Episode 13 of Season 2 has finally convinced me: Mob Psycho has cemented its place as my favorite anime of all time, and Mob, as my favorite anime protagonist.
I was iffy about starting it in the beginning, because I was one of the people who were put off by its art style. I’d only seen still images of the anime, and the drawings looked simple and were not at all what I was used to seeing in anime shows. On a whim, while searching for a new show to watch after I was done binging MHA, I watched the first two episodes a couple weeks ago.
I would like to say that it hooked me in right away, but that wasn’t the case. Rather, it was more of a slow pull; nothing about the show immediately caught my attention (other than the gorgeous scenes of Mob exorcising spirits, the colors and movement of the camera were incredible), but I kept coming back to it. I grew to appreciate the art style and came to realize how incredible the animation of this show really was. The simple designs of the characters didn’t detract from their expressions and personalities, but rather added to them; the animators could stretch the characters’ facial expressions to ridiculous levels to convey the most extreme of emotions and it still didn’t seem out of place because it was fitting for the art style. The characters could take up more interesting and dynamic poses and have a variety of body languages because the animators could focus more on the details of bodily expression rather than on complex character design. You could see that evidently in the way that a character like Reigen moves: his fluid stride, his expressive gestures. The character that seemed most immune to this, though, was Mob, the main character, the one that I should have been getting attached to the most… and though I liked Mob a lot, he wasn’t my favorite character of the show by the end of Season 1. The moments where I really did appreciate his character were during his rare displays of emotions: things like his emotional breakdown after his fight with Hanazawa and his guttural cry of “Riiitsuuuuu!!!” when Koyama attempted to take his brother. Most of the time, though, he was as stiff as a board, even during fight scenes, and it’s hard to get attached to a character who so rarely shows emotions (at least for me), because a part of following a character throughout their journey is seeing how outside events affect them and how they learn to grow from them. But that was also a part of his characterization and I understand that. Besides, that all built up to Season 2.
So, I finished Season 1, and I really wanted to have an out of body experience and dropkick myself in the face because how the hell did I let my biases against what I construed as “rudimentary art styles” keep me from enjoying a show this good for so long? And man, Season 2—
From the first episode, we get the sense that this season will be about Mob’s growth as a person. The first thing we see in this season is how he defeats an evil spirit by learning from it, rather than passively exorcising it. The scene where he gets teary-eyed while picking up the scraps of Emi’s notebook, saying, “I made the decision to consider my feelings more. And you need to pick up things you feel are important,” hits me like a tidal wave every time (and might I add how phenomenal Itou Setsuo’s voice acting is and how fitting it is for Mob’s character?). Throughout the beginning of this season, Mob starts to assert and question more things: who am I to exorcise a family of ghosts who are only living peacefully? Who’s going to stop me if I’m overcome with power? Won’t even a fake curse still have some effect on how the client thinks about the situation? He asserts that he doesn’t want to exorcise the ghosts. He questions whether Reigen was right in simply waving off the client with a fake curse. He decides that he wants to save Minori and is determined to. He’s adamant in his belief that rather than hurting people who are in the wrong, the best route of solution is to help them change. That’s why he forgives Minori for her shitty actions. He’s upset at Reigen for dismissing him and ignoring his growth so he decides to let it be shown. He forgives Reigen because he knows that Reigen is a good person, even though sometimes he can be inconsiderate toward him. His growth is most outrightly shown when he says he wants to confess to Tsubomi after getting in the top 10 at the school marathon. He has goals. He’s determined. Whereas in the beginning of Season 1, he wasn’t even able to decide by himself whether he wanted to join an extracurricular club or not.
