Comment by bisekrankas
14 hours ago
I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially.
Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything.
By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
This is a popular opinion and I think it speaks to a certain truth (bravery isn't not feeling fear, its doing the thing despite the fear, etc) but I think it misses something important.
Superman may not be physically injured if he fails to catch the crashing plane, but he's sure going go be emotionally hurt if someone he's trying to save dies.
Saitama is a bit of a subversion of superman. Superman could do literally anything and instead chooses to save lives. Saitama is basically bored and saves lives sort of by accident.
It's hard to write good superman stories because there's only so many times you can have lois lane tied to some railroad tracks or kryptonite show up again, but the good stories have superman struggling with moral choices and unknown consequences.
Now that I type this out, it seems like most superman movies are pretty constrained by their budget from being able to focus on smaller scale stuff. Basically, if you're making a superman movie, you've gotta have skyscrapers falling over at somepoint.
Anyways, in conclusion: everyone should watch Superman: The Animated Series (and related spinoffs). It's just has a lot of quite good superman stories.
These super heroes have very different tones depending on the author, but spider-man usually constantly has to balance his anonymous personal life with his super heroism. In the Raimi trilogy specially, he gets screwed over a lot.
When I was a kid reading Marvel comics, Spiderman seemed like a bad and relatively uninteresting super hero. His problems were trivial personal issues and he rarely left NYC, fighting local crime or villains like Green Goblin who were just broken humans. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four were in regular contact with government institutions, went into space, and fought interstellar aliens. They just seemed better and more important. Not to mention the Avengers.
As an adult, while Marvel isn't my favorite thing anymore, I find Spiderman to their most interesting superhero.
Same with Naruto. Naruto and Sasuke are both essentially nepo babies inheriting these amazing powers and breaking barriers on day one. They fall down, but get up like its a scratch.
Meanwhile, Sakura, born of no remarkable parentage and easily sidelined plays an initial supporting role to these two egomaniacs.
But, she uses what little power she has and finesses it to medical precision.
She still fails, but I care about her battles a lot.
It's really sad that Kishimoto so terrible at writing female characters. I'm not being a hater when I say this, he has even complained about this himself!
In terms of character concepts he's always really great - Naruto is one of the few series I read almost from the start, all the way to the finish. At the beginning of the series the concept for all male and female characters started out really interesting. But the female characters barely got any development compared to the male ones, and it got worse as the series went on. Partially because it ended up focusing more and more on Naruto and Sasuke, partially because the majority of the female character development was reduced to how they relate to the male characters.
I don't think it's intentional or that Kishi has any malice towards women or anything - if that was the case I doubt he would have been able to come up with interesting character concepts for women in the first place. But the fact that they're sidelined like that still sucks, especially since the potential is there.
I'm glad that Sakura got to be a bad-ass in a few of the side-stories after the main series ended at least.
I constantly get the impression that it's a yaoi manga dressed up as a shonen, and so from that perspective I can understand why women may not be the focus.
Naruto and Sasuke spend much of the entire series pining after each other, and when they do finally - uhm - "resolve their differences", the show tacks on two female counterparts to marry them off to like an afterthought.
I don't blame Kishimoto for this, I blame the shonen crowd more for shaping their expectations on what is clearly a yaoi story
1 reply →
And then you end up with contrived plot points like kryptonite.
Or the alternative: plot armor so thick people even get brought back from the dead regularly.
In One Punch man the gag is that while everyone is fighting for their lives, Saitama is usually distracted by other priorities that are often trivial (such as getting some bug spray, or saving some money down the local convenience shop as they have a sale on noodles), he also rarely gets the recognised for saving the day once he does bother so show up.
Much of it can be power fantasy. But not always.
Think of Superman. His first sacrifice is the sacrifice of his time, attention, and effort for the good of others. He puts his power into the service of others. There are also times when Superman throws himself into situations when he is indeed in danger (usually involving kryptonite). He eventually sacrifices his own life to defeat Doomsday.
Furthermore, while later depictions of Superman only manage an allegorical approximation of the Christ figure, that that allegorical link is made at all is crucial, because it is suggestive. After all, Christ is the ultimate heroic figure. He is both God and Man, both invincible and vulnerable. Through his humanity, a kenotic act, he endures suffering and death to save mankind - an act that is not necessary, but as Aquinas says, most fitting - but through his divinity, he is not just a powerful being, but the fullness of power. The latter does not prevent the possibility of ultimate heroism. Even in his divinity, he has the fullness and perfection of heroic virtue. Meaning, what is most definitive in heroic virtue is perfection in charity, and God is the pinnacle and perfection of charity.
There's a lot of stuff to nitpick in the christ story but I've always thought they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required.
I suspect it resonated more strongly with people of the era whose primary mode of interacting with gods was via sacrificial propitiations, modern relgions rarely stress that part.
I especially liked when he described his super hard training to an acolyte. "What do you mean 100 pushups, 100 squats, 100 sitdows and run? It is just a standard training, not even that hard!!!"
Super easy training. The whole joke is that it's something anyone can do (unless they're one of those people who've convinced themselves that they can't do a pushup).
I think the joke is that saitama's power has no in-universe explanation. It's not that anyone else could go do it if they tried.
Scene (wit subs): https://youtu.be/tIGeJEehzys?t=134
Not to be rude, but if that's your image of Spider-Man or Superman then you have never read a comic featuring either Spider-Man or Superman.
Good point.
I've been rewatching the Alice In Borderland series (much less well known than Squid Games, but with a similar idea) and I think that's a much better portrayal of heroism as the players of the games have no special abilities at all - just their strength, agility, wits and knowledge. Due to the lethal nature of the games, everything is on the line with every game although there's nearly always a "smart" way to get through the game (maybe not the hearts games though - they're just designed to be cruel).
My particular favourite game in AIB is when the character Chishiya (Cheshire Cat) is playing the King of Diamonds and the winners of that game end up being the characters who either risk or sacrifice everything.