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one punch man is a story about a guy named saitama, the titular "one punch man". he lives in a world where heroes and monsters are the norm, and despite being basically one of the strongest beings alive, saitama lives a normal life, unable to feel satisfaction from fighting villains as he's too powerful to ever truly experience the thrill of a fight. that's basically the initial premise and focus of one punch man and i really like it! so what's with the mixed rating?

the main character, saitama, is probably one of the most interesting characters ive seen in a manga so far. while never ... put so bluntly, its made it pretty clear that saitama has some form of depression as he is rarely able to express extreme emotions in his daily life, and is unable to experience happiness from the fights he once loved to participate in when he was younger. there's a sort of comical nihilism expressed in the story as saitama is constantly stuck in a loop of monotony even in spite of his god-like power status.

what balances out with this potentially repetitive element of the story is the interactions saitama has with other people. there are so many memorable characters, even minor ones, that stound out all on their own, but compliment themselves even further with how they interact with saitama and others. there's a great character named king who has a conversation with saitama about saitamas inability to feel extreme happiness anymore, and its such a real situation that stands out from the rest of the story. there are a lot of other moments like this, too, with other heros and friends.

sadly, despite what i love about the characters, the recent arcs in one punch man have.. kind of drained that life out of the story. there is a much larger focus on powerscaling-esque dynamics and large scaled worldbuilding. there are entire sections of the manga where saitama basically isn't doing anything because there needs to be screentime for other characters to have fights with villains i don't really care about. unlike earlier OPM where it was a mainly character focused action/comedy that managed to balance out the fact that the main character could kill basically anything, it feels like recent OPM is trying its best to write the main character out of the story so there is screentime for "cool art, i guess" moments.

that's not to say that all of the recent fights are completely worthless or anything. the art in one punch man is some of the best in the medium and there were a few fights that really stood out to me, but the manga truly begins to feel its flaws once the fights start to keep coming and coming, and you start to notice the blatant, unnecessary fanservice and sexualization of characters. i don't need 4k HD fucking boobs and uncomfortable sexuality in my fights in place of well written character development.

recently, there are rarely ever any moments like that king/saitama conversation i was talking about earlier. any of those moments now feel shallow, half-baked, as if they're only referencing those points from the original webcomic. this really shows itself in garou, whos a character whos initially very well recreated in the first half of the story but slowly becomes more and more of a caricature of his former self as the story strays away from the original webcomic, with core beats in his developement being scrapped, as to have more room for the aforementioned "cool art, i guess" moments. it really is disappointing.

i know a lot of people love this manga but, could it be, idk, perhaps, maybe... mid? no, it couldnt be...
yeah i think it is lol thanks for reading