What One Punch Man and Bugs Bunny Teach Us About True Power
Written by Brian Curtis, Consultant, Creator & Author
Brian Curtis is an author, foundational thinker, and the innovator behind the Cirkuitbreaker project. Leveraging a 25-year career as an electrician in both the public and private sectors, he provides executives with a rare, grounded perspective on self-management and systemic alignment.
You may or may not be familiar with these two iconic characters. Those of us from older generations grew up with Bugs Bunny. One Punch Man is a much newer take on a remarkably similar concept. I recently watched the series with my son, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing is brilliant.
So why compare them in an article? Both characters share traits that set them apart from every other hero in fiction. Through examples and a few personal stories, I want to show why these two are arguably the most powerful characters in all of cartoon storytelling and cinema. While fans endlessly debate who reigns supreme across the MCU, DC, and various anime universes, I hope to spark a different conversation, why Saitama and Bugs are not only the most powerful, but also the most relatable, and how their unique abilities serve as striking examples of true inner growth.
Saitama
Most people are familiar with Bugs Bunny, so I will explain the context of the anime series One Punch Man to start. Much of this will seem cartoonish (and it is), but our fictional stories always carry deeper truths that we can relate to in real life. I encourage you to read and assess my conclusions at the end.
Spoiler alert! I don’t believe you can replace seeing something firsthand, but I am going to explain parts of the story that you may want to see firsthand. I don’t believe what I have to say here will diminish the enjoyment of watching the series later, but it’s your call. The writing in the first season is excellent, and I found myself laughing out loud many times as I watched it with my son, who is in his first year of college.
In season 1, our main character Saitama (One Punch Man) is living a lonely life in a one-bedroom apartment in some conceptualized version of Tokyo, with lettered districts that indicate large masses of inner-city dwellings. Our hero lives in City Z, which is known to be the most active area of monster sightings. There is a little backstory at the beginning, but the short of it is that Saitama has chosen to become a hero for fun. He lives on very little, but his purpose in life is to protect people from monsters, which leads to protecting other heroes as well.
What makes Saitama unique in this story is that his life has become very boring for him. He has grown strong enough that nothing really affects him anymore. His run-ins with monsters have become boring for him because they die in just one punch. He is also completely anonymous.
In this universe, there is a “Hero Association” that hands out ranks based upon a pecking order of competing superheroes. They rank from S to C, where C is the lowest rank, and S represents the most powerful heroes at the top of the pecking order. It is the job of the Association to curb the monster threat and assess new heroes who are interested in joining their ranks. This is part of the main story of the first season.
Saitama inherits a pupil, a cyborg named Genos, who was once a young boy who wanted to become much stronger to fight monsters. Saitama saves him from impending doom, and after witnessing Saitama's effortless strength, he begs Saitama to take him on as a disciple, constantly taking meticulous notes on Saitama's everyday habits to decipher the "secret" to his power.
Shortly after Saitama grudgingly agrees, the Hero Association holds an annual event for new heroes to apply for membership. Saitama seems interested after Genos explains it to him, and they both enter. This is where the story becomes comical and somewhat real.
Saitama and Genos enter the evaluation, and Saitama is off the charts in the physical tests but scores extremely low in the written tests. Genos scores high in both categories and is given an S rank, already being on the Association’s radar. Saitama is a nobody, so he is given a C rank and allowed to join only because his physical score was so high.
Our storytellers, in many ways, are poking fun at institutions and their ability to “assess” people based on mandatory tests and procedures. Saitama doesn’t seem too concerned. He never cares how he “ranks” compared to someone else. His only goal seems to be finding a tough enough monster to present a challenge, so moving up the ranks in the Hero Association gives him something to do, but not something that occupies much mental space. Genos doesn’t seem to be too concerned with his rank either, although he has been placed alongside the strongest of the S-class heroes.
The story progresses, and we get content that mostly surrounds classes of heroes clashing with different classes of monsters and so on. Saitama starts to naturally attract the most heart-centered S-class heroes when they see how unconcerned he is with rank and how easily he dispatches monsters that others can’t seem to deal with.
In one scene, an S-class hero named Silver Fang is asked about Saitama by a B-class hero named Blizzard. She is trying to get Saitama to “join her club,” but Silver Fang readily admits that Saitama is many times stronger than himself. This surprises her since Silver Fang is considered one of the most powerful heroes in the Association.
Strength doesn’t seek recognition. It only serves to balance protection while making others stronger, and Saitama emulates this quality flawlessly. Over-protection disables growth, while a balanced approach disables only the direst threats. This is the constant of the whole series. Saitama is one-punching everything that others cannot while letting them “cut their teeth” on things they can handle without destroying themselves. Genos continually destroys himself against superior monsters but understands that Saitama is there in case things get too dire.
In the end, it is always Saitama who saves the day, punching the most powerful monster that could kill most, if not all, of the other heroes. His efforts go unnoticed by most, walking on his own and doing what he loves to do, being a hero for fun.
