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Review of OPM Manga Chapters 221-224

Summary: If the proof is in the pudding...

As you know, Bob, things have been rather changeable of late in the OPM world. The face of the Hero Association, Amai Mask, has been unmasked as a monster and has fled for environs unknown. People feel betrayed, sponsors want compensation for reputational damage, and the outfit that has been styling itself as the big new alternative to the Hero Association has finally gotten the break it needs to show the world what it can do.

Machinations and demonstrations, that's what this is about.

We open with Webigaza; no, actually, we open with Great Philosopher contemplating a sentient, ten-foot-tall sewer crocodile. After literally throwing the book at it, then dispatching it with a shoulder tackle, he heaves a sigh of relief and satisfaction, not noticing the nine further sewer crocodiles manifesting behind him.

I am always down for more of this guy!

Two more heroes run up to support him, only to find that their prowess isn't necessary: the monsters are being beaten up by a crowd of guys in fancy body armour. They turn their attentions to the injured Great Philosopher, who remarks on the unskilled, yet powerful performances of the commoners in suits who came to his rescue. We see that some of these said commoners are the Soda Pop Boys (now the New Soda Pop Boys), who'd decided to transfer to the Neo Heroes to spite Amai Mask. As they're revelling in how easy this all was, one of the pro-heroes asks who they are. Just as they're about to answer, they notice a ginormous monster crocodile looming behind them and promptly start screaming for their leader.

...a bunch of jumped-up know-littles.

Okay, *now* we begin with Webigaza. She doesn't jump onto scene immediately, instead making sure the attending cameraman has the live feed set just right and has gotten her best profile standing out against the backdrop of the city. Webi addresses her watching audience to introduce herself properly. Even the giant monster appears to be a fan as it politely watches her too. Finally, she's done and jumps down, remembering a little too late that she forgot to promote her new single. Never mind, it's showtime! She makes short work of the monster with a cute-looking, yet deadly, heart-shaped charge that burrows clean through the monster, dropping it dead in its tracks. The watching heroes (pro- and neo-) are astonished at that display of force, with her team of Soda Pops fizzling about how her battle suit is incredibly better than theirs. One of the others explains that she's not just got better gear but has also undergone a terrifying regime of cybernetic and drug augmentation -- all to compete with Amai Mask. And the water she's chugging? That's because her body temperature rises to 70 °C whenever she exerts herself. As they watch her steaming, one of them remarks that that kind of life-shortening ambition has to be insane.

Powerful, beautiful, cursed?

The chapter ends with another cyborg watching the events on his phone. As Saitama, who is watching it upside down, asks if there's an idol concert on, Genos thinks to himself that he really needs to thank Dr. Kuseno for doing so much better by him. [Yeah, no one said Genos was a *nice* person.]

Okay, so my life could suck so much worse than it does already. Also, I can't resist this scene of the two of them having an ordinary day. And sharing one phone.

As we go on, we quickly see that the monsters we just saw the New Soda Pop Boys and Webigaza take out are not an isolated event. Raiden and his assigned team effortlessly smash a group of monsters out of existence, saving an unnamed pro-hero from a sticky situation. As his team praises him, Raiden is humble, praising them and the good use they've made of their battle suits in turn, even as he declares that he doesn't need one, at least not yet. The pro-hero watches them and thinks of how they're both well-equipped and well-organised. As he watches Raiden's retreating back, he considers what a natural leader Raiden is and how it inspires him to want to follow that back too.

Given that the language is read from right to left, this really is an image of leaving the old behind and embracing the new. Will he do it and follow that back?

Monsters are everywhere today. They've appeared in multiple cities at the same time, and are overwhelming the mostly low-class heroes who happen to be on scene. Fortunately, the monsters are also rapidly being defeated by a new group of heroes, the Neo Heroes. Not defeating monsters is Suiryu, who is with his team in an armoured people carrier. He's been sent to apprehend Garou -- for reasons. Mindful of how costly they are, he's opted not to wear a body suit.

This really isn't what Suiryu didn't sign up for.

