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

Drawing details and background is actually pretty fun  _(:,3 」∠)_

Alright I gotta talk about a thing.

I’ve seen a lot of posts about Mob bringing light and happiness into Reigen’s life. I’ve reblogged a lot of them, because they’re great and adorable. You see it all over. Reigen in a dark place, borderline depressed, Mob shows up, needs guidance, actually saves Reigen.

And then one day I was scrolling through and I thought. Does that really happen? Sure, Reigen is a conman and doesn’t have a ton of friends and is kinda wandering in his life but is he really in such a dark place?

On the one hand, I had the option to say that people were projecting, or that everyone just loves that “I was a broken boy and you fixed me” trope (I’m begging you to read Artemis Fowl, which is where that quote comes from). And that would have been fine.

But then I thought back to my own experiences, and I thought back to every time a friend or a family member looked me in the eye and said “hey, I just really get the feeling you’re going in a bad direction, do you need something?” and it hit me that this is exactly what happens to Reigen.

The common use of this trope is that character A appears put together but then is revealed to have a tragic backstory where they fell apart as a person and have been putting up a front, and character B helped them put the pieces together. But this isn’t what happens to Reigen. Reigen get snatched up in the canon timeline metaphorical moments before his crash-and-burn event.

We never see Reigen think about what a dumpster fire his life was before Mob because it wasn’t a dumpster fire. It was approaching one, yes, but it never got there. Mob stepped in and gave Reigen direction, and re-lit the flame of motivation that Reigen had lost when he forgot that he wanted to “be someone.” Reigen was 100% heading in the direction of falling apart, but Mob came in at the last second and picked him up before he actually got there.

I think that’s one of the main pulls in their relationship to me, because a lot about their dynamic couldn’t be possible without it. The entire separation arc relies on the fact that Reigen doesn’t understand Mob’s effect on his life, or the emotional maturity that Mob has shown, which he probably would have noticed if he’d known the whole time that Mob fundamentally improved his whole disastrous life. Even the fact that Reigen is still a con artist relies on this. If Mob had “saved” Reigen from his lifestyle, Reigen would have been given the chance to re-work his life entirely, abandoning the more negative parts of his personality that he says later on that he hates.

Anyway I have a lot of feelings about this and I really respect ONE for taking this angle.

a broadly applicable extended metaphor for the kageyama brothers: 

mob is round and ritsu is sharp. 

this applies to LOTS of things about both of them– least of all, but most noticeably, their hair.

mob is round. he’s blunt, socially dull, tangential to the lives of his peers. he’s like a firm ball of clay rolled between two hands. when he learns new things, it’s like, first he has to make them stick, then he has to re-roll himself back into shape without them falling out. ideally, the things he learns become a part of him. overall, it’s a clumsy process, so he’s not the best learner, but neither is he the worst. and he’s good when it comes to learning about (and improving) himself, because he can reshape himself, being clay. he is also relatively easily influenced by others, who may try to shape him to their own liking. still, roundness is the most comfortable shape for him, so he always returns to it. 

ritsu is sharp. sharp-tongued, sharp-eyed, sharp-witted. he’s like a mass of thorns or shards of glass. when he learns new things, they stick easily, becoming impaled on his jagged surface, and he understands them intimately, though they remain separate from his self. ritsu is a very good learner. but he’s not very good at learning about himself, because when he tries to delve deeper, he gets poked by his own spikes. he is also more brittle than mob, so it’s harder to improve himself; things need to break before they can change shape. likewise, ritsu is less easily influenced, being more solid and thus less permeable. he wishes he was a more organic shape, like his brother, despite the many clear advantages afforded to him by his sharpness.

mob’s psychic power is also based on roundness– his aura in the anime consists of overlapping circles. his power, tied directly to his emotions, is round like a coiled spring. as his explosion meter slowly ticks up, the spring is compressed bit by bit. when he hits 100%, it releases all that potential energy at once, then slowly collapses back to normal. 

ritsu’s psychic power is also based on sharpness– his aura in the anime looks like jagged shreds. where mob’s aura flows like ripples in a pond, ritsu’s cracks and crinkles along fault lines, like paper or tin foil that’s been folded before. the uneven structure means he can’t store emotions as psychic energy in the same way as his brother; emotions just create more faults and fissures, making it harder to direct his power anywhere else.

ritsu is certainly sharp by nature, but much of his jaggedness is a result of having parts of him shattered by trauma. i can’t help but wonder how different he would be had he never met ???%.

mob yells at reigen to shut up at the yakiniku restaurant and reigen walks all the way back to his apartment listening to liability by lorde and sniffling

Little gif i did for the end of mp100 s3 ! It’s been almost a year… this series has such a special place in my heart, i was so happy to animate a little bit on s3 !

#tomeweek2023 Day 3: Birthday + Friends

come on tome. be cool

Well it’s Team Mustang Week, so let’s start with a little picture collage!

Enjoy!

Admin Mustang

redraw of one of my fav mp100 panels……cant believe we’re gonna get this animated

Reigen just fucking died

seeing @gittetj’s post (sorry, hope you dont mind the ping! also everyone should check it out) is really making me think about ritsu and shous relationship again. how shous taken on the gargantuan responsibility to put his own dad in jail. how hes run away from home, taken his own lackeys, stored psychic power into a fuck-off bomb for two months, sent hot spring tickets to ritsus parents so ritsu can go and help shou beat up touichirou without worrying them. he puts a lot of effort into all the little details of his plans to improve on it - you know, setting fire to ritsus home so mob could become motivated to fight, stuff like that.

but, hes not that great at it! the biggest oversight ofc is that he didnt anticipate his dad doing what he did, but for twenty years. hell, shou had no idea what sort of esper power touichirou had and it kind of ended up being important. him trying to motivate mob into action knocked mob out for like. a day.

this omake is a pretty good example of what kind of guy shou is. hes good at thinking a few steps ahead, but ultimately gets help from ritsu to fill out the blind spots.

ritsu, who’s crazy good at being studious and polite and responsible, but has only done out of obligation. the kid who had his whole arc revolve around breaking down from the burden of being the perfect student, the perfect child, the perfect brother. ritsu, who only went along with shous hot springs plan because he figured whatever was happening this was the safest way they would be out of harm’s way, then gradually gained admiration Shou Suzuki, Warrior of Justice, who proudly wore responsibility like a badge.

ritsu makes it very clear that he wants to see what someone else in his position could do against something that is seemingly insurmountable (and again, his first response to shous questions is his sense of responsibility). its only a bit later duing ritsus fight with shimazaki that ritsu finds a proper answer - that he will try with all his might to live happily, and that will be his responsibility to himself. between shou, who’s lost the burden of the responsibility he carried, and ritsu, who finally finds a goal he can wholeheartedly strive to achieve, i can tell you that these two could develop a deeper relationship post-claw arc.