I definitely find myself suffering from a bit of character fatigue with One Punch Man this season.  It’s a constant parade of new – and only-slightly less than new – characters on both the hero and monster (and neither, for that matter) side.  Because ONE designs such outlandish characters they are all distinct, but at some point with so many absurd figures running around and fighting each other their very absurdity seems to make them all blend together into one wriggling mass of silliness.  Fighting is obviously at the heart of One Punch Man, but at times it’s starting to resemble a fighting game rather than a story.

Basically that story is playing out on two fronts at the moment.  We have the monsters uprising, which seems to have some sort of planning and organization behind it but no direct connection to what Garou is doing.  And we have the “Super Fight” martial arts tournament, where Saitama (as Charanko) eventually does do a bit of fighting but not much (about a second of screen time’s worth).  Within each of these settings a whole slew of combatants enter the fray (there are 18 of them in the tournament alone, none of whom I recall seeing before last week).

As for Garou, he proves to be more than a match for Metal Bat – though to be fair, Bat has already been softened up pretty good by the time Garou shows up.  All Bat really wants to do is go help out with Centichoro but Garou is sufficiently self-absorbed that this is of no consequence to him.  When Bat’s little sister shows up, we once more see that there are limited in place with Garou – he’s not going to hurt children, seemingly.  And for that matter we haven’t seen him attack any civilians that I can recall, just heroes.  He gets an approach from the “Monsters Association”, whose attention he’s drawn – but he professes nothing but contempt at the idea of joining them.

What about Saitama?  Well, it seems prohibitively unlikely that anyone at Super Fight can offer him even token resistance, though if anyone can it’s probably Suiryu (Matsukaze Masaya).  I’m curious to see where this martial arts angle is headed, because if none of these men (the lone woman is knocked out in the first bout) can give Saitama any problem, what message are we to take away from that?  If Saitama is so strong that he can effortlessly defeat anyone he faces, does that mean that martial arts is a waste of time?  And how, exactly, is Saitama going to learn anything about martial arts if he ends every bout with one offhand slap that’s not connected with a martial art in the first place?

I’m going to assume there’s some sort of twist of surprise coming here, because otherwise the whole Super Fight subplot is basically a narrative dead-end.  Without any question Saitama does respect Bang, and Bang is deeply connected to martial arts – we primarily see him on the hunt for Garou with his aniki, but perhaps he’ll become involved in the tournament in some way.  At this point that still seems to hold more potential than the monsters uprising, which is basically a bunch of kaijuu I don’t really care about beating up on a bunch of heroes I don’t really care about until the heroes I do sort of care about decide to show up…