Boros: The conqueror who crossed the universe because he was bored

In the throne room of a ship so large it blots out the sky over A-City, a one-eyed giant greets Saitama with courtesy and introduces himself. He is Boros, leader of the Dark Matter Thieves, a band of space plunderers, and he calls himself the Dominator of the Universe. Then he explains why he is there. For years he roamed the cosmos laying waste to everything he found, until he grew so strong that nobody was left who could stand up to him, and he came to know the torment of boredom. A great seer then told him that on a distant planet there lived a being who was his match. Nearly twenty years of travel have gone by. Now he asks Saitama to give stimulation to his existence. Saitama answers with a punch and a rebuke: only an idiot would wreck other people’s planets just because he was bored. That is the central moment of chapter 34 of the One Punch Man manga, by ONE and Yusuke Murata, which the Madhouse anime adapted in episode 11 (2015).

// The theoryA body that no longer feels the usual

The idea that boredom pushes people toward crime has a biological root. In Crime and Personality (1964), Hans Eysenck proposed that some people have a chronically under-aroused nervous system and need more stimulation than others to feel good. In 1965, Herbert Quay described psychopathy as a pathological search for stimulation. Marvin Zuckerman turned the intuition into a measure: his sensation seeking scale, set out in Sensation Seeking (1979), has four subscales, and one of them is called boredom susceptibility. Zuckerman started from the notion of an optimal level of arousal: each person seeks their own, and those whose level is high need stimulation that is more intense, newer and riskier. Adrian Raine supplied the most solid finding, low resting heart rate as one of the best biological predictors of antisocial behavior (The Psychopathology of Crime, 1993), which the meta-analysis by Portnoy and Farrington (2015) confirmed. The theory describes two routes that can add up: seeking stimulation and fearing little. And it is a risk factor, not a destiny.

// The subjectThe first one to survive a punch

Boros is the main antagonist of the alien invasion arc, and the series presents him in three moments. The first is his arrival. The Dark Matter Thieves’ ship stops over A-City and bombards it until only the headquarters of the Hero Association is left standing (chapter 32, episode 10). While one of his generals, Melzargard, fights the S-Class heroes below, he waits on his throne, and in the anime, when his lieutenant Geryuganshoop warns him that an intruder is wrecking the ship, he tells him not to fear for it (episode 11). The second is the meeting with Saitama (chapter 34, episode 11): the prophecy speech and the punch. Boros is the first opponent to survive a blow from Saitama. He only loses the armor that held his power in check, and then he transforms.

The third is the fight itself (chapter 36, episode 12). Boros activates his Meteoric Burst, his final trump card, and kicks Saitama all the way to the Moon. Saitama leaps back, tears him apart with punches, and Boros regenerates, like the rest of his species. In the end he pours all his energy into a cannon that, by his own account, can destroy the surface of the Earth; in the anime, the whole planet. The being who came looking for a good fight is ready to erase the world in order to win it. Saitama answers with a serious punch that undoes the attack and wounds him fatally. (Spoiler warning.) Dying, Boros tells him it was a splendid battle. Saitama tells him he was very strong, and Boros replies that he is lying: he had strength to spare, it was not even a fight, and the prophecy he had gambled on turned out to be worthless. He dies like that, defeated and, in his way, fulfilled.

// The crackSaitama is the control group

The first crack comes from the series itself. Boros is not the only one bored by being the strongest: it is the running joke of One Punch Man, and the hero suffers from it. In the first episode, Saitama remarks that absolute power is boring and beats a giant with one punch; the next morning he finds himself in the middle of an invasion by mole people who finally put up a fight, feels his heart racing, and discovers on waking that it was all a dream. He has the same emptiness and the same hunger as Boros. What he lacks is Boros’s answer. Saitama decided to be a hero for fun and to protect people; Boros decided to plunder planets for two decades, and his arrival on Earth did not need a destroyed city for there to be a fight. If the theory explains the thirst, the choice of what to quench it with is left to each person. Explaining is not excusing.

The second crack is one of scale. Hypoarousal theory is about bodies that are under-aroused by nature, about a slow pulse that can be measured in children. Boros’s boredom is something else: it does not come from a switched-off nervous system but from a superiority that no longer meets resistance. It looks less like a trait than like saturation, and the series uses it as a metaphor for what happens when someone has won everything. Besides, Boros is not a loner. He heads a band of plunderers with artillery, generals and a crew, and Boros himself says his men thought the prophecy was a fairy tale. His boredom is the reason for the journey; the destruction is carried out by an organization that lives off plunder.