Very much on scene, however, is Axel. Just because a monster is ridiculous doesn't mean it's not dangerous: we see Axel rocket skate after a giant snail that's crushing vehicles on the expressway at 390 km/h. He has called ahead to his team to muster at a toll booth and chops into the snail with his poisoned axe to funnel it into the killbox and to slow it down, both of which objectives succeed. One skewering later, the giant snail lies dead in the wreckage of what had been toll gates, stabbed through by dozens of spears. Axel's Hunters celebrate at having finally taken down a large monster without casualties. Less demonstrative, Axel considers that their custom-made weapons have been far more effective than he could have imagined. In that case, the 'great cause' the Neo Heroes has been talking about might be the real deal, and he may as well commit fully.

Well-justified jubilation as killing a monster that would once have required great sacrifice becomes an unremarkable job.

I did say that pro-heroes were not having a good day, and we cut to someone who really isn't. We've seen that Crescent Eyebroll is no slouch as a hero, but his one sabre is no match for the nine-fold threat of the Triple Tongue monsters, who are able to attack him at a distance, pushing him back. He tells the watching crowd to fall back as these monsters are really dangerous, and just then, one snags him by the leg. Before he can do anything, that tongue is cut through, and he falls heavily to the ground. Before he can get up, someone steps over him. It's the gangster Ryumon, and he's double-wielding the pistols he used to shoot through the tongues. He urges his men to pile into the monsters the pro-hero couldn't handle. Crescent Eyebroll gets up and offers to coordinate to defeat the monsters, only for Ryumon to rudely tell him to get lost: his purpose had been to lose publicly, and now they have the footage they need.

The world is seeing pro-heroes fail in real time.

Wild Emperor's team is making short work of their monsters and his team refuses to take a break as they're so pumped from how effortless their suits are. Isamu can't get out of his head how over-effective the suits are: they're integrated with their wearer's nervous system, seamlessly augmenting their intention through artificial muscles. He's seen similar designs in Dr Bofoi's laboratory, and that makes him very uneasy. Is the old man supplying both sides? He decides to take his suit off.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts... deep misgivings for the young genius.

Not all leaders are having a good time. Zaedats brags about his customised battle suit and starts a live feed to his employees to show them how it's done, only to get turned into a human meatball by the aptly-named Meatball Masher. Infelsinave also comes to grief at the hands (claws?) of some monster. As his followers cry out for him to come back to life, apparently, his reincarnation abilities don't work terribly well. Or at all.

Someone who's just doing his job is Metal Bat. Suit or no suit, give him a bat and a monster to smack with it, and he'll do just that. He's not thinking of ramifications. Which is as good a place as any to end this summary. Shall we do some meta?

I don't do clever stuff. Just give me a bat and point me to the nearest monster, thank you.

No, I didn't forget A. I omitted talking about the creep. There's a difference.

Meta: ...is owning a pudding factory cheating?

Sweet indeed are the uses of the adversity of your enemy

The Neo Heroes have truly debuted. They've been saturating online searches for weeks, buying ad space wherever they can, planting stories in the media, and looking to play up the shortcomings of the Hero Association while promising heaven to any prospective recruits. This is where the rubber meets the road, and, boy are they rolling! If Amai Mask's implosion was an opportunity for them to lobby for the power to operate with the same freedoms as the Hero Association, this festival of monsters has been a bonanza for them. In several media formats -- found footage, webcasts, TV reportage -- they've appeared shortly after monsters have and shown themselves to be well-organised, flashy, and very competent. Even Webigaza, who is weeping inside at having lost her chance to challenge Sweet Mask head-to-head, has pulled together and put on a show. In contrast, most of the pro-heroes on site have appeared shabby, isolated, and ill-prepared.

As Ryumon gloats, being seen to succeed where pro-heroes have failed has been the point of this exercise. Since the person he says this to is only a lone pro-hero, the secret of what's really happening is safe from early discovery. It just looks like an unfortunate series of events.

Yes, this is a set up. But who are you going to tell and who'd do anything useful about it? No one, that's who.

