Whenever the topic of a conversation is the shonen anime villains, the antagonists from theOne-Punch Manseries deserve to make it to the conversation asOne-Punch Manhas some of the finest villains for recent shonen anime franchises. What makes the villains in theOPMseries amazing are their unique character traits and strength. The villains play a crucial role in the story ofOPMas the series revolves around a rookie hero Saitama who is insanely strong and is leading a life of boredom as he is unable to find an opponent who could match his strength and give him a decent fight.
OPMfound two of its biggest villains yet in Boros and Garou. Although two of them both arethe biggest villains in the series, theOPMfandom gets divided between the two with both factions upholding the supremacy of whom they consider best between the two. Fans have been hyping up Garou since he has gone through a recent power upgrade which has given him a new and more powerful form called Cosmic Garou. Even after all this, Garou still fails to surpass Boros in terms of being the best villain in theOPMso far.
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The Villain Trope
The main factor that contributes to the Boros being a better villain than Garou isthe variation in the villain tropesused for the two of them. The villain trope used for Garou’s character is the same one that is being heavily overused in the recent anime. The trope of a villain with a traumatic or damaging past is the one used for Garou, it is a quite self-explainable trope as it refers to a villain trope that describes the wrongdoings or evil deeds of a villain by giving the audience a glimpse into their traumatic past where they got hurt emotionally or physically or both. Garou deeply hates the Hero Association and the heroesbecause of the trauma he sufferedin his childhood.
As a child, Garou did not have any friends, and the popular children at his school used to abuse him both physically and verbally. They forced him to play a game called heroes where they always made him a villain and Tacchan, the boy who played hero beat him up. Everyone liked Tacchan and hated Garou because of this Garou developed a deep hatred for the heroes and popular people as he started believing that the popular ones always win in the end. Hence,Garou became a self-proclaimed hero-hunterand began killing the low-ranking heroes and eventually going for the high-ranking ones.
Boros, on the other hand, has a rather unique set of character traits. He was the leader of a band of thieves and alien invaders known as Dark Matter throughout the universe. Boros is the same and exactly opposite of Saitama at the same time. Boros got fed up as he bested every opponent that came across him in a fight, and he came to Earth after an alien seer that he would find an opponent who could fight him on equal grounds and give him the fight that he had been desiring forever. Boros does not have a traumatic or abusive past and this is what makes him way better than Garou as a villain. Garou is a byproduct ofthe same old villain tropethat has started to become overly used now since almost all the recent shonen anime have similar villain characters. With Boros,One-Punch Manbrings the good old-style villainous characters who are evil for no particular reason except for the fact that they enjoy doing evil deeds.
Boros Solved Goku Vs Saitama Debate
Boros is also a better villain than Garou because he solved a big debate among anime fans in general. Ever sinceOne-Punch Mangot popular among the anime audience, anime fans started a debate over whether an overpowered character like Saitama is powerful enough to defeat Goku. It is an implied tradition among the shonen anime audience to assess the power of any new anime’s protagonist by comparing them to everyone’s favorite Saiyan and the protagonist of the Dragon Ball franchise Goku. SinceSaitama is not the average shonen protagonistthat would fall short in comparison to Goku in terms of strength or power. Therefore, fans always tried to speculate about the outcome of a fight between Goku and Saitama until they witnessed the fight between Boros and Saitama.
Fans concluded that Saitama is perhaps the only anime character from a different series that can defeat Son Goku in a fight. They hailed this result because Boros is what Goku would have been like had he turned out evil instead of the jolly, kind, and fight-loving Saiyan that the fans know him as today. Boros is an alien, fight-loving warrior like Goku and even his transformations and the character design are identical to that of Goku.Saitama easily managed to defeat Borosat the end of the Alien Conquerors Arc. All in all, Boros proved to be a better villain than Garou because of his character traits intentions, and overall storyline which was aptly suitable for an evil villain who fancies himself a desirable fight.
