Mob Psycho 100 S2E3-5 (continued)

It turns out that the entity possessing the young girl is one with a reputation. Dimple actually encountered him once before, in the time before he claimed that cult leader host, and it took him quite a while to regain his strength after the beating this guy gave him. In life, Mogami Keiji was actually a world-famous celebrity psychic and exorcist himself. After death, he became one of the world's most powerful and malevolent ghosts.

Mogami was still alive when he attacked Dimple before, but he wasn't doing so in exorcist capacity. It had been shortly before Keiji's apparent death by suicide, and he hadn't been well in body or in mind. Mogami was withered, sleepless, and unkempt, and as he attacked Dimple he babbled about how he will consume all the world's evil to fuel his apotheosis into a god of righteous vengeance or something like that. Looks like he succeeded at least partially.

The assembled psychics (at least, the genuine ones) all give it their best shot. Their best isn't nearly enough. This one-sided fight scene starts out in typical ONE goofiness, with a manga-page compilation shot of all the psychics doing ridiculous rituals and Arataka bantering at the baddy and using his special attacks and whatnot, but then two things happen in quick succession that changes everything.

First, Mob lends his power to the group effort in trying to force Mogami out of his host. There's no reason to assume that Mob is holding back in this scene. He's taking the situation as seriously as he normally does when facing destructive ghosts. And, he can't do it.

There's no trick or sleight-of-hand here, like there was when the scarecrow-demon tricked him into attacking the wrong target a few episodes back. The ghost of Mogami Keiji is inside of the girl's body, attached to it the same way that ghosts typically possess their victims. Mob simply isn't strong enough to make it leave.

Remember, this is a ONE series that hews pretty close to his previous comic in terms of the protagonist's capabilities. Under the usual rules, this isn't supposed to happen.

Second, the girl's father runs over to her and tearfully begs her to fight off the spirit, or for the spirit to leave her, or something. Mogami responds by putting her hand through her father's midsection. There's an eruption of blood. He falls to the floor with a gaping wound in his gut.

So. It happened. The show finally did the thing.

I thought that it was doing this in the urban legend episode, with the Dragger encounter, but in the end it turned out to be half-earnest at most. It briefly tricks you into thinking it's doing this in the Claw arc, when the illusion guy did his trick, but that was a fakeout both in and out of the text. This time, though? This time it's the real deal. The businessman does end up surviving this, on account of it being a gut wound and him quickly getting top-notch medical attention, but he survives it for grounded and realistic reasons. The next time we see him in the episode 5 stinger, it's weeks later and he's still in the hospital on dialysis.

My feelings are complicated.

...

On one hand, it's like...why now? Everything was being treated the same way as all previous fights up until this moment. The same silliness, the same slapstick, the same hyperreality. Mogami hasn't done anything to merit being treated more seriously than the many other ghosts and psychics with alleged murderous intent that have collapsed buildings on or shot fireballs at people before him.
On the other hand, it doesn't escape me that our first non-LoonyTunes violence comes seconds after Mob's first-ever failure in a direct contest of strength. Looking at everything that happens on the screen as a reflection of Mob's state of mind, there is a logic here. In all previous violent scenes, Mob was always holding back, or trying to make up his mind, or doubting himself. The situation was never actually bad as he looked, because at any time he could have decided "fuckit" and gone all out. He might not have been conscious of this fact in all cases, but on a deep, unconfronted gut level it was his root assumption. Mob didn't actually understand what "danger" was until he encountered an enemy beyond his ability - rather than merely his will - to overpower.

Now he knows what danger is, and in the blink of an eye the entire genre of his life changes. If he doesn't ultimately have control, then that means the stakes are suddenly real. If violence occurs, it will have consequences.

At the same time though...I think the fakeouts, especially the intentional one with the Claw, may have weakened the impact of this. Like, lethality aside, we do know for a fact that the Claw has been doing extremely dark shit involving human trafficking, kidnapping, child torture and indoctrination, etc. In the world of the story, I'm sure they're meant to be more than capable of murder. Claw Prime hasn't appeared yet, and he's been built up as a bigger threat than any of the regional underbosses. Unless he's going to be an anticlimactic joke himself, then I feel like he ought to be able to afford his minions a little bit of metanarrative menace by proxy.

