The-strangest-thing-happened - It's Brute Force!

oct. 3 pt 2.

also:

mob choirさんの「exist」の大まかな歌訳と、この歌から語彙、その１：Ａメロ❶

mob choir's 'exist' in rough translation + vocabulary, part 1: verse 1

translator's note: i am a singer. it is not my aim to write singable lyrics in my native tongue; i translate for those who want a sense of what is being sung, to help me better commit lyrics to memory, and to aid my own study of the japanese language (and hopefully yours as well, kind reader!).

multiple translation passes are necessary to produce a poem that preserves as much of the song's meaning as possible while matching its rhythms, so i would hesitate to call what i am doing 'translation'. i think 'rough' is appropriate here.

learning songs in one's target language is a particularly active and participatory kind of immersion! i would much rather sing this in the original japanese, anyway.

vocab + lyrics below the cut.

この歌から語彙 words from this song

目を閉じる　〖 こまっちまう・me wo tojìru 〗　to close one's eyes.

浮遊（する）〖 こまっちまう・fuyuu 〗　floating, drifting. also meant 'wandering about, meandering, difficult to pin down' in an archaic sense.

うずき　〖 疼き・uzùki 〗　usually translated in JP-EN dictionaries as 'ache' or 'twinge'. to my surprise, when i looked 疼き up in a monolingual dictionary, i found that it actually refers to a 'throbbing pain'; 'ache' is off by at least an order of magnitude. related words are うずく (the verb form) and ズキズキ (the mimetic word).

失う　〖 うしなう・ushinàu 〗　to lose (something or someone), to miss out on something.

焼き付く　〖 やきつく・yakìts'ku 〗　lit. or fig. to be seared into, to leave a strong impression, to be etched into.

今際　〖 いまわ・imawa 〗　one's last moments, hour of dying.

惜別　〖 せきべつ・sekíbetsu 〗　a reluctance to or regret at parting.

迫る　〖 せまる・semàru 〗　here to approach, to be imminent.

無常　〖 むじょう・mujou 〗　the japanese buddhist equivalent of anitya; uncertainty, impermanence, change as a force.

つかむ　〖 掴む・ts'kàmu 〗　to seize, grasp, grab, hold...

歌詞 lyrics

Ａメロ

目を閉じても　浮遊する疼き even when i close my eyes a throbbing pain i can't quite pin down 失うほどに　焼き付く shape the more i lose, the stronger the impression left behind-shape 今際の惜別に　迫ってく無常 in my last moments on earth, i don't want to leave the uncertainty that lies ahead fast approaches この手で掴む missing piece the missing piece i'll seize with my hands

part 1｜part 2｜part 3｜part 4

Sometimes I remember that out of everyone else in the military that we've seen, it is the depressed seemingly cynical Roy Mustang who's written as the optimist and I sed a tear

FMA has a conventionally attractive leading man and woman as bitter rivals and yet it’s absolutely clear that the only feelings they have for each other are pure spite. Immaculate.

She’s in her Dostoyevsky era.

im not sure if youve answered this before (ive been scrolling back in your blog but cant find anything?) but do you have any tips on how to write mob?

hmm i have not answered this before, so let me think… writing mob…

keep in mind that i have not written mob, but i have read a lot of mob… in canon.

don’t use verbs that imply very drastic action/expression (e.g. rather than “beamed,” use “smiled,” since mob almost never smiles with enough enthusiasm to qualify as beaming). keep mob’s actions and expressions low-key unless shit is really getting serious. (and actually, re: smiling in particular, remember that he rarely doles out smiles to anyone other than ritsu.)

remember that mob is quite passive– like, he usually isn’t actively engaged in his surroundings. he’s prone to zoning out, deep in thought or just deep in the absence of thought. even when things are relatively intense, he still may feel out of place and hesitate. basically, mob’s default state when things start happening is “not knowing what he should be doing.” when things aren’t happening, he tends to be content with idleness or inactivity.

