The Thing About Reigen Is. He’s Reigen. Sometimes He’s Reigen Arataka, And On Very Rare Occasions

Translation: “Ah, that reminds me, Shishou. Happy birthday.”

I was reading through my copy of the mp100 manga with the separation arc, and I saw that this was included on the very last page of the book, after all of the omake pages.

The version I read online never included this (this was probably added for the print version, there’s some other slight differences from what I read online). It always made me sad thinking that even though everything was resolved, Mob never wished Reigen happy birthday, but he did!

MP100 Theory: Mob’s Power

(This post only uses manga caps for convenience’s sake,)

One of the main plot points of MP100 is Mob’s aversion to using his powers. This was due to a number of things, but that main two being Tsubomi and a tragic event where he accidentally hurt his brother.

This, of course, eventually leads to Mob’s explosions or “100%.” But in theory, these explosions wouldn’t be nearly as bad if Mob wasn’t as powerful. Which begs the question - where did all of Mob’s psychic power come from? 

We know he’s a natural born psychic. He’s had his powers since he was young - Ritsu confirmed as much.

But obviously being able to float dogs since birth doesn’t give you godly powers. There are at least four other natural born psychics in the show, and their abilities all differ.

We also already know that Mob hasn’t been “training” his powers or anything. He’s avoided using them at all cost. So why the strength if he’s not even training? Well, the answer is simple.

Holding back his emotions.

We already know from Dimple that emotions can affect your psychic powers, and from Ritsu’s “experiments,” we know it can increase said power.

So it’s safe to say that after years of stress and other floods of emotions (that Mob has been holding back,) his power naturally increased because of all his turmoil. However, this wouldn’t be bad if he were also using his powers freely like Ritsu did. But since Mob is still too afraid to do such, he was accidentally saving energy.

Saving energy is something that we know is possible due to both of the Suzukis doing it. You can still use part of your energy and save the rest. Kind of like eating one slice of pizza instead of the entire thing.

These two things are what makes Mob so overpowered. Whenever Mob goes 100%, he is using part of 10+ years of held back emotions.

But keep in mind that this energy isn’t being immediately replaced. When you eat a slice of pizza, another one doesn’t magically take it’s place. You either have to cook more or buy another slice. Both of which takes time.

So when Mob goes 100%, he is depleting part of the energy he has saved for so long.

This leads you to believe “Wouldn’t Mob eventually run out of stored energy?”

Yes, but when he uses ???%, this energy is replaced.

During his fight with Teruki, he absorbed the other’s power. (Along with everything else in the atmosphere.)

Luckily, ???% is much rarer than 100%, otherwise Mob would eventually take in more energy than he got rid of.

TLDR: Mob’s power is due to him holding in his emotions and if not for his 100% explosions, he could eventually kill us with a sneeze.

Reunion

Reigen: It’s already dark, guess I lost track of time. —Sigh—- Another day passes…

Mob: Master Reigen: Those were such good times…. Mob: Master Reigen: Time passes so quickly. He’s an adult now, out living his own life…. Mob: Master…. Master…. Reigen: I miss him. I can still hear how he used to call me. Ugh I’m hopeless.

MASTER!

Mob: It’s been a while, Master Reigen Reigen: …………. Mob? 

Reigen: You…..Why are you here? What are you doing here? 

Mob: I was thinking back to old times, and I wondered if you’d miss me at all, so I decided to drop by. 

Reigen: Idiot! Of course I do!  Mob: I was only kidding Mob: Master, I was wondering if you wanted to go get some drinks, since I’m in town. I’m twenty now. 

Reigen: Well… um, I’m not really much of a drinker. (Thinks: Can we pick something else?) Mob: But I’d like to get drinks with you.  Reigen: Uh….Well, we both know I can’t say no to you. Mob: Just one drink 

Mob thinks: ah… he’s only had a few sips

Reigen: You’ve really grown up.

Mob: You’ve gotten older too, Master.

Reigen: Ugh, don’t remind me

Reigen: So you’re in college now yeah? You doing okay?

Mob: Yeah

Reigen: You ever encounter supernatural stuff anymore?