The fact that the show has pranked the audience about this before makes this new development feel like another prank in the opposite direction rather than a sincere "shit gets serious" moment.

It still mostly works, and I'm still happy that MP100 did eventually put its foot down and let a villain make good on their promised threat. Just, the execution feels really sideways on account of how late in the story it comes and what sort of things both did and didn't precede it.

...

As Mogami sets about routing the psychic throng and Dimple urges Mob to flee, Mob comes up with another possible approach.

Good god Dimple, phra​sing!

Mob remembers the astral projection trick that one incel dude used last episode, and believes he can replicate it. Perhaps if he enters the girl's body as a spirit himself he'll be able to shake her free of Mogami's control. Using Dimple as a not-entirely-willing distraction (he gets to pilot Mob's own body for a little while as a consolation prize, though without Mob's soul inside it doesn't do very much for Dimple's potency), Mob does as he proposed and slips through Mogami's psychic defences to confront the ghost himself.

Mogami's a bit impressed. He didn't think anyone here would be able to wriggle through his shields, even with a partner to run distraction for them.

Only a bit impressed, though.

Mob goes all out at Mogami in this mindspace, with psionic lightning storms that distort the screen and break the white light into cascades of eldritch refractions with their mere wakes. Mogami isn't impervious to Mob's attacks. He does appear to be taking damage. Just, not nearly enough.

Once again, Mob is fighting someone stronger than him. He tries as hard as he can, and he loses fair and square.

The way Mogami sees it, the reason that Mob lost this fight is also the reason that the two of them were fighting in the first place. Psionics are the power of the soul. The soul is a machine of desire and yearning. To live is to want. To want is to live.

Mob's life up until now has been characterized by what? Boredom? Frustration? Loneliness, at worst? His loving, affluent parents maybe not paying quite as much attention to him as they should? Not being able to get the pretty girl to like him? Temporary alienation from his brother? How absolutely adorable.

Maybe if he lived in the real world, he'd be able to muster up some real power. Of course, in that case, he'd also understand what the world really is and want to destroy it as much as Mogami does. So, here. Let's take away that deep-seated, hitherto-unquestioned, feeling of safety. Here's a version of Mob's life with his powers removed and reality added.

Cue inception sound effect. As real-world minutes pass, with the possessed girl inactive and the ambulances hauling people away, months upon months of subjective dream-life are experienced by Mob.

In this world, Mob never had any powers, but he's still autistic. His parents don't see him as something remarkable, only as a burden that they barely tolerate out of resentful obligation. His brother Ritsu will have nothing to do with him (even though in real life, the only reason things were ever like that was because of the powers. Well, it's not like I'd been expecting Mogami to play fair lol). Mob is ruthlessly bullied at school, and the teachers don't give a shit. Unlike the times he's been "bullied" in real life, here he never has an ever-present recourse that he COULD fall back on. The pain and the fear and the humiliation are all real now.

The worst comes when a transfer student shows up at Mob's school. An incongruously rich heiress who seems like she should be going somewhere much more exclusive.

Asagiri, the possessed girl whose body this is all going on inside of.

She makes it her life's mission to torture Mob, just because it amuses her. Asagiri's not just a normal high school bully, either. She will actually pay people to physically grab Mob off the street and beat him bloody for her and her (many, many, many) friends' amusement. She can do this in front of teachers. She can do this in front of police. She even gets them to participate. She'll probably get him killed, via suicide or otherwise, eventually, and she will never be made to feel even the smallest amount of regret or remorse for having done so. Neither will anyone else in this world who participated.

Through it all, the voice speaks to Mob from the shadows between cracks in the walls, from the mouths of insects as they eat the rotting garbage that litters the streets, and from within. The voice of Mogami explaining that this is all essentially real. It might not be literal, but it is true. It is an accurate artistic representation.

