A parody that doesn’t have mastery of the target genre’s original tropes is just toothless. On one hand, it’s a parody of shonen manga, which means that has to poke fun at the tropes of, say, Dragon Ball Z - and in order to be an effective parody, it not only needs to be funny, it also needs to have fight scenes that are cool on their own merit. Think about it this way: One Punch Man has to balance a few different tones. It’s Discount Day At The Ass-Whupping Market Rather than (solely) pitting Saitama against a bunch of monsters, the series pits him against enemies he can’t defeat with his fists: the bureaucracy of the Byzantine Hero Association - which he joins more or less on a whim - and the fickle court of public opinion. Instead, at its best, One Punch Man functions as a character study, exploring the ways that Saitama feels painfully, dreadfully bored.
In theory, there should be no dramatic tension here at all - monsters show up, Saitama defeats them, and that’s the end of that. But he’s also powerful enough that every enemy from intergalactic warlords to scientifically engineered giants to literal meteors fall before him with just one punch. The premise of the whole series is, essentially, one big joke: What if the protagonist of a shonen manga was so strong that he could defeat any enemy with one punch, rendering all conflict meaningless? Saitama, appears to be - and is - a bald, stupid guy in a yellow suit that looks like a condom. Pulling off a second season of One Punch Man was always going to be difficult. Leaving Tomorrow’s Problems To Tomorrow’s You The Importance of “I Love You”: Queerness in Evangelion.So let’s ignore the visuals for a moment, and think more broadly about what might have been. Instead, the problems with the show’s second season have mostly served to highlight how great season one really is, and to show some of the seams of what the series can and should do. Still, the characters of One Punch Man are a lot of fun, and ONE’s world-building continues to be engrossing. Other publications have covered the reasons for the decline in quality - changes in personnel, the shift in animation studios from Madhouse to JC Staff, the way protagonist Saitama has, of necessity, moved to the sidelines of the show, etc. The reviews were, to put it mildly, mixed. The long-awaited second run of One Punch Man, based on artist ONE’s acclaimed webcomic, premiered in April and wrapped at the beginning of July.
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