JojiYazoRu

Genos, say *hi* to your fans! 😜

I'd like to have a serious conversation. I want to speak out.

With all due respect to Saitama, the way the Garou fight ended genuinely ruined Saitama for me.

I get that OPM is supposed to be a parody and keep its humor, but doing it right after Genos died? Serious, I was literally crying over his death, and the creators decided it was the perfect moment to add a fart joke. You can't just take a moment where a character's death finally humanizes the protagonist's humanity and turn it into a total circus.

And then Saitama spares Garou just because of Tareo? It makes no sense after everything that happened. The whole time travel thing felt so cheap and pulled out of nowhere just to fix the mess.

Heh, the resolution of the fight between Saitama and Garou split the fanbase in two -- you're far from the only one put off. The Reddit fandom literally split into two subs that exchange members while claiming to hate each other, but that's a psychodrama for another day. You're far from the only one to have been bawling their eyes out at Genos's death -- if you search on the tags 'fandom grief' here, you should still come up with a lot of posts. I personally thought that the story was about to become a complex redemption story as a defeated Garou comes to terms with his actions and tries to live up to the potential of the life he took. As if! ONE doesn't do complex stories; he killed the guy. Eye for an eye, life for life.

I'm at peace with it. Here's how I see it.

Saitama is broken -- and not in the good metaphorical way. He's not really human any longer. He's clinging so hard to Genos's core and to the promise he made Tareo because they're the last bits of what being human and being a hero means to him. Otherwise, he's an impossible being that just farts around and doesn't even need to breathe to live. It's a jarring farce now, but it'll be revisited some day and it won't be a damn bit funny.

The story is over if Genos stays dead. Because Saitama has his answer to the question he posed himself at the beginning of the story, to wit, can his actions actually make the world a better place? The unequivocal answer would be no. It's still maybe now. A very tenuous maybe. For these two reasons,

..To be fair, I can actually agree with you on the time-travel part. You are right that if Genos had stayed dead, the story would have just ended right there, so the reset was a narrative necessity to keep opm going. I can accept that.

But my main issue is the fight itself. It was pure clown show. You mention that by clinging to Tareo's promise and sparing Garou, Saitama was desperately trying to hold onto his identity as a "hero" But in reality, sparing Garou wasn't heroism - it was an act of absolute villainy.

Saitama is not a psychic. At that exact moment, he had no way of knowing he would later turn back time, nor did he have a 100% guarantee that Garou would magically redeem himself. For all Saitama knew, Garou could have just flown away after being spared and started destroying other planets, exactly like Boros did. And we know Saitama thought Boros was an idiot for doing that. By choosing to spare a cosmic monster who had just committed mass radiation murder and destroyed Genos right in front of his eyes, Saitama didn't save his inner "hero" - he risked the entire universe just to satisfy a promise to a dead kid. It’s an egoistic and terrifying level of irresponsibility.

If the creators wanted to show Saitama losing his human boundaries and turning into a detached, god-like entity, they should have committed to that horror. Instead, we got an emotional mess: first he’s furious, then he’s making fart jokes like a cartoon character, and then he suddenly acts like a self-righteous savior. It looks like the writers didn't know what they were doing and shifted tones every two pages.

I'm fine with the story continuing through a reset, but they ruined the character's integrity during the fight just because they were too scared to let the situation stay heavy and serious for even a single arc.

!!! Even if someone tries to argue that this emotional mess means Saitama was losing his mind or experiencing a mental breakdown, the panels and that ridiculous «emotional growth chart» completely contradict it. This is a manga, a visual medium, and we read it specifically to see and feel raw human emotions through the art. If you have to literally draw a mathematical diagram to tell the audience "look, his strength is growing from trauma right now," it means both your writing and your art have completely failed to convey it. A text-only light novel would have handled this with way more dignity and depth

Instead of showing any real heartbreak, the creators gave us pure stupidity. The narrative claims Saitama is going through an unprecedented emotional breakthrough, yet visually, he is just juggling portals and making fart jokes. If he were truly losing his mind from grief, we would see him acting nervous, erratic, or panicked. Instead, midway through the fight, his face becomes completely calm, the black shadow disappears, and his decisions become incredibly sharp and precise.

He handles the battle with cold composure, treating a cosmic threat like any other regular monster. Doing something so mundane, messing around, and dropping toilet humor right after the death of Genos - the only person who accepted him with absolute devotion - doesn’t look like madness. It just looks like chilling indifference and a cheap corporate graph trying to cover up a total clown show

I hear you. The way Saitama went from enraged, to coldly angry, to nearly goofy, to solemn was very weird to witness. He's emotionally incoherent. And no, he didn't have the slightest notion of what Garou could do regarding the time travel.

