Aftermath (part 1)

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???

I really love how Teruki’s hair acts as a barometer to his personal development. It’s so true-to-life for teenagers (guilty of this).

His hair drastically changes whenever something big happens that affects his outlook on life or his sense of self, and it’s exactly the same as when your friend would show up to school one day with an extremely different hairstyle, maybe even dyed a different color, and you’d think like, “Something must have fundamentally changed in your life’s trajectory and your personal understanding of it”. (Honestly, being a teenager is just a series of these moments strung together by homework and video games.)

And every single time his hair changes, it’s against his will. Sure, he usually chooses how to style it afterwards, but both of the Kageyama Scalping Incidents, Sakurai’s hair chop, etc. were against his will. But without fail, it always happens at a major emotional turning point in Teruki’s life. Him being snapped out of his superiority complex (mostly), him being influenced by Reigen’s 1000% and finding a passion for teaching, Mob breaking his own pedestal with the Confession accident, etc.

Teru’s gonna walk into a room at some point in the future with a totally different hairstyle that he chose for no real reason at all, just to shake it up, and everyone’s going to be like Oh My God Teru What Happened and he’s gonna be like, “????? Does it look that bad???? 🥺”

thanks to @jellyana for posting some of teru’s dialogue

MP100 be reiterating the importance of positive adult influence in child development.

Alright I gotta talk about a thing.

I’ve seen a lot of posts about Mob bringing light and happiness into Reigen’s life. I’ve reblogged a lot of them, because they’re great and adorable. You see it all over. Reigen in a dark place, borderline depressed, Mob shows up, needs guidance, actually saves Reigen.

And then one day I was scrolling through and I thought. Does that really happen? Sure, Reigen is a conman and doesn’t have a ton of friends and is kinda wandering in his life but is he really in such a dark place?

On the one hand, I had the option to say that people were projecting, or that everyone just loves that “I was a broken boy and you fixed me” trope (I’m begging you to read Artemis Fowl, which is where that quote comes from). And that would have been fine.

But then I thought back to my own experiences, and I thought back to every time a friend or a family member looked me in the eye and said “hey, I just really get the feeling you’re going in a bad direction, do you need something?” and it hit me that this is exactly what happens to Reigen.

The common use of this trope is that character A appears put together but then is revealed to have a tragic backstory where they fell apart as a person and have been putting up a front, and character B helped them put the pieces together. But this isn’t what happens to Reigen. Reigen get snatched up in the canon timeline metaphorical moments before his crash-and-burn event.

We never see Reigen think about what a dumpster fire his life was before Mob because it wasn’t a dumpster fire. It was approaching one, yes, but it never got there. Mob stepped in and gave Reigen direction, and re-lit the flame of motivation that Reigen had lost when he forgot that he wanted to “be someone.” Reigen was 100% heading in the direction of falling apart, but Mob came in at the last second and picked him up before he actually got there.

I think that’s one of the main pulls in their relationship to me, because a lot about their dynamic couldn’t be possible without it. The entire separation arc relies on the fact that Reigen doesn’t understand Mob’s effect on his life, or the emotional maturity that Mob has shown, which he probably would have noticed if he’d known the whole time that Mob fundamentally improved his whole disastrous life. Even the fact that Reigen is still a con artist relies on this. If Mob had “saved” Reigen from his lifestyle, Reigen would have been given the chance to re-work his life entirely, abandoning the more negative parts of his personality that he says later on that he hates.

Anyway I have a lot of feelings about this and I really respect ONE for taking this angle.

Reigen just fucking died

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

Brain slowly recovering enough that I can hopefully get back to working on End of the World, but I have totally lost my overview, so today I'm just reminding myself of basic thematic stuff, like...

Mob Psycho 100 is about kindness, which is a great and refreshing theme for a shonen manga, and one I appreciate very much. But on a personal level I just can't help but want to prod at it. And Shou is so very different from Mob that he and many of the people in his life make a great vehicle for that.

What if you aren't kind? What if you aren't empathetic? What if you haven't been given the tools to understand other people or yourself? What if reaching out or trying to help has backfired more times than not? What if the people who were supposed to take care of you have hurt and abandoned and taken advantage of you over and over? What if it isn't forgivable?

What if it isn't forgivable...?

2023 vs 2018 vs the original manga panel :-)

if teru’s new hair has 100 fans, i am one of them.