I Like Manga Reigen's Coloring Because It Feels More Natural But Anime Reigen's Somehow Better Fits His

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.

Things I love about this exchange:

1. It’s really funny.

2. Reigen refers to being the bodyguard and right hand man of a megalomaniacal esper terrorist as “Serizawa’s last job” which is a perfect example of his attitude towards everything. “Yes I know you kidnapped the prime minister but have you, personally, got any customer service experience?”

3. It’s clear from this scene that Serizawa’s job interview was saving Reigen from a giant ball of psychic power and at no point did either of them discuss what he’d be doing there.

4. “Smack them with my umbrella.” Obviously this is a translated work and I don’t know if this nuance was in the original line at all, but I love the phrasing here. I don’t believe for a second Toichiro told him to “smack” people with his umbrella so much as "eliminate them without hesitation or mercy" and the fact that Serizawa would frame it in such an innocuous way speaks to the level of denial he was in.

5. Reigen, who recently had to knock out a client that pulled a knife on him: Yeah, things aren’t that different here.

As much as I loved Brotherhood’s version of this scene, there is this wonderful detail in the manga:

He took off his glove.

Roy Mustang - Fullmetal Alchemist Fanart

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

The choice is yours.

thanks, ritsu!

This is hell to upload

sluttiest thing a man can do is have an air of profound melancholy

If you really think about it, what Ritsu was going to do for Mob during Confession Arc (allow himself to be hurt again to snap Mob out of the state he was in) is pretty much exactly what Mob did for him during the Cleanup/Claw Arc of season 1. Mob’s wasn’t intentional or planned out like Ritsu’s was going to be, but he found Ritsu in a violent and abnormal mental state and accepted him fully despite his actions, allowing himself to be bullied to protect Ritsu from enduring the pain of the consequences of his actions. And it was this self-sacrificial beating Mob endured from Koyama that snapped Ritsu fully out of his rebellion and bloodthirst by begging some “super powerful being” not to hurt him (like Mob did to himself in his head).

Also, “Half of that is true, isn’t it?”/“Dont bother trying to get rid of me. Because I’m your brother.” VS “This isn’t some separate, scary version of you. It’s a part of you.”/“Because I’m your younger brother.”

[ID: A series of Mob Pyscho 100 screencaps, here described in pairs.

Ritsu with shadowed eyes and Mob with solid glowing white eyes.

Mob looking serious or neutral and Ritsu with a fearful, shocked expression.

Mob kneeling with a genuine smile and Ritsu smiling with self-assurance.

Ritsu crying and looking battered and Mob sweating and looking harrowed. End ID]

But Ritsu decided to change the ending this time, and end the cycle of self-sacrificial trauma.

Of course, parallels in Confession Arc is a given bc it’s half of the entire point, but it’s fun to explore them.