Overpowered

Whitney:          With all his power, why does he even need martial arts?

Aaron:              I don’t understand the question.

Studio C, ‘The Birth of Superman’ (2018)

 

Hearty thanks to TheUnseriousguy at newgrounds.com for this stunning bit of One Punch Man fanart. (Keep reading; we'll get there.)

So here’s a fun game to play over dinner or on long journeys with fellow geek-culture enthusiasts. First, everybody picks a different superhero. Then the players take it in turns to describe perilous situations or demanding tasks which might plausibly face your average superhuman vigilante. The aim of the game is to come up with a compelling and creative way for your chosen character to escape the situation or perform the task using his or her canonical powers. It’s good fun, especially since every player has to come up with a different approach to the challenge according to the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant hero. When I play this with my siblings, we impose only one specified restriction: nobody’s allowed to pick Superman. Superman’s powers are way too overcharged compared to other heroes: super strength, super speed, super senses, flight, X-ray vision, heat vision, invulnerability, you name it.¹ Superman can escape any perilous situation and perform any difficult task with ease – unless, that is, the player posing the challenge has the presence of mind to append ‘made of kryptonite’ to the description, in which case Superman can’t do anything and may as well just forfeit his turn. Either way, the thing gets very dull very quickly.

I tell you what, though, Superman’s not the only crazily overpowered superhero in the world of fiction. I was recently introduced, for example, to the thoroughly ludicrous adventures of a character known as One Punch Man, through his eponymous anime.² I’ve not seen very many episodes, but those I have seen basically seem to consist of the mightiest heroes the world has to offer exhausting themselves to the point of utter collapse, or nearly, in their efforts to defeat whatever the latest prodigiously powerful threat to civilian lives is, only for One Punch Man to show up at the eleventh hour and utterly destroy the evil at hand by throwing a single punch. That’s why he’s called One Punch Man, you see: just one punch from him and that’s the end of the story for his opponent. Everybody else is striving and scheming and working terribly hard for every inch gained towards victory, but One Punch Man can bring affairs to a decisive conclusion with just one blow. He doesn’t even have to try.

Perhaps the most ludicrous thing about One Punch Man, though, is how stupendously successful he is. The anime is based on a Japanese webcomic self-published by its author on a site called Nitosha. Apparently, the bar for a successful comic on this site is the receipt of about thirty comments per chapter, but by the time it reached its thirtieth instalment, One Punch Man was getting nearly a thousand comments per chapter. The ensuing print manga has sold thirteen million copies, with its first issue topping the New York Times list of manga bestsellers two weeks in a row. As for the anime, its second series is due out this year and its first has been dubbed into a number of other languages.³ And all right, that’s not the most unbelievably dizzying height of success you’ve ever seen a piece of fiction attain to, but I hasten to stress – all this for a story about a guy whose entire thing is that he can defeat literally any opponent by just punching him or her really hard. It’s not exactly what you’d call an intricately woven premise. What is it about One Punch Man, then, that has so captured people’s imagination?

Well, here’s what I think: I think we love the idea of a character who doesn’t have to try at all in order to win at everything. I think we love the idea of someone who can casually waltz in and save the day, guaranteed, with a single stroke of his hand. Life in the real world is hard; you struggle and struggle and sometimes even then you don’t get what you worked so hard for. Like the secondary characters of the One Punch Man universe, we exhaust ourselves over every inch of progress towards our goals; of course, then, the idea that it might be possible for someone to breeze in and overcome every obstacle with an absolute minimum of effort appeals to us.

So yes, as strange as it may seem, I am indeed arguing that one can infer, from the popularity of this delightfully daft comic about a guy who punches stuff, some tiny corner of the human longing for God.

“Is anything too hard for the LORD?” So he asked of Sarah, when she laughed at the notion that she would bear a child within the coming year, as he’d just said she would.⁴ I mean, sure, she’d been incapable of conceiving her entire life, and was now post-menopausal, but more to the point, guys, is anything too hard for the LORD? The fact that everybody else has been unable to defeat the monster doesn’t mean One Punch Man can’t floor it with a single blow; the fact that all the worldly factors that can be measured seem stacked against something happening doesn’t mean God can’t bring it about merely by saying that it will be so. We’re dealing with a totally different level of being here, a totally different level of power to the one that even the mightiest humans the world has to offer operate on. And the extent to which God’s powers outstrip everybody else’s puts One Punch Man and Superman and everyone else to shame: trying to play the superhero scenario game with God as your chosen character would be a very dull business indeed. Because nothing – no situation and no task that could ever be conceived – is too hard for him.

Nothing is too hard for the LORD: do we believe this, adelphoi? Do we understand that our longing for someone to be able to just show up and straight away, effortlessly, overcome every obstacle, defeat every evil, right every wrong, is satisfied in our almighty God? Do we understand that even if every human effort we’ve been able to chuck at achieving something has yielded nothing but exhaustion to the point of collapse, our heavenly Father doesn’t even have to try to make said something happen, if it is his will that it should?

Are we expectant that we’ll see the humanly impossible come to pass? Or do we laugh? Do we suppose that because we couldn’t achieve it, neither can he? If so, let’s repent of that, and instead turn and praise God that nothing is too hard for him – not even raising dead spirits to life and making sinners righteous. After all, if that’s not humanly impossible, I really don’t know what is.

Footnotes

¹ As hilariously detailed in the delightful sketch from which I took my opening quotation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMf3dvNzXbU.

² You can get it on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80117291.

³ Thanks to Wikipedia for compiling so much relevant information on one heavily referenced page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Punch_Man#cite_note-tokyo-reimei-note.com-18.

⁴ Genesis 18 for that one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+18&version=ESVUK.