When asked about his secrets, he merely states that you do “100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, eat three meals a day (bananas in the morning),” and other mundane things that don’t explain why he is invulnerable and can kill monsters with one punch. In a way, the following character represents Saitama’s heart, which is something he is mostly unconscious of.
King
One of the most interesting characters in this universe is King. He is widely believed by the public to be "The Strongest Man on Earth." In reality, he is an ordinary, timid civilian with zero powers who keeps happening to stand near the corpses of monsters Saitama effortlessly defeats. Saitama isn’t a hero to get credit, and King ends up getting it. He becomes Saitama's closest friend and gaming partner.
In a way, you could say he is the spiritual “heart” behind Saitama and keeps him humble since Saitama can’t get the best of him when gaming together. It is really the only thing that frustrates Saitama in the series, but not necessarily. The public, and the other heroes for that matter, believe that King’s superpower is connected to the deep thumping heard when there is a threat nearby. In fact, it is only when King is scared to death, and the sound is simply his heart racing. In effect, it triggers someone to take care of the danger for him.
There is a scene in season 2 when Saitama is genuinely depressed, and King gives him a strong spiritual perspective on Saitama’s journey. It is, without a doubt, the best writing of the series. I will let you watch it without much spoilers here.
Bugs
Bugs Bunny is a similar character, and of all the cartoon characters I can think of, he most closely resembles Saitama. Nothing affects Bugs, and he does his best to aggravate anyone out to get him. Bugs teases and lets his adversaries destroy themselves, much like One Punch Man.
Like many of you, I grew up with Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, and the rest of the Looney Tunes bunch. What strikes me most about the bunny is that he always shows love for the characters trying to kill him or eat him, and teases them accordingly.
The bigger picture
My cousin Barbara told my dad to watch something recently. Dad is getting older, and with age, he has trouble finding meaning in life. Mom is gone, and he does miss her. Barbara suggested watching “How to Live Younger,” a Netflix documentary that she thought Dad should watch.
I put it on a couple of days ago for him (his hands don’t work very well, and he has trouble using the remote), and we watched it, although Dad has a hard time sitting through things this late in life. The first episode deals primarily with exercise and its effects on the body and mind. The episode goes into studies showing how at least thirty minutes of exercise a day increases the body’s ability to fight off disease, creating a better mental state and releasing chemicals in the brain.
The second episode deals with the placebo effect and how patients often have better results when given a placebo. What was most interesting, and what I want to talk more about, is how patients had the same result even if they knew they were taking a placebo. Episode three was about diet and the benefits of fasting, something that is being widely accepted at present.
What is most relevant to our story here is the placebo effect and why patients responded just as well to treatments that they knew were placebos. A placebo is defined as a neurobiological process where a person's psychological expectation of healing triggers real physical changes in the body. When the brain anticipates recovery, it releases endogenous chemicals, such as natural opioids, dopamine, and anti-inflammatory compounds, and alters nervous system signaling. This response can reduce pain, lower inflammation, regulate blood pressure, and restore physical function, even when the external treatment contains no active medical or surgical mechanism.
What spooked researchers more was the fact that patients responded just as well when they knew the treatment was a placebo. Doctors and surgeons didn’t know how to treat these responses, so they just kept doing the surgeries anyway. What the show doesn’t reveal is why it continued to work, regardless of whether or not the patient knew they were just receiving the belief that it would work.
I can tell you from personal experience that the act of caring and giving love is much more powerful than belief. It triggers the natural interactions that support all life and supports the belief that life is precious and worth living. Why keep going if we stop giving and receiving love for one another?
I can tell you, for certain, that my dad would have died shortly after my mom passed away if I wasn’t there. I’m not saying I’m special in any way. I was just there to give and receive love with my dad, so he had a reason to live. I benefited just as much as he did since I was no longer married. I have a son and daughter that I still connect with, but they are moving out of the house, and I don’t get to see them as often.
There is no doubt that a healthy diet and regular exercise contribute to overall health, but if you don’t have someone to spend your time with, then the desire to take care of yourself falls away. In short, we grow older because we unconsciously isolate ourselves over time by prioritizing our external reality. We save for retirement because we fear what will happen if we don’t. Who will take care of us if we can’t afford healthcare or basic needs?
Dad went into the hospital in December of last year. He had low sodium (for the third time from drinking too much water without eating) and had a potentially fatal gallstone blockage in his bile duct. He took a life flight to the University of Washington Medical Center for a sequence of surgeries and ended up in bed for over a week.
At 82, it can take a while before you regain enough strength to walk on your own. Consequently, he ended up in rehab for three weeks. They would have kept him longer if we had let them. The reason I bring it up is because of what it was doing to him.
He loved it there because they did everything for him, but they wouldn’t let him walk on his own due to liability. Liability is a slow death. He was walking fine before his temporary health issue, but despite explaining this ad nauseam to the “health care professionals,” he wasn’t allowed to walk on his own.
This has a destructive element on the mind. If you tell someone they can’t walk, they will believe you, especially at that stage of life. My family and friends were aware of it, and I made sure to get him out of there before Christmas. They insisted he take a walker home to get around, afraid that he would fall down and injure himself.
