Beware of spoilers.
Mob Psycho is a chronicle of adolescence from ONE that brings his style of supernatural fiction into a middle schooler’s social life. Mob, a tiny teenager with a terrible haircut is the guy we’re looking at, and the very first scene we see is of him being exploited by a fake psychic. One of Mob’s greatest weaknesses, just like any teenager is his lack of experience with people. In a different story Mob might have developed a sad, cynical view of the world, but like in most of ONE’s work, the people Mob encounters in his daily life tend not to be explicitly antagonistic in nature.
Mob is a stoic, stubborn kind of fool in that he refuses to be practical even when the situation demands it. He always stubornly follows his own logic int he face of reality, and luckily his powers are enough to pull him through most situations. Yet here we get to see something very important in Mob: he is very afraid of himself. Even though Mob can beat every natural and supernatural enemy he faces, Mob hesitates to use his powers in any regard. Reigen, his mentor does well in empathizing with Mob’s tendencies and powers, but he still doesn’t know exactly what it feels like. This is the crux of Mob’s behavious throughout the series, and this facet of Mob’s character even though moderately explores doesn’t seem to get enough time.
What makes Mob’s story so interesting is the number of things in adolescence it is explicitly not about. ONE manages to reuse many of his tropes without making them feel stale. Mob Psycho never attempts to tackle bodily change, or romance, or the various failures of modern schooling. It’s a very Spider-man like narrative, generally staying within the bounds of Mob’s city. That makes it feel a lot more personal, revolving around a limited neighbourhood of people and places.
The most important message that comes from every episode is that kids rock. It doesn’t avoid writing children like children, and yet it capture how spart and perceptive they can be. When you look at a conversation between kids or adult, you can see a distinction in the narrowness of their thinking. Children are reflective of what their circumstances have given them, and a lot more so than adults. And even better is how ONE represents growing up in the show, as some of the espers in Mob Psycho haven’t been given chances to live happily, grow up or be happy with themselves.
By avoiding some harsh realities, but not all of them, moddle school becomes a vital microcosm of the wider world that Mob Psycho represents. Exploring the identities of ghosts in the real world and the spirit world, it draws clear yet complex analogies between the two. Near the heart of Mob’s moral compass in all these weird happenings are Reigen and Dimple, who act as his parents in supernatural situations. Even despite their shortcomings and individual interests in Mob’s abilities, they still care for him as well as a parent can. It’s not more obvious than it is in modern times that simply having two parents is not enough, and that kids have to be given the agency to learn from any of the adults they trust. Mob is definitely lucky here, but most people tend to be walled away from the people they can discuss their most private problems with. Adding this to the general stigma that dismissed teenagers are dumb and impulsive, it’s no surprise that many of then come out with several mental issues.
While Dimple has probably the greatest episode in the series, Reigen is there in every great moment of the series. The initial distaste for the fraud disappears quickly as you realize that Mob’s respect for him, fraud or not, is completely genuine. Reigen is still very possessive of Mob’s attention and after-school time, and this does come to bite him later. But even when you come to think that Reigen’s incredible luck could have made him relatable to Mob, it becomes more apparent that he is nothing short of the most brilliant, practical and resourceful characters in the series. Everything he does with Mob essentially puts his life at stake against entities he has no clue how to fight. Keeping par with Mob’s unrealistic standards, and maybe pushing those ideas too far, Reigen manages to be, in the end, a good person whose role cannot be replaced or imitated.
Studio Bones uses a snappy, hyper elastic animation style to translate ONE’s manga, as many of the faces and character designs are pretty ordinary or unappealing. To some degree, this mimics reality. Obsessed with the gestures of the body, and to a more specific extent, the various shapes that hands can take in comedy and in every twist and turn of the story, the movement is what is important. Sometimes I still find myself losing track of what’s going on in screen. Reigen’s hands are a character of their own, so much so that a change in his body language can indicate a change in heart, or a loss of agency. That vigour which is put into the images of hands in the physical and psychic world is very pertinent.
Naturally, ending this show was not easy. The final episodes are probably the worst episodes of the show, as they just can’t follow a simple chronological and thematic sequence. The insistence on ending the show with Mob’s crush feels weaker as the show goes on, but ONE’s visuals in this matter do their best to make it fit in. Seeing Teru and others get demolished just did not feel like it was right for an ending of the show. But, hey, at least the final few moments make sense, with Reigen showing his true self, and Mob not afraid to be his true self. Reigen again has to confront his mortality, maybe not for the last time, but just for one important moment. In the end, the true ending was after all, the friends we made along the way, and those friends are more than enough. Even in the most desperate, sad, tortured souls like Mogami Gensai, there was still a small glimmer of hope. And that hope was enough.