One Punch Man - Satire

*obligatory spoiler warning*

This week we’ll be talking about satire, since that’s the dumb assignment Mr. Ravenda decided to give us this week.

Satire is the use of irony, humor, exaggeration, etc., to make fun of something, but also to make some kind of point. So, I thought it would be fitting to talk about the hilarious shounen anime, One Punch Man.

One Punch Man is about Saitama, a superhero who can take out any monster or villain with just one punch.

Saitama is really just a regular person. He worries about things like when the next sale at the supermarket is gonna be, and is just really blase overall. To him, being a superhero is just a hobby he does for fun, but is getting bored with because of his immense strength. Saitama is like a shounen protagonist after they’ve finished their big journey or whatever. He’s already the strongest, and doesn’t have to worry about big things anymore.

Things start to change when he saves Genos, a cyborg and aspiring hero, from a mosquito monster lady.

Genos decides that he should start following Saitama, in order to learn how to be stronger as a hero. Saitama pretty much becomes Genos’ senpai.

Genos is a takes everything very seriously, much like an archetypal shounen protagonist, but Saitama usually just tells him to like chill.   

After following Saitama around for awhile, Genos suggests that they join the Hero Association (which exists since the world they live in is pretty much townsville from the powerpuff girls). The Hero Association is an organization where local heroes can earn money from the government depending on their rank, and how many monsters and/or villains they defeat. Really strong and high ranking heroes are treated as celebrities.To join, people must take an exam to determine whether they can be a hero, and if so, it determines their rank as a hero. Genos immediately joins at S class (the highest class), but Saitama joins the C class (the lowest) due to his low intelligence.

Eventually, Saitama makes it to B Class, and starts to gain public recognition, and more importantly, profit.

This show is absolutely hilarious. I was constantly hysterically laughing from the jokes and how much it made fun of typical shounen anime. There was one part where they got to a building where one villain dwelled. It was most likely a giant maze inside, which would usually be an entire arc in a regular shounen, but they just blow up the entire building, and go to the basement, where they needed to be.

This show just takes typical shounen tropes and just destroys them in a hilarious manner. It’s really funny and makes its point clear: Shounen anime take themselves too seriously sometimes. The genre is great but usually very ridiculous. They make their arcs way too long, resulting in forever running series’ like Dragonball, Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, etc. This show contrasts that by making each episode feel like an entire arc.

It makes fun of all these anime in while also being great by itself.