When Mogami wants to get rid of Minegishi, Mob so firmly believes that he can change and, though he can’t completely trust Minegishi to follow through, he has to have faith that he will. Mogami reluctantly lets Minegishi go, while instilling that Mob’s kindness will not always be the answer and that it’ll be necessary to be hard on people. And Mob takes this to heart, too, as we can see when he tells Reigen and the other espers that they’ll only get in the way in his battle with Touichirou. On his way, he encounters Serizawa who, much like himself from the beginning, was isolated and in dissonance with his psychic abilities. He conveys to him all of the things that he learned through his journey and helps him change; he recognizes that the relationships he built throughout the story has made him grow as a person, and that Serizawa too can grow from it if he just has the right people surrounding him. He offers to be just that, a friend, a person who can understand the things that Serizawa is going through, because that’s what helped him out of his isolated state.
And finally, episode 13, what a fucking trip. Mob goes through so many emotions in just this one episode than we’ve seen from him over the course of two seasons. For the first time, we see him in pure ecstasy, because for the first time, he can truly unleash his powers, untethered by the fear of hurting those around him. We don’t expect to see him smile like that after Touichirou bombards him with fallen building blocks and laser beams and when we see it as the camera zooms in on his face, it’s chilling, almost scary. We’ve never seen Mob like that before. But as he catches a glimpse of Ritsu, he’s lurched back into reality and we see his shame as he’s hunched over on a piece of falling rock. Touichirou’s powers turn him into a bestial, otherwordly being while Mob keeps his form as he goes through multiple emotions at 100%. I’m glad that he never reaches ???% during this fight, because having a subconscious part of him that he has no control over take part in this fight would defeat the purpose of showing his growth; feeling his emotions at 100% without letting them get loose is a result of, I think, the things that tether Mob to his reality. Things like the Body Improvement Club (”Body improvement!!! Fight on!!!!!” omg that had me in pieces), Tsubomi (”I also have someone I need to express my feelings to!”), his brother, Hanazawa, Reigen, all keep him grounded. We see his ideal that he’s kept from the beginning (♫ I keep my ideals sorezore ♫—oh wrong anime) when he says to Touichirou, as he sits in a barrier within a coming explosion: “Just having powers doesn’t mean everything will work out for you.” And something he’s learned along the way: “That’s perfectly fine, as long as you make the important choices yourself.”
And that’s the line that made me completely fall in love with Mob’s character. Here’s the awkward kid who, in the beginning, had to call Reigen to ask if he should join a club, was fooled so easily into attending a cult by a woman who guessed his worries wrong three times, was torn between using his powers against Claw because he couldn’t decide whether he should listen to Reigen or his brother and Hanazawa, was too easily convinced to run for student council president and ended up making a fool of himself. He learns to make his own important choices and we see that so clearly. He makes the choice to run the marathon with his own physical abilities instead of listening to Mezato. He makes the choice to go after Touichirou alone. He makes the choice to stay with Touichirou and help him. And the scene of Mob trying to absorb Touichirou’s explosion, even with the pain of it, is a frightening yet heart-wrenching moment exactly because this is where all of his growth has led him to; he’s determined, empathetic, self-sacrificial, and yes, it’s painful to be in the presence of such a powerful explosion but it’s less painful than letting this man suffer through it by himself.
And when I look back at who Mob was in the beginning, that emotionally stifled 14-year-old boy, it makes this kind of development so much more meaningful because it shows just how far he’s come as a character. Mob’s character development is by far my favorite in any show I’ve watched so far. I think a lot of shounen anime tends to focus on the “power of friendship!” “teamwork!” and overall the idea that all is better than one, and Mob Psycho focuses on that, too, of course, because we see how people like Reigen, Hanazawa, Ritsu, and the Body Improvement Club have changed him. But the most significant thing about Mob’s change is his recognition of the importance of independence and autonomy, too; the ability to make his own decisions, to weigh his own consequences, to balance and prioritize what’s important to him. Maybe that’s a simple, self-explanatory thing, something so small that we tend to forget, but in Mob, the realization of it made the biggest difference.
(I may have had to write this because I have no irl friends watching this show and I needed to put all of these pent-up emotions somewhere. It turned out too long lol.)
