To Return A Hug

thanks, ritsu!

I like how MP100 fully sidesteps the "But Who Deserves Redemption?" question bc honestly it's a bad framing that gets extremely bogged down in philosophical debates about Good and Evil and who gets to make the call and becomes an awful quagmire and is also not necessary. the better questions are:

Is this person capable of change? (Answer: Yes, always.)

Are they actually going to change? (Answer: That's up to them.)

Do you want them in your life? (Answer: That's up to you.)

i think the reason why tome’s arc in s3 eps 7&8 is so blindly gorgeous isn’t just because of the amazing animation, but also because tome desperately wanted to know that she wasn’t alone in the universe and she felt like she was running out of time. then she learns that’s she’s NOT alone in the universe, because she’s surrounded by people who love her and want to support her passions, and that there is always time for the things we love.

and then she actually discovers aliens and just fucking kicks it with them all night

During the Seperate Ways arc, we also see how he went 100% commitment (to the point of insanity) to solve the case of the "Player Killer"

Of course this is partly because he was trying to prove that he doesn't need Mob that much. However, what I find most intriguing about this bit is that while the majority was hellbent on the theory of spiritual interference, Reigen placed his entire bet on common sense. The fact that he really elevated himself to the point of standing as equal with that "player" is crazy. (Not even to mention that he actually managed to win).

Reig lives and breathes common sense, he is the embodiment of common sense. So normal that is equal to insane. He regards himself as a con, yet his business's essence is the relieving and debunking of people's blind life perception. When something seems to pose a threat on this balance, Reig will willingly throw himself on the line to restore it, his way of life, his truth.

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

ritsu and shou take everything they do seriously to a comedic extent they wouldn’t just write a grocery list they would map out where every product is in the grocery store and optimize the route so their grocery trips can be as efficient as possible

it’s a little too late where I am to gather all my thoughts on this tonight, but Reigen is such a tragic character. I’m talking Shakespearean, “road to hell paved in good intentions” type of tragic. fatal flaw and all.

he’s so earnest and he has such a beautiful heart, but the tragedy is that it is often not enough. if you’ve read the manga you probably have a better idea of what i mean.

Versions without glasses&color under the cut

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

Riza misquotes Shakespeare at one point in the manga and it got me thinking about what kind of plays they’d like

Access to deleted fanfiction.

I recently saw a post here on Tumblr that said that when a fanfic gets deleted from Archiveofourown.com or Fanfiction.net (or any other website you can think of) you will never be able to find this again. But let me tell you… this isn’t true.

Nothing ever leaves the web!

I’m going to be using @jbsforever as example. Hope you don’t mind! And if you do just tell me and I’ll delete this post. 

Anyway, jbsforever recently deleted all of her fics on Ao3. This is how her page looks like right now:

As you can see there are only 3 fics available. She had a lot more than that. Luckily for us, she’s putting them on again! (THANK YOU SO MUCH 😘). But there were still 16 fanfictions available that we can’t access through her page anymore.

All you will want to do is open google.com, type in the name of the writer (or the name of the fanfiction if you remember) + the website that their fanfiction was published on.

So for example: jbsforever archive of our own

Now you would have the normal search results appear, like here above ^^.

Normally you would click on the words that are in blue to go to their page. But this will bring you to how the page is currently installed. So we will be working with the words under there, the ones that appear in green. You can see a little arrow pointing downwards at the end of it.

Click on this arrow and a little box with the word “cached” will appear. You will want to click on this. Guess what her page looks like now? 

TADA!!!!! 16 fanfictions and their names for you to enjoy. Unfortunately if you click on one of the stories while on this (rediscovered?) page, you will get an error:

But don’t worry! All you have to do, is take the title of the story you want to read. Go through the exact same process you just did with the author’s name, but just type their name and the title into google now (author + title). And you will have access to their deleted stories!

You will have to google each chapter individually (so type in google: author + title + chapter of choice), but honestly that’s a small price to pay for having access to a goldmine of fanfiction! 

Hope this will come in handy for you! And thank you @jbsforever (ily ♥♥♥).

Have fun reading, everybody!