I Really Love How Teruki’s Hair Acts As A Barometer To His Personal Development. It’s So True-to-life

every once in a while i remember my “???% only appears when mob sustains fatal injuries that otherwise would have killed him because it’s the only time his will supersedes his desire to repress it” theory/headcanon and make myself sad

Roy Mustang snaps his fingers accidentally (while wearing his gloves)

What people think will happen: fire, death, destruction

What will actually happen: a small spark

Why people are wrong: they think Roy’s Flame Alchemy actually creates flame, whereas what he’s alchemizing is the oxygen concentration of the air. Alchemy takes concentration and intelligence so he can’t accidentally move air particles around to make the air so oxygenated as to be flammable. The finger-snap just ignites the oxygen. If the air is normal, it’s not going to ignite.

Extra fun fact: you can probably tell if Roy Mustang is about to set you on fire. The air will feel intoxicatingly easy to breathe because it’s pure oxygen. During the war, Ishvalans probably learned to GTFO if they felt heady and energized.

Extra extra fun fact: Roy Mustang doesn’t need to set you on fire to kill you. He can probably just remove all the oxygen from the air around you, and you’ll suffocate.

The point of this post: flame alchemy is both really cool and really simple.

The kicker: to use flame alchemy effectively, you probably have to visualize the shape of the oxygen cloud that’s going to form. This probably requires a lot of focus.

I am: a nerd.

DRIVE LINK HERE to the official mob psycho 100 fanbook!

as far as i can find, there's not been any comprehensive scans of the fanbook put up online, at least on the english-speaking internet. soooo since there's all sorts of fun stuff in it (character birthdays! character & creator q&a's! who would be most likely to survive on a desert island! guest art by other manga authors (the one in the upper left there is by the creator of FMA)!) i wanted to make sure everybody who wants to could see it!

more info under the cut. enjoy!

5x7", scanned at 300dpi in jpg format. exact pixel dimensions differ slightly due to how my scanner's auto-crop works.

the images uploaded are exactly as they were scanned, no image editing save for cropping. they could use some editing to be more presentable (levels adjustment to bring the darks down, more saturation on the color pages, & a teensy bit of rotation/adjustment) but i wanted to upload the untouched files. i might create a new drive with cleaned-up versions at some point.

i claim no ownership over these images, please feel free to do whatever you like with them, share em, edit em, and so on, no attribution necessary.

i bought my copy from hiro_shop_japan on ebay, if anybody wants to get their own.

these are obviously untranslated- some awesome folks have scanned & translated parts of the book (particularly the qnas). you can find those here! there's also a twitter thread of translated bits from 4chan, but i can't seem to find that one at the moment.

pissed about them cutting out the part of confession arc not because of the lore but because the shot of shigeo cradling mob’s face in his hands would’ve been a one-hit k.o. miracle clip for mp100 amv creators

about suzuki shou and his parents

most of the parents in mp100 seem to be competent, if somewhat distant. the suzuki family is an exception to that trend. when considering shou’s relationship with his parents, the first question to arise was this: why didn’t shou’s mom take her son with her when she left touichirou? this question is fundamental to the suzuki family dynamic.

i mean, we know why she left touichirou, and her decision to dump him was perfectly justified, but she seems to have had a good relationship with shou, so why would she leave him behind? at first, i thought that maybe she was so desperate to get away that she prioritized “disappearing from touichirou’s life” over “raising her son” and viewed the abandonment of shou as an unavoidable consequence of her departure. but from what we’ve seen of shou’s mom, she seemed to be a compassionate person with a strong sense of morality, so it wouldn’t make sense for her to decide to fully remove herself from her son’s life.

could it be that young shou just admired his dad so much that he refused to go with his mother when she left? it’s true that it would be pretty easy to get a little kid to admire you if you showed off some telekinetic tricks, so young shou probably did admire his father, at least for his psychic powers. well, shou’s custody probably wasn’t determined by his own preference, but i do think psychic powers are at the heart of the matter.

we know from that one omake that shou had already awakened his psychic powers before his mom left. i suspect she was crying at that time because she knew how psychic power could corrupt a person and was worried that shou might end up like his father. as a (presumed) non-esper, maybe she had hoped that shou would be like her; after all, he was a kind boy, and you don’t need psychic power to be kind.

so maybe… she left shou with touichirou because she knew that she alone wouldn’t be able to teach shou how to control his psychic powers. only his father, an esper, could do that. but she kept in contact with shou and retained an influence on him in order to teach him good morals and make sure that touichirou wouldn’t be able to manipulate shou to suit his own selfish needs. shou’s mom is the reason shou decided to revolt against his father in the first place.

i also have a hypothesis as to the relationship between shou and his father after his mother moved away. before shou confronted his dad at the top of the tower in chapter 88.1, touichirou had been planning to let shou inherit the world from him (after world domination, of course). that means he felt that shou was more or less on his side, or at least, he thought that shou still had the potential to become a worthy heir. and before that confrontation, shou was not afraid of his father. his behavior makes this clear; for example, he talked cheeky to his dad on the phone after the 7th branch incident. if you’re afraid of someone, you don’t sass them like that. plus, his reaction to his dad’s “i’m taking over the world” TV broadcast was embarrassment rather than dread. shou didn’t see his father as a truly threatening figure.

thus, i hypothesize that before their big confrontation, shou thought of his dad as “a dumb idiot dad who doesn’t understand that taking over the world is impossible and pointless and needs to be taught a lesson (by me),” and touichirou thought of shou as “a teen son who is causing some mischief since he’s in a rebellious phase but can ultimately still be molded to my liking.” their relationship was tense, but not abusive, and touichirou probably gave shou anything he asked for (e.g. underlings) because he didn’t see shou as a threat.

i’m not saying that they had a healthy relationship by any means. there was probably plenty of neglect, but like, a Rich Dad type of neglect, like “i’m not coming home tonight (for the 8th night in a row) so here’s 5000 yen, have your subordinates order takeout or something.” he was almost certainly not being a good dad, but i don’t think touichirou was openly hostile or directly emotionally/physically abusive to shou. touichirou was trying to raise a respectable heir; he was just much more focused on the task at hand, so much so that he failed to take heed of how seriously his son opposed him. the two of them probably didn’t communicate much at all, other than perhaps the father talking At the son and the son responding with impudence. 

that’s why things really came to a head when they met in the tower: because each thought he understood the other perfectly when, in fact, they didn’t understand each other at all. touichirou had underestimated shou’s desire to oppose him, but that misunderstanding didn’t afford shou any kind of advantage. actually, shou already had a huge disadvantage as a result of his own misunderstanding: he had greatly underestimated the true extent of his father’s power, selfishness, and cruelty. 

touichirou physically and emotionally abused shou. the abuse was severe, almost sickening. it’s just that he didn’t start inflicting it until shou directly challenged him that day, at which point all the trauma happened at once. that was when shou was forced to realize how frightening and merciless his father really was. it must have been a painful shock. no wonder shou was prepared to let him go without a word.

So the spirit copies someone you trust. For Tome that was Reigen. For Reigen that was Mob…

And for the spirit possessing Reigen (Rusty) that was becoming Reigen, because you can see his head forming from the Mimic spirit. Which is sad but expected, as it means the few nice words and promises Reigen gave Rusty to trick it were the best it ever heard, side no other face appears on Mimic.

I’m glad Maes Hughes died.

He’s a fan favorite character and I enjoy him a lot too, but I think fundamentally he’s a character who has to die. His role in the narrative is to haunt it.

I might be even more of a weirdo because I enjoy his manga characterization over his Brotherhood or ‘03 portrayal, but I love the idea of Hughes being someone the Elric brothers barely know - someone we, the audience, barely see.

Until he dies.

Because suddenly he’s everywhere. He was Roy’s friend and Armstrong’s superior officer and Winry’s acquaintance and Elicia’s father - and he was the soldier both Ed and Al knew, but didn’t actually know, that got killed because of them anyway.

In the manga Winry stays at Hughes’ place, but Ed and Al enter his house for the first time after they found out he died. For them, it’s not about losing a friend (though I am sure they liked him just fine) because that story is already Roy’s - for them it’s about realizing that this plot they’ve involved themselves in kills people that aren’t actually directly involved at all to begin with. It makes sense for their allies and friends and loved-ones to be targeted by the antagonists - but a soldier who mostly joined in because he was at the right (or wrong) place at the right (wrong) time? That’s not supposed to happen. And that’s what makes Hughes’ death so hard on them.

(and poor Elicia - abandoned children without their fathers were always a weakness of Ed’s)

But Roy? Yeah… he suffers. From the moment of Hughes’ dead on, Roy is haunted by it. By him. His best friend follows him everywhere. We see it in the way Roy only involves himself in the plot because Hughes figured something out and Roy is desperate for answers. He hunts down the homunculi to save this country, sure, but mostly so he can burn his best friend’s murderer to the ground. When Riza talks about winning against the Führer and their military dictatorship, she talks about all of them, not a hint of revenge coloring her vision - but Roy? It is telling that it isn’t a greater ideal that makes him torture Envy, but the agony of his best friend’s death.

The thing that almost breaks Roy is Maes.

No.

It’s Maes’ memory haunting the narrative.

And isn’t that beautiful?

The tragedy of it all, the horror, and the realization that Roy Mustang never really recovered from the War, that his friends are the only think keeping him in one piece, the fact that Roy Mustang is a Hero and a Monster and a fallible human capable of love.

Maes Hughes has to die to remind all of us of what Roy Mustang is capable of: love, loyalty, devotion…. and the slaughter and torture of numerous people.

His ghost is haunting the narrative - and for that I love him.

I made an analysis breaking down the S3 MP100 OP! Thank you @russenoire for the translation and guiding me with them, I can’t thank you enough.

Also, please keep in mind that I am in no way a professional at this, I’m just a kid who likes mob psycho. It’s around 15 pages long and includes insight into the lyrics and visuals, though it might be a bit messy.

But anyways, please enjoy! This was super fun to make.

Google Docs

MP100 season 3 OP analysis-breakdown

MP100 S3 OP Analysis-breakdown Before we start, I’d like to give a big thank you to @russenoire for the translation of the season three OP

i seriously hate that one of the main symbols of reigen's kindness and selflessness is his goddamn feet

[id: four pages of the mob psycho manga.

toichiro says "you understand? ...i can't sense a thing from you. maybe you're related to this boy..." reigen looks at him angrily as he continues to say, "but you should stay back if you hold dear to your life."

a closeup of reigen's feet as he steps toward toichiro

mob says "i will stop you." shigeo looks over his shoulder and says "no one can stop me." another closeup of reigen's feet stepping forward

???% stares forward intensely, reigen looks scared, and then a panel of reigen holding his shoes in a trembling hand

a closeup of reigen's feet with the sound effect "shwoo." tome looks up in horror as reigen faces away with rusty-sama attached to him.

end id]