One Punch Man is a popular manga series turned anime that became even more popular after it became animated. How could a show where the main character can defeat all his enemies in one hit be so popular? That’s because there are cool fight scenes regardless of the overpowered hero. Everyone else is extremely strong in their own way and are capable of putting up epic fight scenes with each other…as long as they don’t fight the main character, Saitama.

1. One Punch Man Season 2 Episode 9

Take note that while some of the characters are stronger than the ones on the list, they’ve yet to show off their abilities. Hence, we’re only including those that have been in actual fights.

Join us as we count down the Top 10 Strongest One Punch Man Characters.

One Punch Man, onepunchman Onepunch-Man / 2012. Murata Yuusuke. Right(→) to Left(←) Action Animated Comedy Seinen Supernatural. Chapter 161 - Atomic Samurai. Chapter 160 - Fake. Chapter 158 - N/A. Manga Description. Follows the life of an average hero who manages to win all battles with only one punch.

Known to many as the man with the most redundant name ever, Speed of Sound, or Sonic for brevity, is one of the fastest characters in the series. Though he can’t really move fast enough to cause sonic booms, he is able to sprint across a long distance at extremely high speeds. When he attacks someone with his sword, it is reminiscent of a samurai using an extremely quick slash of Iaido as he appears behind his opponent after attacking.

He is usually calm in battle, mostly due in part to his ninja training. However, hidden within him is a battle maniac that simply craves for battle. When he meets Saitama, the hero of the series, none of his attacks have any effect on the caped baldy. This gets his blood pumping as he enjoys fighting those who are stronger than him. Despite his skills however, he ranks quite low on the power chart. That just shows how strong some of the characters in One Punch Man are.

Though he is the weakest hero on the S-rank list, Puripuri Prisoner’s strength is still nothing to scoff at. With rippling muscles from top the bottom, Puripuri Prisoner is built like a tank and he acts like one as well. Striding into combat with nothing but his bare fists, he blows away the opposition with his raw strength and musculature.

Puripuri Prisoner also has a mode named Angel Style, in which he increases his strength to its maximum limit, bringing them beyond the threshold. It has the…unfortunate side effect of increasing his muscle mass, causing all his clothes to be torn off completely. Nevertheless, when in this mode, he’s shown to be many times stronger and has even caused severe damage to the Sea King, someone Genos had trouble with. Like him or hate him, Puripuri Prisoner is one tough son of a gun.

Often shown to be a callous individual, Bofoy’s hero name is “Metal Knight” because of his preference in using a robot that looks precisely what the name implies, a metal knight. Bofoy is a true scientist at heart, trying out different configurations with his robot or letting a bunch of hooligans steal his experimental suit just to see how far they can be pushed.

His personality aside, an individual with access to all the technology he has at his disposal is not to be reckoned with. He has enough tech in his arsenal to arm an army and with the amount of robots he has, he could easily cause a disaster rating to rise in the cities of A-Z. Bofoy is definitely someone you don’t want to get on the bad side of.

A fan favourite, Genos is a cyborg who works together with his professor to find out who attacked his town and killed his whole family. One day, he runs into Saitama, who handily dispatches every foe in his way with a single punch. In awe of his power, Genos forces Saitama to apprentice him in hopes of somehow getting some of that strength for himself so that he may avenge his family eventually.

But that doesn’t mean Genos is weak. Though his ranking on the S-rank list is still rather low, that can be attributed more to experience than any weakness on his part. With cybernetic enhancements boosting his physical abilities to the max, Genos moves at inhumane speeds and attacks with inhumane strength. On top of that, he has multiple projectile type attacks that can cause extreme devastation to his enemies. Out of all the heroes who attacked the Sea King, he was the one who did the most damage in the end, barring Saitama. With a thousand and one ways to kill anyone, it's doubtful anybody wants to cross him anytime soon.

Go back to the title, realise it says characters instead of heroes, then we can continue on with the article. Because how can we not include this beast when it comes to the strongest? The Sea King comes from the same cliché that perpetuates the entirety of the series, from the Ground King to the Air King to the Sea King. Arguably, the Sea King sounds like the strongest.

When battling Puripuri Prisoner, he had some difficulty. But it was revealed that he wasn’t even in his full strength as it wasn’t raining. When the rain started pouring down, it became all over for the heroes fighting him. They were immediately batted aside and squashed under his heel. Only the timely intervention of Saitama saved them from him. And well…comparing anyone to Saitama isn’t that fair so the Sea King is still really tough.

The Atomic Samurai is a cool operator who holds his pride close to his heart. When Saitama first tried to shake his hand, he refused, stating that he would only acknowledge him when he got into the higher ranks first. Despite that, he is not unkind. He has his own school of disciples who take after his unique techniques. One of his disciples, Iaian, becomes severely injured during the alien invasion and he shows a great deal of care and concern for him.

Despite not being the highest on the list, the Atomic Samurai is nothing to scoff at. He uses a katana to dispatch most of his opponents with ease, not only boasting superior technique but all round better stats as well such as strength or reflexes. His signature technique, Atomic Slash, cuts the enemy into uncountable pieces in a single instant, leaving behind nothing but dust. When you meet him, don’t even blink, it’ll be over before you know it.

Bang is that one oldie that’s been around so long that he should have become old and frail, yet no one wants to mess with this guy. It’s partly due to his rank as number 4 on the S-rank list. However, it's most probably because of what a beast and badass Bang can be. Earning his moniker of Silver Fang, he darts around the battlefield decimating his foes with ease, his silver hair flashing all the while he is doing so.

The Silver Fang utilises the style of Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist. It’s a relatively powerful fighting style that seems to take after forms of martial arts like Tai-chi, in which strength is not used but rather the strength of the opponent is turned against them. Despite this high level of technique, Bang possesses one of the strongest bodies in the entire series. With a technique that requires zero strength wielded by a guy who has plenty to spare, it is no surprise that he places so high on the list at all. Just don’t let him con you into being his disciple!

The older of two sisters, Tatsumaki received her moniker due in fact to the powers that she has received from being an Esper. Unlike the sissy levitations that normal psychics do like lifting a spoon or a small object, Tatsumaki lifts whole cities at a time to bombard the enemy with. The trail of destruction she often leaves behind has lent her the name of Tornado of Terror.

She doesn’t just have power. When needed too, she could precisely fire rubble into the cannons of the enemy ship and cause them to backfire on their own crew. With the further use of her psychic abilities to boost her lack of physical ones, Tatsumaki is a strong contender for being one of the most powerful beings in the series. Sword art online alicization episode 21.

Boros is an extraterrestrial being that has conquered so many planets and galaxies that he has begun having an existential crisis. He’s very bored. There seems to be nothing capable of challenging him anymore and he’s unhappy about that. One day, he receives a prophecy that there exists someone on Earth who can give him a fight of the centuries. Like every cliché villain ever, he gathers his armada and invades Earth.

This is an alien so powerful, that his underlings are capable of giving S-rank heroes a hard time. And it shows. When faced against the strongest character of the series, instead of going down with one punch like everyone else, he actually takes multiple hits from Saitama before losing. In fact, this is the first time we see Saitama putting effort into fights, using his special techniques like the serious serious series. Lord Boros is the second strongest throughout the series so far purely for the fact that he managed so long against the Caped Baldy, after who else can boast of that fact?

Was this surprising?

With his life going nowhere, Saitama decided to become a superhero so that he could save people after an incident in which he saved a child from a crab monster. 3 years later, after his “intensive” (read: 100 push-ups, 100 squats, 100 sit-ups, 10k marathon and no air-con) workout, he has lost all his hair and become immensely powerful, defeating anyone he comes across with one punch. Which loops back to him feeling like his life is going nowhere as he can’t feel the thrill of battle because everyone else is just too weak.

Yet, despite his overwhelming strength, he doesn’t abuse it for his own need. With power like that, he could have easily taken over the world or led a decadent life, however, he lives like a NEET most of the time. He didn’t even take credit for defeating the Sea King, a feat only he could’ve done at that point of time, just so the other heroes wouldn’t be looked down upon. His greatest strength in all this is his heart and kindness.
Well…not really. His greatest strength is…ONE PUNCH!

Closing Paragraph

One Punch Man is the very epitome of what an action anime should be like. The battles are exciting, fun and interesting to watch. Even characters that were introduced at the last minute are interesting to cheer for because they seem to fight with such ferocity and power that we can’t help but keep in awe at their strength.
And that’s why, despite its horrible premise, One Punch Man is still a good action anime.

That’s because everyone on this list, and those that aren’t as well, provide us with such stunning fights that don’t include everyone being defeated in one blow. Even when Saitama is involved, it gets interesting in its own way as well.

We hope you enjoyed our Top 10 Strongest One Punch Man Characters list. Feel free to leave your suggestions for who else should be on it in the comments below.

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One Punch Man Explained

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A terrible monster suddenly attacks Z-City without warning. Many innocents are killed instantly, and more continue to be wiped out by the terrifying fiend with each passing minute. But when all seems lost, a lone saviour appears and destroys the monster with a single punch. Who is this mysterious protector? He is..

Just a guy who's a hero for fun.

One Punch Man is a 2009 Japanese Web Comic created by the artist and writer ONE. The series is largely an Affectionate Parody of ShounenSuperhero stories, lampooning their over the top melodrama or general silliness by bringing the genre's standard plot to its logical conclusion.

Saitama is an unemployed Salaryman turned part-time Superhero who has become so powerful he can defeat any adversary with a single punch. He also happens to be extremely depressed about this, as it means he has no more challenges left in his life. But despite that fact, Saitama continues to follow his (now utterly monotonous) hero hobby, encountering Mutants, Cyborgs, Ninjas, Humanoid Aliens, Supernatural Martial Arts masters, Psychics, corrupt Super Teams, Kaiju, Sea Monsters and just about everything else you can imagine — all the while hoping that, someday, one of them might put up a fight that lasts longer than their Motive Rant.

The series has been wildly popular, with the ongoing webcomic being adapted into a manga drawn by Yusuke Murata of Eyeshield 21 fame, an English serialization of said manga in Viz Media's Weekly Shonen Jump, a drama CD, a Fall 2015 Anime adaptation from Madhouse, several OVAs from December 2015 on, and an April 2019 second season anime by J.C. Staff. In June 2019, it was announced it would even get it's own video game!: One Punch Man A Hero Nobody Knows, a arena fighter which focuses up to the Alien Invasion arc.

An English dub of the series by Viz Media began airing on Toonami on July 16, 2016. The Japanese dub can also be streamed in subbed form on Netflix for season 1 and Hulu for season 2.

