And This Right Here Is Why We Stan Reigen. He’s The Best Master. And This Is Character Development.

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 !

Mob Psycho 100 - Chapter 1 / REIGEN - Chapter 7 : Reigen Arataka, first and last panel 

Looks like someone needs to call in "???" to school

There is no narrative basis for what Teru is saying here. Shimazaki was winning the fight before he sensed Mob approaching. Shimazaki gauged the situation, determined he was outclassed, gave a flippant reason for surrendering, got spooked when Mob’s anger/powers flared, and teleported away. At no point do we see him showing any signs of being traumatized, contrite or having changed for the better.

Teru is absolutely projecting his own trauma from the ???% encounter onto Shimazaki. It’s obvious Teru sees his past self in Shimazaki when the man declared himself the world’s greatest after Toichiro, and we know Teru is talking specifically about Mob when he says “there are people in this world with powers you can’t even fathom”. 

Teru interpreted Shimazaki’s situation based on his personal experience, namely: person has delusions of grandeur –> encounters the nonpareil greatness that is Kageyama-kun –> sees the error of his ways. He’s “pretty sure” about his conclusion. He can’t imagine having any other kind of reaction after being the target of Kageyama-kun’s wrath.  

This is the second time in the anime we’ve heard Teru acknowledge the lasting negative effects of his encounter with ???% (the part about nightmares for three days and nights wasn’t in the manga). I think it’s moments like these that can add nuance to discussions surrounding Mob vs Teru Part 1- a fight and its aftermath whose comedic elements (the ochimusha, heel-face turn, wig) have already, though well-deservedly, been repeatedly explored. 

anyway, some reigen observations

Friends, once again :’)

Grief in art

Grief is an interesting subject for depiction, because it isn't ever really just one feeling. It's a cluster of feelings, an array of very different, sometimes almost contradictory emotional states, which collectively we understand as expressions of that one underlying condition, which is grieving.

So how do you show that? How do you take that and make it visible to an audience? Many, many artists have tried, and their attempts are varied, fascinating, and very occasionally heartbreaking.

Let's take a little non-comprehensive walking tour of grief in art history, from the 1400s to the 2020s, from the religious to the cartoony, and get in our feelings a bit.

I was going over the scene in ep.07 where Reigen is reflecting before telling Mob he has grown, and I finally noticed that Reigen has his clothes torn in his thoughts…exactly like they were torn by the sword when fighting Claw last season. Which was intially weird to me because Reigen’s words here are as negative as possible, despite that moment where he took the hit being one of his best towards Mob.

And then it hit me, Reigen probably doesn’t know he helped Mob. Reigen likely remembers his involvement as a failure.

The audience knows that it was Reigen telling Mob that he could run away that saved Mob, to the point of him becoming 100% grateful and accidently transferring his powers. But the audience knows because the narration told us so, Reigen was never told this.

For Reigen, that whole mess was one where he went to help some kids in danger, tried to put sense into the villains’ minds and it backfired into pissing them off. He failed so badly Mob was terrified and Reigen had to tell him to run away. And then unknowingly began using up Mob’s powers to little success, needing Shou to step in to save them in the very end.

Perhaps Reigen has come to the conclusion Mob gave him powers to protect him due to being slashed in the back. So as far as Reigen ever knew, he turned out to be another liability Mob had to protect, and nearly doomed them by taking Mob’s powers rather than have Mob deal with it all himself.

He was never aware of how much he saved Mob, and now he considers his involvement in that moment a failure where he held Mob back by being there.

Okay to elaborate on that last tag rant:

When Reigen tells Serizawa to get him as close to Mob as possible, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he gets there. This isn’t surprising. Reigen very seldom knows what he’s going to do until he’s actually doing it. He thrives under pressure. He’ll dance at the edge of a precipice and come out unscathed. He doesn’t need a plan! He’s been thrown into wilder situations before!

He doesn’t crucially, really understand what’s going on. He doesn’t know what the problem is. He knows that Mob’s involved, but he thinks he can fix it the same way he’s fixed things before: with some quick thinking and off-the-cuff advice and half-truths papered over with offers of ramen.

And then he sees Mob. (Check out the last post by @exilepurify for a fantastic analysis of this moment!) That’s when he realizes what Mob’s been dealing with and the scale of his struggles and the harm he’s capable of causing. And it’s also when Reigen realizes how much harm his lies have caused, because he promised to help but he didn’t, he couldn’t, he has no freaking idea how any of this works, but he let Mob believe him.

And after the moment of shocked, horrified realization, he knows what he has to say. And it says so much about Reigen that he’s right! He’s able to figure out what Mob needs! He’s able to pinpoint the thing that will undo this giant knot of insecurities at the center of Mob’s heart! He sees what looks like a monster inside his kid and he immediately understands!

(It’s because he sees a monster inside of himself, too.)

The thing that Reigen gets wrong is in thinking that once he makes his confession, that will be the end of his and Mob’s relationship. It makes sense that he’d assume that! He hurt this kid, and it would be totally justified for Mob to cut him off. But this isn’t that kind of story.

But while he’s running through the tornado, while he’s screaming for Mob to please listen to him, while he’s looking up at the sky and trembling, he’s steeling himself for this to be their final conversation. I’ve seen all the posts about the shoes, and while I’m not disputing a more literal interpretation, to me it feels much more like an acknowledgment of “There’s no coming back from this.” He can’t talk his way out. He can’t cover it up. He’s laying bare the worst parts of himself and ready to suffer the consequences. Whether Mob kills him or decides never to speak to him again almost doesn’t matter; they feel equally final and equally painful. But he doesn’t care, because his confession is what Mob needs.

It’s heartbreaking but Mob was not at all happy to see Reigen arrive with the gun.

He knew there was nothing Reigen could do. They were apart and he couldn’t transfer his powers to him. More importantly, he couldn’t protect him.

And Reigen knew his presence wasn’t soothing Mob.

Asking him obvious questions, putting the whole blame for the situation on himself and taking it from Mob (it’s not that Mob told everyone he’d do it alone, it’s that Reigen let him go), and then even suggesting things will be fine… Reigen said all of that in a very calm and collected voice, despite the look on his face. He was doing it for Mob’s benefit. 

And since Mob was so fucked up, hearing it worked a bit, and it calmed him enough for I’m to finally faint from all the pain. His head knew Reigen wasn’t going to win, but his heart still believed him.