The Strongest Hero

Saitama is a normal guy who accomplishes an impossible feat: he strives to become the strongest hero in the world and succeeds. Only, his success costs him more than he ever realized it would, and I'm not just talking about his hair. In achieving limitless strength, he finds himself hollowed out and unable to find joy in the ordinary striving of everyday life.

This is the quiet tragedy sitting underneath One Punch Man, and it's easy to miss if you're watching for the comedy, which is understandable because the show is genuinely funny, but underneath the absurdity is a careful portrait of a man suffering from a very specific kind of despair: the despair of someone who does everything right, achieves everything he set out to achieve, and finds that the achievement does not contain what he thought it would. Every fight ends the same way, in a single punch, and then he walks home alone, and nothing has changed, and nothing will change, because there is nothing in the world left for him to overcome.

What Saitama is living through has a name older than anime. The writer of Ecclesiastes was a man who had accumulated wisdom, wealth, pleasure, projects, and every variety of human achievement available to him, and he looked at the total of it and called it vapor, breath, something that exists for a moment and dissipates and leaves nothing permanent behind. "Vanity of vanities," he writes, and you can hear in that phrase the sound of a person who has stopped being surprised by their own disappointment, who has run the experiment enough times to know how it ends.

The thing Saitama is missing is not a stronger opponent, though that is what he believes he needs, and the show lets him believe it for a long time. What's actually missing is something his own strength is structurally incapable of giving him, something that can't be trained for or taken by force or earned through discipline and sacrifice. He's missing the experience of being loved without condition, of mattering to something that exists beyond the scale of his own power, of finding that his worth was never located in what he could do or what he could defeat.

This is the very gap the Gospel speaks into, and it doesn't speak into it with another challenge to overcome or a harder challenge to clear. It speaks into it with the news that the thing Saitama has been trying to earn was already given to him freely before he started, that the love of God is not a prize waiting at the end of overwhelming effort, but something offered to him in his apartment, in his boredom, on the walk home from another fight that ultimately means nothing to him. The Christian claim is that there is a joy that does not depend on your performance, a meaning that your failures cannot take away and your achievements cannot complete, and that it comes not from becoming strong enough but from being known by someone who is never impressed by strength to begin with.

Saitama keeps looking for a worthy opponent. What he actually needs is a worthy purpose.