about mob’s speech: his catchphrase, according to his profile, is “i don’t really get it.” from this, we can tell that he’s not afraid to acknowledge his own ignorance or inability. (iirc he is also wont to drop this line at inopportune times, like after someone gives him a detailed explanation or emotional speech.) he’s not stupid, but he’s not especially quick-witted either. he’s a good listener. if he doesn’t know what to say and isn’t forced to answer, he won’t say anything. he doesn’t crack wise or offer witty comebacks or snark; his words may have that kind of effect at times (e.g. “shut up and eat”), but only as the result of a mistake or failure to read the atmosphere. generally, he isn’t sarcastic. he will carry on a conversation, but generally, he isn’t very talkative unless there’s something on his mind.

when something is on his mind, he usually starts by dwelling on it while zoning out (possibly while doing other things, like eating dinner). 

when he does feel strongly about something, he doesn’t hide it, and he has been known to lecture people about their wrongdoings if he gets really riled up. despite that, don’t forget that he trusts in the goodness of people in general and has plenty of faith in his fellow humans. he strongly feels the importance of things he has learned, and as a result, he wants to make sure others understand what he understands. so like… when it comes to communication, his true strength is his benevolent sincerity.

he and ritsu are on better terms than ever lately, and they may come to each other for advice, but i think they both still prefer to think things over on their own if they can. so mob wouldn’t necessarily go directly to ritsu or reigen for help with something that’s bothering him. he’ll probably have a good long think about it first. pensive boy

he has no fashion sense. i would go ahead and credit any/all of his stylish outfits to ritsu or his parents.

he is Not sassy

he is not dramatic (except unintentionally)

he’s not good at reading other people’s emotional reactions if they don’t come right out and say how they’re feeling. or at least, it takes him a while to catch on if he doesn’t know them well

he calls ritsu “ritsu.” he calls tome “tome-san.” he calls mezato “mezato-san.” he calls reigen “master” or “master reigen.” he calls teru “hanazawa-kun.” he calls tsubomi “tsubomi-chan.” generally, everyone is a -san, -kun, or -senpai according to the typical rules. so don’t have him call anyone any weird nicknames or anything overly familiar unless they ask him to call them that (e.g. he calls tome by her first name because she introduced herself as tome-chan, and even then he changed it to -san). and for the record, i don’t think mob has directly spoken to or about shou, but seeing as how ritsu calls shou “suzuki,” mob would almost certainly call him “suzuki-kun.” 

remember that mob’s default neutral facial expression usually comes off as bored, cold, or distant. it’s hard to even tell when/whether he’s deep in thought or slightly upset. even ritsu, reigen, and teru can’t decipher him especially well. (so instead of reading mob’s face… ritsu asks if anything’s bothering him, teru asks what he’s thinking about, and reigen tries to decipher his face anyway and doesn’t ask anything unless/until it becomes Very clear that mob is having problems.)

note that these points apply specifically to non-100% mob

minor MP100 brainrot relapse!

summer = campfire = ghost stories = S&S company outing

The Reigen Arataka Deranged NormalMan Review

Do you ever think about how Reigen has like. A really strange belief in The System and How Things Should Be. Like REALLY strange. Whatever he's got going on is so much weirder than "scammer with a heart of gold".

I think it all comes together if you read the 10th Season 3 omake like, seriously interrogate this:

This is normal, if comedically thoughtful and realistic for a shounen character. This guy talks like a mandatory reporter. What's strange is what immediately follows:

"AS A SPIRITUAL SPECIALIST" DOING A LOT OF HEAVY LIFTING HERE REIGEN

Not only did he hunt down the families of the children bullying his client (insane. where did he get that info), he also contacted the school as if he were representing his own son in order to get justice, and then hunted down a source of complaints when the school fell through.

This is like a genuinely bizarre level of commitment to the bit, and the bit is "the system works, and if it doesn't work, we will find a system that does work, and if we cannot, hell or high water it is my PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to make the system stop slouching so it works again".

Long thread on the manga with this reading⬇️

Before I start. Reigen adopting Teru is more IC than you think but I don't think it is IC in the way people think it is. I think about this a lot and I think people who do it because they like Reigen aren't understanding how into his bit he is. Guy who talks to social services

So remember the arc that won people over to Reigen despite the fact he's an asshole who takes advantage of Mob and derides him constantly in order to keep him complacent?

