Reigen Loves Dogs + Dogs Love Reigen = Happy Reigen. Please Consider:“) 

The Reigen Arataka Deranged NormalMan Review

Do you ever think about how Reigen has like. A really strange belief in The System and How Things Should Be. Like REALLY strange. Whatever he's got going on is so much weirder than "scammer with a heart of gold".

I think it all comes together if you read the 10th Season 3 omake like, seriously interrogate this:

This is normal, if comedically thoughtful and realistic for a shounen character. This guy talks like a mandatory reporter. What's strange is what immediately follows:

"AS A SPIRITUAL SPECIALIST" DOING A LOT OF HEAVY LIFTING HERE REIGEN

Not only did he hunt down the families of the children bullying his client (insane. where did he get that info), he also contacted the school as if he were representing his own son in order to get justice, and then hunted down a source of complaints when the school fell through.

This is like a genuinely bizarre level of commitment to the bit, and the bit is "the system works, and if it doesn't work, we will find a system that does work, and if we cannot, hell or high water it is my PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY to make the system stop slouching so it works again".

Long thread on the manga with this reading⬇️

Before I start. Reigen adopting Teru is more IC than you think but I don't think it is IC in the way people think it is. I think about this a lot and I think people who do it because they like Reigen aren't understanding how into his bit he is. Guy who talks to social services

So remember the arc that won people over to Reigen despite the fact he's an asshole who takes advantage of Mob and derides him constantly in order to keep him complacent?

He has Mob's phone on his GPS. This makes sense; he's been taking him out and about since he was 11. Very responsible!

Reigen dismisses the "Boss" mistake thinking well, it's a misunderstanding, but it got me in. Yet as soon as he heard they're committing crimes, he VISIBLY puts on his Boss Pants to chastise them. Again, normal so far. I think any scammer with a heart of gold would do this. (And foreshadowing for why he retried reprimanding the Claw Cadres a second time after getting power.)

Again. He's a scumbag. So he leaves Mob to beat their asses using his previous rhetoric. But then!

Reigen's shady morality is more like "people who can take care of things should take care of things". To him, Mob is the Authority on Espers, and can handle conflict like this. Immediately upon becoming aware he can't, Reigen thinks "oh, okay, so the only person who can take care of things is someone who can deescalate". (Pictured: Deescalation)

Okay. Besides the fact this is insufferable as a general concept - YOU just told him to handle it YOU are the source of his stress - his first step in deescalation is to force Mob to back down. Rather than asking him not to fight, he reestablishes "rules" in order to convince Mob he must back down - the same way he tried using what he said to worm his way out of dealing with this shit - and then sets himself up as the authority figure to which the others must obviously defer in matters of His Boy, like a parent accepting criticism at a PTA meeting. This isn't Reigen claiming Mob so much as "in order for them to not attack Mob, they must view me as a representative for Mob".

And like a good authority figure:

Continuing with his phrasing:

If you think about it, this is like...an objectively very strange and incredibly bold approach to this situation. They're homicidal. Reigen is a DERANGED level of Normal Man. He has this image in his head of normalcy, of the world at standard operating procedures, and reinforces it right through an entire conflict. Carceral beliefs don't even factor into this, simply expressing his principles and expecting them to fold.

And they do lol. I keep wondering how Shou must have felt listening to him talk like that

We see a little more of his good side in work; when he was getting so little work it was affecting his grocery bills, this moneygrubbing scammer still asked for like $200 to clear an entire city of hauntings. (His regular exorcisms are around $30). Fair prices are part of his principles of how the business should be. He operates basically at-cost. He mentions he wanted to come out here because he's bored. He's killing time as a career.

Aside:

Just realized he called Mob in last minute so Mob didn't know he accepted crops instead of money. Shigeo didn't like that

So consider that he never got caught here and there was a call on the news to hunt him down at the end of this bit: for the average viewer of the anime, it's just funny, but this is part of the Mogami pre-arc so we've gotten a hold of him by now; he probably holds an inherent belief that the police will intercept him and not Mob. Why wouldn't they? Why would an adult man want to dress up in a highschool girl's uniform? The System will understand.

Not relevant to my point but I like how he realizes what's wrong with Mob way before the final arc, just not why it's happening. Also he doesn't say anything.

With the way his principles are, you really get the feeling that Reigen does his best to avoid culpability specifically because if something happened that was his fault, he'd have to step up to the plate to compensate for that, which is troublesome to him who is a career time-killer. It does not occur to him that an actual bad person and scammer would not step up to the plate as a matter of course. This is his way

What I find really interesting is that this Militant Insane NormalMan does have a sense of wanting something "special", but rather than whip Mob up the way Dimple did Ritsu, he ended up projecting his own values onto Mob, as if he could recreate a special "self" within him. He's always deriding him and baiting him and lying to him in hopes of creating a superb person that a special individual like Mob finds admirable, as if Mob is the authority on his quality of character. Sad! lol

Anyway, it adds a lot more kick to this famous line. Reigen genuinely believes in Authority

Authority works!

And if Mob (the authority on espers) doesn't work, who's the person who MUST step up to the plate [common sense]? You guessed it.

