I Swear I Just Wanted To Talk About How Much I Love Tsubomi And Then It Turned Into A 4,000+ Word Dissertation

watching the emi episode makes me kick and giggle my feet

Enami on pixiv

Spoilers for REIGEN spinoff.

You cannot even begin to comprehend Reigen Arataka. He pretends to be psychic for a living. He’s been cancelled on twitter. He has godlike massage skills. His closest friends are middle schoolers. He convinced multiple high-ranking members of a terrorist group to rejoin society. He met aliens and gave them his pajama shirt. He made his own website and it looks hideous. He knows how to fire a gun. He gives surprisingly good advice. He was once trapped in a parallel dimension and almost starved to death. He ranked 4th in the national whac-a-mole championship

i am so late its not even funny but i couldnt live with myself if i didnt draw some finale art

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.

been doing a mp100 rewatch and i think im gonna need to write an essay at some point about hands as a symbol of human connection in the anime in particular… reaching out for connection is such recurring imagery…. and so is rejecting connection through violence enacted with bare hands vs psychic powers…

reigen being so lonely and having all these grand gestural hand motions when he’s putting on his greatest psychic persona but very rarely genuinely reaching out… that one shot in the s3 op with all the hands rly got my brain going ougugh

Brain slowly recovering enough that I can hopefully get back to working on End of the World, but I have totally lost my overview, so today I'm just reminding myself of basic thematic stuff, like...

Mob Psycho 100 is about kindness, which is a great and refreshing theme for a shonen manga, and one I appreciate very much. But on a personal level I just can't help but want to prod at it. And Shou is so very different from Mob that he and many of the people in his life make a great vehicle for that.

What if you aren't kind? What if you aren't empathetic? What if you haven't been given the tools to understand other people or yourself? What if reaching out or trying to help has backfired more times than not? What if the people who were supposed to take care of you have hurt and abandoned and taken advantage of you over and over? What if it isn't forgivable?

What if it isn't forgivable...?

I’ve always felt like something about the end of the Reigen Manga felt familiar and well I came to the realization

Reigen wondering into the woods to die alone after losing losing everything he had left because what he did that he thought was right was wrong while carrying the burden of dozens of spirits he meant to carry to save someone he cared about was really...

Oh

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

Hi! I love all your MP100 metas. Truly amazing! Here is a popular take on mob which I noticed quite common in eastern fandom but not brought up much in western: shigeo actually has very strong ego, in a way that he only allows himself to be affected by words he wants to follow, sticks to his wants without giving in to others' wishes, and sometimes breaking others' worldview (teru) or challenging (ritsu, dimple, reigen) simply by following his own will, which relates to ??? . What do you think?

*blushes* THANK YOU AAAAAHHHHHH

i agree with you! shigeo himself is not even aware of his own strength in that regard for much of the story; watching him become more comfortable with his own iconoclasm is one of the things i enjoy most about mob psycho 100. i think shigeo's strong will and (mostly) unshakeable principles are maybe not mentioned as much in western fandom because shigeo is pretty far from the western--i'm just gonna say american here, because it's the perspective i'm best acquainted with--ideal for a young male protagonist.

we tend to prefer at least some degree of blustery, extroverted self-confidence in our heroes; soft-spoken, sad, traumatized kids who seem unsure of themselves don't fly here unless their character development involves 'outgrowing' this. shigeo is understated, and quiet, and downbeat, and kind of sickly even after gaining stamina. he also doesn't trust himself or his own perceptions for quite a while, and i've read more than a few reviews of MP100 in which these qualities made it easy for the authors to discount him as a whole. if a viewer finds him 'boring' or can't relate to him at all, they won't bother to stick around for his steely tenacity or his surprising resistance to groupthink.

despite his apparent 'weakness', he doesn't give in easily, doesn't bend even if his life is at stake, and even manages to persuade others or change their hearts in his own quiet way, simply by being himself. and his strong ego, as you put it (i would actually say his id, if we're going freudian with this) actually SAVES HIS LIFE. repeatedly. that and ???% are one and the same.

i live in a country where quiet people are routinely overlooked because they're not boldly proclaiming their greatness to everyone they meet; to me, shigeo is a reminder that i don't have to compromise who i am to have a successful life. and that is a powerful message to hear at any age.