One Punch Tropes:

• Abandoned Warehouse District: There's an entire region of town which, for some reason, the monsters always attack; so, unsurprisingly, nobody lives there anymore. It's Saitama's neighborhood, and it's implied that powerful monsters attack there so often specifically because they've heard how strong he is and want to fight him. To the point that an entire monster organisation has made their base there.
• The Ace: Genos is patient, intelligent, self-sacrificing, and a terrifyingly skilled fighter with a strong sense of justice. All this means he's pretty much playing the eternal Straight Man to Saitama's lackadaisical approach to heroism, although ultimately Saitama is still far stronger.
• Adaptation Distillation: At the same time, the anime removes some references pertaining to arcs after Boros' arc, save for some cameos for the characters. For example, they removed Genos' reference of the Blizzard Group's newbie crushing in episode 7.
• Adaptation Expansion: Murata's version compared to ONE's original webcomic. The anime adds even further scenes that were in neither comic.
  • To give an example: in both the webcomic and the Murata redraw, when Boros' ship arrives and devastates A-City, not a single mention was given to what happened to all the people who used to live there, and in the chapters that follow, it's all-too-easy to assume that its whole population was simply wiped out. The anime however devotes several scenes to show that, yes, there were survivors, and the Hero Association spared no expense to make sure they were rescued and secured — it's just that most of the action was centered on the S-Class heroes on the ground and Saitama's battle with Boros in the mothership itself.
  • Of particular note is Murata's Tournament Arc, which doesn't appear in ONE's original, although it's still written by him. Chronologically, it takes place between chapters 52 and 53 of the webcomic.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
  • In the Manga, after the alien invaders trash the Hero Association headquarters, an employee proposes a new building plan he estimates will take 10 years. However, Metal Knight cleans up the excess debris and begins building, finishing the building in 10 days. In the Anime, Genos narrates that a new building was made, but how it was made isn't explained.
  • Also they didn't adapt the extra chapters, which caused a little problem as to how Pri-Pri-Prisoner and Sonic escaped from prison.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Given the source's artstyle, this is bound to happen to everyone save for a few examples.
• Aesop Amnesia:
  • Genos has a bad habit of underestimating his enemies and getting taken off guard, usually losing a limb during the process. He even lampshades that no matter how many times it bites him in the ass he keeps doing it.
  • When the Hero Association first launched, they placed a lot of importance on rankings with high ranked heroes ending up as worthless glory hogs whenever real problems showed up, which were generally resolved quietly by very low ranked heroes. Noticing the issue, the Hero Association took all those heroes who didn't care about where they ranked and formed them into the current S ranks. A few years later, it's clear that they've made no other meaningful changes to the policy given that the strongest person in the association, Saitama, barely made it in at all and only received a fraction of the credit he deserved for his actions. Meanwhile, a bunch of low-level jerks go out of their way to go around 'rookie crushing' and doing other stupid things that only undermine the purpose of the organization.
• Affectionate Parody: Of superhero comics and shounen manga.
• Alien Blood: Copious amounts of it in the last episode of the anime when Amai Mask mercilessly slaughters the harmless aliens who survived the destruction of Boros' ship.
• All Just a Dream: The subterraneans' invasion and Saitama's epic fight against them. The real subterraneans conveniently happen to be invading just as Saitama wakes up, but turn out to be much less impressive opponents.
• All There in the Stinger: The anime adaptation does this quite frequently. One notable example is in Episode 5, when the stinger shows Genos asking to move in with Saitama and giving him rent money in order to convince him. Anyone who misses this stinger, or who hasn't read the webcomic or manga, will be confused as to why Genos is suddenly living with Saitama in Episode 6.
• Almighty Janitor: While Saitama was screwed out of a higher rank because he utterly failed the written portion of the test, several of the other heroes are also content to remain lower-ranked than their power levels indicate for various reasons (because they feel they haven't earned a higher rank, they would rather be the big fish in the small pond rather than the small fish in a big pond, to keep ambitious low-ranks 'in their place', etc.)
• Already the Case: When Armored Gorilla is disabled by Genos, he refuses to give up any information to him or Saitama, boasting that his superior Beast King will kill them both. Saitama then pulls out the messy remains from when he'd slaughtered Beast King and asks if that's the guy he's talking about. After a longVisible Silence, Armored Gorilla switches from Robo Speak to a regular voice and meekly acquiesces.
• And Then What?: Saitama has done it. He's become the strongest hero of all time, able to fell any enemy with a single strike. Such ease in his super heroics, however, has given rise to boredom, ennui, and a lack of enthusiasm when playing hero.
• Anime Theme Song: THE HERO!! by JAM Project.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Mosquito Girl rips off one of Genos' robotic arms in her first attack. Then a few seconds later she realizes that Genos ripped off both her legs at the same time.
  • Iaian loses his left arm to one of Melzagald's attacks.
• Arm Cannon: Genos has blasters built into both his hands.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted. Boros was able to survive Saitama's first attack because his armour protected him, subsequently shattering to pieces afterwards. Boros declares, however, that the armour was actually a Power Limiter.
• Art Evolution: ONE's webcomic, while still rough around the edges, has seen a notable improvement in terms of visuals over time. While still not up to the level of the redraw, the more recent chapters look far more professional than the early ones to say the least.
  • An inverse example happened to Season 2 of the Anime, to the point where it's easy Flame Bait on some sites.
• Art Shift: In Murata's version, Saitama is usually drawn incredibly half-assed, in stark contrast to the ridiculous level of detail given to almost every other character and background, reflecting his attitude toward everything. Whenever he starts taking things seriously and acts like a badass though, he's drawn in the detailed style. Tornado seems to adopt this tendency of normally being poorly-drawn herself when she's angry/pouting.
• Artistic License – Economics: Played for Laughs with the Paradise Group's scheme. They want to make a world wherein people only have to work if they want to, and those who don't work are fully financially supported. They don't seem to know that this is not at all how economics work, but then again they really aren't all that smart.
• Artifact Title: As the series progresses, more enemies (such as Boros and Garou) appear that Saitama has to punch more than once to defeat. They still pose no problem to him though as his initial punches are just his 'normal' ones and he can still One-Hit KO them with moves from his 'Serious Series' (and in the latter's case, he never really intended to kill him anyway).
• Asshole Victim: Quite a few suffer from this, such as the random thief who goes around looting when the Mosquito Girl shows up, only to be killed by a gigantic swarm of mosquitoes literally sucking the lifeblood out of him. And anyone dumb enough to kill, threaten, or attack civilians, or the heroes attempting to defend them when Saitama is around.
• Ass Kicks You: This is how Saitama beats Suiryu in the tournament. He accidentally knocks him clear out of the ring with a HIP CHECK of all things while he's trying to imitate one of Suiryu's moves!. And it's so strong that Suiryu plummets into the audience!
• Atomic F-Bomb: Saitama lets out a frustrated one after he defeats Vaccine Man in the first chapter.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Beefcake is a bodybuilder who grows into a giant monster after his scientist brother makes him special steroids.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Whenever you hear this guitar chug, be sure that some ass is about to be kicked.
• Award-Bait Song: 'Kanashimi Tachi Wo Dakishimete'. A perfect way to end the first season of the anime after the epic fight against Boros. Also, considering Madhouse tendencies to not continue an anime series (although the second season is later confirmed).. thank you, goodbye indeed.
• Badass Gay: Puripuri Prisoner, an okama and the 17th ranked S-Class hero.
• Badass Grandpa: Bang AKA The Silver Fang, the 3rd ranked S-Class hero.
• Badass Longcoat: Zombieman wears one.
• Badass Moustache: The hero Spring Mustache is apparently named after his, admittedly very stylish, mustache. Bang also has an awesome old man-style mustache.
• Badass Normal: In the second issue, we get a flashback to the time before Saitama gained his incredible strength, when he fought a crab monster with nothing but normal human speed, strength, agility, and a necktie. He won. Also, a fair amount of high-ranking heroes are simply average-looking people who happen to have Charles Atlas Superpowers.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The Volume 9 bonus chapter has the Blizzard group try to work in order to get themselves a new car, with Fubuki suggesting to use fliers for money opportunities and the majority of the group getting side jobs that only get them 3.5 million combined. Fubuki comes back with over 2 million alone, describing her getting it as having put her body on the line to do so. Mortified by their leader apparantly resorting to prostitution for the group, the other members vow to make sure she never does it again by working harder.. before she reveals that she was out bounty hunting and said fliers she was talking about were wanted posters.
  • After the defeat of the Underground King and the Sea King, the appearance of the Sky King seems to be the beginning of a new saga, to complete the land/sea/air trifecta. The birdmen however get massacred in a few pages by the actual new threat: an alien invasion led by galactic conqueror Boros.
• Bald of Awesome: Saitama. He used to have Shounen Hair, but it fell out from all the training.
• Bald of Evil: A gang of bald terrorists eventually appear, making people fear anyone who is bald, including Saitama, who decides to defeat the gang simply to make his life easier.
• Barehanded Blade Block: Saitama can do this with one hand. Then SNAP THE BLADE. Hell, he doesn't even need to use his hands because he can do the same with his TEETH!
• Bathos: One Punch Man to its core. The show is more or less what would happen if you plucked a parody character & put him in the middle of a Grim Dark world. Or maybe a serious character in a parody world. It's hard to tell.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Averted; when Saitama is thrown onto the moon, he holds his breath until he can jump back.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Zigzagged. Genos is probably the most morally sound of the characters considered to be particularly handsome in-universe, whereas, despite being a high-ranking hero, Handsome Kamen Amai Mask is a merciless Anti-Hero who kills any monster he can get his hands on regardless of their crimes. Speed of Sound Sonic is essentially neutral, but is antagonistic most of the time. Ugmons invoke this, becoming powerful monsters through their ugliness, whereas Pig God is at first glance a Fat Bastard but can be considered one of the most heroic S-Class heroes.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Regular guy Saitama wished to become a hero who could defeat any enemy with one punch. After years of training he got what he wanted, which led to an existential crisis.
  • Saitama also promised that if they both successfully registered as superheroes (because he didn't want to go alone), he would make Genos his official disciple. He soon regrets the decision.
  • Boros was an unstoppable alien conquerer who found himself in the same predicament as Saitama, and followed a prophecy that he would find his equal on the distant planet of Earth. In his fight with Saitama, he is forced to use all his powers and trump cards, and he even gets Saitama to use a couple 'serious' attacks. However, after his defeat, he can tell that Saitama was still holding back, but at least he got the challenging fight he always wanted.
    Boros: It was as if.. throughout the entire battle.. not once.. did you bare your fangs.. heh. Prophecies really can't be trusted. You are too strong.
• Beef Gate: Non-videogame example. The Hero system allows the top-ranked member of each class the opportunity to move up to the next class.
  • Amai Mask intentionally sits at the top of A-Class to keep anyone he considers undeserving from getting into S-Class.
  • Top-ranked C-Class hero Mumen Rider is an unintentional one. He refuses to go into B-Class for personal reasons (probably because he is severely underpowered even for B-Class) but his presence still generates a standard that must be surpassed for a hero to rise from C-Class; because he has the personality and Heroic Resolve of an Ideal Hero, but no powers, a hero must have some kind of combat ability to surpass him and reach B-Class.
  • Similarly, Fubuki is top of the B class due to her Inferiority Superiority Complex and desire to command the other B-Class heroes instead of just being one A-Class hero among others, although Saitama might be slowly talking her out of it.
• Begin with a Finisher: Genos immediately resorts to incinerating the entire House of Evolution with his cannons rather than go inside. Unfortunately, the most important parts of the facility are underground.
• Berserk Button:
  • Saitama doesn't take missing his Saturday special sales very well.
  • Mosquitoes seem to drive him crazy, especially when he can't kill them.
  • Long drawn out exposition sets him off pretty quick.
  • Doing damage to his apartment also counts.
  • And most of all, don't make fun of his baldness.
  • Calling Tatsumaki a brat will guarantee a brutal beatdown from her.
• Beyond the Impossible: Metal Knight was able to fix and improve City A in seven days what the Hero Association assumed would take a minimum of 10 years. With that he even improved it by reinforcing the Headquarters so it could house A Rank heroes and have roads all over the country. The Association is both amazed and terrified of Metal Knight for pulling this off.
• Big Damn Heroes: There are plenty of Saitama’s feats of strength and speed shown throughout the series that he can effortlessly move at the Speed of Sound and push to it the Speed of Light if he so desires, but like anything revolving Saitama’s character he needs to be motivated enough to show it off like that; with that there are examples of Saitama simply getting late, or being misdirected, from reaching the place some big commotion is happening as he just casually strolls (or runs in human speed) to his destination instead of just arriving in lightning strike accuracy, that results in Saitama coming up in dramatic fashion when all hope seems to be lost or when there’s no one left around to witness his real power, perpetuating the narrative that very few people know how powerful Saitama really is.
• Bishounen:
  • Sonic wears makeup, has long hair, and is very pretty and slender.
  • Lightspeed Flash, the S-Class hero, is also very pretty and with long white hair.
  • The top A-Class hero, Handsome Kamen Amai Mask, is a pretty boy idol.
  • Facially, Genos also fits, but his other features are pretty masculine.
• Bishounen Line: Once Mosquito Girl absorbs all the blood her mosquitoes have collected, she becomes more human in appearance.
• Blade on a Stick: A-Class hero Stinger's weapon of choice.
• Blessed with Suck: Saitama wanted to be a superhero who could blow away evil with a single punch.. which as it turns out was incredibly boring. Now battling villains and monsters are about as exciting as a trip to the grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk.
• Blood Knight: Saitama. He first became a hero when he rescued a child from a monster after being fired from his previous job with no hope of getting a new one. He felt such a rush after this first heroic rescue that he dedicated himself to becoming a hero. At one point he has a dream about being attacked by an army of monsters that actually CAN give him a challenge. The next morning, he goes up against enemies similar to those in his dream, but not as strong; he's left horribly disappointed.
• Bloodless Carnage: When Sonic decapitates the Paradisers in the anime, only the last one who dies partially off-screen is shown bleeding, despite the fact that 20-30 people in front of him lose their heads too — there's literally no blood from them, the heads fall off and they're dead. That's it.
• Bloody Hilarious: In the anime adaptation, instead of being slapped through a building Mosquito Girl's body splatters on it, releasing all the blood she absorbed beforehand. It's enough to cover the whole side of a building and then some.
• Body Horror: Mosquito Girl's victims are reduced to mummified husks when her swarm sucks out all their blood.
• Bookends: Season 1 of the Anime adaptation begins and ends with an extremely threatening Mysterious Being showing up all of a sudden, outlining why all humans have to die, with Saitama one-punching them after their bragging and being very frustrated that was all it took. Especially in the last case, since he had just fought someone who could actually take more. Also, in that same episode wherein he dreamed he fought some worthy foes, dramatic music swelled and Saitama's heart beat, as if he's feeling some challenge once again.. only this time it's Boros whose blood is pumping again, with the prospect of facing a truly worthy foe whom he could go all out with.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: Bang attempted this with Saitama and Genos. Neither went for it, the former because it would be pointless and the latter because he has the 'best defense is a good offense' mindset.