I think Garou's expression on coming to understand Saitama said it all:

He'd been chasing limitless power at all cost, no? He's staring at Saitama like a guy who has struggled to get to the Gates of Heaven, peeking in, and seeing, not angels of mercy, but six-penised rape demons, all waiting eagerly for him to step over the lintel and be their latest toy. The horror of Garou realising that the prize for throwing off all limits is madness, echoed in his thoughts:

You are totally right: we SHOULD see an angry but grief-stricken Saitama. Maybe numb, but something. If he were sane, that's what should happen. I think Garou stands in for us as he watches the guy with horror. I joke not/joke that Garou taught Saitama time travel as a way of putting a hit out on himself, so he quit with this bullshit before it was too late.

And the graph? Well, it drives powerscalers mad on a regular basis. I think they're trying to make a metaphor do the work of a fact. You can ignore it: Saitama is far too strong to ever be taken down by Garou, and there is no way that Garou will ever be able to catch up. That's the only point it sought to make.

It is weird and more than a bit gross. We do know two things about Saitama though -- when you strip him down of every pretension, he holds true to his sense of heroism and to his love for Genos. I wonder how ONE is going to make it all worth it. I'm watching because he's taken a hell of a liberty, but if anyone can make us come back sometime next decade, to this arc and reread it nodding appreciatively at the set up, ONE can.

And about the fart jokes, they serve another purpose than just wildly innappropriately timed toilet humour. That and the sneeze also serve to showcase us that despite Saitama apparently breathing in space, he's still human and he's breaking his own body's homeostasis by not requiring to breathe or have warmth and that his own body is trying to re-establish that connection to his physiology by sneezing when he's cold and suddenly farting on reaction he had no conscious control over. He's a god in all but name but still constrained by his human body and without, he'd be bereft of intrinsical humanity that is his human form and becomes something entirely different. Sure, humanity is not defined by strictly having human form, far from it, especially in this manga, but it's also integral in many ways. Especially to Saitama who is grounded by his own physiology when he experiences ice cream headaches, has to eat food when he's hungry or has to use the bathroom like normal human beings, despite not being constrained by any rules like magically being able to interact with hyperspace gates and breathe in space. I also get the feeling that while the fart was treated in humorous manner during the ominous future, the implications of such probably won't be in the future.

@theomnicode I understand your points, but I have to respectfully disagree with a few things. First, regarding the toilet humor versus humanity, I can partially agree that the sneeze was meant to show his physiology. The sneeze? Sure, I can accept that. But a fart joke? Come on. There were so many other ways to show he’s still human — he could have scratched an itch, shivered, or coughed. Choosing a literal fart joke while he is standing on a dead moon, surrounded by the corpses of his friends, holding the ripped-out heart of his disciple in his hand... that’s just a jarring choice that ruins the whole emotional weight of the moment.

And about the power-scaling graph if the authors find it easier to draw a literal mathematical chart to show Saitama's emotional state instead of conveying it through the art itself, then what is even the point of making a manga? Manga is supposed to SHOW emotions, not plot them on a grid.

The parallel with Mob from Mob Psycho 100 doesn't really work here either. Yes, Mob bottles up his feelings, but when he snaps, he visually changes form. We can clearly see his raw rage and how painfully hard it is for him to process those emotions. Furthermore, whenever Mob calmed down, he experienced total exhaustion, fainting, and muscle weakness. Even if we assume Saitama, as a demigod, doesn't feel physical fatigue, where is the emotional toll? After his casual chat with Garou, he just mindlessly copied a technique, traveled back in time, punched another Garou, and that was it. There was no emotional aftermath or exhaustion from his grief.

Even if the argument is that Saitama went through a phase of anger/denial and then suddenly hit the acceptance stage mid-battle, it just didn't look like that at all. There was no sign of acceptance, emptiness, or shock in his behavior on Jupiter. It was just his default blank face and casual conversation with a cosmic terrorist.

Plus, if the goal was to show that Saitama was trying to keep his sanity behind a blank face due to shock, why give him that terrifying "black face" of pure rage at the very beginning? Emotional numbness doesn't work that way. You don't go from absolute berserk fury to a comically blank face two pages later just to chat. It just looks like inconsistent writing, not deep grief.

Second, about the "Saitama doesn't kill humans" argument, let's look back at chapter one. Crablante was originally a human who mutated, and he actually showed genuine empathy by sparing Saitama's life because he pitied his dead eyes. Yet, it didn't save him Saitama brutally killed him anyway. Saitama has never cared about whether a monster has "leftover human parts" or "reasons" for being mutated.

