The-strangest-thing-happened - It's Brute Force!

I genuinely love so much that Roy Mustang, for all his brutal pragmatism and haughty coldness and quick ruthlessness, is an idealist. I especially love that his idealism is explicitly different from a naive idealism that does not yet know what the reality is, like that of his youth.

The idealism he carries during the series is a very conscious, active, vicious idealism armed with teeth and claws that he stubbornly and aggressively chooses to possess. He tells Hughes, as the war ends, that he is aware that these are pipe dreams, that this is unrealistic, that this is runaway hope, but he chooses to dream anyway because it is necessary for better futures (and he's right, imagining a better future believing that things can become that IS necessary for change). It's an idealism that is wildly optimistic but in a very grounded, pragmatic way. And for that reason, it's actually never at odds with his very calculating and aloof manner.

It's just so great. He is a ruthless idealist, and his idealism itself is vicious in the way that it is prepared to fight bloody to protect and enact this dream of things getting better.

i am so late its not even funny but i couldnt live with myself if i didnt draw some finale art

Grief in art

Grief is an interesting subject for depiction, because it isn't ever really just one feeling. It's a cluster of feelings, an array of very different, sometimes almost contradictory emotional states, which collectively we understand as expressions of that one underlying condition, which is grieving.

So how do you show that? How do you take that and make it visible to an audience? Many, many artists have tried, and their attempts are varied, fascinating, and very occasionally heartbreaking.

Let's take a little non-comprehensive walking tour of grief in art history, from the 1400s to the 2020s, from the religious to the cartoony, and get in our feelings a bit.

That one Series of Unfortunate Events quote

[ID: A Mob Psycho 100 comic. Muraki gestures to Sakurai, who's glaring and surrounded by an ominous red-black aura while holding up a sword, and says, "You must understand-- he had a terrible childhood." Mob stares at him, dead-eyed, and replies, "Yes, I understand. I'm having a terrible childhood right now." Reigen is lying twisted behind him in the Family Guy Death pose. End ID]

minor MP100 brainrot relapse!

summer = campfire = ghost stories = S&S company outing

Idea: Takenaka is using his powers in this scene. He notices Reigen staring at him, and decides to listen to Reigen’s thoughts to see what’s up. But what Takenaka realizes in that process is that the man is also reading him like an open book – this telepath can hear Reigen breaking down every miniscule aspect of his current presentation, and the conclusions he’s drawing are so uncannily accurate that he might as well be a telepath himself. Being read like this is a new experience for Takenaka since he’s always been on the other side up to now, and this is honestly really unnerving for him.

The Reigen Arataka Deranged NormalMan Review

Do you ever think about how Reigen has like. A really strange belief in The System and How Things Should Be. Like REALLY strange. Whatever he's got going on is so much weirder than "scammer with a heart of gold".

I think it all comes together if you read the 10th Season 3 omake like, seriously interrogate this:

This is normal, if comedically thoughtful and realistic for a shounen character. This guy talks like a mandatory reporter. What's strange is what immediately follows:

"AS A SPIRITUAL SPECIALIST" DOING A LOT OF HEAVY LIFTING HERE REIGEN

Not only did he hunt down the families of the children bullying his client (insane. where did he get that info), he also contacted the school as if he were representing his own son in order to get justice, and then hunted down a source of complaints when the school fell through.

This is like a genuinely bizarre level of commitment to the bit, and the bit is "the system works, and if it doesn't work, we will find a system that does work, and if we cannot, hell or high water it is my PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to make the system stop slouching so it works again".

Long thread on the manga with this reading⬇️

Before I start. Reigen adopting Teru is more IC than you think but I don't think it is IC in the way people think it is. I think about this a lot and I think people who do it because they like Reigen aren't understanding how into his bit he is. Guy who talks to social services

So remember the arc that won people over to Reigen despite the fact he's an asshole who takes advantage of Mob and derides him constantly in order to keep him complacent?

He has Mob's phone on his GPS. This makes sense; he's been taking him out and about since he was 11. Very responsible!

Reigen dismisses the "Boss" mistake thinking well, it's a misunderstanding, but it got me in. Yet as soon as he heard they're committing crimes, he VISIBLY puts on his Boss Pants to chastise them. Again, normal so far. I think any scammer with a heart of gold would do this. (And foreshadowing for why he retried reprimanding the Claw Cadres a second time after getting power.)

Again. He's a scumbag. So he leaves Mob to beat their asses using his previous rhetoric. But then!

Reigen's shady morality is more like "people who can take care of things should take care of things". To him, Mob is the Authority on Espers, and can handle conflict like this. Immediately upon becoming aware he can't, Reigen thinks "oh, okay, so the only person who can take care of things is someone who can deescalate". (Pictured: Deescalation)

Okay. Besides the fact this is insufferable as a general concept - YOU just told him to handle it YOU are the source of his stress - his first step in deescalation is to force Mob to back down. Rather than asking him not to fight, he reestablishes "rules" in order to convince Mob he must back down - the same way he tried using what he said to worm his way out of dealing with this shit - and then sets himself up as the authority figure to which the others must obviously defer in matters of His Boy, like a parent accepting criticism at a PTA meeting. This isn't Reigen claiming Mob so much as "in order for them to not attack Mob, they must view me as a representative for Mob".

And like a good authority figure:

Continuing with his phrasing:

If you think about it, this is like...an objectively very strange and incredibly bold approach to this situation. They're homicidal. Reigen is a DERANGED level of Normal Man. He has this image in his head of normalcy, of the world at standard operating procedures, and reinforces it right through an entire conflict. Carceral beliefs don't even factor into this, simply expressing his principles and expecting them to fold.

