GsGsarthotegga
December 21, 2022
Mixed Feelings
There's a balancing act that's always been present in Mob Psycho. When it comes to shounen, If you look at its absurdist takes on the superhero genre, like DBZ, then you get the sense that the main characters could just snuff out the whole world by sneezing. There comes a point where normal people really do seem useless or are at least completely dependent on the heroes for their continued existence. The plot centers around the most powerful characters and no one cares about weaklings, who effectively become non-entities at worst or comic relief at best—it's kind of a hyper-exaggerated variant of great man theoryin history. MP seeks to reconcile these opposites of the ordinary person and the super-powered.
Mob and other psychics have powers great enough to destroy cities and to transform the world, but Mob has a tendency to try and forego using his powers altogether, as he seems to view these abilities more so as a hindrance or distraction when it comes to societal integration and self-actualization, and he quickly flips most of his opponents into doing the same thing when they get too big for their britches.
The dynamic of psychic versus peasant could even be likened to the gifted and the ordinary. Sure, you might not be as super-duper in whatever way as another person or vice versa, but you can do such and such to improve yourself and better integrate into society or achieve some other goal. While I'm not convinced by Mob's pretense at humbleness in the slightest, it's a necessary addition to the shounen genre, as sometimes these heroes appear to transcend the need for society altogether, due to the outlandish immensity of their accumulated power.
Honestly, though, a lot of the themes in Mob are getting stale enough that I'm glad this is the final season. It's always like "believe in yourself" and general self-improvement and school/career-based themes. Which is not wrong or anything, and it's positive, but sometimes I feel like the commentary is so obvious and narrow in focus as to be trite—the themes are often just pep talks from Tony Robbins, told with a wiser-than-thou conviction and dictated by Mob with his messianic-but-actually-totally-ordinary-dude overtones, and it can be downright sickening.
I got this vibe throughout the series, starting with S1, and it's apt that S3 deals so heavily with cults or religion and myth formation—as well as closely related components, such as charisma, popularity, self-perception/control, etc. MP has the repetition of something like Jagaaan when it comes to that series' myopic fixation on adulthood and approaching middle-age. I feel like Mob was written by a high school guidance counselor asking "How can I make these adolescents more smoothly oiled cogs that won't muck-up the efficiency of the system?" as he rubs his hands together and vicariously sees the $ signs he generates for bigger fish. Many of the themes and the way ONE presents them leave me feeling strongly cynical and jaded—or rather I just am, and I'm disgusted by his optimism. It's not that I'm a pessimist, either, it's just that it's easy to lay the positivity on far too thickly.
Is society really just this well-functioning entity we need to tailor ourselves to jump through increasingly tiresome hoops for? What I'm getting at is, MP seems so fixated on the young adult as an economic unit, and has no actual concern or engagement with society for what it is. Obviously, there's worth in self-improvement and societal integration, but when we only fixate on adjusting ourselves to fit into a system, it seems to imply that the system is perfectly functioning, and it's we that need to harmonize ourselves according to the system's tune, when that should often not be the case. I'm not the biggest fan of Eden of the East, but the series noted some problems and looked at society more broadly. Mob fixates only on the self; EotE fixates more on the system but is a little more balanced and mature. The superior work in terms of thematics would hope to weigh both. It's not that art always needs to take a broader look per se, but when a work is so content to navel-gaze for such ungodly lengths of time, one has to make the observation that "You have a really nice tree (I mean, broccoli) there, but there's a whole forest of trees (broccolis) you haven't even considered."
I know the comparison I made about the gifted student to a powerful psychic like Mob is not a 1:1 comparison or perfect example (to illustrate, it also comes with certain potential costs, like Mob having the occasional frightening meltdown, though I can see parallels here as well), but it almost feels as if Mob encourages a kind of self-sacrifice and refuses to use his incredible inborn talents—instead behaving as if he is ordinary and hamstringing himself until he's forced to act as a superhero or perform a parlor trick for his friends, and to what end? Does this make him noble? Half the time, the preachy script practically presents him as a messianic figure, or at least oh-so-enlightened, that is, when he doesn't come across as an oblivious dimwit and ONE decides to reinstall Mob's inspirational philosopher firmware update.
It's like, good for you: you had some great advantage, and you cast it aside and gave yourself a handicap so you can "live normally" and play Peasant Simulator. How precious and special. Maybe imagine if the gifted just pretended they were all ordinary and suppressed their talents. If anything, Mob seems to promote rigid "in-the-box" conformity that's just disgusting, and from what I've heard and read about the Japanese education system, it appears to me as if MP simply reinforces mediocrity. That leads me to circle back to the high school guidance counselor comparison. Everything circles back to that, eventually.
To reinforce this mentality, just look at many of the other characters who were formerly baddies, randomly popping up for the animators to have something to do, and their story can essentially be summed up as: "Turns out, I was born with great psychic ability. I was part of a secret organization of psychics with a plan for world domination or something like that, and I got paid a lot of money to do it. But then a high school kid, who was a more powerful psychic, knocked me around and killed a few—well, maybe a whole lot of—brain cells and showed me the light. Now I realize I'm just average after all, because I'm not super-duper in every single way and some people are better than me at certain things, you know? Time to go work a low-wage peasant job at the convenience store and live on ramen bricks to fuel my few remaining brain cells instead of utilizing my one notable and tremendous talent. Oh, but I'll use my powers again when the plot compels me to do so, so you can see some sick animation!"
