#difficult questions

The Rod of Discipline

I have been dying for backstory for Bang and Garou forever, and here we are!  Normally, I do get annoyed when backstory is interspersed with a current fight, but in this instance, it adds a much-needed context to everything that is happening.

We find out mostly through Bomb, who is watching the showdown between erstwhile master and disciple closely.  As the elder of the pair,  Bomb has seen it as his role to correct the dissolute life his talented younger brother once led.   The cruel, selfish, hard-drinking, hard-fighting and sluttish life that Bang had once led would be difficult for anyone to countenance and with Bang hurting people on a whim,  Bomb decided that he had to step in.

“You haven’t even overcome yourself.” That is for me the pivotal line here.

Overcoming oneself seems to be the theme here.  It’s definitely been the big thing for Bang, first feeling ashamed that he had tried to kill his own brother while the latter had shown restraint even as he beat him down.  

Bang disciplined himself, set aside his offensive style to develop an incredible defensive style, opened a school and even became a hero more recently.   We see a series of snapshots as Bomb watches Bang’s development approvingly.  He’s been more ambivalent of Bang’s decision to become a hero,  but you can’t fault Bomb for still keeping an eye and supportive hand on his brother, come what may.

It's good to see that while his brother succeeded in admonishing him for his selfish and anti social life, Bang still has to learn to truly give of himself to others. Turning over a new leaf is a nice idiom, but truly changing oneself is a long-term project.  I’ve written before about Bang’s failings as a master. Bang acknowledging his failings as a master in text is so important. It's not just Garou: losing nearly all his students is an outcome of his neglecting them. 

Even in his ninth decade of life, there’s something wholesome and humbling about seeing Bang realise that he still has things to learn and room to grow.   He wants to get through to Garou the way Bomb got through to him.   That’s why he’s thrown away chance after chance to land a killing blow, getting hit and hit again as he faces off against Garou and hopes to reach him.

We leave off as something seems to be happening to Garou.  He’s still and his mask is cracking.  Bang is watching expectantly and...

...ah, but we’re going to have to wait and see what happens as we go to see what else is going on.

To the Bitter End

Over on the other side of the battlefield, something else is going crack and another disciple is questioning his convictions. Under the relentless assault of billions of monsters, Genos’s legs have finally given way and he goes crashing to the ground.   But he doesn’t think of his predicament first: Tatsumaki is also down for the count and she’s in a worse state than he is in.   He rockets over, slams the Black Sperms holding Tatsumaki into paste and starts to drag Tatsumaki away.

Unfortunately, her dress is a heck of a lot stretchier than it looks, making dragging her hard work.  Black Sperm isn’t helping, taunting him with the number of ‘him’ left over ( about 4.5 billion).  It’s hopeless.  There isn’t a way to turn this situation around.

As though to echo Genos’s gloomy thoughts, Tatsumaki briefly regains consciousness to ask him to run away already.

Tatsumaki, going back to Demon Cyborg rather than Genos is on one level emotional separation, but it’s more than that. By calling him by his hero name, she's also absolving him of any guilt in abandoning her.  Heroes hate to leave someone behind and are big on berating themselves that there should have been something they could have done.  By telling him there's nothing he could have done, she's telling him it's okay to leave.

And in answer, he laid on top of her to shield her from the monster as long as possible.

Not that Black Sperm is making it easy.  Genos has propped himself up as much as possible so as to provide a buffer between himself and Tatsumaki and the monster is pile-driving his head and what’s left of his arms into the ground, but it’s worse than that. The last page is filled with blood splatter and that blood is Genos’s. It’s not easy to make a full-bodied cyborg bleed (but we saw such an event early on, when Genos ripped Armored Gorilla’s limbs off and thrashed the poor creature so soundly blood poured out of its nose), but you can... and with so little body, Genos doesn’t have much blood to spare. This isn’t just broken parts to be fixed overnight.  He really is getting beaten to death here.

Looking at this, I’m thinking just how true to his name, Genocide, he is.  You see, the kanji with which his name is written means ‘great slaughter’ but it also means ‘to fight fiercely until the end’.  Even in the terrible state he is in, he still has the power to slaughter every last monster on site by self-detonating and erasing all life in a five kilometer radius.  But he’s turned away from that to continue to fight for the life of one lousy human being with whom he’s never gotten along, even at the price of a slow and painful death.  Even if it turns out to be for nothing. 

If that’s not strength, I don’t know what that is.   A lot of the words may be carried over from the webcomic, but they hit completely differently. It’s sad to see Genos thinking himself weak because he can’t do what Saitama does and stretch out a lazy arm to eliminate even the toughest enemies, but he’s shown us so graphically how much more to strength there is than inexhaustible physical prowess.

Meta: The More Similar, The More Important the Differences

It’s easy to see the physical similarities between Garou and Bang and easy to note how both of them are drowning in talent   But I can’t help but be struck by how different their rationales are in coming off the rails.  There is no way Garou would not have been appalled by Young Bang.  Garou is motivated by his struggling to think of how to make a positive, noticeable impact on the world, not just his own personal gratification. 

Garou does not drink, smoke, take drugs, chase after women (or men).  He may be getting in a lot of fights, but they’re not purely for fun.  He’s a good person wrestling with his place in the world.  On the other hand, Bang has been a bad person who is wrestling with his desire to become a better person in this world. 

I’m thinking... just as we know that Bang’s joining the Hero Association wasn’t mainly intended as a message to Bomb (who saw it as his little brother saying ‘I’ve really changed), I’m sure Bang is seeing Garou as being just like him in the reason he’s acting out, which isn’t right either.

I’m not having a good feeling about this as I look at the brothers’ hopeful faces.

Coda: ONE is evil, part 66

I've been saying that this arc, ONE has been going out of his way to break heroes in a way they find most painful to them, and he’s really brought the savage. Melting off Darkshine’s skin.  Killing Atomic’s friends and mentors in front of him in the nastiest way possible. I’m sure that Atomic Samurai is going to be triggered every time he even hears someone slurping up a thick milkshake.   A guy like Genos, who likes a six-foot separation distance between himself and 99.9999999% of the world, ONE loves inflicting prolonged, sadistic, dignity-attacking manglings on him. 

This time, ONE has outdone himself, by presenting Genos with situations where putting himself in compromising positions is the only heroic course of action.  Way up too close to Drive Knight, who compounded the indignity by discarding him shamelessly as soon as he got what he wanted from him.  I can see ONE now, steepling his fingers.  'Oh, you want to protect Tatsumaki at all costs, eh?  Admirable, admirable, now climb on top of her. Yeah, you heard right. Chop-chop, those little monsters aren't going to wait around forever.  She won’t mind -- she’s passed out.  Oh, you mind? Look on the bright side, once they beat you to death, you're not going to have to remember this. Then again, given how tough you are, that may take a while...'