What's different about Hatano, part 2
(Part 1 is here; part 3 and part 4 were posted later.)
The second thing about Hatano that isn’t like other characters who’ve chased after Mob is the fact that he has a unique relationship with…well, let’s say Mob’s equally unique experience of reality. So first, a little background on that.
Most people in Mob’s world don’t experience it the way he does. It’s not just that he’s one of the few who realizes they’re all living in BL World, though that’s a big part of it. (The only other person who does, as far as we know, is Mayama, the mangaka who has some degree of control over Mob’s story. Though, interestingly, he actually didn’t realize he lived in a BL manga world until Mob told him in season 1.)
In most of his relationships, Mob is completely inauthentic. His priority is remaining a side character, and sincerely connecting with others not only doesn’t serve that goal, it has a lot of potential to undermine it. He does seem to care about his family somewhat, particularly Ayato. But that’s about it.
Except that he has one other relationship, of a sort: his relationship with us, his audience. It’s kind of strange, when you think about it. Mob’s whole thing is being a side character. And yet, he narrates his own story to us in a way that’s unmistakably protagonist-like. Maybe he justifies it through his emphasis on advising us on how to evade story traps like him. He may not have anyone else who shares his awareness of how BL World operates, but offering advice on how it works and how to avoid L with a B implies that maybe one of these days, someone else will embrace side character status like him. Maybe someday he won’t be alone.
For now, his voiceover comments are a big part of his personality, and they’re very distinct. Sometimes Mob goes so far as to overtly break the fourth wall, like in the first episode of season 3, both when he brags about escaping the situation with Kikuchi and boasts that he’s BL-proof (above), and later in that episode, when he asks us if we’ve guessed yet why he’s exercising (below). (And of course, every single time “Bubble Mob” appears in the corner of the screen, he does nothing but directly address the audience.)
The rest of the time, he does this in a more subtle way. His voiceover commentary isn’t like a typical voiceover in a show or movie that’s less self-aware. If we watch a something that uses voiceovers in a typical way, the person speaking doesn’t acknowledge who they’re speaking to, or even that they're speaking to anyone. In most stories, unless some kind of context is used to explain who is being addressed (e.g. a frame story), calling attention to the fact that the voiceover implies that someone is being spoken to would undermine the realism of the story. Mob never acknowledges that he’s the protagonist of his own TV series, and in fact doesn’t seem to be aware of it. (Well, except when he does things like speculate about whether there will be another season.) But he constantly acknowledges the viewer through his advice and narration. He may not know how or why, but he knows there’s someone out there listening to him.
So Mob goes through his world with this important knowledge that practically no one else shares, pretending to have friendships and so forth but never forming any sort of authentic bond with anyone (with the possible exception of Ayato), and the closest thing he has to a real friend who he can be honest with is the audience.
And the other characters he interacts with don’t seem to notice any of this, even when he shows outward signs of how he’s experiencing this world. Sometimes he makes his observations out loud instead of in a voiceover, but no one seems to bat an eye. He regularly says and does things in front of Ayato that strike him as strange, but when Mob shrugs them off, Ayato does too.
Hatano’s relationship to Mob’s experience
Most of the time, Hatano seems to be like the other characters in Mob’s world. Despite his keen interest in Mob, he usually doesn’t seem to see how he’s different from other people. Except that occasionally, he does! Every so often, he sees into Mob’s reality in a way that other characters can’t.
The first time we see this happen, he hasn’t even met Mob since the interaction they had when they were children. At the end of episode 2, Mob’s voiceover tells us, “What I didn’t know at the time was that a destined age-gap love was looming just around the corner.” Hatano stands in the foreground watching a blissfully ignorant Mob walk away in the background. Then “Bubble Mob” appears in his little green circle in the lower left corner of the screen to talk about how more will be revealed in the next episode. That’s when something weird happens. Hatano turns his head and looks right at Bubble Mob, who is seriously disconcerted by this. “Why are you looking at me?” he asks. Then he hastily wraps up the episode, as if he’s eager to do so in order to escape from Hatano.
This is the most overt example of Hatano being able to perceive things other non-Mob characters don’t, but it isn’t the last.
The next time happens in episode 3, when Mob is desperately trying to think of ways to put Hatano off. “In order to squash a flag that was raised in the past,” he thinks in a voiceover, “it might work if I tell him I’m a different person from this guy he remembers.” Immediately, before Mob has said a single word out loud, Hatano says, “I’ve always liked you. I could never mistake you for someone else.” It’s as if he just heard Mob’s voiceover. He clearly doesn’t hear it all the time, unless he’s incredibly good at pretending otherwise. But it almost seems like for Hatano, the boundary between Mob’s reality (the version of reality that we experience as viewers) and the reality inhabited by Hatano and the rest of the people in BL World occasionally becomes more permeable.