Sure, you can compare Mob to Superman. Reporter by day and superhero by night. Superman fits into society via his reporter role, and he uses his fantastic powers against criminals and villains who are too formidable for the police, functioning like something of a god watching over the world. Likewise, Mob is just a good boy who wants to live a good life and he does good deeds when he has to; it's really as simple as that, but in some sense MP feels outdated and, on occasion, even more unreal than an old comic book. Superman is an outsider pretending to be something he is not. He is an imposter. Is Mob an imposter? How are we supposed to conceive of these psychic powers in relation to society or humanity? Is this an aberration? An evolutionary path for humans that will become the norm? Should it be cultivated? Should it be suppressed? Should it be stamped out? Society itself doesn't seem to have much of a view on this, despite the pyrotechnics occurring on a regular basis in Mob—and even a giant freaking broccoli sprouting into a religious symbol in the middle of the city! Myths appeared to form around the green giant without the government or anyone investigating or talking about it in any real depth. "Well, it's just a massive broccoli bigger than our buildings. We sort of kind of looked into it over the weekend, but we had a lot of paperwork... It'll be good for tourism and will remind children to eat their vegetables. A win-win deal!" It's a bit surreal...
I remember reading a story a few years ago that had a similar viewpoint to Mob's when it came to incredible powers like these and an emphasis on deprioritizing them in terms of their importance, but in that story, the powers were an aberration—furthermore, they had a finite source that would eventually fade away, a useful temporary function, and they were not truly innate, so I believe a thought process akin to Mob's was justified there. But is it justified in Mob's world? I don't see any reason to think it is. This is just the philosophy that was chosen for Mob. He is a mouthpiece for the author, who has a high school guidance counselor mentality and is an avid consumer of shounen (or at least possesses an awareness of shounen tropes) and producer of mildly deconstructionistic shounen.
Despite my distaste for MP's presentation of its ideas at many points, I see what ONE was doing. There's a telling piece of dialogue from a psychic character indicating the powers are a nuisance and they'd be better off without them. As I've suggested above, the powers seem hazy in relation to society, and most people forget about them or don't pay them the inordinate amount of attention they seem to deserve—other than the concrete example of there being prisons for psychics, it all feels unreal. If we return to the point about DBZ, even when Goku and Vegeta eat at a diner, start a family, have kids, etc., they're not really part of society in the way we would conceive of such an idea. It's like they're imposters stepping in one day, maybe obliterating society, the world, and, who knows, maybe even the solar system, the next day. Their powers alienate them from being part of society. Likewise, the more the characters in MP are able to control their powers and suppress them and get Mob's positive vibes firmware updates, the more they mature as individuals and the more integrated into society they become. Which is totally not cringe at all.
Not too dissimilar from ONE's other series One Punch Man, Mob is absurdly OP in comparison to his antagonists and rivals, and most of his real hurdles are centered upon the self, the villains just being shounen straw men to burn and let rise out of the ashes with a brand spanking new epiphanous firmware update. Thankfully, the tired formula changes with the season finale, and I think ONE took the tedium to heart, because the way he manipulated power in a meaningful manner during the first big battle is actually quite novel for shounen, and he tops it off with a much-needed reversal by casting aside the usual cookie-cutter baddies to look intensely inward toward the end of the season.
I think the author, indeed, does a solid job with the writing of his characters quite often, even in spite of the cast being so large that some of them become a little thin or just kind of disappear for long stretches or altogether. However, despite the compliment, the problem is that he's also not subtle, and sometimes he is so direct that he over-explains and monologues EVERYTHING within a character's mind and seems to spare no details to the audience. It's a whole lot of telling and little showing in a way that is sometimes painful, especially in a visual medium. The argument between Mob and Dimple being a perfect example of this, with Dimple even calling what Mob said embarrassing or gross, and that's my reaction to quite a few scenes throughout the run of this series. There are a number of internal feelings that need to be expressed in a delicate and mature manner to not sound ridiculous, but sometimes I feel like this show is directed at precocious toddlers rather than teens or young adults. When I think about it, the scene between Mob and Dimple was strong enough on its own, but it's like ONE was afraid the audience wouldn't see the "deep" layers as fully as he would like, and he needed to hand-hold the audience with excruciating levels of detail, so he nearly went the Re:Zero route where they had Subaru whine about needing a mommy to Rem for A WHOLE EPISODE! Never go full Re:Zero! Remember the % meter? That's a manifestation of how much of a feelings dump the author is about to lay on the viewer, so get ready to point and laugh.
Most of the Tome arc was strong, until the random fever dream ending that sullied the moment, but not many other segments stood out that much other than our two main arcs, and the pacing ends up feeling sometimes a little too fast or the story too compressed. The buildup is not always adequate, and the series feels disjointed, as if random arcs that don't belong together were cobbled into one season. At least the first half of S2 was a lot stronger than S3, especially before Mob could lecture generic big mean bad man; and S1 had the freshness factor, as the themes weren't nailed into my head with a hammer just yet. But the main thing about MP has always been its visual prowess compared to other series, while also usually being well-paced and having just good enough characters and writing to accentuate the action. At its best, Mob's fight sequences have a kind of dynamism that few shounen in the past have achieved when it comes to choreographed animation, often featuring a wide-range of perspectives and angles and inventive camera movements in spurts, while also refusing to neglect the character acting in the quieter moments (especially prominent in episode 8) like so many lesser shounen would. Whether one thinks the series is more notable for well-animated fight scenes or writing/characters, the two complement each other well. The series would certainly not be good if it lacked one or the other—it'd be a mere shallow (and occasional) sakuga fest, like My Hero Academia on the one hand; or high school guidance counselor wish-fulfillment on the other.
Just like with other shounen, MP indulges in the same escapist tendencies that are epitomized through psychic powers, but the series is also critiquing the very powers that allow for this kind of fiction—maybe it's even telling you to indulge in less escapism yourself and to eat your food rather than playing with it and turning your broccoli into a religious shrine dedicated to your bad haircut. Oh, and, uh, to be yourself, or something...
