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MOB PSYCHO 100 (2016)

https://myanimelist.net/anime/32182/Mob_Psycho_100 From the creator on One-Punch Man ONE, Mob Psycho had a crowd around it from the very beginning. And it shows, with over 300.000 people having marked this anime in their MAL lists. At the time of writing this Mob has a nice score of 8.54 and is in top 100 ranked shows (#87). While a great score like this doesn’t always mean that the show itself is great (looking at you SnK, Fairy Tail and Tokyo Ghoul), Mob has the score rightfully.

Our protagonist Shigeo is a middle-schooler and assistant to exorcist and con artist Reigen. Shigeo is also a psychic, the strongest psychic ever supposedly. See the similarities with OPM? But that’s where they end. While Saitama uses his power knowingly and worket throwards getting it, Shigeo was born with it and tries his best not to use it. Other than that he tries to live a normal life. There’s a girl he likes, so he tries to get her to like him back. And what better way to get a girl like you than to start working out? Mind you Shigeo’s only talent are his psychic powers, so he’s bad at sports, school, mostly everything. This is where the body improvement club comes in. They accept Shigeo (and later the punk - Tenga) without hesitation and want to help him. This really shows that getting good at something is a long process and you shouldn’t give up just because it’s hard in the beginning. This is also true for the creator of Mob Psycho, ONE. If you’ve seen his early OPM chapters, you’ll know what I mean. They were charming in their own way, but it’s no Miura (Berserk) or Araki (JoJo’s). But back to the show at hand.

Shigeo’s psychic powers are linked to his emotions and mental state. We can see why he is hesitant to use the powers in one of the flashback scenes, where he unknowingly hurts his brother Ritsu. That’s why Shigeo tried to look for mentor. And he found the best person possible - Reigen.

Reigen is a con artist as I mentioned. But a good kind. He makes people think he has psychic powers (he has none) but he helps them anyway (a massage always helps). However, his main role in Mob is guidance to Shigeo. Reigen makes him want to be a better person. Hence why mob joined aforementioned Body Improvement Club.

Teruki is another great example of the self-betterment. Before he met (and lost to) Shigeo, he was really carefree about using his powers for his own good. And I don't blame him, I'd do the same in his place. But his behaviour is important because he loses to Shigeo and is stripped of his pride - his hair. He went from the teen idol look to a "balding hermit" really quickly. This migth symbolise his attitude throwards psychic powers. Going from "I have everything" to "Maybe there are better ways to use my powers" in one fight.

So we have established that this is basically a “coming of age” story about Shigeo. Other source for this influence is his younger brother, Ritsu. He is the complete opposite of Shigeo. He is good at sports, he is student council vice-president, he is really charismatic, the whole package. But he lacks Psychic powers. This is why Shigeo wants to be more like Ritsu and vice versa. The diference here is that Shigeo’s feeling are those of inspiraton, whereas Ritsu’s are fear and envy. This plays role in Ritsu’s downfall and later his growth.

In the end I'd love to mention Mob's wonderfull visuals. While the character designs might seem odd, they work really well. The show is really colorful, because the use of psychic powers gives the artstyle lots of space to shine. The action scenes look amazing, as they should. Mob also uses lots of experimental artstyles, for wxample the ghost in all girls school, where it's paint on glass. It gives the spirit a different look and it works well. I know this is kinda dated, but Mob should've easily won the Crunchyroll Awards for best animation. Yuri!!! on Ice was great, but no way was it better looking than Mob.

So This was Mob Psycho 100 and also my first review-thing. I am not entirely sure how to go about this yet, But I surely hope you enjoyed reading through this. I'd love to make this into a longer series, where I just share my thoughts on different anime I've seen. I won't give a score from 1 to 10 in here (I've got MAL for that), but a simple: Go watch Mob Psycho, It's worth it.

Next on my list is Keijo!!!!!!!! (as selected by my close friend), so stay tuned for that.