Potato is yum

This was supposed to be the day where I talk about One Punch Man S3. But I can’t write it. I don’t want to beat a corpse so I’ll just talk about my thoughts on how it’s become like this.

My opinion is that One Punch Man has fallen into the trap of “Good Enough” just like many other adaptations. It’s pretty well established that a new story must have the best first impression possible to get a consumer base to consume it. In the case of One Punch Man, this first impression was one of the best examples of action animation with incredibly fluid animations, incredible voice acting, and a story that quickly pulled viewers into the world. After the hardest work of acquiring an audience what then?

This has actually been a big problem for a lot of major Animes such as My Hero Academia, One Piece, and many others. They build up a large audience but have to continue moving somewhere to keep the money ball rolling. At the end of the day, views are needed to pay the bills and bills will forever haunt us creators. So I’ve given examples of One Piece and My Hero Academia both of which have maintained relevance despite running for so long. What’s the difference between these two examples and One Punch Man?

I think the difference is the acceptance of “Good Enough” for aspects that are vital to the anime’s identity. For My Hero Academia, the writers choose to pivot the story to a slower pace causing them to lose some consumers. However, this choice of pivoting the story was made to maintain the quality of the story and animation for the action that is now closing the major arcs of the story. It’s true that retiring All Might made the series drop dramatically in views but knowing how to allocate their resources made it possible to cater to people following the story and to people following the spectacle.

If you go on youtube you can probably find a bunch of videos of just clips from action anime where the main character powers up or some big letters talking about some amazing fight scene. I often go back to season 1 of One Punch Man to rewatch the fitness test or go back to My Hero Academia to watch Deku punch the crap out of that big ass robot. But when I go back to watch these clips it’s really not for the story but for the spectacle. When studying One Punch Man season 1, we can see how the mix of story and spectacle are refined in the starting episodes as each episode is basically a story on it’s own. The only real story behind One Punch Man is the story behind Saitama losing his humanity. While this story is incredibly interesting, it is definitely not the reason why I first watched the show. I watched it because I saw a clip of a bald naked guy squishing a mosquito.

From looking back at season one, there is a clear emphasis on the animation of the spectacle while the other parts have some fairly obvious cut corners. However, the viewer doesn’t really care about those cut corners because in the overall story, those cut corners don’t matter. To cite an example, the underground laboratory they fight in pretty much repeats every few seconds but nobody would notice it because it’s not a detail that stands out. In season 3, much of the spectacle got reduced so much it would be almost impossible to call it animation. From looking at season 2, this is clearly because the publisher thought that this would be “Good Enough”. I think all creators can take something from this because we don’t have infinite time and resources.

Try to figure out what matters and make sure it’s better than “Good Enough”.