And they do lol. I keep wondering how Shou must have felt listening to him talk like that

We see a little more of his good side in work; when he was getting so little work it was affecting his grocery bills, this moneygrubbing scammer still asked for like $200 to clear an entire city of hauntings. (His regular exorcisms are around $30). Fair prices are part of his principles of how the business should be. He operates basically at-cost. He mentions he wanted to come out here because he's bored. He's killing time as a career.

Aside:

Just realized he called Mob in last minute so Mob didn't know he accepted crops instead of money. Shigeo didn't like that

So consider that he never got caught here and there was a call on the news to hunt him down at the end of this bit: for the average viewer of the anime, it's just funny, but this is part of the Mogami pre-arc so we've gotten a hold of him by now; he probably holds an inherent belief that the police will intercept him and not Mob. Why wouldn't they? Why would an adult man want to dress up in a highschool girl's uniform? The System will understand.

Not relevant to my point but I like how he realizes what's wrong with Mob way before the final arc, just not why it's happening. Also he doesn't say anything.

With the way his principles are, you really get the feeling that Reigen does his best to avoid culpability specifically because if something happened that was his fault, he'd have to step up to the plate to compensate for that, which is troublesome to him who is a career time-killer. It does not occur to him that an actual bad person and scammer would not step up to the plate as a matter of course. This is his way

What I find really interesting is that this Militant Insane NormalMan does have a sense of wanting something "special", but rather than whip Mob up the way Dimple did Ritsu, he ended up projecting his own values onto Mob, as if he could recreate a special "self" within him. He's always deriding him and baiting him and lying to him in hopes of creating a superb person that a special individual like Mob finds admirable, as if Mob is the authority on his quality of character. Sad! lol

Anyway, it adds a lot more kick to this famous line. Reigen genuinely believes in Authority

Authority works!

And if Mob (the authority on espers) doesn't work, who's the person who MUST step up to the plate [common sense]? You guessed it.

There are other aspects of Reigen's character that everyone and their dog has already picked up on (his self-loathing is the entire reason the way he talked to Mob in Confession arc hit so hard), but this one's my favourite. He's insane

here’s proof that serizawa’s new umbrella is supposed to be transparent (or at the very least translucent), btw. it’s a consistent detail in the manga and it’s obvious in every panel in this multi-page sequence. i only picked a few where i thought it was most obvious. it’s a great detail emblematic of serizawa’s growth. the umbrella is no longer a tool used to shelter or block out the rest of the world; he can see through it now and it ties in well with its use in this chapter as a tool to protect as opposed to attack.

aaaand here’s the preview pic for next week’s episode. solid white umbrella, just like his old one. i’m pretty pissed that the anime is doing this; maybe it was to save on the animation budget or something? i don’t know but i sure as hell don’t like it. so i’m speaking my truth as a transparent umbrella stan now. spread the word! let the truth be known!!!

seeing @gittetj’s post (sorry, hope you dont mind the ping! also everyone should check it out) is really making me think about ritsu and shous relationship again. how shous taken on the gargantuan responsibility to put his own dad in jail. how hes run away from home, taken his own lackeys, stored psychic power into a fuck-off bomb for two months, sent hot spring tickets to ritsus parents so ritsu can go and help shou beat up touichirou without worrying them. he puts a lot of effort into all the little details of his plans to improve on it - you know, setting fire to ritsus home so mob could become motivated to fight, stuff like that.

but, hes not that great at it! the biggest oversight ofc is that he didnt anticipate his dad doing what he did, but for twenty years. hell, shou had no idea what sort of esper power touichirou had and it kind of ended up being important. him trying to motivate mob into action knocked mob out for like. a day.

this omake is a pretty good example of what kind of guy shou is. hes good at thinking a few steps ahead, but ultimately gets help from ritsu to fill out the blind spots.

ritsu, who’s crazy good at being studious and polite and responsible, but has only done out of obligation. the kid who had his whole arc revolve around breaking down from the burden of being the perfect student, the perfect child, the perfect brother. ritsu, who only went along with shous hot springs plan because he figured whatever was happening this was the safest way they would be out of harm’s way, then gradually gained admiration Shou Suzuki, Warrior of Justice, who proudly wore responsibility like a badge.

ritsu makes it very clear that he wants to see what someone else in his position could do against something that is seemingly insurmountable (and again, his first response to shous questions is his sense of responsibility). its only a bit later duing ritsus fight with shimazaki that ritsu finds a proper answer - that he will try with all his might to live happily, and that will be his responsibility to himself. between shou, who’s lost the burden of the responsibility he carried, and ritsu, who finally finds a goal he can wholeheartedly strive to achieve, i can tell you that these two could develop a deeper relationship post-claw arc.

What does the manga add to Roy and Riza's relationship that the anime doesn't have? Asking out of curiosity since I'm an anime only and they're still one of my favourite pairs of all time!

Oh, ha, I didn’t specifically point to the manga because I have anything in particular against Brotherhood (…or 2003 for that matter) it’s just not my canon, and I’m used to specifying which version of FMA I mean when I talk about the series. I do have a list of petty grievances against Brotherhood, but there is nothing fundamentally altered between Roy and Riza.

..

I mean. Yes. A number of my petty grievances are related to them. And feel slightly less petty as thought is spent on them.

But I would need to go back and watch the anime scenes again to point out the specifics of why.

[many hours later]

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