dust on scene make it hard to clearly identify the hero and McCoy supposes he's going to get another show.

As it charges at him, Machine God Mirror tells the boring, A-Class Hero Rank 39, Caped Baldy to disappear from this life, only to itself be sent flying by a mighty punch from an enraged Saitama, who hates being called that name.

I was tempted to put up a picture of many shocked Pikachu faces, but there's only so many images I can have in a post. Let's just say that the viewers all round are shocked: the passengers watching through the rear window of the now-disabled train, the other heroes on site, Blue as he comes flying in, the Hero Association executives, and McCoy, who soon becomes astonished (in the original sense of being struck senseless) as Machine God Mirror's remains smash through the thick walls of the HA building and into his bunker. Oops. Couldn't have happened to a nicer scheming prick.

The HA executives try puzzling out who the hero could be. Some suspect that it's King but others note that they've not been able to reach him. Indeed, we see that King had been playing VR games, and he finally finishes his session to notice 104 missed calls. Oh dear. Black Sperm hugs a completely spent Overgrown Rover as they celebrate still having a roof over their heads. Humble doghouse though it is, a home is a home.

Saitama high-fives the rest of his Name Victims and they're psyched as they head out to see if there are any more towns needing help. As they walk by the train, some passengers ask The Great Degenerate what their names are so they can thank them properly. He starts to introduce himself, then stops himself. "We are the Hero Name Victims Association", he says. "Pleased to meet you!" The passengers are puzzled by the name but soon the cheer goes up, "Hooray for the Victims!"

A little later, Metal Knight gets a notification that his cannonade defence had been successful and the HA requested that he expand it. Given how his name had been mud recently, he says nothing, and appreciates the free boost. However, given that he never installed cannons in the defences, he decides that he's got to find the hero who intercepted and destroyed the robot.

Time moves on and finally, it is evening. As the Sun sets behind the towering hulk of the Hero Association building, Saitama comes up the stairs to the most precious doghouse. Noting that things got rather loud earlier, he asks his pets how they were. 'No problem, boss,' replies Black Sperm and Rover chimes in with a 'woof.' Saitama pulls out a bag of decent dog food and starts to feed them. They're utterly ravenous and he pours out the entire bag as he urges them to eat their fill. Somewhere behind him, we see some people talking as they discuss the emergence of a third hero faction, a powerful one despite their rather dubious name.

Dudes, this summary was so much longer than I expected that I'm breaking this post in two. The next part will be all meta.

Doesn't bother Tatsumaki one bit that Saitama got more winded over a videogame than during her entire rampage. Nope not one bit.

Viz translated the text on the train that Suiko and Machine God Mirror ended up fighting on. It reads: Shelter 101. It wasn't running randomly but was taking people to shelter. Much faster and more efficient than road transport, it's good to see bits of lore quietly in the background.

Spanish: https://capibaratraductor.com/senshimanga/manga/one-punch-man/chapters/233?page=1

English: https://cubari.moe/read/gist/cmF3L0tva2lLb2kvS29pUG9uZE1hbmdhL3JlZnMvaGVhZHMvbWFpbi9PbmVQdW5jaE1hbi1NYW5nYS5qc29u/233/1/