The third time happens in the other direction—instead of Hatano seeing what things are like for Mob, Mob sees something through Hatano’s eyes. Specifically, he experiences a daydream of Hatano’s.
It isn’t completely unprecedented for Mob to see something from someone else’s mind as if he’s seeing it himself—but it is unprecedented for someone with Hatano’s role in Mob’s life. The type of thing he sees through Hatano is also unique.
The one other person whose eyes Mob sometimes sees through is Ayato. When Ayato tells a story, not only is the viewer able to see a flashback of him having the experience he’s recounting, but often, it’s clear that Mob can see it too, in a very literal sense. We see a perfect example of this when Mob asks Ayato what kind of guy Hatano is and he tells the story of what happened when a girl confessed to Hatano at school. We know that Mob actually sees this flashback because he identifies the specific type of flower that surrounds Hatano (the same way other BL main character types that he encounters have some kind of accompanying burst of flowers). Mob sees Hatano’s face ringed with gerbera daisies, which he’s able to identify despite Ayato saying nothing about them (and not seeming to perceive them at all). Mob’s face is even lit by a mysterious light as he comments on the gerberas, as if Hatano’s “sparkling aura” has been conveyed through the story into Mob’s bedroom.
So it’s not completely unheard-of for Mob to be able to see what someone else is picturing. But in Ayato’s case, he has only seen flashbacks connected to stories Ayato tells. (I’m not counting fantasies about Ayato that are clearly just Mob’s imagination, which Ayato is completely unaware of.) That makes Hatano the first person besides Ayato whose eyes Mob sees through, for starters. More specifically, he’s the first of Mob’s suitors to have that effect on him. And it’s also noteworthy that the narrative of Hatano’s that Mob sees 1) isn’t narrated—he’s not picturing it because Hatano is telling him a story, he’s just spontaneously inside of it without warning, and 2) isn’t a memory, but a scary fantasy—a daydream about something he’s worried about. Specifically, Mob finds himself inside of a scenario from Hatano’s mind in which Mob is arrested for “deceiving a minor” due to their relationship. Hatano goes on to talk about how he heard something on TV that led him to believe that people wouldn’t accept their relationship if they dated, but the fantasy clearly swallowed Mob up independently of that. Hatano only comments about the TV thing after the fantasy has ended, and he’s just talking about social disapproval, not Mob getting arrested. Nothing he says here would lead Mob to picture the jail daydream, and anyway, the daydream happens before he even raises the topic.
The fact that Mob found himself inside of this fantasy is remarkable enough that he’s clearly thrown off by it, commenting “Hang on, was that Hatano’s daydream just now?” He doesn’t dwell on it, but he gets that it’s weird.
There’s something else about this fantasy scene that I only noticed after seeing it a ridiculous number of times for the fansub project. I’m not certain that it’s significant, but I think it’s worth mentioning. Mob mentions in the scene that he’s a “mobu,” an anonymous side character. Specifically, he asks the guards for a trial and then, more specifically, “a trial worthy of a side character”—basically, the kind of trial that would befit a “mobu.” Now, you could justify this in a few ways. Maybe Hatano’s fantasy is just a setting that Mob is dropped into, and he says what he would say if he were actually thrust into that situation. We don’t know if Hatano is even aware of what he says. But this is Hatano’s fantasy. It seems like the things the police officers/prison guards say to Mob come from Hatano’s mind. Maybe the things Mob says do too. If so, it suggests that Hatano knows about Mob’s “mobu” status. Again, it’s hard to say how to interpret this, but it’s a possibility.
A brief digression about characters who engage in direct address
In the next part of my post I'm going to be comparing Mob to another character who sometimes breaks the fourth wall, but first I want to situate Mob in the pantheon of characters who use direct address for a second. I'm not going to try to do an overview of this whole topic. This post is going to be long enough as it is, and plenty has been written before on this subject. But I want to stop and think for a second about what fourth wall-breakers tend to be like and why they do what they do.