Once I brought him home, he never used the walker and hasn’t since. Fear will kill you in the end, and liability is just an example of fear. Fear of losing something that you never had in the first place. The only thing we ever have is our capacity to love one another and ourselves. Balancing that is paramount to overall health and well-being. Saitama is a great example of that.
As a collective group, we are starting to understand this more and more. Old business structures are based on making money, but it comes at the cost of using other people for one’s own gain, destroying the mind and body over time. I will admit that I didn’t see it so accurately for what it was when I was working as an electrician.
When you create hierarchies of increasing revenue models, it creates conflict in the mind and body. Money becomes the reason for working, so it creates stress between every relationship within that structure. If making money is the goal, then you want to make more, meaning that you are at odds with everyone else there since the highest income spots are few at the top. It kills our relationships with one another.
It is nobody’s fault, only our misunderstanding of who and what we are and how that has created the structures we work in and live in daily.
Trading time for money creates a situation where money starts to separate you, on a greater scale, from everyone else, causing you to grow older. Everyone is trying to take care of themselves without much concern for other people’s ability to take care of themselves. We say, “If you do the work and sell enough, you will be successful.” The truth is that is not the case.
Clarity is what makes us successful, and becoming clear on how to give and receive love in equal proportion without creating over-dependence in one direction or the other is what creates a healthy lifestyle, both mentally and physically. The money itself is evidence of the monsters inside our minds that tell us we “need to save for tomorrow or die,” when, in fact, we can’t die. Everything dies and is reborn every day.
The cells in your body are no more than ten years old. Think about that for a little bit. I believe the only reason the cells are that old is that we haven’t learned the process of renewing the mind daily.
Killing monsters in the mind takes time, and it’s not something that can be sold. There are legions of coaches and consultants selling emotional intelligence, but it is gained by a deeper and deeper understanding of the self over time. Tempering the body and mind is a process, and it happens under the right conditions.
If you are focusing on external things, it never happens because your emotional states are directly connected to something you have or don’t have. You don’t learn to create your own state of being as fast. This is not a religious article, but this is a fact, and it is why Jesus said to “seek ye the kingdom of heaven first.”
Chasing something outside yourself leads to boom-and-bust emotional cycles based on the fear of loss, leading to self-destruction. There is nothing wrong with the things we create, but when our minds are fixated on them, then we have a hard time seeing the bigger picture.
When all we want at the deepest level (some people will deny this) is to become closer to one another over time, reaching a singularity again, then focusing on external things just pulls us apart, making us grow older. People talk about the power of attraction and other things, but magnetism slowly breaks down under the power of gravity. Our interactions wane, and in reality, that is all we are. Unconditional love is what keeps our interactions more profound over time, forever.
Spiritual laws were spoken for the sake of growth and increased clarity over time. “Love your father (source) with all your heart, mind, and soul” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” are the two that stand out most in our spiritual texts. The reason the first one is spoken before the second is that the people around us don’t know who they are or what they are.
We aren’t identifying ourselves as creators and infinite potentiality when we externalize our freedom. If we don’t connect with our inner guidance, then we don’t know how to accomplish the second. We are an infinite array of projected thought forms and energy, and our ability to change our own momentum is relative to our own understanding.
So, what then is the bigger picture? Many of you who have worked for yourself for years understand much, if not all, of this. It is why emotional intelligence is talked about in the business community. From the outside, it’s easy to watch people tear themselves apart when they aren’t grounded. It impacts the ability to listen and communicate in more profound ways.
The success of our lives is relative to these seemingly simple skills, although I believe they are some of the most difficult to develop. We are experiencing another temporary bubble in the AI movement. I have lived long enough to know that it is just another marketing scheme to extract as much revenue as possible. Its fundamental design is based on marketing, not human connection.
If the things we create slowly destroy us, then it forces us to change much faster. My advice? Follow the simple spiritual laws. After all, you are always looking at yourself. Do your best to value other people’s time the same way you would value your own. Momentum is always changing. It is the only thing that never changes.
Saitama, for me, is the best example of this. He’s invulnerable, so he has somehow found the secret to creating a structure within a field that is not affected by any other projected energy or thought form (except for King, who beats him at every game they play together). He can get rid of any monster with bad intent with one punch. They present no challenge for him, and there is no fear when facing them. He does it because he loves to protect those who may succumb to fear.
I think there is a Saitama and Bugs Bunny at the heart of every one of us. Something that cannot be destroyed, where we are just children having fun and playing together, forever.
Read more from Brian Curtis
Brian Curtis, Consultant, Creator & Author
Brian Curtis is a specialist in self-management, human energy systems, and organizational alignment. After a distinguished 25-year career as an electrician, he stepped away from traditional industry models to explore the intersection of universal laws, human behavior, and corporate structure. Through years of deep introspection and creation, he recognized that true professional success is dictated entirely by an individual's inner state and emotional alignment. Today, he dedicates his life to helping leaders heal the heart space, dismantle outdated behavioral patterns, and cultivate sustainable freedom. He is the founder of Cirkuitbreaker, a decentralized platform modeled after the balancing laws of nature.