• Bubblegum Popping: Saitama annoys the speaker at the hero seminar by chewing gum and then making a bubble so big it covers his whole face when it pops.
• Call-Back: Chapter 22 has the exact same opening shot of Z-City as Chapter 18, only this time, Z-City is heavily damaged by the debris of the giant meteor.
  • When Doctor Stench gives a long winded speech to Saitama, Genos interrupts him and says it's best to sum it up in 20 words or less.
• Calling Your Attacks: Most of the heroes and villains have at least one.
  • Saitama sometimes pulls out the 'Consecutive Normal Punches', which will completely disintegrate or outright liquefy his opponents. On the rare occasion that he gets somewhat serious, he also has an even more insanely powerful 'Serious Series' of moves.
  • Genos: 'INCINERATE!'
  • Silver Fang teaches the 'Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist' to the students at his dojo. His brother is master of the 'Whirlwind Iron Cutting Fist'. The techniques can be combined into the 'Cross Fang Dragon Slayer Fist'. After learning these and a dozen other 'fists', Garou creates the 'Monster Calamity God Slayer Fist'.
  • Even Licenseless Rider has moves like 'Justice Crash' and 'Justice Tackle'. 'Justice Bike Throw' is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Note, that none of these moves has been effective in the least to his opponents.
  • Puri-Puri Prisoner: 'Angel [some sort of attack or action]!'
• Cassandra Truth: When Saitama reveals that the secret to his incredible power consists of essentially body weight exercises and running (it's just 100 situps, 100 pushups, 100 squats, and a 10km run daily), none of the other characters believe it. Genos in fact claims it's a flat-out lie, saying that no one could get as powerful as him just doing that.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Saitama regularly engages in small talk with villains or other heroes who happen to show up on the scene, as for him there's literally no threat and no stakes.
• Catapult Nightmare: Happens to Saitama. He vehemently refuses to play rock paper scissors with someone with a booger on their finger in his dream.
• Central Theme: Boredom and the importance of having conflict in a world that doesn't exactly have it.
• Challenge Seeker: Satama's driving motivation is to meet and spar with an opponent who will not drop dead from his trademarked One-Hit Kill punches. This inability to find a worthy opponent drives much of his boredom as a superhero.
  • King explores this in the manga, pointing out that Saitama could seek other challenges in combat outside of victory, that he could pursue challenges outside of combat, or that he could try striving to become a better — as opposed to stronger — hero. None of these engage Saitama, only the thrill of combat being truly exciting for him. King suggests they just play a fighting game, but Saitama says he's numb even to that. King says he'll handicap himself so he's on Saitama's level, playing with only two fingers, and Saitama loses his shit.
• Charles Atlas Super Power: Seems to be almost a law of physics in the setting:
  • Saitama became as strong as Superman through sheer physical training. Namely 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and running 10 km every single day!^note
  • Silver Fang Bang, Super Alloy Darkshine and Tanktop Master, and quite a few other heroes also apparently gained their own less extreme superheroic abilities through physical training.
  • Several monsters indicate they gained their powers or mutations by doing one thing obsessively, such as one guy turning into a crab monster from eating huge amounts of crab.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The boy who Saitama saved in his Origin Story has a grandfather who's a multimillionaire and thus founded the National Superhero Registry. The grandfather founded it exactly three years ago after hearing how Saitama saved his grandchild.
  • Also, the House of Evolution. After the arc with them as the Big Bad, they completely disappear from the story. Until many chapters later, where it is revealed that Zombieman, the 8th ranked S-Class hero, was one of their creations.
• Clothing Damage:
  • In Chapter 6, Saitama has all his clothes blown off by the blast from one of Genos' attacks.
  • Puripuri Prisoner also inflicts this on himself whenever he fights, because his muscles are too huge for his prison uniform.
• Comically Invincible Hero: The comedy of Saitama's power is how anti-climatic his battles are and his response to this.
• The Comically Serious: Genos doesn't acknowledge Saitama's weirdness one bit.
• Constructed World: The whole series takes place on a Pangea-sized continent shaped like Saitama prefecture with city-states named after the alphabet, and that's just the beginning of its differences. See Crapsack World below.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Chapter 20 has the Hero's Organization investigating Saitama's neighborhood and finding all the damage from his previous fights, with the destruction caused by the giant in the B and D cities also mentioned.
  • In Chapter 99, when Child Emperor fires his last Wave Motion Gun at Phoenix Man and the blast travels all the way from the underground to surface, there's a shot of the moon in the background, which still has the dent Saitama made when he was knocked into it by Boros and having to launch himself from that spot to get back to Earth.
• Conveniently Empty Building: A lot of buildings in Z-City are abandoned, letting heroes like Saitama destroy them while fighting there without consequence. Justified by few people living there due to how frequent monster attacks are. The section where Saitama lives and most of the fights take place in particular is completely deserted.
• Couch Gag: The second season's opening has, near the end and for just a few frames, the appearance of a different character every time, drawn in the super deformed, half-assed style usually reserved for Saitama and Tatsumaki.
• Crapsack World: Not noticeable due to resembling modern Japan, but if monsters appear and millions die on a daily basis, it can qualify as this.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Several S-Class heroes have no other abilities outside of smashing things. Metal Bat even seems to take pride in this fact.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Saitama's specialty.
  • Stinger did not even get a chance to fight back against the Sea Folk's king.
  • Neither did Licenseless Rider, or against anyone for that matter.
  • Garou gave one to the S-Class heroes after becoming a Mysterious Being. Until Saitama appears, that is.
• Cursed with Awesome: Despite Saitama's existential angst over having near infinite strength, his ability to defeat ANYTHING with a single punch has easily saved the lives of entire cities of people a hundred times over.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: After being defeated, the head of the House of Evolution uses his talents at creating regenerating bodies to produce unlimited octopus tentacles.. and opens up a takoyaki stand.
• Cute Monster Girl: Mosquito Girl is pretty creepy looking at first, but it helps that she doesn't wear any clothes. Later chapters, and the anime's second season, add more of them such as the dominatrix Do-S, Gorgeous Gorgon Eyesight (which has a more monstrous second form) and Maiko Plasma, who looks like a geisha. The second season's opening puts all three together for a brief moment.
• Cutting the Knot: When Genos and Saitama assault the House of Evolution, Genos simply blows up the entire building rather than bother fighting through every floor. Saitama is disappointed because he wanted a fight, but lucky for him there's a basement.
• Dark Secret: The S-Class 'strongest man on earth' King isn't strong at all. He just happened to be saved by Saitama 5 times and received credit for it by accident. He didn't mention it because he didn't want to dishearten anyone and he closed his eyes when he was attacked so he didn't see the real hero take the monsters down. He's just a scared Otaku way over his head with terrifying presence and ridiculous luck.
• Deadline News: During the attack of Vaccine Man at the beginning, a reporter gets cut off by a Snowy Screen of Death, which prompts Saitama to step in.
• Decompressed Comic: Very much so. Just read chapter 25, the entire chapter is just Metal Knight arriving and landing near Genos.
• Deconstruction: Of settings where superpowers are both common and diverse. If such a world existed, we would expect massive disparities in individual power level, with a small minority standing head-and-shoulders above the rest. Curb Stomp Battles would be the norm.
  • The 'Ninja Village' is one for Naruto. Turns out when you take children and teach them to fight and kill from such a young age, it's not some kind of scenario to laugh at the misadventures of the characters. Rather it's a brutal, cruel, tortuous and ultimately monstrous to take innocent kids and turn them into blood-soaked killers who are only good for doing criminal wetwork.
• Deconstructive Parody: One Punch Man parodies nearly every superhero sub-genre in the book to tell a surprisingly brilliant satire about the importance of conflict in a world where everything is easier to achieve than ever.
• Defeat Means Menial Labor: Minor villain Hammerhead is seeking to get a law passed that will allow slackers like himself to get paid for not actually doing any work. After nearly getting killed by 'Speed-O'-Sound' Sonic and Saitama (as well as having his Powered Armor destroyed), Hammerhead wisely gives up. He can later be seen filling out a job application and then working as a doorman a bit after that.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Speed of Sound Sonic. As Genos puts it, 'It's like saying a round circle'.
    • During the Garou arc we meet his fellow ninja Gale Wind and Hellfire Flame, suggesting that everyone in their ninja village has a name like this. Naturally, that includes Flashy Flash.
  • Also Flashy Flash and Handsomely Masked Sweet Mask.
• Determinator: The main reason Saitama has become so strong is due to his ability to stick to his hellish workout schedule for three years in a row.
  • A later flashback chapter shows this may have always been the case as far back as age 12, where he kept chasing a man-sized mysterious being that stole his money from two bullies that were shaking him down until it knocked him out.
  • Licenseless Rider doesn't seem to have won a single fight in his life and yet he refuses to give up against enemies even he knows he has no chance against.
  • Metal Bat grows stronger as he recieves more damage. He attributes it to 'Fighting Spirit!'
• Disproportionate Retribution: Lampshaded when Saitama calls out a crab monster for trying to kill a little boy who drew nipples on its shell with permanent marker.
• Dissonant Serenity: Saitama usually approaches his fights with a completely impassive, almost bored expression.
• Distressed Dude: This is basically Genos's role when the writer needs to show how strong the Monster of the Week is before Saitama defeats it easily.
  • This also applies to the C-Class hero Red Muffler who sets the standard for his class being completely average in terms of strength (which is still about 5 times greater than the average human). He is often shown with other heroes facing off against monsters that are way out of his league. He provides a useful insight for the audience on stronger heroes and their abilities. His strength provides a useful benchmark. That being said, he is often in a state of panic as he is clearly outmatched by the Monster of the Week.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Mosquito Girl loves those 'hot, sticky juices' her mosquitoes collect for her.
• Don't Call Me 'Sir': Genos insists on calling Saitama 'teacher', and when Saitama tells him not to, he switches to 'master' instead. So 'teacher' it is.
• Drunken Glow: OVA 6, a drunk Tatsumaki is shown with a distinct drunk Blush Sticker. She's also uncharacteristically happy given her tsundere personality.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Despite killing hundreds of monstrosities in his early career, Saitama never got the credit for his actions because he wasn't in the Hero Association. When he does join, his barely-passing score on the written test puts him near the bottom of C-Class. Since no one can believe a C-Class hero is actually capable of such feats, rumors start that he's stealing the credit for other heroes' work,resulting in him getting panned by civilians and fellow heroes alike.
  • Invoked in the aftermath of the Sea King's fight: we see Saitama getting an entire pile of hate mail from the people he saved.. then we flash back to him deliberately acting like a glory-stealing, selfish Jerkass who did a Kill Steal on the Sea King to prevent a genuine Ungrateful Bastard from ruining the name of the heroes who tried to stand up to the Seafolk invasion — his hate mail is due to the citizens being pissed off at his apparent scheme, with the people who know it was an act genuinely praising him.
• Dungeon Bypass: Genos attempts this with the House of Evolution by blowing up the entire building with one of his lasers without even bothering to step inside; but it's ultimately subverted, since the actual stronghold was underground.

