For the last several years there has been so much discourse in the Anime Communality about how a protagonist being "overpowered" ruins any sense of "tension" or "stakes", this is most overbearing in Isekai discourse but it's relevant to a lot of modern not actually Isekai Fantasy shows and VRMMO based shows. Also the Magic Academy genre which I'm indeed not into but not for this reason.
As a modern Anime Fan who's actually been into American Superhero Comics for longer it reminds me of Superman discourse. But with Superman few take it seriously anymore, or at least anyone spouting it unironically can be safely assumed to have not actually tried to read many Superman Comics.
Thing is I don't always like how Superman fans go about defending him. One Twitter argument I had involved a person saying the best Superman stories always involve him fighting someone stronger then him. And I'm like no, plenty of great stories come from challenging Superman with situations you can't simply punch your way out of. Superman The Movie never has Superman fight any super powered beings and it worked out great. The earliest Siegel and Shuster stories also were not about fights.
However one thing I think Superman fans need to be willing to admit more often is that sometimes Superman being overpowered is the point. Sometimes it is fun to simply see a normal criminal in over their head get easily taken care of. Sometimes it's fun to see the people hijacking a Plane find out Lois Lane is on it and realize they ____ed up. And sometimes it's fun to simply see bullets bounce off Superman's chest.
And that's the comparison I also make to the iconic scene in episode 4 of Sword Art Online when a bunch of bad guys start slashing away at Kirito but we see that he's so much higher leveled them them that he's recovering HP faster then they can deal damage. That moment is in so many SAO hate videos cited as the moment they knew the show would just be a mindless power fantasy with no tension or stakes. But to me it's simply the VRMMO Anime version of bullets bouncing off Superman's chest. It's also an early one off episode where Kirito isn't even serving as the protagonist in this context, it has nothing to do with the "stakes" of the main story.
A lot of the Memes about Superman in the Silver Age are not even based on anything in the main Superman books, they're mostly the antics that went on in the Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane comics and occasionally Supergirl's solo stories. In modern Anime terms those are the equivalent to a Slice of Life Gaiden(Side story) spin off show like Slime Diaries. But there's a lot of Isekai or Isekai adjacent Anime that are just Slice of Life in a fantasy setting to begin with like 300 Slimes. I think the reason so many people didn't get In Another World With My Smartphone is that it was essentially one of those but before people got used to their presence, in 2022 we had Land of Leadale from the same director which was treated with a bit more respect.
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