I regret to inform you that "[player characters] look like someone pressed randomise on a Gorillaz picrew" has described all self-consciously edgy urban fantasy RPGs for the past thirty years.
having audio processing issues is so humiliating like yeah i heard you and yeah i was actively listening but the problem is i dont know what the fuck you sayed
Oh so the plural of surgeon general is surgeons general, huh? Well what about bunnies rabbit. Puppies dog. KITTIES CAT. Did you ever think of that, you sillies goose?
if youve never physically been in the presence of like, a real live wolf, and you probably wont get the chance to, heres some stuff about them you should know
a wolf’s fur is so unbelievably thick that you can get like, your whole hand into it while petting. and then you can keep going
wolves are a lot bigger than you think they are. think about how big you think a wolf is then just like double that
they dont really smell like dog but they DO smell and youre not going to be able to figure out if its a good smell or not
a wolf really wants to lick the inside of your mouth. he will not stop trying to lick the inside of your mouth at any cost, and generally speaking you need to press your lips together kind of tightly when he approaches your face so that he doesnt worm his damn tongue in there to give you what he thinks is an appropriate greeting
a wolf doesnt really want to look at you while you pet him but he wants you to pet him. hes embarrassed
if a grown ass wolf decides to lay down on you, you just have to deal with it and thats your life now
young wolves, much like young dogs, are overwhelmingly goofy and stupid. a teenage wolf will see your very fragile, very human shoulder and go “i can probably step on that with my full weight” and then he will do it
letting a wolf eat out of your hand is actually not remotely frightening, and youll want to do it all day
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 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.