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Several monsters Saitama defeated in flashbacks show up as still images in episode 4 of the anime, before any of said flashbacks have been shown.
  • In Murata's version, you can see King among the bystanders while the Paradise group is destroying the golden turd.
    • He appears even earlier in the anime, at the beginning of the first episode, as the passerby who crosses the shot right before Vaccine Man's attack (though he's barely recognizable).
• Early Installment Weirdness: Early chapters had Murata at his most artistically free ways, some chapters were very experimental, like one chapter devoted to a single fluid fight sequence as if the manga pages were animation cells, and another fully colored chapter just about Metal Knight taking flight; while these chapters had an unique feel to them, in the end those chapters proved to be a problem for the published volume releases, forcing a different numbering of chapters and some sequences had to redrawn to fit properly in the volumes; later on Murata is found being more contained to traditional manga panels, reserving his artistic signature to some double spread pages, thus never being troubled by the volume releases again.
• Electronic Eyes: Genos of course. They possess some kind of Search & Destroy feature. They also glow when he's fighting.
• Emergency Trainee Battle Deployment: This technically happens to Saitama as within the Heroes' Association, Saitama is a low ranked fresh graduate who takes on S-level missions exclusively. Of course, Saitama is also extremely underrated within the organization and has a wealth of unrecognized prior victories.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Saitama killed his first monster with nothing but a tie, and fought numerous others with sheer determination before he even reached his dream of defeating any opponent in one punch just like the superheroes he watched on tv as a kid.
• Epic Fail:
  • During Fubuki's challenge to Saitama and his 'Saitama group' (composed of Genos, Bang, and King) in the hopes of making Saitama join the Blizzard group, the challenge was to beat the opposing group in a video game, with the loser submitting to the winner's commands. While Bang and Genos were eliminated easily due to being novices. Saitama boasts about having played the video game before and not losing easily. He ends up losing faster than both Bang and Genos.
  • Sonic is offered a monster cell to become stronger and warned to eat it raw. He cooks it instead and rather than transforming into a monster, it just gives him the runs.
• Establishing Series Moment: The series tells you exactly what you're in for right from the start. A monstrous villain goes on a rampage, Saitama steps up, the monster boasts of its strength, Saitama does his thing, and finally Saitama immediately complains about how anti-climactic it was.
• Event Flag: Lampshaded in the fight with Garou, when Saitama, who had been excited at the prospect of finally getting a decent fight, starts to get angry when Garou keeps hitting obvious 'loser flags' with his hokey villain monologue.
• Everyone Has Standards: Some of the S-Class heroes were shocked to see Sweet Mask execute the alien survivors, who were tied up, on the spot because they were evil and did not deserve to live.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • The story of One Punch Man is the story of a man who can defeat anything with one punch.
  • Quite a few superhero names hit the nail on the head. Saitama's in particular is the unflattering 'Caped Baldy'.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Standard villain reaction to Saitama.
• Explosive Overclocking: Boros' Meteoric Burst
• Facial Markings: Sonic has red/purple stripes under his eyes. Tank Top Tiger has tigerish markings.
• Fail O'Suckyname: Many members of the Heroes' Association. It's what happens when these things get decided by committee.
• Faux Action Girl: Ring-Ring in the martial arts tournament arc. She's the only female fighter in the tournament, and in her introduction is mentioned as having defeated all other active female martial artists in her area. Once in combat on-panel, she falls easily to a minor male character who didn't even have to use his primary weapon.
• Fearless Fool: C-Class Rank 1 hero Licenseless Rider has tried to face down a horde of power-armored terrorists and a nigh-invincible monster that defeated multiple S-Class heroes, despite having no apparent superpowers of his own (one of his named attacks is throwing his bike at them). He barely survives both encounters, but he's also one of the few people who realizes Saitama actually defeated the Sea King on his own.
• Fighting the Lancer: The 'Sparring' two-parter. Genos takes it very seriously.
• Finger Poke of Doom: Saitama uses a 'special' attack called Consecutive Normal Punches when fighting Beast King. Of course, just one normal punch was all Saitama really needed to use.
• Fish People: Ones calling themselves Sea Folk invade from the sea in Chapter 23. They're tough and numerous enough to warrant a full-scale hero counter-attack.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In The Stinger for Episode 9, if you look closely at Madame Shibabawa's mouth while she's shouting, you can see the cough drop that ends up killing her.
  • In Episode 2, when Saitama defeats Mosquito Girl, you can see A Twinkle in the Sky right after the blood spatter on the building, potentially setting up her survival.
• A Friend in Need: Despite complaining about the way Genos follows him around, Saitama shows concern for him and even fights Asura Rhino on his behalf when he gets turned into 'modern art'.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • Garou, who goes from a nobody to becoming one of the strongest beings in the series capable of fighting against several S-Class heroes and defeating them.
  • Saitama is an example of this himself. Going from a melancholic out-of-work Salaryman to a nigh-unstoppable force of nature any supervillain or monster who knew what was good for them would be existentially terrified of.
• Full-Frontal Assault:
  • Puripuri Prisoner 'transforms' into Angel Mode by ripping his clothes off and fighting in the nude.
  • Beefcake rips out of his clothes when he grows to giant size and goes on a rampage.
  • Saitama himself also ends up defeating Mosquito Girl naked after Genos accidentally incinerates his clothes.
• Fun T-Shirt:
  • Saitama seems to have a liking for them.
  • The redrawn manga has a penchant for these, with bystanders such as a little girl's shirt saying 'School Child' or a man whose shirt reads 'Ippan Zin'^note
• Funny Background Event:
  • When our heroes must climb a mountain to get to the House Of Evolution headquarters, we see the path they took and a sign saying 'Beware of the Bears'.. with an unconscious, bloodied bear lying right beside it.
  • One random panel in Chapter 19 has a crow with human arms and legs stealing a fishbone from a cat. It's actually shown that a couple of crows mutated after eating the remains of the Beast King.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The monster that Saitama defeats in Chapter 1 wanted to wipe out humanity as punishment for 'poisoning Mother Earth'.
• Giving Them the Strip: Sonic has to slip out of his clothes to avoid getting crushed by the Sea King's grasp. Poor Genos gets an eyeful when Sonic, still naked, Flash Steps onto the street in front of him.
  Genos: 'Who was that pervert?'
• Godlike Gamer: While King is a complete fraud, having been confused for being a hero and 'the world's strongest human' due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time multiple times, he is a wiz at video games, having outclassed everyone, including Saitama and the best gamers among the Blizzard Group, at every game they have played.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Various characters eyes will glow with a mysterious light to make them looks more badass or scary at that particular moment, such as Saitama and Genos when they defeat monsters, or Dr. Genus when he falls into the depths of his For Science! research madness.
• Gone Horribly Right: After three years of dedicated training, so focused that it made all his hair fall out at the age of 23, Saitama got what he sought: the ability to defeat any foe with one punch. He didn't realize just how boring that would be.
• Gonk:
  • Any of the family gifted with unfortunately large cleft chins.
    • Whose last name turns out to be 'Bigchin.'
  • Pig God, on account of his obesity.
  • The child Garou saved, mirroring the cleft-chinned kid Saitama saved.
  • Weaponized by the Ugmon, humans turned into monsters by intense feelings of jealousy and inferiority.
• Gorn: The titular One Punch can reduce even the toughest of beings to Ludicrous Gibs. The two times Saitama uses a multi-hit combo (called Consecutive Normal Punches), it liquefies every part of his opponent above the waist.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Saitama eventually realized he isn't famous even though he's been saving the city as a hobby for quite some time. Turns out, he needed to be registered as a superhero to get credit. Without that, the general public just considers you a weirdo in tights.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Licenceless Rider ends up on the receiving end when he tries to hold back the Sea King.
• Groin Attack: Saitama does this (accidentally) to a Ninja (Speed of Sound Sonic). The ninja survives, as Saitama wasn't actually trying to attack him, Sonic fell onto Saitama's fist He does it again in a special chapter, accidentally elbowing an attacker coming from behind in the groin (coincidentally, the same ninja he'd accidentally groin attacked before).
  • The reaction of Sonic after this groin punch is simply a pastoral mountain scene with the words 'One Moment' in large print.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Played with regarding Saitama's training schedule. It's a straightforward but strict training schedule that he treats as the 'Kill You Or Make You Stronger' variety. However, while it is a good set of body-weight exercises with cardio, there's no way such a regime would result in the spectacular strength, endurance and durability he has achieved.
• Heel Realization: After Saitama defeats him, Garou asks why he became a hero. Saitama replies that, for him, being a hero is just a hobby. Garou immediately flies into a rage ranting that a real hero isn't like that. This leads to Saitama's Armor-Piercing Response of 'You settled on being a monster but what you really wanted to be was the hero'. This shocks Garou into stunned silence as Saitama accurately deconstructs his whole mindset and reasons for trying to become a monster. When he's finished, Garou quietly asks 'What should I do now?'
• Hero Insurance: Cities get leveled and destroyed all the time during the fights between the villains and heroes. Good thing Saitama doesn't have to pick up the tab to repair the damage caused by the fighting.
• Hero Killer: Subverted with Garou, one of Bang's former but still BEST students. He targets all the strongest heroes to defeat them,but never actually killed any of them.
• Heroes 'R' Us: What the so called 'Heroes' Association' is shaping up to be by most accounts. After the Monsters' Association Arc had ended, said corporate business went into a desperate recruitment drive for new blood to refill the ranks. A great many skilled and well known potential recruits flatly turned them down due to how far the organization's standards had plummeted.
• Heroic BSoD: Saitama has a brief one when he realizes he's become too strong and can't enjoy fighting any more. Luckily, Genos then turns up to make things interesting. Then he has another one when he realizes he's not famous.
• Heroic RRoD: Overusing psychic power will make you bleed from your nose and mouth, and might reopen old wounds. An injured Tatsumaki was pushed to the limit brawling with Saitama.
• Hollywood Cyborg:
  • Genos; it's currently unknown how much, if any, of his body is still organic. However, he's noted as being extremely attractive looking anyway, and has an entire legion of fangirls.
  • Genos is looking for a rogue cyborg that destroyed his hometown at the start of the series. Minor characters Armored Gorilla, Jet Nice Guy and Armored Clerk are also cyborgs despite looking like fairly normal animals and humans in armor rather than techno-organic monstrosities.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Saitama is a inversion; the hero is the one that can't be defeated instead of the villain. He also respects the willingness of others to engage in fights like these to protect others, or from a sense of duty. Notable examples include Licenseless Rider's stand against the Sea King and Charanko challenging Garou by himself.
• Hotter and Sexier: The original ONE version has only a few key female characters appearing in and out of story, the most recurring ones, Tatsumaki and Fubuki, are never said to be particularly beautiful by other characters and ONE’s simple drawings don’t put the sisters on any Fanservice situation; Murata on the other hand really makes use of his high grade art style to make pretty much all female characters in the series have varying degrees of titillation, Tatsumaki and Fubuki have their beauty in display in every panel with borderline skintight outfits, several daring cover pages that has Fubuki posing as if during a photoshoot session, like a gravure model; also if a new batch of heroes that didn’t exist in ONE’s version happen to have a new female amongst them, it’s very likely she will be a very alluring woman as well.