Mob: Occasionally But every time I do, I think of the things you taught me and the things we’ve been through together. And it’s through these experiences that I’m able to live a normal life.  Reigen: Haha you’re giving me waayy to much credit. 

Mob: No it’s true, meeting you was the best thing that happened to me. 

Mob: Uh…. are you crying? Reigen: Of course not

Reigen downs his drink in one go and falls forward onto the table Mob thinks: Has he had too much?

Reigen slurring: Moooobbb Mob thinks: Is he okay?…He’s really falling apart. Reigen: Awww look at your chubby cheeks, just like when you were little. Mob: Ugh not this side of him

Reigen pets his hair for a bit. Reigen: But… real talk. I’m really happy to be able to see you again.

Reigen: Mob…. you’ve grown up into a really good person. Mob: Of course I did…. I’m YOUR student after all.  By Gamtga on twitter

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.

I swear I just wanted to talk about how much I love Tsubomi and then it turned into a 4,000+ word dissertation on her, Mob and why I think Tsubomi is so important to mp100’s narrative despite, or maybe because of, being a very minor character.

I haven’t counted, but I think Tsubomi shows up in less than 30 pages throughout the entire comic, plus a single omake. That’s really not much, especially considering half of those appearances are just to point out that she’s present in the given scene.

In other words we never get to know much about her and she has no character development to speak of (unless you want to call her remembering that Mob exists character development). Normally that would annoy me to no end - Love interests that only exist to be love interests and the “guy gets the girl in the end (as a reward)” trope is boring at best and offensive at worst.

I was apprehensive while first reading through the comic because right off the bat it looks like mp100 sets itself up to follow the “guy gets the girl” narrative. However, ONE did a pretty clever thing with the trope by both taking advantage of the expectations we have for it and completely discarding them.

“Middle school boy tries to impress the girl he’s in love with” isn’t exactly an adequate description of mp100’s plot. Anyone can see from very early on that that isn’t what the story is about at all. But to Mob? To Mob that’s exactly what it’s about. Everything Mob does that doesn’t involve people being in immediate danger, everything Mob wants to change about himself, is to some degree motivated by Tsubomi. In his mind Tsubomi is the end goal and he’s doing his best to make his life a “guy gets the girl” kind of story.

But, by thinking like that, even after years of never actually talking to her, he has put her on a pedestal where she has become an ideal and no longer a person. Mob never really talks about Tsubomi or gives any explanation as to why he likes her so much, and I guess because she’s the school idol and lots of boys are interested in her, no one really questions it either. Of course he would like Tsubomi, right? Everyone likes Tsubomi.

Tsubomi gets to stay on her pedestal, silent and with almost no sign of a personality, for almost the entire comic. It isn’t until chapter 94 that we get to see her as an actual person, because that’s when Mob, for the first time within the comic’s timeframe, treats her as an actual person by doing something as mundane as handing her a paper tissue because she sneezed. Even Takane Tsubomi sneezes you know.

Keep reading

ITS THAT TIME OF YEAR FOLKS

He got a makeover. No more star, but he has lights

“Shut Up and Eat” yakiniku omake — original Japanese dialogue analysis and translation

The 3rd installment of the four-part yakiniku omake series in Mob Psycho 100 involves a bit of clever wordplay to make Mob’s slurring make sense, which means that the translation had to play around with the words a little bit to make it work in English. So, what did Mob actually say in Japanese?

I got the raws from the Manga One app in the Japanese iTunes app store.

I would like to preface this by saying that the most popular translated version, where Mob says the infamous “Shut up and eat” line, is the best translated version in my opinion, because Mob actually slurring that is a totally feasible thing. I’ll explain more about that in the translation notes below, but this version I translated isn’t reworked to match the syllables and make the slurring believable, but rather to try and represent the Japanese meaning.

Reigen: モブ。— Mob.

それもう焼けてるぞ。— It’s about to burn!

Mob: ………

Reigen: モブ… —Mob…

それもう焼けてるぞ。(二回目) — It’s about to burn. (A second time)

なぁ… — Hey…

Mob: このくらい…よく火を通した方が好きなんで。— It’s good like this. I like the heat to spread evenly throughout.

