Rewatching Old YouTube Videos Like “woah. This Is Just Like Full-Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Episode

DRIVE LINK HERE to the official mob psycho 100 fanbook!

as far as i can find, there's not been any comprehensive scans of the fanbook put up online, at least on the english-speaking internet. soooo since there's all sorts of fun stuff in it (character birthdays! character & creator q&a's! who would be most likely to survive on a desert island! guest art by other manga authors (the one in the upper left there is by the creator of FMA)!) i wanted to make sure everybody who wants to could see it!

more info under the cut. enjoy!

5x7", scanned at 300dpi in jpg format. exact pixel dimensions differ slightly due to how my scanner's auto-crop works.

the images uploaded are exactly as they were scanned, no image editing save for cropping. they could use some editing to be more presentable (levels adjustment to bring the darks down, more saturation on the color pages, & a teensy bit of rotation/adjustment) but i wanted to upload the untouched files. i might create a new drive with cleaned-up versions at some point.

i claim no ownership over these images, please feel free to do whatever you like with them, share em, edit em, and so on, no attribution necessary.

i bought my copy from hiro_shop_japan on ebay, if anybody wants to get their own.

these are obviously untranslated- some awesome folks have scanned & translated parts of the book (particularly the qnas). you can find those here! there's also a twitter thread of translated bits from 4chan, but i can't seem to find that one at the moment.

Emi’s short story — A translation

So, what was Emi’s story about in S2E1? I only got decipherable screenshots of the first page, and there’s about three words that were too obscured/blurry to decipher, but I’ve put together a translation of the first page of Emi’s short story, “Adventure”, for your reading pleasure.

Translation below the cut!

“Adventure” by Emi Takada

If an extremely honest acquaintance, with whom you normally don’t interact much, suddenly begins putting together words that sound insanely good, would it not feel like a last will and testament?

At the garbage dump behind the school, while carefully piecing together her words, the girl turned to me and began to speak discreetly. “Every day, I fill my diary bit by bit with lies like that. And then someday, when I’ve lost my memory, I will surely read the diary, and undoubtedly, from that moment on, I will start living a life that isn’t mine.” Because of her staring at her feet and stuttering out this story, I truly couldn’t imagine her in the classroom at all. When and how the incident of this deceitful daily life first occurred, and how she had so elaborately put it into words, I thought it sounded like a villain monologuing in a novel… I remembered lining up for school lunch with a full head, trying to decipher these things.

————————

It’s got some really interesting connotations for how Emi was feeling at the time of writing, specifically how Emi probably felt having to hide her true interests and nature around her “friends”. If she keeps hiding herself bit-by-bit, eventually she will be living a life that isn’t hers.

Day 10: Static

I've had this ageswap story in my head where as a kid Reigen jumps in the middle of the street to save a dog and he meets Mob when Mob shows up to save Reigen (and the doggo) from oncoming traffic. So Reigen stalks Mob to the office and he's genuinely a good kid because little Reigen thinks it's the coolest thing to help people with your powers and Mob acknowledges this and agrees to take him on as his student

His Battlefield Once More

Book in Figure: BLUE

favorite visual gags:

something drawn realistically to show an emotion

something drawn poorly to show an emotion

a broadly applicable extended metaphor for the kageyama brothers: 

mob is round and ritsu is sharp. 

this applies to LOTS of things about both of them– least of all, but most noticeably, their hair.

mob is round. he’s blunt, socially dull, tangential to the lives of his peers. he’s like a firm ball of clay rolled between two hands. when he learns new things, it’s like, first he has to make them stick, then he has to re-roll himself back into shape without them falling out. ideally, the things he learns become a part of him. overall, it’s a clumsy process, so he’s not the best learner, but neither is he the worst. and he’s good when it comes to learning about (and improving) himself, because he can reshape himself, being clay. he is also relatively easily influenced by others, who may try to shape him to their own liking. still, roundness is the most comfortable shape for him, so he always returns to it. 

ritsu is sharp. sharp-tongued, sharp-eyed, sharp-witted. he’s like a mass of thorns or shards of glass. when he learns new things, they stick easily, becoming impaled on his jagged surface, and he understands them intimately, though they remain separate from his self. ritsu is a very good learner. but he’s not very good at learning about himself, because when he tries to delve deeper, he gets poked by his own spikes. he is also more brittle than mob, so it’s harder to improve himself; things need to break before they can change shape. likewise, ritsu is less easily influenced, being more solid and thus less permeable. he wishes he was a more organic shape, like his brother, despite the many clear advantages afforded to him by his sharpness.