• I Am Not Left-Handed: Saitama rarely puts any effort into fighting because of how powerful he is; the rare person that can stand up to him (i.e. Boros and Garou) face the 'serious style'.
• I Am Not Shazam: The web-comic is named One-Punch Man and it is intended to refer to Saitama as well as accurately capturing the essence of his powers and super-hero identity. However, he is never called 'One-Punch Man' in-universe. Currently his assigned name with the Heroes Association is the 'Bald Cape' (often dubbed as 'Caped Baldy').
• I Was Having Such a Nice Dream: Saitama's epic and exhilarating battle against the subterraneans is cut short by his alarm clock.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The Hero Association's disaster levels are a non-video game example:
  • Wolf: Appearance of a being or group that might pose a threat.
  • Tiger: Threat to an unspecified yet large number of human lives.
  • Demon: Threat to a whole city or its functionality.
  • Dragon: Threat to multiple cities.
  • God: Threat to humanity.
• Idiot Hero: He's not so much an idiot, but Saitama is very unperceptive about certain things. While it seems he got through school, he is still a little Book Dumb sometimes. Sometimes, like in a flashback, he beats the monster of the week without even realizing it. In addition, he misses some facts or easily inferred pieces of knowledge, he didn't know about the hero ranking system despite people talking about it around him, he forgets people's names a lot even if he's been told them several times, and he often misinterprets information that he hears or gets sidetracked easily. Much of this has to do with how lazy he is. The biggest offense, though, is that he never realized that it's impossible for people to get as strong as he did through strength training. The only thing that he knows is that he did it somehow and he still believes that anyone else can succeed in the same way despite being told how impossible that is.
• Ignored Enemy: Borderline with Tatsumaki, who is technically an ally but is extremely belligerent to her fellow heroes. In particular, she refuses to believe Saitama could be a competent hero and trash-talks him at length, which he just ignores.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes:
  • Most of the registered superheroes wear these, from a snakeskin suit to Final Fantasy-esque armour, with a bonus chapter dedicated to heroes participating in a costume contest.
  • Saitama averts this by dressing in what looks like pyjamas.
  • S-Class hero Watchdog is a guy in a dumb-looking dog costume who single-handedly takes care of Q-City, one of the biggest hotspots of monster activity. When he's introduced, we see him sitting on top of a massive pile of monster corpses.
• In the Name of the Moon: 'Riding the bicycle of justice, Licenseless Rider enters the scene!'
• In-Series Nickname: Every hero is given one by the Hero Association. The names usually describe their appearance or powers.
• Inaction Sequence: Frequently defied and deconstructed, as Saitama doesn't like overly long speeches. Whenever someone tries to pull this off, Saitama tends to put a stop to it either verbally or physically. This is a non-subtle 'jab' at mangas/animes that love padding.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Nobody seems to have any real understanding of how Saitama actually got his superpowers.
  • Saitama himself believes he got his power (and lost his hair) due to repeated physical training every day for 3 years. Everyone quickly points out that not only was his training regime relatively mundane, but no amount of training could make the things he does even remotely possible.
  • A flashback chapter parodies the idea of some unknown factor empowering him. Saitama suffers strange pains when his training routine started to give him powers, implying some sort of transformation.. only for it to turn out he got a stomach ache and toothache from eating a huge amount of candy from an old lady he helped the week before.
  • Dr Genus theorizes that Saitama somehow exploited the Charles Atlas Superpower properties of the setting to through sheer hard work break the very concept of a 'limiter' on himself, allowing him to basically completely ignore any common sense or physical rules of reality others who gained or developed superpowers get held back by. But he's still so lost on how Saitama actually did that, that he gave up on creating an ultimate being and opened a Takoyaki stand instead.
• Instant Fanclub: Genos accumulates an off-screen one thanks to a popularity poll which deems him one of the most handsome (and therefore highest ranking) heroes. He was given the nickname 'Cyborg Prince' by his fans in-verse.
• Invincible Hero:
  • Deconstructed with Saitama who seems to exist as a Take That! to these kinds of heroes, showing how, over time, Victory Is Boring both for the audience and the characters themselves.
  • Subverted with Genos. Although a very competent hero, he gets wrecked at least once per arc. At times even after it appears he has won. Doubles as a Take That! to other manga in which the hero usually just gets cosmetic wounds. Genos loses limbs, gets his face cracked and other assorted injuries. These are usually fixed by the next episode, however.
• Jaded Washout: Saitama, before becoming a hero. Even as a kid, he didn't feel his future looking up. And even after becoming a hero, once he reached his current Invincible Hero status, his outlook on life is back to square one.
• Jerkass Has a Point: That Ungrateful Bastard at the end of the Sea Monster Arc may have said some disrespectful things about the heroes, but he does have a point when he talks about the heroes' classes not meaning a thing, as some heroes, like Fubuki and especially Saitama, are proven stronger than the class they are placed in.
• Kaiju: Gargantuan humans, bugs, and sea creatures.
  • Monster King Orochi , especially in his transformed state, where even the individual dragons he's made of are much larger than a full grown man. Keep in mind that he's made of presumably hundreds of these.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Kamakyuri (one of the monsters from the House of Evolution) attempts an ambush by crashing down through the ceiling of Saitama's apartment. He begins to introduce himself but is killed instantly by an irritated Saitama, who demands he pay for the damage.
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: The opening theme plays during Saitama's fight with Boros in the season one finale.
• Leave Him to Me: Genos attempts this, but is interrupted when Saitama plants both opponents in the concrete.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Any time Saitama is drawn with actual detail, it's a cue that the fight is basically over.
  • If you survive Saitama's NormalSeries (or piss him off bad enough), he brings out the Serious Series and then you realize that his Game-Breaker level of power from earlier was him barely trying.
• Licked by the Dog: Garou is defended by the kid he threatened to kill in the webcomic
• Lightning Bruiser: The Sea King is described as this when he fights against Sonic.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: New characters have been introduced at a steady pace, but starting with the sea monster invasion arc, over a dozen new A- and S-Class heroes are introduced.
• Loafing in Full Costume: Saitama has worn his costume while doing mundane things such as grocery shopping.
• Lost in Translation: Some jokes didn't translate that well to the western audiences due to cultural differences. For example, Saitama saying that he won't let the kid get killed due to Japan's declining birth rate might fly over the heads of western people.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Pri-Pri-Prisoner is one, however, he's so worried that he might end up assaulting someone that doesn't reciprocate his feelings that he resigned himself to being imprisoned when not superheroing around. As a result, he's said to inflict lots of black comedy rape to the inmates that he thinks deserve it.
• Lower-Deck Episode:
  • The 'Rumor' two-parter, focusing on an outside investigation into rumors about Saitama's neighborhood.
  • One special chapter features a B-Class hero who finds himself in over his head.
• Ludicrous Gibs: The end result of any suitably powerful blow, such as humans being struck by monsters or Saitama punching anything at all. The anime opening features Saitama with fist upraised, casually walking away from the rain of blood-soaked entrails that used to be a monster. He later punches a giant demon so hard in the fist that the demon's flesh vaporises off his body, leaving behind a flailing skeleton.