Inexcusable

You know, this is *not* the first time the world has seen a coordinated attack by monsters. The Monster Association did just that a few weeks ago at the most. And the Hero Association, far from learning from the experience, has so far resisted making changes to how it organises and deploys its heroes, going so far as to ignore the findings and recommendations made by Child Emperor. Worse, with their giant HQ, they've been actively pulling in A- and S-Class heroes to serve as unpaid bodyguards (cast your minds back to chapter 172), meaning that most cities only have C- and B-Class heroes able to patrol. They say never attribute to malfeasance what can be explained by incompetence. There's certainly plenty of complacency and incompetence to go round... HOWEVER, making operational changes is McCoy's responsibility. And there's a bit of a conflict of interest here, to put it politely. We've seen that he's been selling monsters on the side for personal profit and working with Ryumon to organise hero gambling in which monsters are planted to play odds with heroes and bring the HA's name into disrepute. Beyond that, we've also sat in on enough meetings to see that McCoy has gained an outsized voice in being able to stifle any initiatives he doesn't like.

The Hero Association may not be the most nimble of organisations, and it came to life when monster attacks were relatively rare. It was always going to struggle to understand and change its modus operandi in the face of a rapidly-worsening monster situation. But it's being actively sabotaged from within as well -- and almost nobody knows it yet.

The HA is no brain trust, but with a guy like this actively sabotaging efforts to improve, they're in real trouble.

There is a real question of whether Sekingar will be able to return in time to expose and oust McCoy before the HA crumbles.

Designs matter

I was looking at Zaedats's battle suit and thinking that it reminded me strongly of something. Then it came to me: Armored Gorilla! That combination of bulky, stiff plates and flexible cabling is very similar.

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle...

Sabotage aside, if you asked Dr. Kuseno about such a design, he'd tell you for free that this combination is a bad idea for fighting monsters. It's quite appropriate that chapter 224 has Genos showing off his newest body on the cover: when you look back through earlier iterations of his bodies, the plates-and-cabling design was one he used to sport and found through very bitter experience that it just Did. Not. Work. Successive bodies have had more armour, and since Gouketsu crushed the last one with external cabling, Genos's bodies have been exclusively armoured. (1) For a guy who lives 24/7 in armour and won't carry extra parts around with him (remember, he tried with a suitcase but just didn't take to it), the need to be as light and flexible as possible without compromising power and safety is a permanent issue and chapter by chapter, we see that Murata has represented the struggle of development very well. [Important aside for any fan artists thinking of fretting about the way they draw Genos: Murata is a crazy-good draughtsman with a keen interest in machines who is paid to sell three million copies of OPM manga a year(2); it's his business to worry about these things. Yours is to just have fun!]

Genos's earliest body that we have a good view of (left) vs. the current iteration (right). The product of multiple generations of experimentation and ruthless field-testing. The value of these experiences is something no one else working with machines has in their world.

Even without the question of sabotage, without the benefit of brutal field testing, anyone designing a battle suit to go toe-to-toe with strong monsters was dicing with danger. Not that people like Zaedats would have listened: I remember with glee that the webcomic equivalent of this chapter came out in 2020, three years before the OceanGate Titan imploded IRL because an arrogant billionaire just had to go adventuring. OPM may be fantastical, but its read on human nature is pretty solid.

When untested designs + overconfidence meet real opposition, the result is messy.

Core matters just as much

Touching on the case of Genos again, one of the big things he had to learn -- and this learning process is very painstakingly detailed in the manga -- was that parts were not enough. If he wanted to become strong, if he wanted to grow, he had to learn what to pay attention to, how to fight beyond just spamming blows, how to dig deep and find the determination to keep going when things go wrong, and how to face an enemy superior to oneself in at least one aspect and find a way to win anyway. Genos acknowledging the truth of what Dr Kuseno told him about needing to stop coming back crying for upgrades every time he got frustrated in a fight was a real inflection point in the character's growth:

Accepting the truth is the foundation on which greatness is built. It sucks, though.

Great Philosopher and Raiden both put their finger on what's operationally troubling about the body suits. The first, most of the wearers are inexperienced fighters. On their bodies, yes, they're very strong and can pack a punch, but there's so much more to fighting successfully than that that it's worrying to think of what they can do if they face a monster that's not immediately able to be put down. The second, and the thing that worries Raiden further, is that with the immediate boost in strength and ability, they might not see the need to develop true skill and strength.

Normally, I'd call that narrow-mindedness but the total lack of training and overconfidence of most of the Neo Hero recruits is real cause for concern.

