skygiants | (no subject)

For some time now I have been informed that I should probably watch Mob Psycho 100, as it was very good, and I accepted this cheerfully as most likely true but did not in fact do anything about it. Then eventually various people made a concerted effort to bully me into watching Mob Pyscho 100 by telling me that it was like a Frances Hardinge novel, which unfortunately everyone knows is my weakest flank, and then

blotthis came in for the kill by offering to watch Mob Psycho 100 with me, and so now I have seen Mob Psycho 100 and promptly moved over to wanting to tell everybody else that in fact they should probably watch Mob Psycho 100 as it is really in fact extremely good!

... and also, yes, a little bit like a Frances Hardinge novel, on the basis that our protagonist Shigeo Kagayama, aka Mob (a nickname for 'background character'), is a sweet if sometimes accidentally terrifying child who draws in feral companions and morally ambiguous mentors like a maraschino cherry factory attracts bees.

This is Mob! His signature characteristics are noodle arms and a thousand-yard stare. Mob has phenomenal psychic powers that result in occasional explosions, but he also holds a firm belief that using psychic powers for one's own advancement or to harm other people is both a.) morally wrong and b.) genuinely uninteresting. Instead, he joins the Body Improvement Club so he can work hard and get good at sports! (He will never get good at sports.)

(The Body Improvement Club, for the record, are minor characters but the best characters. Never have I ever so loved a collection of jocks. They're just so supportive! They love their new noodly-armed friend! Anyway.)

Mob is very chill normally in a way that is more or less designed to avoid psychic explosions, but every so often he is excessively tried and then things go south. It's usually fine though!!

This does not actually prevent him from being a good mentor some of the time! It's complicated. Anyway all the other available mentors are generally worse, except for Body Improvement Club, who are, again, absolutely the best mentors it is possible to be.

Other significant characters include:

Mob's baby brother, Ritsu. Ritsu is cool! Ritsu is popular! Ritsu is chill, level-headed, and admirable in every respect! ... thinks Mob, who loves his little brother very much. Anyway, what child hasn't occasionally teamed up with an evil student body president and/or a weird psychic cult from time to time. Adolescence is rough.

Teru, another local psychic with perfect hair and none of Mob's innate scruples. Sometimes, you demolish another child in a telekinetic battle and then absolutely eviscerate the foundations around which their sense of self is constructed, and that's how you make a friend! Or something. Anyway, by the second season the relationship between Teru and Mob is a bit like that of Sakura and Nozaki in Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun: Teru has identified the central figure in his own personal mythology and Mob has a vague impression that it's nice that his pal sometimes gives him a hand on group projects, and I think that's very sweet.

Dimple, a theoretically malevolent ghost. #2 in the running for mentorship of Mob and, as aforementioned, probably a worse candidate than Reigen, most of the time, but still important! It takes a village!

Plus a vast and rich tapestry of weird schoolchildren, wannabe cultists, psychic kids, psychic minions of secret psychic societies, and also Mob's parents (not pictured), who just wish he'd stop accidentally bending their spoons every night at dinnertime.

Unfortunately none of these character screencaps will give you a good idea of the animation of the show itself, which is deeply psychadelic, incredibly weird, and just genuinely phenomenal. It's really hard to encapsulate this in a text post so I'm just going to embed the opener to give a sense of like ... the range ....?

Watch on YouTube

It's definitely not always like this, often it's not like this, but the show knows how to shift into this mode on a dime to create maximum impact, and if you like cool animation the visual interest is worth it in and of itself, I think. But also it is worth it for being all at once genuinely very funny and very creepy and very heartwarming in unexpected ways; Mob is a very good child and I care about him very much!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

Mob has a part-time job working for morally ambiguous mentor prime Reigen, a "professional psychic" who has given Mob a lot of great advice about not abusing his psychic powers for personal gain and also has no qualms about making use of Mob's psychic powers for personal gain.

Do you have any idea how much TV I have already watched this year? I am not designed by nature to watch this much TV. Normally I watch one miniseries ± Jared Harris a year and I'm done.

From:

skygiants

Anime is so short! It probably takes less time to watch two seasons of this show than it does the Lord of the Rings trilogy! (I really think you would like Reigen a lot.)

From:

rushthatspeaks

I highly recommend the manga, too, as I don't know whether they're going to adapt the rest of it, though I hope they do, and it has one of the great perfect endings.

The Body Improvement Club are so great. I love how they just let the erstwhile Telepathy Club hang out in the clubroom anyway because why not.

Ritsu is so great, too. Who among us has never spent hours and hours glaring meaningfully at spoons. Also, everyone, including Mob, gets sucked occasionally into the trap of treating Ritsu as The Competent One, and then something or other happens where Mob demonstrates that actually he is older, thank you, and has more emotional maturity. And then everyone but Ritsu is shocked.

I have consulted the concept of What Would Reigen Arataka Do for actual parenting advice on multiple occasions. Works great as long as you're clear on when you should actually do what he would do and when you should do the exact fucking opposite.

From:

skygiants

I didn't know until I was writing up this post that the manga was actually complete already -- for some reason I was under the impression it was ongoing! -- but now I do know this and also I have learned that the BPL has the first three volumes translated ..... INTRIGUING.

They're just so all-round supportive! I spent much of every episode going "well THIS seems like a job for the Body Improvement Club," and every so often I was actually correct, which was always extremely delightful for me.

