[id: Part Of The Reigen Spinoff Manga. First Panel Shows Roshuuto Walking While On The Phone With Rusty-sama

I really love how Teruki’s hair acts as a barometer to his personal development. It’s so true-to-life for teenagers (guilty of this).

His hair drastically changes whenever something big happens that affects his outlook on life or his sense of self, and it’s exactly the same as when your friend would show up to school one day with an extremely different hairstyle, maybe even dyed a different color, and you’d think like, “Something must have fundamentally changed in your life’s trajectory and your personal understanding of it”. (Honestly, being a teenager is just a series of these moments strung together by homework and video games.)

And every single time his hair changes, it’s against his will. Sure, he usually chooses how to style it afterwards, but both of the Kageyama Scalping Incidents, Sakurai’s hair chop, etc. were against his will. But without fail, it always happens at a major emotional turning point in Teruki’s life. Him being snapped out of his superiority complex (mostly), him being influenced by Reigen’s 1000% and finding a passion for teaching, Mob breaking his own pedestal with the Confession accident, etc.

Teru’s gonna walk into a room at some point in the future with a totally different hairstyle that he chose for no real reason at all, just to shake it up, and everyone’s going to be like Oh My God Teru What Happened and he’s gonna be like, “????? Does it look that bad???? 🥺”

don't mind me just going a bit insane. anyway GREAT WRITING

The thing about Reigen is. He’s Reigen. Sometimes he’s Reigen Arataka, and on very rare occasions he might be Arataka Reigen, but there’s no scenario in which he’s just Arataka. I don’t know him like that. You don’t know him like that. He doesn’t even know himself like that. He’s on a last name basis with his own mother.

about suzuki shou and his parents

most of the parents in mp100 seem to be competent, if somewhat distant. the suzuki family is an exception to that trend. when considering shou’s relationship with his parents, the first question to arise was this: why didn’t shou’s mom take her son with her when she left touichirou? this question is fundamental to the suzuki family dynamic.

i mean, we know why she left touichirou, and her decision to dump him was perfectly justified, but she seems to have had a good relationship with shou, so why would she leave him behind? at first, i thought that maybe she was so desperate to get away that she prioritized “disappearing from touichirou’s life” over “raising her son” and viewed the abandonment of shou as an unavoidable consequence of her departure. but from what we’ve seen of shou’s mom, she seemed to be a compassionate person with a strong sense of morality, so it wouldn’t make sense for her to decide to fully remove herself from her son’s life.

could it be that young shou just admired his dad so much that he refused to go with his mother when she left? it’s true that it would be pretty easy to get a little kid to admire you if you showed off some telekinetic tricks, so young shou probably did admire his father, at least for his psychic powers. well, shou’s custody probably wasn’t determined by his own preference, but i do think psychic powers are at the heart of the matter.

we know from that one omake that shou had already awakened his psychic powers before his mom left. i suspect she was crying at that time because she knew how psychic power could corrupt a person and was worried that shou might end up like his father. as a (presumed) non-esper, maybe she had hoped that shou would be like her; after all, he was a kind boy, and you don’t need psychic power to be kind.

so maybe… she left shou with touichirou because she knew that she alone wouldn’t be able to teach shou how to control his psychic powers. only his father, an esper, could do that. but she kept in contact with shou and retained an influence on him in order to teach him good morals and make sure that touichirou wouldn’t be able to manipulate shou to suit his own selfish needs. shou’s mom is the reason shou decided to revolt against his father in the first place.

i also have a hypothesis as to the relationship between shou and his father after his mother moved away. before shou confronted his dad at the top of the tower in chapter 88.1, touichirou had been planning to let shou inherit the world from him (after world domination, of course). that means he felt that shou was more or less on his side, or at least, he thought that shou still had the potential to become a worthy heir. and before that confrontation, shou was not afraid of his father. his behavior makes this clear; for example, he talked cheeky to his dad on the phone after the 7th branch incident. if you’re afraid of someone, you don’t sass them like that. plus, his reaction to his dad’s “i’m taking over the world” TV broadcast was embarrassment rather than dread. shou didn’t see his father as a truly threatening figure.