• Made of Iron:
  • Whatever training Saitama took didn't just make him insanely strong, but also gifted him with incredible endurance, so much so that hitting him can actually harm his opponent.
  • Hammerhead, the leader of the bald terrorist group, has an unusually thick skull which allows him to survive a lot of head trauma.
  • Super Alloy Darkshine's basically a lower-level Saitama in this regard.
• Magic Pants:
  • Played straight with Saitama's pajama pants when he fights the Subterraneans, although it is a dream sequence. It's later averted when Genos incinerates all of Saitama's clothing as collateral damage against Mosquito Girl.
  • Also averted with Puripuri Prisoner, who frequently ends up buck-naked.
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • After Genos' entire arm is ripped off, he only glances at it blankly for a moment before going back to his fight.
  • After his brush with Asura Rhino:
  Genos: That didn't work.
  Saitama: Dude, he cracked your face open!
• Me's a Crowd: The scientist who founded the House Of Evolution made numerous clones of himself to assist with research. They get turned into a Red Shirt Army.
  • Black Sperm
• Mile-Long Ship: The ship Boros and the Dark Matter Thieves arrive in is positively massive. According to Genos' notes, the ship is in excess of 15 kilometers long by 9 kilometers wide, and bristling with enough firepower to completely demolish City A (with the sole exception of the Hero Association Headquarters) in a single bombardment.
• Mistaken for Badass: King is a Fake Ultimate Hero who reached S-Rank by accidentally receiving credit for defeating various monsters(all of which were killed by Saitama). In reality he is a completely ordinary guy, but is too afraid to correct everyone's assumptions.
• Mistaken for Gay: When Saitama is informed that a scientist has 'taken a great interest in your body' (for experiments), he replies that he doesn't swing that way. Genos corrects him.
• Monstrosity Equals Weakness: Saitama claims that Garou has never been weaker after he changes into an even bigger mysterious being while trying to beat him, as opposed to the smaller more human monster he was before.
• Mook Horror Show:
  • Tends to happen to minor villains, especially the non-human ones, as once Saitama has committed to fighting them he doesn't let up until they're splattered across the city. The only mercy is that their horror tends to be brief.
  • Asura Rhino's experience when he senses how powerful Saitama is. All the more terrifying because Asura Rhino was indicated to be the most powerful being encountered so far (stronger than even the several-hundred-foot tall giant from an earlier issue), and has never feared anything in his life, but in seconds, he goes from being a Smug Super to screaming in fear and immediately breaking off his attack.
  All my instincts are screaming at me.. Get away from him! He's dangerous!
  • The crew aboard the spaceship that the Dark Matter Thieves arrive on Earth in get to witness this firsthand when Saitama manages to board their ship hovering well above the city. He single-handedly slaughters most of its crew, and damages large portions of their ship. And once he kills several of their elite fighters, it only further terrifies them. Similarly, Melgalzald gets a taste of this as well after the ship's Death from Above attack gets negated completely by Tatsumaki, who then proceeds to turn the shells around, and flings them back onto the alien ship.
• Mr. Fanservice: A number of male characters are walking eye-candy, predominantly Sonic or Garou, who regularly expose their beautifully sculpted bodies either because of their Form-Fitting Wardrobe and Clothing Damage.
• Ms. Fanservice: Among all the female characters, Fubuki is the one who gets the most exposure mainly through artworks outside of the story. Some female monsters also get to show off their curves.
• Mugging the Monster: Anyone that attacks Saitama out of the blue, not realizing that he's so far above them. On two separate occasions, 'Snake Fist' Sneck, Tanktops Black Hole, and Tiger try to bully or defame Saitama into quitting professional superhero work, only to quickly realize his insane power, which they all wrote off as a trick or joke, is completely real. Bang lampshades this as he observes Tiger and Black Hole's attempt. They could have gotten away with the attempt to shame Saitama (not that Saitama gives a damn), but Bang pretty much immediately declared that they were screwed the moment they attempted a newbie crushing.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Saitama can defeat anybody with a single punch. This means that should he deign to pull out such simple moves as a combo that anybody can master (The Normal Chain Punch, for example), better start praying for his opponent. Taken Up to Eleven when used in conjuncture with his 'Serious Series' moves, such as 'Serious Consecutive Side Hops' and 'Serious Table Flip'.
  • The two tasks which Saitama finds the most daunting? Swatting mosquitoes and finding a lost cat.
  • An entire faction of heroes, reaching all the way to S-Class, is dedicated to Tank Tops.
• Mundane Utility: Genos can use his blasters to dry off dishes. His heat sinks are rather good at dispersing heat from a hot-ramen eating contest as well.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Chyose from the tournament arc and his clan have been selectively breeding their genes for generations to make the strongest warriors. Once they teach the 'plebians' about their strength, they plan to continue getting stronger until they rule the world. Saitama tells him that they are basically doing the same thing as breeding corn. No matter how sweet you make it, corn is just corn. Saitama then beats the guy in 2 seconds.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: Despite his limitless strength and reflexes, Saitama still somehow has trouble with mosquitos. Though it's unlikely they could pose him any real threat, it's very convenient that Mosquito Girl decides to consolidate the power of her swarm into herself, giving him one human-sized target to aim at instead of millions of tiny ones.
• Ninja: 'Speed of Sound' Sonic.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction:
  • Despite how many battles he ends up fighting, the fact it only takes a single blow for Saitama to defeat any opponent has left him rather listless.
    Saitama: I became the hero I had always dreamed of being. But how can it be that, even though I should be satisfied, I feel so empty..?
    Saitama: Having overwhelming power is pretty boring..
  • Boros, leader of a group of space raiders, became bored with galactic conquering due to how easy it became. Saitama, however, finds the idea of rampaging across space just because you're bored moronic.
• No-Sell:
  • Thus far nothing has been able to harm Saitama; not even Boros or Garou were able to even bruise him. He doesn't even bother dodging most attacks because they won't do anything to him anyway. A comment from his fight with Genos implies that he generally only bothers to dodge to avoid having his uniform destroyed.
  • He's also incredibly resistant to psychic powers. Tatsumaki can only barely lift him a few feet off the ground (she was injured, but nothing has given her any trouble before).
  • Happens to Genos when he underestimates his enemy. Asura Rhino defeats his Incinerate attack by just exhaling.
• Noble Demon: Garou to a tee, oddly enough, being that he doesn't take to nor condone underhanded tactics, engage in mass slaughter other Mysterious Beings are known for and act more or less as a fair and honorable combatant. Also he didn't take too kindly to a sleazy Hero's Association coordinator using his questionable ties to certain celebrity personnel in order to hit on some groupies as said corporate lowlife can attest.
• Nominal Hero: In-Universe, the term 'hero' is not used in the traditional sense anymore and designates someone from the Hero Association. Consequently, every hero known so far is technically a Nominal Hero by virtue of being Punch Clock Heroes. In fact a good chunk of the low-level heroes from the association are nothing more than glory-hogs seeking to look good. Others like Genos or Amai Mask seek revenge against the monsters; Superalloy Darkshine wants to feel good about himself; King was forcibly drafted into the association; Terrible Tornado simply enjoys slaughtering monsters.
  • Saitama is the best example since he is a hero for a hobby. Although he is a decent man, he explicitly only wants to fight monsters, having no interest in saving civilians or actively stopping the threat of the monsters. He in fact slacks off his duty as a hero, only doing the minimum required to stay active.
• Non-Powered Costumed Hero: Many of the lower-class registered heroes seem to have no superhuman powers at all, Licenseless Rider being the most obvious example (although his powers may have been overshadowed by the supervillains he faced).
• Non-Standard Character Design: Normally, Saitama looks like he's drawn very simply, in comparison to the detailed designs of everything around him. Sometimes he shifts to a more serious-looking action style.
• Not Quite Flight: Saitama can't fly, but as his jump distance is effectively limitless (he can even jump between the earth and moon), he might as well. However, he generally runs to his destinations when he's in a hurry.
• Not So Different:
  • Saitama has a brief moment of this after seeing Hammerhead do the same ridiculous windmill attack (spinning his arms) that he used to do as a kid.
  • Happens during his fight with Boros who, like him, became the most powerful being on his planet and lost interest in life. Saitama would SURELY NOT find an end to his boredom in destroying other planets.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Hammerhead and his followers claim to be going on a rampage against the wealthy and powerful because of the corruption of the wealthy, but in reality most of them, especially Hammerhead, simply don't want to have to really work for a living. Hammerhead changes his ways after most of his followers are killed by the bloodthirsty ninja Sonic (an encounter that Hammerhead himself barely survives), and he is spared by Saitama.
• Now, That's Using Your Teeth!: Can muscle training do this much? Really?
• Off with His Head!: Sonic's favourite method of attack. 'Why is everyone collapsing all of a suddennnnnnnnnnnnn..'◊
• Offhand Backhand: To a giant bug that had just mopped the floor with 5 registered heroes.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: It's not rare with Saitama. A major example: toward the end of the Tournament arc Gouketsu is introduced, a giant Dragon-level monster who gets a lot of build-up and seems a future Arc Villain. Saitama effortlessly obliterates him off-screen, just like nearly every opponent he faces; only his head is left.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Asura Rhino, who is the first villain to be able to accurately gauge Saitama's power. Before doing so, he was supremely confident in his invincibility, but then his survival instinct kicks in.
    • In the same part Saitama suffers a massive one when Asura Rhino enters Carnage Mode for a week, due to the fact of having forgotten that day was Saturday and he was missing grocery deals, thus he one-punched Asura in regret of having forgotten that.
  • Also, anything rated threat level Demon tends to cause a Mass 'Oh, Crap!' for everyone in the city.
  • The previously smug superhero candidates suffer a collective one when they realise just how powerful Saitama is.
  • After being hurt by Watchdogman and attacked by a group of A and B class heroes, Garou is about to go tend to his wounds when suddenly Genos lands behind him intent on killing him.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: While the Blizzard Group's out earning money to get a decent car, Blizzard returns with one-third of the amount in a short amount of time while the rest of the group are scraping by with their part-time work. After they question how she was able to do such a thing her dialogue makes it sound like she prostituted herself, until she explains she was capturing criminals for their bounties. Then it's revealed this is what she originally ordered her group to do in the first place, but they mistook her order as being to get part time work.
• One-Hit Kill: This is the premise of the story and basically Saitama's super power. He's so ridiculously strong that he can kill anything in one punch, even when he's holding back.
• One-Winged Angel: Several monsters have a transformation that they use when someone presents them with a challenge. Generally these make them both more monstrous in appearance(thus less human and easier to justify killing) and substantially more dangerous:
  • Mosquito Girls starts out mostly humanoid with various insect features. After absorbing her mosquito swarm, she Turns Red and retains her human features while the insect ones become more pronounced.
  • Carnage Kabuto starts as a combination of a man and a giant rhinoceros beetle. When he enters 'carnage mode' his coloration changes from fleshy to green and purple and his face becomes more demonic.
  • The Sea King is first seen as a fish man wearing various royal regalia. When it starts to rain, the atmospheric moisture allows him to bulk up, becoming considerably more fishlike.
  • Boros is humanoid with alien coloring and one eye. While fighting Saitama he goes through several transformations that each make him larger and more alien in appearance.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Most professional heroes get this treatment given just how ineffectual they can be against monsters that the higher ranks or Saitama can obliterate without breaking a sweat.
• Parody Sue:
  • Saitama, especially early on, is a parody of the God-Mode Sue, being too powerful in comparison to those he faces. However, it's shown that he's incredibly disillusioned by his immense power and values finding a Worthy Opponent over really being heroic. As the story moves on, he starts to lose his Sue status thanks to being forced to fight seriously on a couple occasions, although even that is described in-universe as him barely trying. Depending on the reader, he may gain more traditional Sue attributes due to becoming more like the Ideal Hero.
  • Most other traditional Sue elements get handed to Genos. He's handsome, rich, popular, talented, makes his hero debut as class S at age 19, broods and talks at length about his Dark and Troubled Past, and gets away with causing a lot of damage to his surroundings. What puts him on the parody spectrum is that for everything he has going for him, he's usually the one getting his ass kicked, primarily due to his own recklessness.
  • Garou is a parody of Villain Sue, being an unstoppable force that keeps getting more powerful with no real explanation and trounces everyone until Saitama comes along. However, his status as the most powerful antagonist faced yet is effectively neutered due to how he's never killed anyone besides monsters and was never planning on it. Garou was never an actual threat and halfassed trying to be a villain.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Any individual rated threat level Demon or above qualifies for this; Demon-level threats threaten an entire city, Dragon-level threats threaten multiple cities, and God-level threats threaten all of mankind.
  • Genos is sometimes this, blowing up large buildings with his Arm Cannon early on at the drop of a hat. Tornado of Terror also manages this by way of her namesake Psychic Powers. She's even destroyed Saitama's house just lifting the Monster Association out from under the ground.
  • Saitama. His punches completely destroy monsters, leave massive holes in buildings, and are strong enough to destroy meteorites that a Macross Missile Massacre and Genos' Wave Motion Gun failed to damage.
• Petting Zoo People: The members of the House Of Evolution are all these, including a mosquito, a lion, a slug, a frog, a mole, and a cyborg gorilla.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The amount of heroes who actually behave like superheroes is very low. Silverfang at one point bemoans how many of the S-Class heroes are Power Level obsessed and don't act at all heroic after Tornado ends up scrapping Genos over a petty insult, and Licenseless Rider ends up holding top rank in the C-Class heroes despite being an unpowered Muggle because he's actually willing to act superheroic.
• Police are Useless: Zigzagged and Discussed. In a side chapter in the redraw, Saitama is brought into a police station by officers suspicious of him (e.g. out wandering around during a working day, blood on his hands, living alone in an abandoned area) and because he vaguely resembles an image of a criminal in the area. Despite this the officers are shown to be Reasonable Authority Figures who remain professional despite their clear suspicion, and during their questioning the chief laments how the police are now effectively seen as this due to the flashier and cooler Hero Association overshadowing them in the public’s eye despite all the legitimate work they do for society. It’s later shown that while the police are in fact no match for threats at Demon level and above, their criticisms of the Hero Association as corrupt Glory Seekers aren’t unfounded and the chief later admits that Saitama was a true hero after he defeated the monster and let the police have the credit to prevent them from being humiliated in the public eye.
• Power at a Price: Played with; when he reappears later on, the head of the House of Evolution says that Saitama's power came at a great price.. he became bald. Immediately afterwards, though, he plays it straight, indicating that as he sees it the real price of Saitama's power is the way it has alienated him from the rest of humanity.
• Power Levels: Of a sort, for both heroes and villains. Registered heroes rank in four groups (C-Class, B-Class, A-Class, and S-Class), and have numerical ranks within those. These are of course not accurate measures of their strengths as, after registering, Saitama starts out at a low point in C-Class despite having set records in every physical test. Most human villains seem to be ranked similarly, at least as far as the class system goes. Monsters meanwhile are measured with 'Disaster Levels', which denote their power in terms of scope of possible destructive capacity (Wolf, for unknown; Tiger, threat to an unspecified large number of human lives; Demon, threat to a whole city or its functionality; Dragon, threat to multiple cities; God, threat to humanity).
  • A special chapter has Child Emperor create a device that can calculate a person's physical strength numerically. As a benchmark, the average C-Class such as Red Muffler was 100. B-Classes like Darkness Blade were several hundred, A-Classes like Stinger and Great Philosopher were over 1000, a regular human was 22, a bear was 905 and a Demon-level monster was 6999. The device can't give readings for people who are weaker than an average person. It also can't read Genos since he's mostly mechanical and when it tries to read Saitama it breaks and can't give a reading, leading Child Emperor to assume he's out of shape (while assuming the same result from King means his power exceeds 9999). Fubuki's psychic powers also can't be quantified (she comes in at 19 physically, regular human level), Child Emperor concluding that the device is pointless.
• Power Makes Your Hair Grow: Inverted. Saitama's training made all his hair fall out.
  • Boros plays this straight, however. His hair grows longer and longer until his hair is identical to a Super Saiyan 3's hair.
• Prophecy Twist: Boros came to Earth because a seer told him the planet would have an opponent that would rekindle his love of battle. The seer never said he'd win.
• Punch-Clock Hero: Saitama mentions that he doesn't really believe his heroics will have much of an effect upon the world and he only does them because they bring him excitement. At least, they used to.
• Pursue the Dream Job: Saitama quit being a run-of-the-mill salaryman and trained for three years so he could take up superheroism as a hobby.

