THE FATE OF GAROU: One Punch Man Chapter 170 review

THE FATE OF GAROU: One Punch Man Chapter 170 reviewOne Punch Man Chapter 170 review

So, with this, we’ve officially come to the end of the Monster Association slash Garou arc and/or saga. It’s been a very long time – it started like over seven years ago – and in my opinion, I think it has a pretty satisfying ending here. But then again, I am kind of like a Garouu stan, so maybe I appreciated it more than the average viewer.

But first, I want to thank the team that was able to provide us with these translations – they crushed it as usual, and without them, we’d be in the dark for like a long time. So thank you, guys. But anyway, the chapter opens up here without seeing Garouu at a police station, and he’s kind of like spilling the beans about everything – ultimate goal, plans, the whole absolute unbiased evil stuff.

And I’ve always kind of thought of this as like Garou’s shonen MC goal because I’ve always kind of seen Garou as like a warped shonen protagonist, if anything, and I think that’s what ONE was going for with him, to be honest. Like instead of becoming like the Hokage or the Pirate King, he wanted to become absolute unbiased evil and bring world peace that way.

Also, guys, if you like my One Punch Man content, please subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s fine if you don’t want to, but if you just need a reminder, here you go. Thanks. But it turns out that he’s not at the police station to answer for those crimes, but he’s there to make a report about the diner dash stuff.

This happened way back in chapter 87, the whole thing where after Garou’s fight with Bang and Bomb, he went to this diner, ate everything on the menu, and then just left without paying the bill. And it eventually wound up with Saitama running into him and like one-punching him without even realizing that it was Garou.

But this is like the first of two big surprises here because not only is Garou here and we’re seeing him so soon, but he’s with Bang. So, this is like super surprising to me because I really didn’t expect us to see him so soon because originally in the webcomic, it takes like 17 chapters before we see him again, and that took like five years in real-time.

As for Bang being with Carl here, that still hasn’t happened in the webcomic. Like, I just expected this to happen much later on in the story, but I’m not mad at it or anything. It just, I don’t know, feels odd that Bang and Garou have reunited here, but Bang is essentially reforming Garou if anything. That’s the big theme of this chapter.

But an interesting thing here is Garou telling Bang, “Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my dad.” And then, like, the narration says Garou’s parents never showed up to his detention. And that, you know, brings up a great point. It’s like, yeah, who are Garou’s parents? I mean, granted, we don’t know the parents of everyone.

I mean, we don’t know any of Saitama’s family, and we probably never will. But Garou is still relatively young, like he’s 18, so you’d expect him to be in his life somewhat, but they’re not. And Bang has always kind of been that father figure to him for the most part because we saw in season two at least that Garou found Bang’s dojo when he was still a kid.

And going further into the sequence, we get the whole Star-Lord and Yondu moment where it’s like, “I may not be your father, but I’m your daddy” because Bang’s like, “All it takes to become a parent is to have children, but you can’t become a teacher without leading the way for them.” And Garou is like, “You know what? Can’t argue with that.”

Then we get a flashback to when Bang found Garou. I guess this happened sometime after he lost to Saitama in the previous chapter, and we see Garou under a waterfall. And this is super interesting because this is originally where we see Garou again for the first time in the webcomics, 17 chapters after he’s defeated by Saitama.

But it’s actually King that finds Garou, not Bang. Going forward, Bang thinks to himself, saying like, “I’m the one who showed you where the secret training grounds were. He may well have wanted me to find him.” And I’m pretty sure that’s the case. Like, Garou ultimately wanted to reunite with Bang, but, you know, the way that Garou is, he can’t just straight up say, “I’m sorry, sensei, take me back.”

But Garou says the only reason he came back to Bang is so he can remember his “this,” and then essentially that Bang is the only one on his level and that he only really wants to spar against him to get stronger.

Then Garou asked Bang, like, how Tario’s doing, and we cut to Tario. He’s kind of reliving Baro’s childhood here, as to where like they’re on a very similar playground that we saw, and they’re forcing Tario to be the monster. The three bully kids are, you know, just kicking him the same way that Baro was kicked.

But the difference here is that Tario has an upbeat demeanor and he’s not feeling necessarily victimized the way that Garou was. But he’s kind of embracing this role, ‘I’m Garro, man the hero, and you guys are actually fake heroes.’ So, in a way, Garou is kind of achieving, at least partially, one of his goals, and that is mitigating Tario’s bullying here by showing that you can be like a hero, but you don’t have to be a hero in the traditional sense.

You could be like the anti-hero, like Garou, which is something dead Garou didn’t necessarily have when he was a child. He kind of construed monsters into being anti-heroes, if anything, with the traditional heroes being like these unjust bullies, which is obviously a flawed mindset that led Garou to the path that he, you know, went on, which of course turned him full-blown anti-villain. And then we see Waganma pull up, and apparently, he’s just full-blown buddies with Tario at this point.