mob’s psychic power is also based on roundness– his aura in the anime consists of overlapping circles. his power, tied directly to his emotions, is round like a coiled spring. as his explosion meter slowly ticks up, the spring is compressed bit by bit. when he hits 100%, it releases all that potential energy at once, then slowly collapses back to normal. 

ritsu’s psychic power is also based on sharpness– his aura in the anime looks like jagged shreds. where mob’s aura flows like ripples in a pond, ritsu’s cracks and crinkles along fault lines, like paper or tin foil that’s been folded before. the uneven structure means he can’t store emotions as psychic energy in the same way as his brother; emotions just create more faults and fissures, making it harder to direct his power anywhere else.

ritsu is certainly sharp by nature, but much of his jaggedness is a result of having parts of him shattered by trauma. i can’t help but wonder how different he would be had he never met ???%.

Riza misquotes Shakespeare at one point in the manga and it got me thinking about what kind of plays they’d like

Hi! I love all your MP100 metas. Truly amazing! Here is a popular take on mob which I noticed quite common in eastern fandom but not brought up much in western: shigeo actually has very strong ego, in a way that he only allows himself to be affected by words he wants to follow, sticks to his wants without giving in to others' wishes, and sometimes breaking others' worldview (teru) or challenging (ritsu, dimple, reigen) simply by following his own will, which relates to ??? . What do you think?

*blushes* THANK YOU AAAAAHHHHHH

i agree with you! shigeo himself is not even aware of his own strength in that regard for much of the story; watching him become more comfortable with his own iconoclasm is one of the things i enjoy most about mob psycho 100. i think shigeo's strong will and (mostly) unshakeable principles are maybe not mentioned as much in western fandom because shigeo is pretty far from the western--i'm just gonna say american here, because it's the perspective i'm best acquainted with--ideal for a young male protagonist.

we tend to prefer at least some degree of blustery, extroverted self-confidence in our heroes; soft-spoken, sad, traumatized kids who seem unsure of themselves don't fly here unless their character development involves 'outgrowing' this. shigeo is understated, and quiet, and downbeat, and kind of sickly even after gaining stamina. he also doesn't trust himself or his own perceptions for quite a while, and i've read more than a few reviews of MP100 in which these qualities made it easy for the authors to discount him as a whole. if a viewer finds him 'boring' or can't relate to him at all, they won't bother to stick around for his steely tenacity or his surprising resistance to groupthink.

despite his apparent 'weakness', he doesn't give in easily, doesn't bend even if his life is at stake, and even manages to persuade others or change their hearts in his own quiet way, simply by being himself. and his strong ego, as you put it (i would actually say his id, if we're going freudian with this) actually SAVES HIS LIFE. repeatedly. that and ???% are one and the same.

i live in a country where quiet people are routinely overlooked because they're not boldly proclaiming their greatness to everyone they meet; to me, shigeo is a reminder that i don't have to compromise who i am to have a successful life. and that is a powerful message to hear at any age.

out of the 90 or so panels that ONE devotes to the mental fight between shigeo and mob in mob psycho 100's confession arc -- from mob's conscious awareness of shigeo's presence to shigeo's eventual dissolution and assimilation of mob -- just seven show us that the child can actually be heard arguing with himself from the outside.

since the anime concluded its run last year, i've had those panels on my mind. studio bones only animated the largest one and relegated shigeo's speech on it to internal dialogue (much more on that decision here). they're so compelling that i decided to redraw them in my own style.

this is the seventh and last of them. it occurs just before shigeo smacks reigen in the head with a chunk of fallen city in hopes of scaring him off (it doesn't work).

its text reads:

｢他人が”僕”を飼い慣らすことはできない。モブの本当の姿を知ればあの人は僕を開放するよ。」 tanin ga boku wo kainarasu koto wa dekinai. mobu no hontou no sugata wo shireba ano hito wa boku wo kaihou suru yo. 'no one else will be able to tame me. now that he knows mob's true form, that man will set me free.'

[image ID: amidst swirling teal winds, hair wild and eyes aglow, a teenaged japanese boy wearing a gakuran and an eerily neutral expression muses 'tanin ga boku wo kainarasu koto wa dekinai. mobu no hontou no sugata wo shireba ano hito wa boku wo kaihou suru yo.' storm clouds are gathering around his eyes as he speaks, partially obscuring his face.]

ONE's original panel:

この一連の他の絵 kono ichiren no hoka no e other drawings in this series panel 2｜panel 3｜panel 5｜panel 6