Mob Psycho 100 S2E3-5

This review was fast lane comissioned by @Bernkastel


This sort-of-trilogy of episodes is weird. Weird in a different way than MP100 normally is. And also weird in its structure. And also weird in its placement.

On one hand, it does some things that I'd virtually given up hope of Mob Psycho 100 ever doing, and resolves some longstanding sources of confusion and frustration I've had with the series. It's also, for the most part, an extremely strong piece of writing with extremely strong visuals on its own merits; definitely some of the best material in the show so far.

On the other hand, "a few episodes into season 2" is such a strange place to put this kind of shift. If I'd been watching this continually I'd probably be nursing some serious whiplash right now (there was a little bit of foreshadowing, in the "urban legends" episode, but only a little bit). There's also a structural element that's both very effective at tying things together, and also kinda clumsy and artificial-feeling.

It's good, don't get me wrong. These are three very good episodes of MP100. They're just also weird.


Episode 3, "One Danger After Another ~Degeneration~," is basically a minisode collection. The four bite-sized adventures contained therein all serve to raise important thematic threads or establish relevant powers and concepts, but mashing them all together right before the payoff in episodes 4-5, well...this is the thing that I said feels kind of clumsy and artificial. On one hand, I feel like integrating these miniplots into the previous episodes would have felt more organic. On the other, maybe spacing them out that much would make them harder to recall when needed. Not sure how I feel about this decision overall, but regardless!

Subplot A: an angry, bitter man comes to Arataka seeking a service that he never advertised, but insists on being provided. He wants to put a curse on someone. When he refuses to take no for an answer, Arataka rolls his eyes and gives the man a "talisman" of scratch paper and scribbles and tells him to carry it around with him and think about the person he wants to curse, he's sure it'll do something eventually, no fee required, now fuck off.

When the man leaves, Mob asks Arataka a surprising question; is it really wise to let that man walk around thinking that he's cursing people? Sure, it was a good way to get rid of a sketchy-seeming man without escalation, but what will the effects be of letting him walk around thinking he's doing harm and taking pleasure in anything bad that coincidentally does happen to the "target?" Will that make the already unpleasant customer even worse? Will it encourage his worst tendencies? Will it increase the amount of negativity in the world, and possibly empower other, actually dangerous, entities?

Arataka didn't realize until now what Mob's state of being really means, in terms of worldview. Being that well-atuned to the spirit world, Mob sees subtle emotional and symbolic interconnections that most people ignore as every bit as important as tangible interactions. Arataka is slowly coming to understand just how little he understands the being he's been stringing along for profit.

Also, the curse guy gets mad when nothing happens and hires a different psychic to curse Arataka for tricking him, but it's a really lame curse that Dimple can neutralize without even needing to mention it to Mob. Just as well, in Arataka's opinion; he doesn't want Mob to realize how right he might have been.

Subplot B: a woman hires Arataka to deal with the spirit that's been haunting her apartment. She thought she just had a stalker at first, but then the stalker started watching her through her fifth story bedroom window without any sign of a rope or anything.

Mob quickly determines that the presence outside her window is actually a projection, with its origin point being in the apartment next door. Turns out it WAS a human stalker. Just, one with a minor astral projection power.

Heh, I guess my "powerful, versatile wild espers and weak, limited artificial ones" theory is well and truly bunk now.

When confronted, the pervert tries throwing punches, making his arrest a simple matter. He'll probably have learned his lesson by the time he gets out, the customer is satisfied. But, on the topic of the customer, Mob pays a lot of attention to how her feelings changed at each stage of the investigation. When she thought that there was a ghost staring at her through the window, she was frightened of what it might portend and just wanted it to stop being there. Once she found out that the "ghost" was actually her creepy next door neighbour, though, it all changed completely. Anger. Indignance. Contempt.

What changed, exactly? *Why* did it change? Mob isn't sure. As Arataka observes in the "curse" subplot, Mob's world includes no distinction between the magical and the mundane. From his perspective, it's all mundane. Or maybe all magical. Being autistic probably adds another level to this, with the opacity of normative human interactions making them essentially just one more set of arcane rules that govern the behavior of one more type of unpredictable entity.

That said, the main point of this minisode is to establish that astral projection is a persistent thing and not just a one-off random quirk of one of the Claw dudes.

Subplot C: a fairly direct follow-up to both of the above. Some dickhead college freshmen hire Arataka and Mob to take them to a famously haunted junkyard and take a "spirit photo" of them. And then refuse to pay when nothing supernatural happens. The schadenfreude comes the next day, after a ghostly childlike figure has slowly manifested itself into the background of the photograph. They are now terrified and begging for an exorcism.

Arataka offers to use his occult Photoshop skills to exorcise the spirit from the .jpeg, but that's not enough for them. The existence of this ghost, regardless of whether or not they have to look at or be near it, is too terrifying for them to tolerate. So, charging a much higher price than usual on account of last time, Arataka drags Mob back to the junkyard. Here, he encounters something he's never seen before; benign ghosts.

The junkyard is adjacent to the burnt ruin of a small house. A family of three died in this housefire some years ago, and they've been haunting the area ever since, accounting for the junkyard's reputation. During life, they were poor and overworked and had little time for one another. Now dead and free of obligations, father, mother, and small child are free to be together as a family in a way they never could in life. Their unfinished business keeping them tied to the mortal world is nothing more than their love for each other, and the fear that whatever comes next may or may not allow them to remain together. They'll probably move on eventually, but for now they just want to be left alone.

...that definitely makes me a little more emotional than it would have a few years ago, I won't lie.