Mogami doesn't go into details about his own childhood (oh we'll be getting back to this thread though, don't worry). What he does share is that when his powers manifested, he became a well-known psychic, though unscrupulous agents were always able to screw him out of a lot of his profits (well, we've definitely heard that one before...). Eventually his mother - the only person who he still loved - fell ill, and the medical bills were more than he could pay. Even when he turned to crime, using his mental powers for assassination on the down low, the bills just kept on climbing without her ever getting better.

It turned out that Keiji was doing it, accidentally. His growing misanthropy - accelerated by being pushed into crime - manifested as a toxic psychic presence that killed the person closest to him. He found out when she herself came back as a ghost to haunt him.

Since then, Mogami absorbed as much suffering and discontent as possible in the form of malevolent ghosts that he consumed. Enough to guarantee that after he killed himself, he'd become a dark god who could repay evil unto evil and make those who think themselves untouchable suffer the worst of fates (what Keiji's grudge against this particular family might be, I couldn't say. Might just be their socioeconomic position, might be something more personal). He hopes that perhaps Mob will now have the disposition and the power necessary to join him in this crusade.

When Mogami restores a semblance of Mob's power in this semblance of reality, Mob starts making to kill his simulated tormentors. Fortunately, however powerful Mogami is, he still only has a human mind with a human attention span. Yeah, I didn't buy it when he claimed that Mob only got into the Asagiri's head because he let him in on purpose. My disbelief was now vindicated when Dimple manages to break in as well while Mogami's busy putting Mob through the Edgelord Inception treatment. It doesn't take much to snap Mob out of it; after all, it's not like Mogami's simulation actually made that much sense beyond the thematic.

Dimple's also able to give Mob a line to Arataka, which helps more.​

Most of all, being reminded of the real version of Ritsu - the one who always loved and looked up to his brother, and only distanced himself from him out of fear - brings Mob out of it entirely.

Mogami tells him that yeah, sure, obviously this isn't a literal, plausible permutation of Mob's literal real life. That's part of the point. He created this simulation by twisting familiar names and faces in order for Mob to more readily understand what someone else's life, surrounded by a different group of people, might have been like. It's still true to life in that representational sense. The half a year's worth of subjective time that Mob spent in here cannot be un-remembered or un-learned.

Mob replies that that is true. However, now that he has some perspective back again, what he's learning to take away from this experience is how thankful he should be that his actual life is so much better than that. And also that he should try to have as positive an impact as possible on the world, to make people less cruel and uncaring. He knows people can change. He's seen it happen. He's even experienced it himself just now. That said, Mogami did succeed at ONE of the two goals he set out to achieve. He might not have instilled Mob with the desire to join him, but he did teach him the true meaning of want and desparation, making him considerably more powerful at least in these kinds of circumstances.

The 100% ticker is relevant again, for once. And this time I think I actually get it. Sort of. The captions relaying it to the audience are very deceptive, in a way that makes me still think that the author originally had a different idea in mind for what they would mean, but I understand the concept they're trying to communicate. They're - essentially - how aligned Mob's ego and id are at the moment. It's not actually ticking up over time from accumulated stress to an inevitable release (like I said, I'm pretty sure that that's what ONE *originally* planned for it to be, but later changed his mind), it's how single-minded and uninhibited he is in pursuit of the task at hand.

100% aligned Mob is able to win the ensuing rematch with Mogami, sort of. It turns out that as a consequence of his reckless ghost-absorbing spree prior to suicide, Mogami is really more of a "they" than a "he" at this point. The negativity he was torturing Mob with these last six dream-months were drawn from the collective experiences of many enraged spirits, not just one. Which makes sense; it was a little hard to reconcile Mogami's alleged life of loneliness and suffering with him being a TV celebrity with a loving parent.

In all likelihood, he was as privileged and sheltered as Mob. Most of the anger and misery are from experiences he appropriated. He got mad over the consequences of his own poor decisions, realized that being mad made him stronger, and thus set out to steal more mad for himself.