Direct-addressers are almost always funny, often sardonically. This takes different forms. Sometimes you get Garfield, other times you get Deadpool, other times Clarissa Darling. Sometimes they’re douchebags, like the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall. Sometimes they’re actual sociopaths, like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. They’re almost always at least a little bit cut off from their world, as if they have one foot in the audience’s world and one in their own and this gives them the perspective they need to make trenchant comments on the people around them. It can be as simple as the fact that the people around them are a bit absurd, or as stark as the fact that they believe themselves to exist on a different moral plane from everyone else. But it seems pretty much universal that there's some kind of difference between them the the people around them.
Mob is certainly cut off from his social world. Most of the time, this is simply a result of his trying to avoid falling in L with a B. But he can also be a creep. He constantly spies on his peers, manipulates them, and lies to them. For example, in season 3, he causes two friends to fall in love as a sort of experiment, then gloats in the distance while cackling to himself. Though that last part isn't so remarkable for him, since he’s always laughing at everyone behind their backs.
One big subcategory of fourth wall-breakers is, well, smug buttholes. Ferris Bueller is the archetypal example. Parker Lewis was created to be the off-brand Ferris Bueller. Zack Morris is the absolute bottom of the barrel in this class. Basically, these dudes (and they are always dudes, in my experience) seem to talk to the audience because they feel so superior to everyone around them—even their supposed friends—that when they want to talk about what they really think and feel, only an unseen adoring public will do.
Mob is hardly the opposite of this. He has a real smug streak and he can definitely be a dick. But he's more anxious and more alienated than the typical smug butthole type, and he has a kind of low-key but profound ennui just below the surface. In other words, he's a bit like a really stressed out, subtly despair-filled Ferris Bueller.
Another fourth wall-breaker who found someone who noticed
The first time I saw Hatano look at Bubble Mob, it made me think of another example of a character who habitually broke the fourth wall, then encountered another character who, on some level, noticed her doing this. I’m thinking of Fleabag and the (Hot) Priest.
Directly addressing the audience is Fleabag's raison d'être. In the first season of Fleabag, she does it continually, sometimes at times that would shock or offend the other characters if they were aware of it (including while she's having sex). None of the people around her notice this.
Then, in the second season, something different happens. Fleabag meets the Priest, starts to bond with him, and then he starts to do something that takes her completely by surprise: he notices when she's addressing the audience.
During one of their first times hanging out alone, she addresses the audience like she normally does, and he shocks her by noticing this and asking her about it. “What was that?” he asks. “Where’d you—where’d you just go? You went somewhere.” When she tells him “nowhere,” he accepts it and backs off.
In another scene, when she does it again, he once again comments on it. “That thing you’re doing,” he says, “It’s like you disappear.”
When Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator, writer, and star of Fleabag, was asked about the Priest’s ability to sense when Fleabag is breaking the fourth wall at a BAFTA event, she said that the Priest can tell what Fleabag is doing because of his relationship with God. She said that Fleabag "has a relationship with the camera the whole way through and it was interesting to have somebody who has a similar thing. He's mirrored 'cause he has God. And she's witnessed by the camera the whole way through…I just felt like it would be a really good way to mirror each other's journeys."
Respectfully, I don’t buy this explanation. It may be what Waller-Bridge was thinking about when she wrote season 2, but it doesn’t resonate at all with my experience of the series. I vastly prefer the explanation given by Kathryn VanArendonk in her piece “Fleabag Breaks the Fourth Wall and Then Breaks Our Hearts,” written for Vulture.
Fleabag’s sly, secretive, sometimes resentful tendency to break the fourth-wall of her own story is an escape hatch. She dissociates from her own life whenever things get to be too much….The Priest feels her leave him, even though he can’t quite see that she’s leaving him so she can speak to us….But when he notices Fleabag talking to us, he’s barging into our secret relationship with her, pointing at exactly the place she assumed no one could see — pointing at us, her distancing strategy, her audience who can’t ever speak back to her. That false intimacy she shared with us? Suddenly it’s real, and it’s not between Fleabag and her silent viewers. It’s between Fleabag and the one person who can still see her whenever she tries to take a step away.
This is a profound kind of engagement with Fleabag’s attachment to her “secret camera friend” (Waller-Bridge’s term for the audience Fleabag addresses), much more profound than what we, as Mob’s secret friends, ever see from Hatano. But it does tell us something about what the stakes are in this kind of situation.
While VanArendonk analyzes Fleabag and the Priest, she ends up saying some things that could easily apply to Mob.