He has Mob's phone on his GPS. This makes sense; he's been taking him out and about since he was 11. Very responsible!

Reigen dismisses the "Boss" mistake thinking well, it's a misunderstanding, but it got me in. Yet as soon as he heard they're committing crimes, he VISIBLY puts on his Boss Pants to chastise them. Again, normal so far. I think any scammer with a heart of gold would do this. (And foreshadowing for why he retried reprimanding the Claw Cadres a second time after getting power.)

Again. He's a scumbag. So he leaves Mob to beat their asses using his previous rhetoric. But then!

Reigen's shady morality is more like "people who can take care of things should take care of things". To him, Mob is the Authority on Espers, and can handle conflict like this. Immediately upon becoming aware he can't, Reigen thinks "oh, okay, so the only person who can take care of things is someone who can deescalate". (Pictured: Deescalation)

Okay. Besides the fact this is insufferable as a general concept - YOU just told him to handle it YOU are the source of his stress - his first step in deescalation is to force Mob to back down. Rather than asking him not to fight, he reestablishes "rules" in order to convince Mob he must back down - the same way he tried using what he said to worm his way out of dealing with this shit - and then sets himself up as the authority figure to which the others must obviously defer in matters of His Boy, like a parent accepting criticism at a PTA meeting. This isn't Reigen claiming Mob so much as "in order for them to not attack Mob, they must view me as a representative for Mob".

And like a good authority figure:

Continuing with his phrasing:

If you think about it, this is like...an objectively very strange and incredibly bold approach to this situation. They're homicidal. Reigen is a DERANGED level of Normal Man. He has this image in his head of normalcy, of the world at standard operating procedures, and reinforces it right through an entire conflict. Carceral beliefs don't even factor into this, simply expressing his principles and expecting them to fold.

And they do lol. I keep wondering how Shou must have felt listening to him talk like that

We see a little more of his good side in work; when he was getting so little work it was affecting his grocery bills, this moneygrubbing scammer still asked for like $200 to clear an entire city of hauntings. (His regular exorcisms are around $30). Fair prices are part of his principles of how the business should be. He operates basically at-cost. He mentions he wanted to come out here because he's bored. He's killing time as a career.

Aside:

Just realized he called Mob in last minute so Mob didn't know he accepted crops instead of money. Shigeo didn't like that

So consider that he never got caught here and there was a call on the news to hunt him down at the end of this bit: for the average viewer of the anime, it's just funny, but this is part of the Mogami pre-arc so we've gotten a hold of him by now; he probably holds an inherent belief that the police will intercept him and not Mob. Why wouldn't they? Why would an adult man want to dress up in a highschool girl's uniform? The System will understand.

Not relevant to my point but I like how he realizes what's wrong with Mob way before the final arc, just not why it's happening. Also he doesn't say anything.

With the way his principles are, you really get the feeling that Reigen does his best to avoid culpability specifically because if something happened that was his fault, he'd have to step up to the plate to compensate for that, which is troublesome to him who is a career time-killer. It does not occur to him that an actual bad person and scammer would not step up to the plate as a matter of course. This is his way

What I find really interesting is that this Militant Insane NormalMan does have a sense of wanting something "special", but rather than whip Mob up the way Dimple did Ritsu, he ended up projecting his own values onto Mob, as if he could recreate a special "self" within him. He's always deriding him and baiting him and lying to him in hopes of creating a superb person that a special individual like Mob finds admirable, as if Mob is the authority on his quality of character. Sad! lol

Anyway, it adds a lot more kick to this famous line. Reigen genuinely believes in Authority

Authority works!

And if Mob (the authority on espers) doesn't work, who's the person who MUST step up to the plate [common sense]? You guessed it.

There are other aspects of Reigen's character that everyone and their dog has already picked up on (his self-loathing is the entire reason the way he talked to Mob in Confession arc hit so hard), but this one's my favourite. He's insane

As much as I loved Brotherhood’s version of this scene, there is this wonderful detail in the manga:

He took off his glove.

ⵜⴰⵍⵡⵉⵜ ⴷ ⵜⴰⵢⵔⵉ

Edit: Print now available here.