thus, i hypothesize that before their big confrontation, shou thought of his dad as “a dumb idiot dad who doesn’t understand that taking over the world is impossible and pointless and needs to be taught a lesson (by me),” and touichirou thought of shou as “a teen son who is causing some mischief since he’s in a rebellious phase but can ultimately still be molded to my liking.” their relationship was tense, but not abusive, and touichirou probably gave shou anything he asked for (e.g. underlings) because he didn’t see shou as a threat.

i’m not saying that they had a healthy relationship by any means. there was probably plenty of neglect, but like, a Rich Dad type of neglect, like “i’m not coming home tonight (for the 8th night in a row) so here’s 5000 yen, have your subordinates order takeout or something.” he was almost certainly not being a good dad, but i don’t think touichirou was openly hostile or directly emotionally/physically abusive to shou. touichirou was trying to raise a respectable heir; he was just much more focused on the task at hand, so much so that he failed to take heed of how seriously his son opposed him. the two of them probably didn’t communicate much at all, other than perhaps the father talking At the son and the son responding with impudence. 

that’s why things really came to a head when they met in the tower: because each thought he understood the other perfectly when, in fact, they didn’t understand each other at all. touichirou had underestimated shou’s desire to oppose him, but that misunderstanding didn’t afford shou any kind of advantage. actually, shou already had a huge disadvantage as a result of his own misunderstanding: he had greatly underestimated the true extent of his father’s power, selfishness, and cruelty. 

touichirou physically and emotionally abused shou. the abuse was severe, almost sickening. it’s just that he didn’t start inflicting it until shou directly challenged him that day, at which point all the trauma happened at once. that was when shou was forced to realize how frightening and merciless his father really was. it must have been a painful shock. no wonder shou was prepared to let him go without a word.

This is hell to upload

I figured I would also upload this too, but here’s the inside covers and all the bonus pages from the final volume of Mob Psycho 100!

The last image says “Because of you, I was able to change.”

I like how MP100 fully sidesteps the "But Who Deserves Redemption?" question bc honestly it's a bad framing that gets extremely bogged down in philosophical debates about Good and Evil and who gets to make the call and becomes an awful quagmire and is also not necessary. the better questions are:

Is this person capable of change? (Answer: Yes, always.)

Are they actually going to change? (Answer: That's up to them.)

Do you want them in your life? (Answer: That's up to you.)

There is no narrative basis for what Teru is saying here. Shimazaki was winning the fight before he sensed Mob approaching. Shimazaki gauged the situation, determined he was outclassed, gave a flippant reason for surrendering, got spooked when Mob’s anger/powers flared, and teleported away. At no point do we see him showing any signs of being traumatized, contrite or having changed for the better.

Teru is absolutely projecting his own trauma from the ???% encounter onto Shimazaki. It’s obvious Teru sees his past self in Shimazaki when the man declared himself the world’s greatest after Toichiro, and we know Teru is talking specifically about Mob when he says “there are people in this world with powers you can’t even fathom”. 

Teru interpreted Shimazaki’s situation based on his personal experience, namely: person has delusions of grandeur –> encounters the nonpareil greatness that is Kageyama-kun –> sees the error of his ways. He’s “pretty sure” about his conclusion. He can’t imagine having any other kind of reaction after being the target of Kageyama-kun’s wrath.  

This is the second time in the anime we’ve heard Teru acknowledge the lasting negative effects of his encounter with ???% (the part about nightmares for three days and nights wasn’t in the manga). I think it’s moments like these that can add nuance to discussions surrounding Mob vs Teru Part 1- a fight and its aftermath whose comedic elements (the ochimusha, heel-face turn, wig) have already, though well-deservedly, been repeatedly explored. 

Friends, once again :’)

reuniting with mom