There are other aspects of Reigen's character that everyone and their dog has already picked up on (his self-loathing is the entire reason the way he talked to Mob in Confession arc hit so hard), but this one's my favourite. He's insane

If you put them together they almost form one(1) functional adult.

Also bonus doodle because I couldn’t get this post out of my head

There is no narrative basis for what Teru is saying here. Shimazaki was winning the fight before he sensed Mob approaching. Shimazaki gauged the situation, determined he was outclassed, gave a flippant reason for surrendering, got spooked when Mob’s anger/powers flared, and teleported away. At no point do we see him showing any signs of being traumatized, contrite or having changed for the better.

Teru is absolutely projecting his own trauma from the ???% encounter onto Shimazaki. It’s obvious Teru sees his past self in Shimazaki when the man declared himself the world’s greatest after Toichiro, and we know Teru is talking specifically about Mob when he says “there are people in this world with powers you can’t even fathom”. 

Teru interpreted Shimazaki’s situation based on his personal experience, namely: person has delusions of grandeur –> encounters the nonpareil greatness that is Kageyama-kun –> sees the error of his ways. He’s “pretty sure” about his conclusion. He can’t imagine having any other kind of reaction after being the target of Kageyama-kun’s wrath.  

This is the second time in the anime we’ve heard Teru acknowledge the lasting negative effects of his encounter with ???% (the part about nightmares for three days and nights wasn’t in the manga). I think it’s moments like these that can add nuance to discussions surrounding Mob vs Teru Part 1- a fight and its aftermath whose comedic elements (the ochimusha, heel-face turn, wig) have already, though well-deservedly, been repeatedly explored. 

#tomeweek2023 Day 3: Birthday + Friends

come on tome. be cool

[Image ID: A page from the Reigen manga. Panel 1: Reigen stands in a forest looking exhausted. He says, “At least I bought bug spray this time …” Panel 2: He sprays himself down. Panel 3: A closeup of his face. He’s dripping with sweat and his eyes are sunken. He says, “Preparations complete.” Panel 4: Reigen loosens his tie as he staggers towards the viewer. His face is sweaty and he has a haggard expression. He says, “All right then …” End ID.]

Okay listen it’s been a month since i read this and i CANNOT stop thinking about “At least I bought bug spray this time…” It’s just. It’s so Reigen.

This man is dying. He is being eaten alive by a curse that will kill him in less than 3 hours–probably closer to 2 by this point because this place is pretty far outside of Seasoning City. Since Serizawa couldn’t destroy the curse, he knows that Mob is the only person who could get rid of it–and he doesn’t think that he’ll get there in time, if he comes at all. Reigen’s last-ditch plan is to try to trudge into the most haunted forbidden evil woods he knows about in the hope that he can make the curse that’s killing him fight a different, worse curse, and if that doesn’t work at least he’ll die in a place far away from other people and the curse will be prevented from victimizing anyone else.

And what does he say when he arrives at the Evil Death Woods? “At least I brought bug spray.”

One of the things that makes Reigen’s character work is that he is Just Some Guy. A deeply bewildering, paradoxical guy who lies for a living, but still just a guy. Different characters in MP100 are trying to exist in slightly different genres, and for all his absurdity Reigen is the character who is the most grounded in the real world. He worries about his fire insurance during a psychic terrorist attack. He’s the one who goes “Hey, this is illegal?” and “Kids should not be dealing with this” and “You’re supposed to be adults, what is your PROBLEM?” when he’s introduced to the shonen-anime-villain Scars.

And he’s the sort of person who thinks, yeah, dying of a horrible curse in the woods would be bad, but you know what would be worse? That and bug bites. And he’s not … wrong, but it’s not something that anyone else in the series is going to think of. It’s such a normal worry in such an abnormal situation. It’s so grounded.

And it’s also … weirdly hopeful? I feel like a lot of people talk about this part of the manga like Reigen’s given up and is just marching to his death, but he really isn’t. Yes, he was willing to take on the curse to save Tome, and he’s well aware that he might die, but he’s still trying to get out of it with everything he’s got. He doesn’t have powers, but he’s really clever! He goes into a place with a time distortion effect in the hope that it will buy him more time! He manipulates the curse into turning around so that it gets attacked by the Mimic spirit but he doesn’t! If it had been a more even match between them like he’d hoped, he might have been able to get out of the woods even without Mob coming to save him.

He’s aware of the danger and how much the odds are stacked against him, but he hasn’t given up! And the bug spray feels indicative of this. He thinks he might succeed in getting rid of the curse. He thinks he might need to get out of the woods on his own. And if that happens, he’s going to be so happy about not getting covered in bug bites this time.

Motherly Love.

and without the silly quote, because I can't decide which one I like best:

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.

ITS THAT TIME OF YEAR FOLKS

He got a makeover. No more star, but he has lights

genuinely, the best thing about Roy and Hughes' friendship is that Roy is a brutal pragmatist who is haughty, ruthless, and often cold and Hughes is a goofball who is always friendly, cheerful, and welcoming, but Roy is the hopeful idealist and Hughes is the cynical realist