What a fucking douche.

In probably the best animated, best scored, and most spectacular battle sequence of the show thus far that no amount of screenshots could do justice to, Mob defeats Mogami as the dominant pseudo-personality of the tormented ghost swarm. After that though, it turns out that no amount of good feelings and determination are enough to overwhelm the swarm as a whole. This possession turned out to be kind of a Legion situation, and unfortunately there aren't any pigs nearby.

But, when overwhelmed even in his 100% mode, Mob's consciousness is lost. Letting something else take the wheel.

Mogami, his voice now just one among the many, realizes at the last moment that the person he was just dealing with was just a shell. A talking, conscious container for a different entity altogether. From his tone of voice, it seems like Mogami might actually know what type of entity it is. He's about to explain it before he - along with all the other wraiths - is crushed.

Outside in the real world, one of the other psychics who didn't get badly injured or run away in fear surreptitiously grabs Mogami and as many others as he can into his evil pokemon jar thingy.

It's that Claw guy. Whatsisname. The one who tried to turn Dimple into a pokemon that one time. Anyway, he succeeds at turning Mogami into a pokemon, and promptly leaves. Seemingly having gotten what he really came from. This will be relevant later on in the series, I imagine.

After Mob returns to consciousness in his own body and thanks Dimple and Arataka for helping him with that second will save, he turns his attention to Asagiri. She's woken up, possibly or the first time since Mogami and his minions possessed her however many months ago, and all she can say to Mob is a tearful apology.

Was she literally the character that Mogami portrayed her as in the simulation? No. However, she was figuratively that character. It was an accurate artistic representation of her. Not anymore, though. She's never going to let that be her again.

Hmm. On one hand, I don't feel like torturing children is a good idea in any circumstances. On the other hand...Mogami kind of did the right thing by accident here? Maybe? Sorta? Especially if this ends up having a ripple effect on her father as well, though admittedly that's a longshot.

As a testament to Mob's belief in redemption, the denouement shows that Arataka Reigen is not the same man he was at series' start either. He's still ruthlessly exploiting and gaslighting a child, sure, but at the same time I don't think that the Arataka of early season one would ever pass up a 500 million yen reward on account of how much collateral damage there ended up being. Arataka doesn't do anything to identify himself with the person who saved Asagiri.

Mob doesn't either.

Flash ahead to Asagiri visiting her father in the hospital and telling him that the person who freed her was a middle school boy. Her father didn't invite anyone matching that description, and he didn't happen to notice Mob at Arataka's side among the crowd, so this mystifies him.

An internet search eventually leads Asagiri to a drawing that looks a lot like Mob. It's on the front page of the "psycho helmet religion" cult's website. IE, those former Dimple-cultists who started worshipping Mob after he beat up their previous god and haven't been heard from since. Consequently, they end up getting the equivalent of several million USD as a donation.

I wonder if the increased reach and prominence that this gives them will let the cult grow big enough to start actually making Mob more powerful through their collective belief? This three-parter did just establish that Mob (as distinct from the ??? entity buried in his nervous system) still has the potential to gain XP, so this might cause him to gain still more.


Like I said. Almost a genre-hop for MP100, at least for that middle part there. I don't know if it'll be a persistent one, but it definitely shook things up at least for as long as it lasted.

Mogami actually reminds me of a monster I made up in my teens. Similar concept and metaphysics. Very different powerset, but still, amusing parallels.

The shorts in episode 3 did a good job of setting up the thematic questions that the Mogami two-parter then answered, about how different living humans and undead ghosts really are (or aren't), how the failure of good men to act is responsible for much of the world's evil, etc. I still think they might have fit in more naturally if they'd been spread out in the last couple of episodes, but there's also a strength in their proximity forming a self-contained arc.

I'm not sure if this was quite as good as the S2E1 "Ripped Apart" episode (well, in terms of story. Visually, this was the height of MP100, hands down, no contest), but it comes close. So far, season 2 is absolutely living up to its reputation as a series high mark.