Mob summarizes their story for his companions, with Arataka manoeuvring him into sharing it all aloud himself using his typical tricks. The asshole freshmen are just more frightened than ever at hearing the ghosts are right here right now, and demand that they be exorcised at once.

Arataka has a bit of a crisis of conscience. He definitely wants to squeeze money out of these dickwad kids, but, well...innocent ghosts are a novelty. Dimple tries to goad the ghosts into doing something violent in the name of pre-emptive self-defence, but he isn't able to (after the fact, he claims that he was just doing this as a test to make sure they weren't trying to trick Mob. I don't believe him, but I don't think I was meant to). In the end, Arataka leaves it up to Mob to decide what to do, since Mob is the one who can actually see and hear what's really going on.

And, this is the first time that other people have trusted Mob to make an important moral decision. He's had to choose between the conflicting demands of multiple parties before, but now Arataka is asking HIM to make the decision, on his own, and let the moral consequences all be on him in turn.

Mob doesn't exorcise them, obviously. But the (apparent) suffering of the dickheads who have to live with the knowledge that these ghosts still exist in the same universe as them gives him pause. Why isn't there a way to give *everyone* what they want? It seems like there should be. Why isn't there? Mob goes home from the still benignly haunted junkyard disquieted, like a machine in his mind is still partly clogged.

The eb and flow of goodwill in the world is more complicated than most people know. To Mob, those psychic tides are as imminent and tangible as the ground or air. For him the boundary between human and spirit-entity is blurry at best, whereas for other people it's a sharp divide. And...he just can't understand why the world won't just work the way that it seems like it should.

Subplot D: this one is short and cute, but still has a bit of a kick to it. While Mob is on his way home from somewhere, one of those Araki-looking delinquent gangs from the other schools tries to shake him down for money. He tries to verbally deescalate. When that doesn't work, Dimple possesses one of them and forces him to hurt and humiliate himself, only stopping when Mob tells him to stop. Feeling the need to make up for that embarassment, the punks redouble their aggression against Mob...only for Ritsu, who had just wandered up the street, to see them attacking and start Vader-choking the leader. Once again, Mob convinces his brother to let the punk go and hope they'll have learned now. They run, but come back when Ritsu leaves. Finally, the body-building club intervenes and chases them off for good.

Before the bodybuilders move on themselves, one of them - the ex-delinquent Onigawara, who has visibly started putting on muscle ever since finding his new hobby - gives Mob an important warning though. Mob might have plenty of people who will stick their necks out for him, but his stubborn pacifism is forcing his friends to worry and work for him when he has the power to take care of this stuff on his own. It's not like relying on other people to use force on his behalf is making the world any less violent than defending himself would.

Granted, Mob never asked any of these others to do what they did. Or even indicated to them that he wanted their help. But, by virtue of them caring about him (even if it's probably not for the most admirable of reasons in Dimple's case), they are still compelled to help him.

Mob needs to exercise power. Not doing so in some situations is placing an undue burden on those who care for him. He needs to make decisions, proactively, independently, and to be okay with those decisions having consequences that he will need to answer for.

So. That brings us to the following two-parter. Or...the latter two-thirds of this greater three-parter, depending on how you look at it. Like I said, these minisodes are thematic and informational setup for the following payoff even if there's no direct plot connection.

Episodes 4-5, "Inside ~Evil Spirit~" and "Discord ~Choices~," have Arataka and Mob summoned across the country to the house of a wealthy business magnate for a very high-paying job. When they get there, it turns out that virtually every pro psychic - genuine and fraud - in Japan has been invited. The magnate is desperate to save his only child from demonic possession, and wants all of them to try their best. Whoever succeeds at this exorcism will be made a wealthy man.

Also, ONE really outdid himself with the looks and mannerisms for the assembled psychics.

...okay, actually I just looked back at the Claw leadership and the delinquent gang war scenes, and I take it back. This is a completely average ONE ensemble shot, not an exceptional one.

The child in question is visible to the assembled magicians via one-way mirror, bound hand and foot to the bedposts of an otherwise lavishly comfortable bedroom. Her father explains that he's tried every psychiatrist, every medication, every medical and psychotherapeutic option that exists. And also that she's being restrained for her own and others' safety.

The psychics argue over who gets to go in and try first. Arataka, of course, challenges them all to a game of rock-paper-scissors and telegraphs that he's going to choose paper, and every single one of them falls for it. Simultaneously. So, Arataka is up first. Mob isn't detecting much of a psi-aura from the girl's room, but experience has taught him that some powerful spirits are capable of masking their auras to a degree; so, either her dad is just crazy and there's no demon at all, or else the demon is quite a potent one. When Arataka goes in, the girl tells him that there's nothing wrong with her; that her father has been abusing her physically and emotionally for years now, and that when she finally started trying to fight back he decided she was crazy or possessed. If anything, he's the one who suddenly turned into a monster, not her.

She pushes things a biiiiit too far at the end, though, when Arataka starts to leave and she suddenly starts crying about how much the restraints around her wrists are hurting her and begging him to release them. In a way that you'd think she'd have done from the beginning if she was really in that much pain.

Even more incriminating, though, is the fact that she addressed Arataka as "Mr. Psychic" before he ever introduced himself as one. According to her father, she had not been told that a psychic was about to come in. And there's no way she could have seen or heard through the one-way mirror.

When Arataka shares these thoughts with the others present, the girl says that she guesses the jig is up now, no need to continue trying to frame the father, she'll just need to brute force it from here.

Well, "she." Her voice gets distinctly masculine as she shatters the one-way mirror with a telekinetic blast, tears herself free of the bed, and stands up.


Splitting it here.