Mob Psycho 100

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Think of a show starring two characters. One character is extremely popular at school, gets amazing grades, and is genuinely adored by his peers. This character’s brother is very quiet, gets poor grades, and is terrible at almost every activity he tries to. The only redeeming quality about the brother is his incredible psychic abilities; he can bend spoons and throw people. Who in this case would have an inferiority complex?

The brother, right? He has this power to hurt other people and has a brother who is a thousand times more popular than he is.

Unfortunately, that's wrong. Mob Psycho 100 breaks many TV tropes like these.

Mob Psycho 100 is an anime produced by Studio BONES with a 12 episode run for its first season airing from Jul 11, 2016 to Sep 27, 2016. Mob Psycho 100 is adapted from the web comic drawn by Internet artist ONE and is about an 8th grader called Mob who has psychic abilities but is a social pariah at this school. He acquires a psychic mentor who simply exploits him for his psychic abilities since the mentor has none. Mob continues his daily life all while trying to realize his life’s purpose, albeit he’s in no rush. On the surface, Mob Psycho is a very well polished action and comedy anime that is very aware of the tropes it’s fitting into. Just like ONE’s most popular web comic, One Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100 is both aware of and breaks many tropes. However, digging past the surface gets us questions about the nature of popularity. 

There are a plethora of interesting characters in Mob Psycho 100. The two that are constantly at play with each other is Ritsu and Mob, the older brother who has it all and the younger brother who has none. At first, when we are presented with both characters, we see clearly that while Ritsu has charm comparable to that of Steve Jobs, Mob has charm comparable to that of Bozo the Clown. At school, Ritsu is very popular, on the student council, and most of all, excels at whatever he tries, academic or physical. Mob is the polar opposite, with almost failing grades and incredibly low physical stamina and strength. Mob constantly lives in the shadow of his brother, which isn’t helped by his parents’ constant comparison of the two. Both dad and mom come at Mob with the classic “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” that siblings everywhere dislike.

The most interesting part of their character is how you expect them to behave is contradictory to how they actually behave. Mob is untalented compared to Ritsu, but he still restrains himself from using his psychic powers to move himself higher on the social ladder for reasons explained later in the anime.

I was very surprised to find out about Ritsu’s jealousy of Mob’s psychic powers. Before, I had assumed Ritsu would’ve served as a role model for Mob, but in fact, the series flips that expectation on its head, and instead we see Ritsu despair over not having psychic powers, when he clearly lives what we consider a happier life than Mob. This clearly should not be the case, but the show makes such a convincing case for Ritsu’s jealousy that it never feels out of character. In fact, this flaw fits his character perfectly, since he has always been on top and better than his little brother, except for when it comes to psychic powers.

Ultimately, Mob Psycho 100 was designed to be a gag anime that makes fun of the shonen anime genre’s many tropes of powering up and heroic traits. However, under the surface, I think it teaches us a deeper lesson about expectations. The perfect, popular student never has it all. The student who does very well at one thing can be very content with not being good at other things. Perhaps we should all be like Mob and be at peace with who we are instead of trying to learn how to bend spoons.

This is the main reason why I am so interested in this show. Mob Psycho 100 has a way of breaking certain tropes in TV shows in a clever way, and I hope it continues to do so. SECOND SEASON LEGGO!