"everyone but Ritsu is shocked" is really the key to their dynamic and it's extremely charming to me. Also, it truly is astonishing the number of times that it turns out that what Reigen Arataka Would Do is, in fact, the correct and appropriate thing to do! Mentor powers ACTIVATE.

From:

rushthatspeaks

There's a hilarisad bit in the manga extras where you get a look at Ritsu's day/life planner and discover that his plan for after college had been to get a stupid, boring salaryman job so he could spend hours and hours every day glaring at spoons. And now he has no idea what to do with his life!

Oh, Ritsu.

From:

blotthis

becca did i never tell you that mob is ALSO a mispronunciation of his given name!!!

or maybe i did and you reasonably thought "an untranslateable pun is not important to my review of mob psycho 100." which. ok. fair.

god i love mp100 so much. mp100: hey if you have ptsd pretending you don't won't work actually. take up a hobby! change some teens lives! go to karaoke! accidentally start a cult! exorcise an extremely depressed ghost! win best in show at the county fair!

Edited Date: 2020-09-23 02:20 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

yeah you DID tell me that and it IS important information but I did not trust myself to accurately remember/represent it! fortunately you came to do it properly anyway :D

other things I tried to do in this post and did not succeed in: properly frame the fact that Mob explosions::Utena duels::Princess Tutu heartshards in terms of difficult self-knowledge and narrative catharasis, I tried so many times and then eventually gave up. It's very important to me though! Adolescence of Shigeo!

From:

blotthis

what's the problem? i think you did a great job here. who needs framing when you can just say things.

you've also more effectively intrigued me about princess tutu than the first 4 episodes (??) did. compelling comparisons

From:

skygiants

Hot Princess Tutu takes: the fourth episode is the first episode that is at all good; the second season is actually the first season (out of two) that is really consistently good; despite this the thing as a whole is a perfect work of fiction. Please don't trust my word on any of this, I've seen it too many times to be at all rational about it.

From:

landingtree

*person who only watched three episodes of Princess Tutu and was not grabbed*: pricks up ears.

From:

blotthis

i JUST saw this!! i am not actually sure how many pt episodes I've seen that was a random guess for effect. want to watch princess tutu with me

From:

skygiants

blot of COURSE i do

From:

blotthis

oh i NEVER see my dw comments. you should just tell me elsewhere. anyway great let's do it

From:

hokuton_punch

I'M SO GLAD YOU LIKED THIS SHOW BECAUSE I ALSO LOVE IT ♥ (I have yet to finish the second season, but at least I read the manga, so...) Just! MOB IS SUCH A GOOD CHILD! And I love Reigen SO MUCH in all his weirdly terrible mentory glory. IT'S GREAT I'M HAPPY YOU ENJOYED IT ♥

From:

skygiants

Yeah it was a very consistent delight, I am really glad I yielded to the bullying! MOB IS SUCH A GOOD KID, I feel such a flood of endearment every time I look at his thousand-yard stare .... which means the manga is almost certainly in my near future. :D

From:

themis1

That trailer has a feel of 'Yellow Submarine' about it.

From:

skygiants

You know, now you mention it ... ironic, given that I haven't seen 'Yellow Submarine' since I was three years old and the Blue Meanies terrified me so much I had to hide under the bed for years every time that song came up on my parents' Beatles albums.

From:

themis1

I do hope I haven't reawakened a childhood trauma! (Mine was balloons, still hate them.)

From:

skygiants

lol at this point I can consider the Yellow Submarine without flinching but it was touch and go there for several years!

From:

cinaed

I love this show! I may or may not be the owner of Dimple earrings, haha. And the Body Improvement Club is indeed the best! They're so supportive of Mob! And I just love everything about Reigen the disaster man who is somehow also sometimes a good mentor.

From:

skygiants

While I was looking for screencaps for this post I found several Body Improvement Club posters on Etsy and Redbubble and appalled myself by seriously wanting to buy some of them. Who KNEW? If you showed me a picture of these jocks two months ago I could not have had any possible comprehension of what they mean to me now ....

From:

issenllo

Alas, it's too short! It's a thing of weird beauty. There's also a live action version.

From:

skygiants

I have heard this! I have heard ... not great things about it. Have you watched it? What did you think?

From:

issenllo

It's rather awkward and a bit cringey and takes itself too seriously, and nearly all the actors are visibly older than canon. They do have their moments. Ritsu is cheerful -- too cheerful; Mob's actor is not bad, underacted, but that fits his character.

From:

krait

This is delightful.

...Not least because I have spent years hearing about Mob Psycho 100 and believing it was about a group of people involved in organised crime. *facepalming*

I think I must have mixed it up in my head with another series I've heard a lot about but never seen! (Katekyou Hitman Reborn, perhaps??)

From:

mneme

Baccano?

Baccano does, in fact, have a number of characters who are involved in organized crime (although that is basically never what the plot is about, exactly; disorganized crime, sure) and ends up being reccommended a bunch since it's very good. It does not have psychics, though (well, not technically).

From:

krait

Could be; I've never seen Baccano, either!

From:

skygiants

I was convinced for years that Mob himself was some kind of telepathic serial killer ... not correct! As it turns out!

From:

asakiyume

This looks *very* fun.

From:

skygiants

I highly recommend it! Two short seasons, each plot twist more incredibly off-the-wall and yet genuinely touching than the last.

From:

asakiyume

I don't find it on streaming Netflix--where do you see it?

From:

skygiants

It's on Crunchyroll -- one can watch without an account, the ads will just be slightly annoying! (The thing that opens up first up top is the second season, you have to scroll down a little to get to the first.)