It’s tempting to think of Fleabag’s compulsive habit of looking to the viewer as a form of intimacy.…But that sense of intimacy, however effective it may be for the viewer, is only ever one-sided….Her intimacy with us is also a way of distancing herself from anyone who could actually speak back to her. The scene where Fleabag sees a therapist played by Fiona Shaw underlines that idea very directly: The therapist asks Fleabag who she confides in, who her friends are, and Fleabag turns to us once again with a knowing, happy smile. We are her friends, because we are the recipients of her private disclosures. That scene is thrilling and crushing at the same time. It’s so flattering to be her confidant, and so sad. Her closest relationship is with a presence she can neither see nor hear.
Mob’s situation is very different from Fleabag’s in most respects. Her situation is realistic; his is fantastical. Her history is traumatic; the worst thing that has happened to Mob is the realization that he lives in a fictional universe. (Though to be fair, if you give that enough thought, it’s fairly horrifying.) He isn’t avoiding engaging with the people in his world because of psychological turmoil or alienation of the sort Fleabag deals with…well, not the psychological turmoil part, at least.
There are two kinds of distance that Mob puts between himself and other people. Often, he simply avoids relating to others. This is mostly due to his calculated assessment of the risks involved. Sometimes he gives people a wide berth and sometimes he only avoids certain types of interactions with them, but either way, he’s not engaging because he can see that there are certain risks involved. This is very different from what separates Fleabag from those around her, both in type and in magnitude.
Except when he kind of is
At the same time, the fact that he’s realized that he lives in this contrived sort of universe and that he has to watch everyone around him allow themselves to be buffeted about by it without noticing it, much less attempting to fight it, does have an effect. I’m not trying to dig too deeply into the implications of realizing you live in a fictional world. If you were to go deep enough, it would have some pretty disturbing existential implications that might be more fitting for a Philip K. Dick novel than a BL parody. But that’s not the story being told here. Still, the emotional distance Mob maintains between himself and the people around him is clearly caused by his alienation from his world and their lack of awareness about it. How can he get close to anyone who is so far from understanding his daily experience? How could he even respect them enough to relate to them authentically at all? So Mob’s inability to authentically bond with others does have some of that existential dimension to it. And in that respect, his alienation bears some resemblance to Fleabag's.
Whatever the cause, VanArendonk’s statement above applies as thoroughly to Mob as it does to Fleabag. Like her, “[his] closest relationship is with a presence [he] can neither see nor hear.” And by the same token, if someone was able to see him clearly enough that they noticed the ways he disconnects from the world, as the Priest sees Fleabag, that would represent a kind of closeness that would mean something, that might even be enough to make relating to a person in his world more worthwhile than always prioritizing his “secret camera friend.”
Hatano isn't the Priest—but they have some things in common
As I wrote above, Hatano's ability to notice Mob's fourth wall-breaking and his tendency to act on it aren't nearly as profound as what we see the Priest doing with Fleabag. Nevertheless, that more concentrated example of the phenomenon does tell us something about what it means, even in smaller doses.
It means that a person who notices fourth wall-breaking is attuned to the fourth wall-breaker to an extent that others aren’t. Maybe they’re just more attentive or perceptive when it comes to that character. Or maybe they’re also alienated from their world in some way, and that puts them on the same wavelength as the other person. If, as Waller-Bridge says, the Priest’s relationship with God has something to do with it in his case, it’s a possibility that someone like Hatano could prove, on further investigation, to have something or someone outside of himself that he’s somehow in dialogue with.
In any case, it seems unequivocally true that such a person is poised to relate to the fourth wall-breaker in a more meaningful way than the other characters they typically encounter. After all, having some understanding of how someone sees the world is a prerequisite for really relating to them, much less having feelings for them in a way that actually means something.
Mostly, this tells us something about how Hatano's feelings for Mob are different from the feelings most of Mob's suitors have for him. But this might point to the possibility that Mob's feelings toward Hatano differ as well (though not necessarily in the way Hatano would like). Mob seems to treat people's feelings toward him with the most contempt when they're unfounded, seemingly random. After all, as he says in the opening theme, "this Boy's Love is too absurd." It's hard to respect someone whose feelings are so ridiculous, when they have so little basis in anything. Kikuchi seemed to touch his heart in part because he was quietly observant, noticing things about Mob and basing his feelings on actual information about him instead of pouncing on him on some thin pretense the way most of his pursuers do. If Hatano also shows that he sees Mob in a real way, a way that no one else has before, it has the potential to make a difference in how Mob sees him, too.
Next up, part 3, followed by part 4.
Thanks to @my-rose-tinted-glasses for helping me out with gifs and by being a sympathetic sounding board.
Looking for a fansub for Zettai BL 3? Check out this masterpost by @ikeoji-subs.
