Ochimusha
~Psychic Powers and Me~
Japanese Title:
OCHIMUSHA ～超能力と僕～
OCHIMUSHA ~Chounouryoku to Boku~
Original Air Date:
9 August 2016
Teru is shocked; he has never met another congenital esper his age. Naturally, he moves to establish who's the stronger of the two. Dimple advises Mob to fight back with his psychic powers, but he flatly refuses. The cocky teenager then slams Mob's body with gleeful abandon across Black Vinegar Middle's landscape, taunting him the whole time in hopes of forcing a fight out of him. This is... difficult to watch. Dimple agrees. He tries to talk Teru into a draw, then turns to intimidation when that fails. Teru exorcises him.
All this taunting and body-slamming, however, is only annoying Mob. He asks Teru to stop before someone gets hurt, but the little blond egomaniac bristles at the implications and proceeds to wreck the campus with Mob's skinny frame instead. When the boy flings a drawer full of knives from the home ec room at Mob, he ends up with an unfortunate haircut for his trouble. Teru is now officially pissed off enough to kill.
Mob realizes what lies behind Teru's hostility and spells it out, not unkindly. Teru gives up. He chokes the boy with his own physical strength, but Mob still refuses to yield or fight back. An old shame laps at the edges of his fading consciousness: high school boys mugging him and Ritsu, a few years prior, for their gift money. They fling him into a wall when he protests... He awakens with a jolt, but doesn't remember sleeping. The older boys lie sprawled on the pavement amid spreading pools of crimson. Silent. Unmoving. And for all we know, dead; Ritsu, on his side, is moaning in pain... the red wetness on Mob's hands, his face, is not his... The boy's breathless body hits the floor, his explosion counter shorting out at 92%.
A dejected Hanazawa turns to leave, but a bright burst of wind stops him cold. It's a Kageyama-shaped hole in the universe, with glowing white stars for eyes: ???%. ???% blasts his clothes off in greeting. Teruki initially thinks he's getting the fight he sought, but Mob isn't even conscious. ???% then drains the boy's powers in humiliating fashion. Next, the humanoid abomination breaks his school apart and blasts him—shrieking in remorse—into the stratosphere, along with the rubble and everyone knocked out on the school grounds.
Mob comes to his senses. His powers have caused yet another accident: hopeless shame tips his counter into 100% Sadness. Weeping, he pieces the school back together exactly as it was. He then apologizes to the naked, shorn Teru, whose gang abandons him in horror. Teru moves to apologize too, but the Muscle Bros interrupt. Mob rejoins his club for squats.
After school, Mob searches for Dimple for hours, to no avail. He finally apologizes to his brother for what was ???%'s first appearance when he gets home, but Ritsu deflects it with a white lie.
The nightly news reports on a tornado earlier this afternoon over Black Vinegar Middle with a person caught inside. Ritsu watches downstairs in a cold sweat, alone, and flashes back to the same incident his older brother remembered. That thing he saw wasn't his brother.
Alone, in his bed, Mob sneezes. He's caught a cold.
Tropes appearing in this episode include:
- Afraid of Their Own Strength: Arguably the biggest reason for Mob's apparent suicidal pacifism. He refuses to fight back because he doesn't want to kill Teru, and is painfully aware of how easily he could do so.
- Blunt "No": Mob's answer to Teru after the latter fashions a sword from his tie and begs again for a contest of strength between them:Teru: Now, attack me! Let's have a [con]test of strength!
Mob: No. note - Chuunibyou: Inverted. Mob is the exact opposite of this trope: humble, unassuming, and convinced that he is not special despite his wealth of psychic powers.
- Downplayed: Pre-humiliation Teru fits this trope in nearly every way except he has the actual powers to back up his swollen ego.
- Dark Parody: Of the contests of strength typical of shōnen-marketed fighting series.
- Said fights rarely present refusing to fight—Mob's response here—as an option, nor do they tend to call much negative attention to property damage. Mob's recalcitrance is not shown in a negative light, and the camera in this battle lingers on the tangible effects of Teru's ego gone haywire: shattered windows, holes blasted through walls, spewing faucets. Moments of levity during the battle—like the narrator commenting on a clash of ideals between the boys after Teru strangles Mob, or Teru's embarrassing ochimusha note haircut after Mob deflects his flung knives—skewer the concept even further.
- Ironic Echo: Of Mob's Handshake Refusal upon first meeting Dimple in weakened form. The bewildered Mob offers his hand in friendship to Teru, who backs off on instinct.
- Lying to Protect Your Feelings: Ritsu when Mob apologizes for injuring him all those years ago.
- My Kung-Fu Is Stronger Than Yours: Double subverted and parodied, quite darkly.
- Mob refuses to play this game at all, but the lack of damage Teru is able to inflict on him with psychic power already proves Mob's superiority. For all Teru's demands that Mob show his powers, it hasn't sunk in for him that he's seeing them in action. In the end, Teru gives up and uses his raw physical strength to strangle Mob, who then plays this trope straight and absolutely humiliates Teru—while unconscious.
- To make abundantly clear just how ridiculous penis-measuring contests can be in any context, ???% drains a naked Teru's psychic energy from his nether regions at his forcing Mob into one.
- Really Dead Montage: Parodied. Mob's memories of Dimple after Teru exorcises him are all terrible: perving on Tsubomi and other girls at his school, threatening to send Reigen to the hospital, deriding his strength training, and pestering Mob for the chance to possess him, among others. His counter doesn't even budge after the montage.Teru: What's wrong? Does it actually bother you that your little pet was erased?
Mob: No, not really. - "Reason You Suck" Speech: After the ochimusha haircut, Mob offers an incredibly sad one to Teru that shatters what remains of his sanity.
- Sanity Slippage: Teru makes a sword out of his tie and starts ranting about his status as the Chosen One and the protagonist of the world while Mob looks on in bemusement.
- Stepford Smiler:
- After admitting to Teru that he isn't bothered by Dimple's being exorcised, Mob searches for the ghost in the rain for three hours. These are not the actions of someone who isn't bothered.
- Ritsu deflecting Mob's apology also counts. He tightens his grip on the doorknob to his brother's room while lying about what he saw that day.
- Unconscious Objector: ???%. Mob will not fight Teruki, but ???% has no issues intervening if Mob's life is threatened.
- Warrior Therapist: Played with: Mob, who calls Teru out on the insecurity behind his need to dominate others, then shows him the error of his ways while unconscious. The encounter changes Teru's life and outlook on the world forever.
