This central irony is heavily underlined early in the series, when Mob is set up to join his school’s flailing Telepathy Club, which ostensibly exists to investigate the potential existence of aliens and psychic powers. It’s not just that he wants other things besides being a powerful psychic his powers aren’t even interesting to him. Instead, Mob wants to be popular, and to win the heart of his childhood crush, Tsubomi-chan. But Shigeo (nicknamed “Mob” because he seamlessly blends into the background) avoids using his powers as much as possible. Our hero, 14-year-old Shigeo Kageyama, is probably the most powerful psychic on the planet. Mob Psycho takes the basic idea of a protagonist who is definitionally all-powerful and gives it more emotional heft and seriousness, leaning into the idea that there are some problems you can’t solve by punching them. He isn’t detached from reality, but his invincibility leaves him perpetually aloof, bored, and put-upon. He also clashes with the other members of the Hero Association over what it means to be a hero - though the other characters all have specific, flowery ideals, Saitama just wants to be a hero for fun, something ONE underlines again and again. (Not for nothing, the most purely sympathetic character in the series is Mumen Rider, a totally normal guy who uses his bicycle to save people.) Saitama struggles to advance in the rankings of the Hero Association as other heroes take credit for his escapades and the public frequently mocks him for his appearance. Though the people around him are cyborgs, psychics, and geniuses, Saitama is a completely ordinary person who simply became strong through sheer effort and force of will. One Punch Man frequently devolves into a riff on drawn-out shonen series where the protagonist’s victory is a foregone conclusion (specifically Dragon Ball), but the most compelling parts of the series pit Saitama up against an opponent he can’t beat with brute force - bureaucracy and office politics. ONE’s breakout series One Punch Man is, in essence, a single joke repeated ad nauseam: Protagonist Saitama can defeat any enemy with a single punch, and, without any real challenge or adversity, struggles to find meaning in his life. His work tends to ask, “What if you already had all the power you could possibly need… and it didn’t make you happy?” ONE, the pseudonymous mangaka behind Mob Psycho 100, flips this script on its head. Your friends can give you the emotional strength to punch good, but at the end of the day, it’s your fist. Ultimately, their success and growth is expressed by individual strength, often in single combat. The protagonist, whether it’s Izuku Midoriya, Naruto Uzumaki, or Son Goku, relies on others and builds relationships. Each new foe is deadlier, cooler, and more interesting than the last.Īccordingly, while plenty of shonen series have deep, long-established character benches, it can also be a fundamentally individualist genre. Protagonists start with a specific, seemingly impossible goal - Naruto’s quest to become the strongest ninja in his village, Luffy searching for the One Piece, and so on - and spiral outward. The nature of serialized, weekly chapter releases intended to bring on regular readers, long anime seasons intended to bring on weekly viewers, and expanding merchandise opportunities intended to feed into the manga and anime means that shonen stories are incentivized to lean into regular cliffhangers. Shonen, the genre of manga and anime typically marketed to young boys, has escalation built into its formal DNA. What more is there to do? For Mob Psycho 100, this is just the beginning - our hero has to decide what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Protagonist Shigeo Kageyama, aka Mob, has already defeated a worldwide conspiracy of evil psychics and seemingly saved the Earth from domination. The third and final season of Mob Psycho 100 picks up at a point where any other series would have ended.
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