an average analysis

One Punch Man: Curing vaccine man.

One punch man episode 1

It’s not usual for a story to begin with its own description. I could tell you my plan and my layout to make things easier, to predigest the bitter misunderstanding that the grass has for the sun into the sweet milk Sol meant for us, but that would be too cold a thing to get things started. This story begins in media res: an explosion.

Episode 1 (Manga chapter 1)

How sparse and precious life is, on the oldest remnants of a cosmic tantrum. Zoomed between the slow chirps of birds, past the lumbering cumulus, slippery stratus, past the definitionless boundary between something and nothing we call the entire atmosphere, through that rich space of possibility which allows planets to plant and stars to cast their light like seeds, we can still feel the vague warmth of our creation.

Against the opaque curtain of the cosmic microwave background, we can still hear the time when everything talked to everything. Every atom was waltzing and energized, and the light flinging from their dancing changed partners like a good ol’ fashioned Texas two-step. We cringe at the surface of an eternal argument that decided

We need space.

What followed is an extended period of clinging and claiming, splitting, halving, grabbing, saving, 
waiting,
playing, 
and breaking.
The same thing.
Over and over again,
mulling it over,
from every angle,
the praying in the heart 
of every star that's spraying.
Each growing, coalescing,
bragging, shining,
compressing, blessing
super-rapid undressing
a few bits of iron for the globes
and one globe for the hemes.
Guess I'll go.
Just an average 
guy
who serves as an average 
hero.

Just an average guy who serves as an average hero.

- Saitama

An average day, with an above average glance at the sky. Gaze long enough into the abyss, and you might get yourself a whole-assed backstory:

The earth is a single living organism…

I am the wrath of Mother Nature incarnate!

-Vaccine Man

Which am I?

A fiery star dipped in the annealing waters of the earth, a stellar sword, Nature’s apostle?

Or your average guy…

Plucked from the earth 
like a carrot in a pumkin patch,
a misfit like Play-Doh
in a pile of Legos,
How could I not be special?
How could I not be
The Being
for which all beings
are mental
playthings...
How could I not be
The Main Character?

Try it, and your Smile Man, man… say Sayonara man…

Sure, you get bigger, your words seem to reach outside the confines of your comic, you take on the weight of the world and gain the true powers of gravity: growing, devouring, indiscriminate derogatory valuing. All gets lower. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

But with all that down-looking,

you forget that your father,

your genetic destiny,

is atomized in the sky,

deci-mating with explosions

in the mind

In other words,

Go fuck yourself.

Pinocchio

didn’t wish on your light.

But what’s left of us? All our sickly bits acid raining on the statue of our life?

just an average guy confused what’s right to left, and what’s left to write.

One punch,

one step,

one letter,

and

what an adventure!

---

ILB

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If you feel like you didn’t learn anything about One Punch Man, sorry. Are we really watching to learn about him though? Or is it because he reminds us of ourselves? In any case, here’s something more understandable.

Vaccine man seems to be so insignificant as the first of the monsters we see Saitama “fight”. The fight is short in a shorter context. The words of vaccine man give us the first taste of the emptiness and inconsequential attitude that affect Saitama. My view was to look at Vaccine Man and Saitama, as Vaccine Man would say, as one organism. Often times in the middle of everyday life in a city that seems almost nameless to us, we are struck with a sudden and inescapable thought of our pointlessness. It is tempting to seek out an all-encompassing cure to everything, a panacea and vaccine, a fountain of youth. There must be something that can save us from meaninglessness, “some compensation for the shit we put up with” says Haruki Murakami. The greater the disease of the soul, the more compensation we seek. Vaccine man was the incarnation of something turned soulless, an apathetic universe which coldly severs its parasites, leaving the whole, ultimately, too small for its parts. After all, vaccine man, and humans are both children of the earth, and both sought the destruction of the other, and by extension, the grief of their Mother. We would do well to remember what made us, at least at its later stages: atoms sharing photons vigorously and charitably. And we’d also do well to remember that of mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism, all are called symbiosis. It will be a thesis for me going forward that although One Punch Man ends things with a single punch, the same punch, the death punch, the reason for doing so, the reason for the “Guess I’ll go” is different. I think Saitama’s search for his authentic will which wakes him up from his everydayness, most notably from grocery store trips and job hunts, is the monster he dreams most to conquer. It is invisible and internal, and it is a story for tomorrow.

p.s.

I didn’t expect the first minute of the series to take me an entire post to write about, but then again, there’s a lot more to the backstory than meets the eye. I’ll write more about the other scenes too. The first episode is a banger.

OPM Japanese:

アルバムメーカー - FC2ホームページ, galaxyheavyblow.web.fc2.com/fc2-imageviewer/?aid=1&iid=2.

Space stuff:

Siegel, Ethan. “When Did the Universe Become Transparent to Light?” Forbes, 10 May 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/10/when-did-the-universe-become-transparent-to-light/?sh=57b6a8191924.