• Real Place Background: Apparently, Saitama's ◊apartment◊ does exist somewhere within Saitama Prefecture. City Z is in fact based on locations within the Saitama Prefecture. Even the whole continent is the shape of Saitama Prefecture!
• Reality Ensues
  • Being a hero doesn't mean you can neglect daily necessities, such as buying groceries and taking a piss.
  • Cracking a giant meteor with a single punch? Awesome. Its falling debris destroying the city? Not so much. It's also sadly true that real life heroes can end up blamed for their actions, such as doctors being sued for trying and failing to save someone injured in front of them or crowds turning on firefighters who saved lives but not property.
  • When Mumen Rider takes on the Deep Sea King, Rider has a sudden burst of Heroic Second Wind, complete with a 'World of Cardboard' Speech that drips of Heroic Resolve, and even gets a crowd cheering him on. Deep Sea King still flattens Rider with one hit. However, this actually makes it even more heroic given that he's perfectly aware that he doesn't have a chance and is trying to do the right thing anyway, even if it kills him, and his actions ultimately help buy time for Saitama to arrive.
  • The series as a whole showcases just how much damage a superpowered being could really cause when he's not following a comic code.
  • The anime adaptation of Boros' ship destroying A-City includes a scene of a memorial for those who weren't lucky enough to survive the attack.
  • Being the strongest man in the world isn't all it's cracked up to be. Being able to win any fight with no effort or challenge has left Saitama bored and depressed. He's so impossibly powerful that nobody believes it at first either.
  • Saitama assumes that people have heard of him given all the monsters he's beaten. Being a Humble Hero who never took credit for his actions, lives in a deserted city and isn't part of the official Heroes Association, this is far from the case.
  • Darkness Blade's Impossibly Cool Clothes are at times a hindrance; due to his Spikes of Villainy, he accidentally stabbed himself in the face when raising his arm too high.
  • A group of monsters think they have an advantage on Flashy Flash due to the narrow corridors limiting his ability to maneuver. However, given that he's still orders of magnitude faster than them and has no problem killing, he stabs them all in the head before they even finish talking.
• 'The Reason You Suck' Speech:
  • Garou delivers these to the S-Class heroes after curb stomping them.
  • Saitama delivers one to Garou, calling him out on being just a jaded cynic who wanted to be a hero but couldn't, so he instead chose to 'lower the hurdle right before the goal' and become a monster instead. Saitama calls Garou out on this mindset, especially when Garou loses to him, ending with an Armor-Piercing Question: 'what about next time? What will you do next?'
• Relax-o-Vision: Used in Chapter 15. After a particularly painful attack, the scene cuts to the words 'Please wait a moment' over a picture of Ghibli Hills.
• Resurrective Immortality: Zombieman, whose power is that he can't die at all and will regenerate no matter how many wounds he gets.
• Ridiculously Average Guy: Were it not for Saitama's baldness, he'd have no distinguishing features whatsoever, but at the same time, his baldness makes him even more nondescript.
• Ring.. Ring.. CRUNCH: In the first episode, Saitama shuts off his alarm clock by casually slapping it with enough force to send it through his floor.
• Robo Speak: Armoured Gorilla talks like this at first, but drops it after he's defeated and admits he was only trying to sound cool.
• Running Gag:
  • People mistakenly thinking Saitama would desperately want his hair back or being generally tactless about the subject of his baldness.
  • Genos losing at least one limb in a fight.
  • Kids calling Saitama (who's 25) 'uncle', which he bitterly denies.
  • Saitama and Sonic having a duel? It's somehow gonna end with Sonic getting humiliated.
• Scene Transition: Several of the manga chapters are just one scene drawn out over a dozen or so pages, with scenes flowing into each other so fluidly that you could make an animation out of them.
• Scenery Censor: Saitama ends up naked after Genos accidentally incinerates his clothes. Thankfully a little smoke and, after, a street sign cover his genitals.
  • There are also some convenient clouds during Beefcake's stroll between cities.
• Scenery Gorn: A good deal of artwork is spent showing how utterly ruined the surroundings are after any significant fight.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!:
  • After seeing Saitama's amazing performance in the Hero Association's physical exams, one of the other entrants flatly declares, 'I'm going home.'
  • Sonic's reaction to Puri-Puri Prisoner's Angel Mode.
  Sonic: '..He's naked. And he's definitely no angel. Nor is he human. Nor do I want to watch. I'm out.'
  Puri-Puri Prisoner: 'No one has ever seen my Angel Mode and lived to tell about it.'
  Sonic:'All the more reason to leave.'
• Serial Escalation: Saitama's fight with Boros. It starts with the latter surviving one of Saitama's punches, followed by Boros getting his arm punched off, healing it back, going into his Super Form, kicking Saitama to the moon, Saitama jumping back, the two of them exchanging combo attacks, Boros regenerating from a splatter of pulp, and finally firing a massive Kamehame Hadouken which Saitama deflects with his first 'Serious Punch'.
• 'Shaggy Dog' Story: The subterranean chapter, which has Saitama finally meet a Worthy Opponent in an epic battle. Then he wakes up. While the subterraneans do exist, and he encounters them soon after, they're far less impressive than in his dream.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: This is the fate of almost every villain in the story.
• Shout-Out:
  • To the Shounen and Tokusatsu stories it mocks.
  • Several to Anpanman: in Japanese the titles are similar (Onepanman/Wanpanman), Saitama's costume is based on Anpanman's, and the name of the series' first villain, Vaccine Man, riffs on Baikinman ('Germ Man'), Anpanman's main villain. A 2019 anime special even has Keiko Toda, the narrator of the adaptation, do the narration for Saitama's adventures.
  • Vaccine Man also looks a lot like Piccolo.
    • He's even voiced by Christopher Sabat in the English dub.
  • Smile Man has a uncanny resemblance to El Chapulín Colorado, of all things. He even has a hammer as a weapon and similar costume. His brothers, Angry Man and Crying Man, share this design.
  • The cover page to chapter 3 features a suspiciously Godzilla-like kaiju.
  • Genos' backstory is similar to several Kamen Riders, especially those of the Showa Era. There's also the Licenseless Rider, who rides a bicycle to battle. His hero name in Japanese — Mumen Rider — is another pun on Kamen Riders.
  • The anime adds one: Asura Rhino's Asura Mode transformation is colored purple with green lines, much like Eva-01. For bonus points, it's also an out-of-control berserker mode.
  • One monster is a ginormous insect with a human face in the middle of its insect head, and one of the heroes who shows up to fight it is a scarred swordsman clothed all in black. Unlike Guts, he gets his ass handed to him.
  • Episode 5 has a nod to Dragon Ball Z, with Saitama destroying the punching machine à la Vegeta.
  • In the anime rendition of Puri-Puri Prisoner's fight with Sea King, the sequence when initiating Angel Style bears a very strong resemblance to Sailor Moon's Transformation Sequence. Minus the part where a battle suit appears.. but not minus the part where his original clothes disappear.
  • The title pages of several manga chapters contain Shout Outs. Chapter 6's has 'I'm gonna change' (Cutey Honey's Catchphrase) while Chapter 13's has 'Aku Soku Zan' (Hajime Saito's motto).
  • In Episode 9 of the anime, Genos enters his fight against the Deep Sea King in a way that looks suspiciously similar to Mega Man◊.
  • Episode 10 of the anime sees Tatsumaki fighting another suspiciously Godzilla-like kaiju.
  • One of the crew of Boros' ship is a Prawn.
  • The entire sixth special (where the plot is about the murder of Zombieman) to Detective Conan: Child Emperor acts like Conan Edogawa (well, both have the same seiyuu).
  • During the Martial Arts Tournament arc, while Saitama is inspecting the contestant roster you may notice a contestant by the name of Rossie, who fights under the 'psycho-analysis style'.
  • In Chapter 39, the part of the robot face seen underneath Genos' face-skin looks an awful lot like a Terminator.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: After landing a hit on Saitama, Boros takes a break to gloat about his superior regenerative power that should eventually grant him victory. Saitama interrupts him, clearly showing that he's neither fazed by the blow nor impressed by the talk.
  • Again when Saitama fights Orochi. He starts to introduce himself as the all powerful pinnacle of monster evolution and Saitama tells him he's heard it countless times before.
• Strong and Skilled: Garou has an incredible amount of power and speed, but supplements his raw power with the ability to analyze his opponent's fighting style through observation and develop a counter style that negates all of his opponent's attacks.
• Slasher Smile: Sonic is often sporting one, which he refers to as a bad habit.
  Saitama:You just want to try your techniques on me. I can tell by that child-like smile on your face.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Leaning more towards the idealistic end.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: Referenced in the show itself with the 'Disaster levels'. Wolf level is only a potential threat. Tiger is Personal, Demon is City, Dragon is everything above City until Global, which is designated as God level. The series itself plays with this, though, as the first monster encountered in the manga, Vaccine Man, is a dragon level threat, the second highest. Another one of these doesn't appear until 10 chapters later.
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • The Tank Topper Army has a single female, Tank Top Girl.
  • Ring-Ring is the only female participant of the Tournament Arc.
• The Social Darwinist: The House Of Evolution was made for the purpose of evolving humans beyond their current limits, since the genius creator found everyone he met to be inferior to him. He gives up when he meets Saitama, an ordinary man who surpassed his limits with sheer determination alone.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Played with like most typical Shonen tropes. The day to day monster and villain attacks vary greatly in threat level, but the monsters fought at the end of their respective sagas seem to legitimately increase in power as time goes by:
  • The Subterranean King, failing to live up to the one in Saitama's dream, comes across as rather weak and is unceremoniously dealt a One-Hit KO (though, since he didn't get a chance to do anything, it's possible he was stronger than he looked).
  • Asura Rhino gets a greater build up, being talked up as the House of Evolution's best fighter and defeating Genos without going One-Winged Angel, but is still killed with one punch.
  • The Deep Sea King tears through a number of heroes, including S-Classes Puri-Puri-Prisoner and Genos, before being killed with one punch. A subversion because Deep Sea King was far weaker than some of the earlier monsters, including the aformentioned Asura Rhino. Deep Sea King was only pitted against the weaker heroes first (Puri-Puri-Prisoner and Genos is also among the weakest of S-Classes) before getting killed by Saitama.
  • Boros is the first to survive one of Saitama's normal punches, and even his Consecutive Normal Punches, and is also the first opponent to get Saitama to use a 'Serious Series' attack. The next monster of course gets killed in a single punch.
  • Gouketsu, the last monster fought by Saitama at the end of the Tournament Arc, gets defeated offscreen, not leaving much room to compare him to previous villains. He probably subverts this though; considering how little time it took for him to be defeated, it's likely he only took one punch.
  • Garou ends up being a Double Subversion. While he starts out much weaker than Boros, getting knocked out on three separate occasions by nonchalant singular attacks, he grows stronger after every fight, culminating in him becoming a 'Perfect Monster' able to continue fighting even after taking a direct Serious Series attack.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The ending song. It's a cheery romantic song in contrast to the heavy metal opening and rock soundtrack.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
  • Done deliberately in group artwork, where Saitama is often pushed to the side and cooler-looking characters like Genos are made the most immediately noticeable.
  • A good example is the Volume 2 cover◊, which consists of Genos looking good in the foreground and Saitama crammed into the corner, looking stupid.
  • Invoked in-universe where people tend to attribute Saitama's victories to the other, more appealing, heroes around him, leading to situations like King having all the fame Saitama should have while everyone thinks Saitama is a fraud.
• Status Quo Is God: Saitama is actually disappointed that his hair fell out. However, whenever Genos points out that Dr. Stench can easily replace it for him, he refuses.. for some reason. It's never explained.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: In the Boros attack, it’s revealed by Mr. Exposition that the building is made of the strongest stuff there is. The next time Genos turns to Saitama, Saitama has already left the building BY JUMPING THROUGH THE CEILINGto go fight the aliens. The anime adaptation shows that this made no detectable sound.
• Stylistic Suck: The crude art of the original webcomic is deliberate. ONE can draw very well when he wants to.
  • In both the webcomic and the manga, Saitama in particular is generally drawn in a much more simplistic, lower-quality style than everyone else to reflect his utter disenchantment and laziness.
  • Tatsumaki is no slouch in this department either, regularly being drawn in a manner befitting her usual behaviour.
• Super Registration Act: Subverted. Supers are not required to register in the National Superhero Registry, but unregistered heroes are not taken seriously by the general public. Only registered members receive fame and fortune for what they do; those that don't sign up are pretty much just costumed lunatics in the public eye. Saitama starts out as a 'hero for fun' who was blissfully unaware that registration was even a thing (somehow) and does not start receiving any form of public recognition for his acts of heroism until well after he has already prevented several potentially city-destroying incidents.
• Superhero Prevalence Stages: The prologue of the story starts in the Early stages of superheroes, when there's not that many and they're disorganized. The leap forward into the actual story shows a world in the Late stage where there's dozens of superheroes, a governing body controlling them, and villains whose sole goals are to challenge the heroes' authority.
• Taking You with Me: Subverted. Genos primes his self destruct as Mosquito Girl is about to kill him, hoping to take her out in the blast. Saitama splatters her across the wall right before Genos blows up, removing the need.
• 'Test Your Strength' Game: One of the gags during the hero exams involves a punching a machine to test strength. Saitama doesn't hold back and sends it crashing into a wall.
• Teach Me How To Fight: The already ridiculously strong cyborg Genos starts following Saitama around, calling him 'sensei', and asking to become stronger. When Saitama tells him how he achieved his current strength, however, Genos is kinda disappointed.
  • Suiryu also asks to become Saitama's student after seeing him beat Gouketsu. He was rejected.
• The Force Is Strong with This One: A few characters occasionally show the ability to detect 'energy levels' of powerful beings, allowing them to determine their locations and threat levels. Some, like Genos, use mechanical means of detection, whereas others are completely biological and can still sense it. Almost no one reacts to Saitama's power level, suggesting it might just be too high to detect.
• Theme Music Power-Up: The anime has an uplifting battle theme that is played not just for the heroes, but also for some villains' hopeless but determined struggles against Saitama. Licenseless Rider gets a solemn Dark Reprise of this theme when he challenges the Sea King.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Just one punch leads to death and dismemberment, which is often accompanied by a look of mind-numbing boredom from Saitama.
• Too Dumb to Live: Sneck hears that the new C-Class hero he had been berating was only C-Class due to an appalling written test score and that he had gotten a perfect score in the physical exam by a ludicrous margin. Sneck decides to 'Rookie Crush' this newbie to keep him from getting cocky. Saitama promptly destroys him. He's not the only one dumb enough to try such half-baked stupidity where the jerks in question realized too late that was a really, really, really dumb idea.
• Training from Hell: Parodied. Saitama does 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, and 10 kilometers of running every single day with no breaks. Said training was what caused him to go completely bald. ^note
• Tournament Arc: Saitama joins a martial arts tournament disguised as Charanko using a wig.
• A Twinkle in the Sky: Mosquito Girl is slapped aside by Saitama and dies from it, most likely because she was knocked through at least one building in the process.