Apart from the suits, it's been interesting to see how the calibre of Neo Leaders really comes out. Those who are accustomed to leading, like Raiden, Axel, and Ryumon, have no problem commanding coherent action from their troops. Those who are more egoistic, like Webigaza, Infelsinave, and Zaedats, have followers who mostly watch rather than act alongside them. And the odious A hasn't been given anyone. Good, no one deserves such a punishment.

Coincidence? Only if you want to buy a bridge in Brooklyn

Sure, there's a good chance that Zaedats was just unlucky. However, looking at Infelsinave's body, all I can think is that looks like a hit job. Monsters are never that neat. How many hundreds (literally hundreds -- I've counted) of monsters have we seen? Ever seen one that just makes one neat hole center-of-mass and leaves? Without so much as glancing at anyone else? No, that doesn't sound like a monster at all. You don't need to be a seer to suspect that public perception isn't the only thing that's being manipulated here.

A most un-monsterlike monstering. Hmm...

Causes? Smells Cultish To Me

Something else that made me go 'hmmm' was Axel mentioning a 'great cause'. Now, it's true that a hero needs something to believe in to act. However, to hear Axel talking about a 'great cause' speaks to more than mere do-gooding and to a bigger vision that the Neo Hero Organization wants to see enacted.

It's interesting that the Hero Association doesn't bind its heroes to any particular belief: as long as they do the right thing, why they do it, and what they do it for is up to them. There's no central mission binding them all together into a coherent whole. Which is a good thing, in that it enables mavericks like Saitama, Okama Itachi, and many other heroes who'd be stifled by a system, to find their niche and thrive. And is also a bad thing in that it means that there's no long-term unity and cooperation. Yes, heroes come together in times of crisis but there's none of that long-range thinking and action that can really make a big difference -- there's a reason Amai Mask still wanted to see the S-Class disbanded (3).

If we have a 'cause', then we'll have graduations in commitment and 'outsideness'. What do we know so far, then? People who are committed to a Neo Hero ideology, whatever it turns out to be, are Blue, who founded it, and Axel. People who are definitely outsiders are the recently-arrived pro-heroes and Suiryu. Everyone else is kinda in the middle, and we'll see who they are with time.

No, no, don't! Argh, he can't hear us!

Strained but not Broken

One of the big differences between the webcomic and the manga is that many major relationships in the manga are merely very strained rather than completely broken. Fubuki and Tatsumaki had little to do with each other because the latter was just too toxic while they had a challenging relationship in the manga that was worth fighting for. Likewise, in the manga, Isamu may no longer be Bofoi's assistant, but we've seen him remonstrating with him to join the then-impending MA raid. And while the old man didn't come to the shooting match, he did come through in a way that only he could, saving the heroes from dying of radiation poisoning and remediating the nuclear fallout. So Isamu has a reason to give Bofoi the benefit of the doubt in a way his webcomic equivalent just didn't.

For him, this is one more piece of the puzzle of the Neo-Heroes that he and Sekingar set out to solve. He's in an interesting pickle: he's helping Sekingar investigate the Neo Heroes with the aim of finding out whether they're a threat or treasure and in bringing down McCoy, but so far, everything he's found is worrying and Webigaza appears to be onto him. She could blow his cover whenever. And now, he's got to worry about whether Bofoi is also in on this, *but*, crucially, he isn't immediately jumping to the conclusion that it must be because Bofoi wants to rule the world and is open to the idea that there may be another reason for the old scientist's involvement. Excellent use of intelligence, Isamu!

Good question -- suspicious but not making closed-off assumptions.

I know that I'm steaming to see when the manga-specific plot points break out, but it's all actually building slowly but nicely.

PS

(1) Yes, if you ask, I'll happily make an entire post about that.

(2) I hear someone ask, 'What do you mean three million copies? I thought they only sold a fifth of that, and sales were going down issue by issue?' Listen, the sales figures you see are nonsense -- they represent physical issues sold and those are quite literally the tip of the iceberg. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OnePunchFans/comments/1n9hhri/so_how_well_does_onepunch_man_sell/

(3) Yes, that might seem surprising. Ask me about it, and I will happily write a meta just about that. It's very interesting to me.

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