OPM Manga Update 217: New Home
Summary
So yup, Saitama’s back to his new home with a talking weird monkey and a six eyed dog in tow. He’s blissfully oblivious to the fact that these are dangerous monsters that have just fallen on hard times and he causes a lot of damage to Metal Knight’s prized robot defences, just as they were being talked up as superior to heroes. He gets in a spot of bother but is bailed out by King claiming to have seen the robots randomly blow up.
As Forte and co goggle at Saitama talking to King, we get Saitama’s new position.
This is probably the last tame chapter we’ll get for a while, heh heh.
Meta: Man vs. Machine... Or Pride Goes Before A Fall
Metal Knight isn’t as clever as he thinks he is.
Cast your mind way back to Metal Knight reconstructing the Hero Association. From beginning to end, he had it entirely designed, material procured by, and built by robots.
He did it in seven days, three days ahead of his own deadline.
Now, we’re beginning to see the results of the excess speed. The road Saitama is on is just a poured-on strip of asphalt. Not only poured on, but the surface was barely graded so you can see the texture of the substrate. The craters he left unfilled and unsecured might serve as a chilling warning to the HA executives but they’re also serious focal points for erosion and subsidence in the near future.
More seriously, his anti-monster defences really suck. Drive Knight might have imputed malice to Metal Knight when he tried to persuade Sekingar to view Bofoi as an enemy but all malice aside, there are some serious problems. Such as the doors: so overconfident is Bofoi in his robots’ ability to stop anything that he’s only designed one set of doors... and they fail *open* rather than *closed*. People have been building castles and fortifications for millenia -- the idea of a portcullis, i.e. a door that falls shut by default and needs effort to raise is standard. As is having more than one door so that if something happens to the guards, the place isn’t left open. No, no, no, Bofoi’s far too smart for any of that.
Apparently too, there isn’t a second line of monster defences, if the monster that smuggled itself into HQ in the body of a worker is anything to judge by. Now that Black Sperm and Overgrown Rover have been let in, there doesn’t seem to be a way to find them. Pure hubris -- and Metal Knight can’t say that he wasn’t warned.
Why am I going on about this when there’s cute, shrunken-down monsters, outraged heroes, and the ever-otherworldly Saitama to talk about? Two reasons. The less important reason is that others have covered it elsewhere. I’ve already talked about the way the support heroes appear to have been screwed over here and the differences between the manga and webcomic despite the superficial similarity here.
The more important one is that with monster attacks becoming both more common and more serious, something IS going to have to give. In all seriousness, hoping that a small group of well-meaning, terminally-brave people is going to be able to guarantee the safety of the civilized world is beginning to look somewhere between naive and delusional. So far we haven’t seen public criticism of the Hero Association but that’s sure to come soon. Something is going to have to be done to supplement and complement the pro-heroes’ efforts if it isn’t all to be for naught: no matter how strong, no one can be everywhere at once.
Metal Knight’s idea of mechanising the problem away is not the best one at present -- were a person at the gates in control of the robots, this debacle would never have happened as they’d have been able to use their judgement to sort out the issue with the monsters there and then -- but it’s going to become an increasingly compelling one.
Now I know what this all has been reminding me of: a house of cards. Complete with the requisite chaotic element that’ll send it all crashing down.
Been feeling gentle disquiet? Don’t worry, things will be on fire soon enough!