One Punch Man Season 2 Episode 9

• Un-Confession: Played with. It first seemed that King's confession that he's just a normal human might get drowned out by the sound of the crow monster's deafening cries, but Saitama actually heard everything.
• Underestimating Badassery: Any time Saitama gets in a fight, he's dismissed as a weakling, either due to his rank or his unassuming appearance. Most don't live to regret that, and the few that do know not to mess with him from then on (except 'Speed-O'-Sound' Sonic, who just won't let it go).
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • Despite Saitama's heroic efforts of destroying the gigantic meteor and dividing it into smaller pieces just so the city would not be totally destroyed, a lot of the Z-City citizens are pissed, at first because they think he was just taking credit from the S-Class heroes who couldn't destroy it, and then when it's established that he did destroy the meteor, they're mad because of the damage its debris caused. However, he does counter with his very own awesome 'World of Cardboard' Speech.
  • Played straight when he defeats the Sea King. One prick in the crowd of people he saved claims that since he defeated the monster so easily, it couldn't have been that strong and the heroes who failed to beat it were just weak. Saitama turns this around by claiming the other heroes had weakened the monster enough for him to kill it and he could steal all the credit for finishing it off. This causes everyone to think he was faking again and the other heroes would get the credit.
• Unlikely Hero: Though the decision to become a hero was Saitama's own, his main motivation seems to be boredom and he often gets frustrated by the ridiculous situations he finds himself in. Consider how most heroes start their stories. Most of them were for revenge or to get acceptance.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Saitama wears a bright jumpsuit and a cape while Genos is a cyborg with black sclerae and robotic arms, yet no one bats an eye at them. In fact, Genos can mingle with a crowd without being found out. Justified, as the Hero Association exists and there are costume wearing heroes so people are used to seeing this kind of thing.
  • Deconstructed with Saitama. He barely even acknowledges a monster before or after he kills it and, most of the time, even forgets about it completely. Because of this, he doesn't report in his heroism to the Hero Association, leading to one of the main reasons he is still at such a low rank.
• Unwitting Pawn: During the Hero Killer arc, the eponymous Hero Killer Garou meets a kid who loves heroes and pretends to be a fellow fan in order to get information on where he can find certain heroes.
• Up to Eleven: Saitama's strength training is absurdly simplistic and played for laughs, but it prepared him to defeat skyscraper-sized monsters with less effort than Superman does.. somehow. The other characters who have heard his explanation comment on how flat-out impossible his strength is when compared to what he claims to have done.
  • Not simply his strength, but his speed is so far beyond super-human, it is ridiculous. During the first confrontation with 'Speed of Sound' Sonic, Sonic spends half a chapter trying to intimidate Saitama by ricocheting randomly off the trees around him at superhuman speed. When Sonic asks if he can even see him, Saitama instantly turns his head towards him (with a disturbingly motion-blurred face) to ask if he can go home now.
  • Equally Saitama is lazy beyond anything seen in a shonen, to the point where half the time, the artist can't even be bothered with shading him in.
  • Happens literally in the fight against the Sea King. Ten fighters — Stinger, Lightning Max, Puri-Puri Prisoner, Speed of Sound Sonic, Jet Nice Guy, All Back-man, Buzz-Buzz Man, 'Snake Fist' Sneck, Genos, and Mumen Rider — are all beaten until the 11th fighter, Saitama, comes by and one-shots the beast.
• Vagueness Is Coming: 'The Earth is in trouble!!!', according to a fortune teller with a 100% track record for accuracy. Essentially, the greatest disaster of the age is due to strike before the year is out. However, since Shibabawa died before she could elaborate on said 'trouble', nobody actually knows what it is or when exactly it'll happen.
• Villainous BSoD: Garou seems to have one of these after being defeated by Saitama.
• Wall of Text:
  • Genos' backstory is delivered this way as a joke. Ever wonder what an origin story sounds like without a flashback? Now you know.
  Saitama: YOU IDIOT!!! TELL IT AGAIN IN 20 WORDS OR LESS!!!
  • We get another one explaining the National Superhero Registry, presumably also provided by Genos for Saitama's benefit.
• War Memorial: A giant monument with the names of the victims from the alien attack on City A is shown right as the credits roll for the final episode of the first season.
• Wham Episode: In Chapter 107 of the webcomic, on the downside, after the Garou incident, the Hero Association has lost faith from the public, Saitama unintentionally damaged the reputation of Metal Knight (by destroying his defenses he built for the Hero Association) and Tatsumaki (his fight with her did serious damage to the cities they fought in causing complaints about her), so now the Hero Association will increase their surveillance on them, several heroes are retiring, including Bang, and Child Emperor gained a distrust for the adults in the Hero Association. On the upside, Fubuki finally decides to move up to A-Class and Zombieman wants Dr. Genus' help to remove his limiter.
• Wham Shot: Episode 11 of the anime, when it's shown that Boros didn't die after one punch from Saitama. A lot of jaws hit the floor at that point, at least among people who hadn't read the webcomic or the manga version yet.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Saitama never hesitates to kill monsters — even one that was running away — regardless of intelligence, yet he lets human criminals live, including a guy who killed a whole building full of people for no reason. This later becomes a major element of the Garou plot arc, as he's a human who thinks it's unfair that the heroes always win and the monsters always lose. He ends up following the trope to a T anyway, which is why both the monsters and Saitama refuse to consider him an actual monster.
  • It should be noted that one major element of the series is that many monsters start off human and then become monsters usually due to some sort of obsession. The idea seems to be that these kinds of monsters are Always Chaotic Evil but if the monstrous form can be shed, such as with Psykos or Garou, then they were just 'playing monster' and can be redeemed.
  • It should also be noted that Saitama doesn't kill anything that hasn't seemed to kill anyone or if they are like him in a way that he deems them redeemable. For example, he let the kelp monster escape perhaps because he didn't actually kill the two A-Class heroes that he fought and was simply looking for a good fight. He also didn't kill Hammerhead despite him having his men punch down a skyscraper ^note , but he may not have known about that. We do know that Saitama spared him because he saw Hammerhead as the type of person he could have been if he took the wrong path. He was also going to let the Beast King and his buddies live if they apologized, but the Beast King murdered two of his allies and the Demon Mole retreated without saying sorry so he took both of them down. He ended up sparing their ally, the cyborg gorilla, because he apologized and answered his questions.
  • Additionally, we also do not know exactly what happened with Ground Dragon (the monster that was running away) once Saitama caught him. It is also implied (in one of the specials) that Saitama is not particularly good at incapacitating things without killing them (in that same special, he gave a monster the opportunity to 'spit out' his teammates before attacking him), and this would be especially difficult with monsters because he does not know how much force he needs to use in order to damage them. The humans that he fights are mostly people who are attacking him specifically because they are jerks or bullies, or want a fight (e.g. members of the Heroes' Association, Sonic) whereas the monsters he kills are deliberately trying to indiscriminately murder civilians.
  • Played for drama with Handsome Kamen Amai Mask, who feels no remorse for anything that either resembles a monster or identifies as a monster, ruthlessly executing unarmed aliens and a rampaging caveman the association wanted him to bring back alive, as well as demanding that Garou not be left alive even after he'd reverted back to human, claiming them all to be 'evil' and describing his own actions as 'justice' because of this. And then it's recently been shown that Handsome Mask is perfectly fine with killing brainwashed humans that he knows are brainwashed, too, showing that Handsome Mask won't hold anyone up as a measure if they get in his way.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer..: Most of the S-Class heroes are only really good at cutting/bludgeoning/punching stuff, so even when some of them encounter a Blob Monster, they're stuck futilely doing their thing because the literally only other option would be to stop fighting it. At least until Metal Bat discovers its weak point, allowing them to eventually harm it in a meaningful way. Saitama also falls into this category, of course, though the fact his metaphorical hammer would make the Goldion Crusher look like a rubber mallet tends to make up for it.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Several of these in the manga, exploring Saitama's life before the story began.
• Worf Barrage:
  • Several heroes do this against the current Monster of the Week, only for it to either do no damage, or the bad guy has a Healing Factor which negates everything they just dished out.
  • The bad guys are also subjected to this when fighting Saitama, only for their own attacks to barely do anything to him. For example, attacks from the Sea King that seriously injured several heroes earlier barely move his head.
  • Hilariously parodied when Saitama is unable to kill a single mosquito despite slapping and hitting it several times. He then manages to kill their queen with a simple slap when she was about to finish off Genos.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Virtually every hero and villain gets Worfed. A is beat by B, who is beat by C, etc etc in a continually escalating battle of badassitude, and whoever is the mightiest gets to be one-punched.
  • Genos, despite being considered very powerful by a lot of characters, tends to be defeated quite easily by named villains. While normally this would serve the purpose of demonstrating how strong said villain is, and thus a potential worthy opponent for The Hero, Saitama knows better.
  • The Sky King attacks the Heroes' Association headquarters, referencing the Underground King (18 pages) and the Sea King (200 pages), implying that this is the beginning of an arc. Total time until he's Worfed? 7 pages.
• World of Badass: Superheroes are incredibly common here, so much so that no one acts surprised when insanely strong guys in silly costumes turn up day after day to battle the forces of evil. However, while there are a lot of 'heroes' in this country, most of them are not at 'heroic' level. C- to B-Class heroes handle threats that most soldiers/policemen can handle. Most of the threats that currently come into the world are usually impossible to handle unless it's by an A- or S-Class hero and even they are sometimes not enough.
• 'World of Cardboard' Speech: A very effective example is done by Licenseless Rider, when he's in a hopeless fight against the Sea King.
  Licenseless Rider: No one expects much from me.. They think a C-Class hero won't be much help. I know that better than anyone. I'm not good enough for Class B. I'm weak. I know that much. No one has to tell me I have no chance of beating you. I already.. know that! And yet, I must try. It's not about winning or losing! It's about me taking you on right here, right now!
• World of Jerkass: To a T. Aside from several Ungrateful Bastards among civilians, there are only a few amount of legitimate heroes that you can count on your hands. The others are egotistical jerks who are slaves to their public image, another top-ranked hero who is willing to kill any monster even if they surrender, and the second strongest hero who is a Bratty Half-Pint who uses her Psychic Powers to bully and intimidate anyone she views as weak and/or annoying. And even Saitama, who is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, has a constant 'meh' attitude that irritates people In-Universe to high heaven.

• You Killed My Father: Genos is looking for the cyborg who killed his family and damaged him enough so that he became a cyborg himself to survive.
• Zero-Approval Gambit:
  • Saitama invokes this by claiming that the only reason he defeated The Sea King was because all the other heroes risked their lives to weaken it and that being the one to deliver the Coup de Grâce would ensure that he got all the credit.
  • This also turns out to be the intention of Garou. His plan being to become the greatest monster the world had ever known so he would put an end to all conflict by being a common threat to the entire world. That's what he claims, anyway. His discussion with Saitama implies his real motivation was to force a real hero to emerge to stop him.

One-Punch Man.

Saitama is unstoppable and is all the more miserable for it.

Example of:
Invincible Hero