Reigen: 焼き過ぎだ。それだと肉本来の味が消えてしまう。—It’s cooking too much. It’s going to completely lose the original flavor.

Mob: いや、おいしいです。— No, it’s tasty.

Reigen: いや、それはベストのおいしさではない。— No, that’s not the best taste.

焼き過ぎな上にタレも付け過ぎだ。タレの味しかしないだろう。— It’s overcooked and you put too much sauce on top.

Mob: いや、おいしいです。— No, it’s tasty.

Reigen: また！それも焼き過ぎだぞ。— Again! That one’s also cooking too much.

ちょっと焦げてんじゃねーか。— It’s a bit scorched, isn’t it?

あ、ほらそっちの肉もあと4秒くらいで… — Ah, look—that piece of meat, in about four seconds…

「師匠は肉にうるさいなぁ…」と言おうとしたが、口に入れた肉が予想以上に熱くて舌が上手くまわらず… — “Shishou is picky about meat, huh…” is what Mob tried to say, but when he put the meat in his mouth, it was hotter than expected and his tongue couldn’t articulate well.

Mob: チッ… うるせぇな。— Tch… Shut the hell up.

Reigen: ………..

霊幻は静かに肉を焼いた。— Reigen cooked his meat in silence.

——————————

Notes:

- Mob: このくらい…よく火を通した方が好きなんで。— It’s good like this. I like the heat to spread evenly throughout.

「このくらい…」　actually directly translates to “This much…” (in regards to how much he’s cooking the meat over the grill). It employs the Japanese technique of “only say half the sentence and let the rest be unspoken”, but that wouldn’t make a lot of sense in English and kind of sticks out translated strictly like that. So I just finished the sentence.

- Mob: チッ… うるせぇな。— Tch… Shut the hell up.

So, this whole thing is a joke about the many uses of the word 「うるさい」　(urusai). 「うるさい 」　can be used to mean “loud/noisy”, “annoying/bothersome”, “picky/fussy/particular”, and “shut up!” when shouted as an interjection. I’ve been in a class in Tokyo where we were all yelled at for talking by our professor, who kept saying 「うるさいだよ！」. In Mob’s originally-intended sentence—「師匠は肉にうるさいなぁ…」—he was using うるさい to mean “picky/fussy”, since Reigen truly would not relax and leave him alone over that meat. But because the meat burned his mouth, he ended up clicking his tongue and slurring 「うるせぇな。」　He dropped the “Shishou” and “about meat” parts entirely, his hurt tongue not moving fast enough and holding out an “e” vowel throughout the latter half of the word instead of raising up into an “ai” sound. This… makes the word very rude. And since all other parts of the sentence were dropped, it also makes it an interjection— a rude and harsh version of “Shut up!”, which I’ve chosen to represent by making Mob curse. (Turning rude conjugation forms into English cursing is a pretty common practice in Japanese translation, as they have more expressive conjugation forms than us and we have no other real way to express that inherent hostility/brashness.)

In the most popularized English translation of this scene, the translators did something very clever to make Mob’s slurring possible, since we don’t have “rude” verb forms in English. What Mob originally wanted to say was, “Shishou sure likes to talk about meat…”, which gets slurred into “Shut up and eat.” The syllables specifically from “shishou” and “about meat” can be slurred into something phonetically resembling “shut up and eat”. I think this is extremely clever and fantastic translation work.

Anyway. Reigen deserved that.

*whispers* I,,,, ll o ve…..   y ooo   uuu u

mobdonalds (more below the cut)

Can it be considered fanart if it involves the collective effort of 4 almost-uni-students spending 1.5h at a local mcdonalds cutting up nori, arranging fries and artfully using ketchup packets to recreate the faces of mp100 characters?

Further info on our reasoning behind the type of food used for each character:

(All in good fun, we were just goofing around with our food)

Mob is a double cheeseburger while Ritsu is a normal cheeseburger - this is due to Ritsu's feelings of inferiority

Haystack Teru gets some nice fries for his hair for that golden crispy look

Reigen is the plumpest juiciest burger with the nicest bun because. You know.

Shou... I'm so sorry Shou you deserved better (ignore how it looks like a crime scene)

Train ride.

Bonus: