I’m Upset That Part Of The Shigeo/Mob Conversation That Was Cut In The Anime Was Shigeo Holding Mob’s

tried making a finished version of this pic since i currently cant find it online. 

was fun for practice! until i had to draw all the grass

Throughtout the time Reigen knew Mob, he bought books so he could better understand him and be prepared to answer his questions/help him out(While maintaining the façade that he is the master in that field).

But it wasn’t only though books...

Reigen also trained his body so he could better understand/help Mob who was doing the same with the Body Improvment Club. Reigen maybe a con artist, but at the end of the day, he never wanted to be unable to answer one of Mob’s questions or be unable to offer him help because he knew Mob needed him and also that he thought the world of him. So much so in fact...

While it’s not exactly stated, but rather shown, Reigen is a smoker, something that he does his best to hide from Mob because he doesn’t want to instill such a habit to him. But despite the con man he is, and all of what I just mentioned

Reigen still wants Mob to be all he can be, his own man, away from Reigen.

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

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]

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

Throughout the series, we see that Teru is hypersensitive to dangers and quick to resort to violence, not to mention the whole stuff about his favourite torture method.

Another intriguing thing about Teru is his incredible adaptability, how he turns other people's to his own, as if he wants to gain control of everything in his life, same with his idea about "hierarchy" in a particular earlier arc.

All of this can very be attributed to Teru's constant fear of being caught and used for his power.

(Despite not knowing about his true power, Teru's Black Vinegar fellows seem to be heavily reliant on him. This results in a paradox situation where Teru wants to gain control yet also be afraid of being used, probably explains his "shadow leader" status)

Teru can use psychic power to protect himself, but wasn't psychic power the thing that pushed him to this way? Because of it, he could not live a regular life, and was constantly afraid of being alienated, rejected and hurt. And then Mob - another esper like him - showed up and told him that psychic power doesn't make him any different. That he is just as much of a commoner as everybody else, while also able to pursue the charm within himself without relying on psychic abilities. Of course, the issue with psychic power runs deeper than this but it's another can of worms (and once again, a parallel to Mob). For the time being, those were words Teru had desperately wanted to hear. "Commoner" later on became the mantra, the belief he fights tooth and nail to adhere to, showing the strength of his inner desire to change, or more accurately, to convince himself that he can really be normal.

Teru's redemption is often joked about for being speedran over. Still, I really like the concept of it happening as a swift phase rather than a long and tedious journey because most of his problems had somewhat been solved during the fight with Mob.

People can change if you just push the right button.

last night i woke up at 4 am with the inexplicable need to write meta abt how what little we know of teru’s backstory parallels mob’s life in mogamiland and how depriving them both of a support system/familial relationships/friendships leads each of them down the path of violence and eventually even to the same action  (strangling someone) 

something like ‘time won’t make you someone. it’ll kill you first’

The Same People (1/5)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

Drive folder - AO3

In which Mob asks Tsubomi out and then some other things happen. Four of sixteen twenty total pages. Click to make the images bigger/more legible. ID in description.

i haint even fucking seen the finale, i wanted to finish this bit first. sortof tryna emulate ONE's busted no-taper fixed-width inking style. id follows

ID: Four black and white comics pages about characters from Mob Psycho 100.

Page 1:

A park bench sits along a trail in front of a wall of trees with black trunks and white, vague foliage. Tsubomi pushes herself off of it, smiling, and says "Oh--you made it!"

Mob approaches her along a trail. The same black trunks surround him, but a few are broken--one lies across the trail in front of him. He steps over it and says, "Hey, Tsubomi."

Tsubomi and Mob stand across from each other, maintaining eye contact across a blank gap. Tall vertical trees stand behind Tsubomi while those behind Mob are broken and bent. Tsubomi's expression is vaguely demure, her hands folded in front of her, while Mob is smiling and leans forward. He carries the sunflower in his right hand.

Page 2:

Tsubomi's face is large in this empty panel. She has an odd expression on. There is a smirk; her eyebrows are slightly folded and one is raised higher than the other. One eye squints a little. She says, "I guess the, uh. The storm has passed."

Mob looks down, makes himself anonymous, two eyes and some black shapes. "Yes."

Then he looks up, and there he is in full detail. One side of his collar is damaged and torn. He smiles widely, his upper lip curled. "Yeah. It has."

Tsubomi points with two fingers and takes a step along the trail, looking back at him. "Great. Let's take a walk, I'm tired of sitting here." She's smiling widely, clearly relaxed. Mob, staying where he is, gently holds out a hand and says, "Oh, yeah, but, uh, if I could--" His shoulders hunch. The sunflower is visible in his grip.

Mob is in an empty panel in exaggerated perspective so the top of his head is huge and his feet are tiny, far below him. Only his wobbly eyes are visible, looking down at the sunflower that he's holding diagonally across his chest now. He says "--ask you to stay here one more minute. So I can..." Tsubomi interrupts across a panel border, "Right."

Now Tsubomi's head and shoulders are in the empty square, and this time we're looking up at her from below. "You wanted to tell me something." She again looks mildly concerned in her eyebrows; there is a dimple in her cheek but otherwise her mouth betrays no happiness.

Off-panel Mob says, "Yes." Tsubomi, in close-up, squints and looks down.

Page 3:

In a tiny little panel Tsubomi is just her hair, a black oval, facing Mob, who looks up from his head tilted down.

Mob faces the reader, the otherwise empty panel framing his head, shoulders, and upper torso. He looks straight at the reader and says, a calm smile on his face, "Tsubomi, I like you. A lot."

This view is maintained as Mob looks away and shrugs one shoulder, still smiling. "Always have. Ever since we were little. You never treated me any different because of..."

A smaller panel just shows his head and shoulders as Mob looks back at the reader and traces a small circle by his head with his finger, to indicate him, his brain, something.

Another smaller panel just shows his shoulders and upper torso as Mob once again holds the sunflower diagonally across his chest. He fidgets with the head of the flower. "So if you would--uh, I was wondering..."

The same view of Mob returns, now with a few of the bent trees half-visible, highlighting his form. He holds the sunflower out in front of him. The flower is large and has its own little highlight. He has one of those smiles that's so strong that the front of it gets pushed down by your upper lip. He says, "Would you like to go out. With me."

Page 4:

Tsubomi stands, head, shoulders, and upper torso highlighted by the vertical trees behind her, looking right at the reader. She has a mild smile on and leans to the right.

The same views but the trees are gone, so it's just her as she leans farther, her shoulders slump, her mouth flattens out of the smile, her eyebrows crinkle together. She stares right at the reader.

The same view of her in an empty panel now twice as wide as the others, so she looks smaller though her size doesn't change. One arm has goes up to hold her hip. She drops her head down so her partially-visible face is a silhouette surrounded by the black shape of her hair and collar, just a nose, an ear, and a closed eye.

End ID.

yall already know what it is. sad tsubomi hour. this comic will answer two questions: one, what did the rejection actually look like?? two, how did mob get tsubomis number later???

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.