Understandable because, you know, they bonded together by both being kidnapped during the majority of this arc. On Tario being friends with Waganma has impressed the bully kids because, you know, Wagan was super rich. He’s the son of Nirinki, who’s like, you know, one of the big donors to the Hero Association.

So it’s basically showing us that Tario’s doing fine. Waganma has had his character arc, and he’s not like an awful bratty kid anymore, at least for the most part. And Garou is like, ‘Do your best, Tario. I’m gonna do the same.’ And then going forward, Garou says something super interesting to Bang, where he says, ‘You think you could arrange some sort of fighting contest with the heroes for me?

The ones I fought after turning into a monster were you, Bomb, Flash, Blast, and that weird bald guy, Saitama or something. If I take them all on in order, I’m pretty sure I could reach some sort of awakening without monsterizing this time.’

So, I really don’t know if this is going to be a thing because, like, this doesn’t happen in the webcomic or anything like there’s no future tournament that Bang organizes with heroes showing up and sparring Gar or fighting them or whatever. So, if this actually does happen, I think that would be super interesting.

And we may see something like this happen, at least for training purposes, for like everyone to get stronger. But also, Garou saying ‘reach some sort of awakening without monsterizing’ this is amazing too because this is like Garou’s future power up as to where he’s going to become, you know, above dragon level, possibly without having to go down the route of monsterizing.

I don’t think he’s referring to like removing his limiter because I really doubt anyone’s going to remove their limiter besides Saitama in the entire series. But maybe he’ll get to the point of like breaking it again.

And also, you know, it’s never really been fully explained what breaking it means, aside from just removing it obviously. Then Banks like, “Oh, so you think you can beat me? Don’t get ahead of yourself. After all, my back has been feeling quite good since Metal Knight performed the full-body maintenance on us.” So, this is interesting, right?

This is in reference to what happened at the end of the previous chapter when Metal Knight conveniently showed up at the very end of the battle, started to clean everything up, and said that he was going to perform mandatory maintenance on everyone to decontaminate them, get rid of the radiation that they had, and I guess he also did some other stuff and helped them out.

I guess this is supposed to make you partly suspicious of Metal Knight, for sure, right? Because that’s the game that one has been playing. He wants you to think that Metal Knight is your enemy, as Drive Knight put it, but I’m pretty sure by now you know my stance. Metal Knight is not the bad guy here. It’s actually Drive Knight.

But anyway, we come back to the Hero Association. We see Second Guard talking to Sitch. We’re talking about Garou here, and Sitch says Silverfang will become his guardian and will introduce him to the association eventually. Now, I don’t know if that literally means that Garou is going to join the Hero Association and become an S-Class hero, but anything is possible at this point.

I guess it’s just hard to see Garou willingly doing that because while he is a good guy now, I still think the core fundamental of him is still opposed to just the whole idea of a hero and the Hero Association itself, right? But I do think that he will fight alongside the heroes for sure. He’ll be more so like a vigilante, if anything. We also find out that Bang has submitted his resignation.

Bang is straight up retiring from being a hero here, and I guess he’s just going to focus full-time on reforming Garou. Now, I don’t necessarily think this means that Silverfang is going to be benched for the rest of the series. Like, I’m sure he’s going to fight eventually, maybe in the final arc, but for this next big saga we’re going into, don’t expect Bang to get his hands dirty, at least the way that he did in the previous one.

So then we come back to Bang and Garou, and we get this funny, interesting sequence here where Bang asks Garou if there’s any girls he likes, and surprisingly Garou fesses up and he says that he likes the girl who plays the Yellow Ranger in some Sentai show, and Miranda actually draws her for us at the end of the chapter, and he says that she resembles Garou’s mom, so Garou has like an Oedipus complex, I guess.

But anyway, Bang’s like, “But aren’t the Yellow ones in Sentai shows usually the big, strong, curry-loving types?” and Garou’s like, “Your info is out of date, old man. Let me tell you about Sentai nowadays.”

So this is super interesting to me, at least, because we’re going more into Garou than we really ever have before, like we hardly get to know Garou as a person outside of his whole being a martial artist and the absolute unbiased evil aspect of him. So he’s like a Sentai nerd apparently and he’s into the Yellow Ranger, and I think this is really cool.

And then we come to the final page of the chapter, and we see Genos and Saitama just like hanging out at ground zero. But the real reason they’re here is because they’re looking for like stuff from Saitama’s apartment, because Saitama’s like, “I sure hope the first thing we find is a hot pot.”

Because you know, most of Z City, including Saitama’s apartment, was destroyed in the battle here. But we see this rustle behind a rock in the distance, and I know what the reveal is here, but I’m not gonna say it in this blog because it’s a spoiler.

But yeah, that’s where the chapter ends. And also, it turns out that there’s going to be like a month-long break after this, and to be honest, I’m completely fine with it because ONE and Murata went on like a rampage these last couple months with finishing this arc. But let me know what you thought about this chapter in the comments. What do you think about the ending of this arc? Let me know in the comments. Have a great day, and I’ll see the next one.