Lower Your Weapon

Roy Mustang snaps his fingers accidentally (while wearing his gloves)

What people think will happen: fire, death, destruction

What will actually happen: a small spark

Why people are wrong: they think Roy’s Flame Alchemy actually creates flame, whereas what he’s alchemizing is the oxygen concentration of the air. Alchemy takes concentration and intelligence so he can’t accidentally move air particles around to make the air so oxygenated as to be flammable. The finger-snap just ignites the oxygen. If the air is normal, it’s not going to ignite.

Extra fun fact: you can probably tell if Roy Mustang is about to set you on fire. The air will feel intoxicatingly easy to breathe because it’s pure oxygen. During the war, Ishvalans probably learned to GTFO if they felt heady and energized.

Extra extra fun fact: Roy Mustang doesn’t need to set you on fire to kill you. He can probably just remove all the oxygen from the air around you, and you’ll suffocate.

The point of this post: flame alchemy is both really cool and really simple.

The kicker: to use flame alchemy effectively, you probably have to visualize the shape of the oxygen cloud that’s going to form. This probably requires a lot of focus.

I am: a nerd.

I did some Mob Psycho hand studies this week because I love how expressive and simple the studio draws them!! Most of these are.. Reigen’s hands. I want to study every Reigen frame.

Ramalama (Bang Bang)

You cannot even begin to comprehend Reigen Arataka. He pretends to be psychic for a living. He’s been cancelled on twitter. He has godlike massage skills. His closest friends are middle schoolers. He convinced multiple high-ranking members of a terrorist group to rejoin society. He met aliens and gave them his pajama shirt. He made his own website and it looks hideous. He knows how to fire a gun. He gives surprisingly good advice. He was once trapped in a parallel dimension and almost starved to death. He ranked 4th in the national whac-a-mole championship

Alright I gotta talk about a thing.

I’ve seen a lot of posts about Mob bringing light and happiness into Reigen’s life. I’ve reblogged a lot of them, because they’re great and adorable. You see it all over. Reigen in a dark place, borderline depressed, Mob shows up, needs guidance, actually saves Reigen.

And then one day I was scrolling through and I thought. Does that really happen? Sure, Reigen is a conman and doesn’t have a ton of friends and is kinda wandering in his life but is he really in such a dark place?

On the one hand, I had the option to say that people were projecting, or that everyone just loves that “I was a broken boy and you fixed me” trope (I’m begging you to read Artemis Fowl, which is where that quote comes from). And that would have been fine.

But then I thought back to my own experiences, and I thought back to every time a friend or a family member looked me in the eye and said “hey, I just really get the feeling you’re going in a bad direction, do you need something?” and it hit me that this is exactly what happens to Reigen.

The common use of this trope is that character A appears put together but then is revealed to have a tragic backstory where they fell apart as a person and have been putting up a front, and character B helped them put the pieces together. But this isn’t what happens to Reigen. Reigen get snatched up in the canon timeline metaphorical moments before his crash-and-burn event.

We never see Reigen think about what a dumpster fire his life was before Mob because it wasn’t a dumpster fire. It was approaching one, yes, but it never got there. Mob stepped in and gave Reigen direction, and re-lit the flame of motivation that Reigen had lost when he forgot that he wanted to “be someone.” Reigen was 100% heading in the direction of falling apart, but Mob came in at the last second and picked him up before he actually got there.

I think that’s one of the main pulls in their relationship to me, because a lot about their dynamic couldn’t be possible without it. The entire separation arc relies on the fact that Reigen doesn’t understand Mob’s effect on his life, or the emotional maturity that Mob has shown, which he probably would have noticed if he’d known the whole time that Mob fundamentally improved his whole disastrous life. Even the fact that Reigen is still a con artist relies on this. If Mob had “saved” Reigen from his lifestyle, Reigen would have been given the chance to re-work his life entirely, abandoning the more negative parts of his personality that he says later on that he hates.

Anyway I have a lot of feelings about this and I really respect ONE for taking this angle.

I have the bad habit of leaving my computer on sometimes, so my dad always shuts it down because it drives him nuts. but he knows not to close photoshop without saving my drawings and this is the shit he saves them as. 

Two wildly different responses to the systemic dehumanization of being a soldier.

growth

Train ride.

Bonus:

Reigen loves dogs + dogs love Reigen = happy Reigen. Please consider:“)