There is actually a dark pattern here: both Crablante and Garou showed "humanity" at some point, but that mercy only led to even worse disasters and more people suffering. Crablante's mercy created a broken, emotionally numb god (Saitama) who suffers from existential emptiness. In turn, Saitama’s mercy toward Cosmic Garou (due to an old promise to Tareo) literally caused a nuclear apocalypse that melted the organs of every hero nearby and cost Genos his life. Sparing a monster because of "human sparks" always backfires in this world. Sparing someone who is currently causing a literal mass apocalypse doesn't feel like "preserving humanity" to me - it feels like a terrifying lack of responsibility from a hero.

I'd like to have a serious conversation. I want to speak out.

With all due respect to Saitama, the way the Garou fight ended genuinely ruined Saitama for me.

I get that OPM is supposed to be a parody and keep its humor, but doing it right after Genos died? Serious, I was literally crying over his death, and the creators decided it was the perfect moment to add a fart joke. You can't just take a moment where a character's death finally humanizes the protagonist's humanity and turn it into a total circus.

And then Saitama spares Garou just because of Tareo? It makes no sense after everything that happened. The whole time travel thing felt so cheap and pulled out of nowhere just to fix the mess.

Heh, the resolution of the fight between Saitama and Garou split the fanbase in two -- you're far from the only one put off. The Reddit fandom literally split into two subs that exchange members while claiming to hate each other, but that's a psychodrama for another day. You're far from the only one to have been bawling their eyes out at Genos's death -- if you search on the tags 'fandom grief' here, you should still come up with a lot of posts. I personally thought that the story was about to become a complex redemption story as a defeated Garou comes to terms with his actions and tries to live up to the potential of the life he took. As if! ONE doesn't do complex stories; he killed the guy. Eye for an eye, life for life.

I'm at peace with it. Here's how I see it.

Saitama is broken -- and not in the good metaphorical way. He's not really human any longer. He's clinging so hard to Genos's core and to the promise he made Tareo because they're the last bits of what being human and being a hero means to him. Otherwise, he's an impossible being that just farts around and doesn't even need to breathe to live. It's a jarring farce now, but it'll be revisited some day and it won't be a damn bit funny.

The story is over if Genos stays dead. Because Saitama has his answer to the question he posed himself at the beginning of the story, to wit, can his actions actually make the world a better place? The unequivocal answer would be no. It's still maybe now. A very tenuous maybe. For these two reasons,

..To be fair, I can actually agree with you on the time-travel part. You are right that if Genos had stayed dead, the story would have just ended right there, so the reset was a narrative necessity to keep opm going. I can accept that.

But my main issue is the fight itself. It was pure clown show. You mention that by clinging to Tareo's promise and sparing Garou, Saitama was desperately trying to hold onto his identity as a "hero" But in reality, sparing Garou wasn't heroism - it was an act of absolute villainy.

Saitama is not a psychic. At that exact moment, he had no way of knowing he would later turn back time, nor did he have a 100% guarantee that Garou would magically redeem himself. For all Saitama knew, Garou could have just flown away after being spared and started destroying other planets, exactly like Boros did. And we know Saitama thought Boros was an idiot for doing that. By choosing to spare a cosmic monster who had just committed mass radiation murder and destroyed Genos right in front of his eyes, Saitama didn't save his inner "hero" - he risked the entire universe just to satisfy a promise to a dead kid. It’s an egoistic and terrifying level of irresponsibility.

If the creators wanted to show Saitama losing his human boundaries and turning into a detached, god-like entity, they should have committed to that horror. Instead, we got an emotional mess: first he’s furious, then he’s making fart jokes like a cartoon character, and then he suddenly acts like a self-righteous savior. It looks like the writers didn't know what they were doing and shifted tones every two pages.

I'm fine with the story continuing through a reset, but they ruined the character's integrity during the fight just because they were too scared to let the situation stay heavy and serious for even a single arc.

!!! Even if someone tries to argue that this emotional mess means Saitama was losing his mind or experiencing a mental breakdown, the panels and that ridiculous «emotional growth chart» completely contradict it. This is a manga, a visual medium, and we read it specifically to see and feel raw human emotions through the art. If you have to literally draw a mathematical diagram to tell the audience "look, his strength is growing from trauma right now," it means both your writing and your art have completely failed to convey it. A text-only light novel would have handled this with way more dignity and depth

Instead of showing any real heartbreak, the creators gave us pure stupidity. The narrative claims Saitama is going through an unprecedented emotional breakthrough, yet visually, he is just juggling portals and making fart jokes. If he were truly losing his mind from grief, we would see him acting nervous, erratic, or panicked. Instead, midway through the fight, his face becomes completely calm, the black shadow disappears, and his decisions become incredibly sharp and precise.

He handles the battle with cold composure, treating a cosmic threat like any other regular monster. Doing something so mundane, messing around, and dropping toilet humor right after the death of Genos - the only person who accepted him with absolute devotion - doesn’t look like madness. It just looks like chilling indifference and a cheap corporate graph trying to cover up a total clown show