Discord
~Choices~
Japanese Title:
不和 ～選択～
Fuwa ~Sentaku~
Original Air Date:
4 February 2019
Mob's class has a new transfer student: Minori Asagiri.
Minori invites the entire class to a welcome party at her father's house. Everyone except him. Cut to Mob's teacher, who slaps him hard in frustration: the child doesn't know the answer to a simple algebra problem. He orders the young Kageyama-kun to remain standing for extra humiliation. The class giggles in glee; Minori finds this especially amusing.
After school, a pair of high school bullies we've seen before are mugging Mob for money he doesn't have. Ritsu walks past, refusing to intervene; they don't know each other here. We watch Minori dump a carton of milk on him in class while she mocks him. The other students' laughter and the teacher's indifference fill the air... Mob sits alone at night in a corner of his sparse and disheveled room, a haunted look in his eyes. He's endured months and months of this. Daily.
In the world outside, a strange calm hangs over the locked room. Most of Asagiri's other guests are out cold. Dimple!Mob suggests abandoning the boy to his fate. It's been almost a half hour, and the teenager should have come back victorious by now. Reigen refuses: he has more use for Mob yet. Since he can't unlock much of the teenager's psychic strength himself, the sleazy ghost reluctantly agrees.
Mogami is currently too distracted with other matters to attend to the real world. Good news for Dimple: he uses the spirit's lapse in attention to break the other psychics—and Minori's gravely injured father—free. He elects to go in after Mob to save him; Matsuo, an ex-member of Claw's 7th Division gone legitimate, gives him a power boost.
Mob sets a dish of milk out for a stray cat. A little kindness in a cruel world, but no kindness goes unpunished here. Minori and her gang arrive to kick him savagely in the ribs for this, but he has had enough. As Mogami finally restores his powers, the child explodes. Just as the blood-soaked Mob moves to strangle one of Minori's friends, Dimple breaks through and helps him remember who he is... and whom he came to save.
At this, Mogami's illusion evaporates, revealing a world teeming with furious spirits: the medium's diet before his suicide. Mob exorcises them as fast as they appear. They eventually overpower him anyway and consume his spiritual form, spawning ???%.
This nearly formless thing inside Kageyama blasts Mogami's dark playground to oblivion, awakening both children and casting Mogami out. Matsuo captures what remains of the restless former medium for his collection, thanks them, and leaves. The boy thanks Minori for teaching him a valuable lesson. In tears at this, Minori apologizes for her cruelty, thanking him in turn for his kindness.
Tropes appearing in this episode include:
- Alpha Bitch: Minori. It's implied that she repents.
- And I Must Scream: Minori, forced by Mogami to reenact many of her previous acts of cruelty to other students with Mob. She is confronted with just how horrible she's been to others for much of her short life.
- Barbaric Bully:
- Deconstructed with Minori. She spurs her friends into tormenting Mob and laughs while they do her dirty work; in the manga she is shown to join in on the fun at least once. The majority of the abuse she visits upon the boy is psychological: though she doesn't lay a hand on him herself (with the exception of dousing him in milk) her bullying is every bit as brutal as if she had.
- And played straight with Minori's friends, all boys, who do her bidding. They kick the snot out of Mob for 'talking back' to her, then break his head open with a brick for protesting. In the manga, they also kick to death the stray cat Mob was feeding.
- Brainwashed: Mob, downplayed. He forgets his psychic powers and all the positive details of his life, though his identity remains otherwise intact. Mogami very nearly succeeds at brainwashing him, but Mob is still nicer (and more himself) than Mogami would like. The child demands Minori and company apologize and needs additional prodding—a brick to the head—to finally lay hands on his tormentors.
- Brainwash Residue: A positive example. Mob retains the memory of six months' worth of bullying after the experience. He emerges grateful for those who love him and for his fortunate position in life.
- Break Them by Talking: Mogami's suffocating, wall-to-wall internal monologue within the dark playground he builds to torment Mob. The spirit alludes to crowding out the boy's subconscious thoughts with it—thereby suppressing Mob's skepticism and will—after Dimple helps him break free.
- Mind Rape: Mogami's cruel attempt to gain a sympathizer in Mob. It fails in spectacular fashion, thanks to Mob's Heroic Willpower and Dimple's (and Matsuo's) intervention.
- Minor Living Alone: Outside of Mogamiland, Mob has two loving parents and a younger brother who adores him; here he lives entirely alone and his brother... is a stranger. That this is the case, and that he literally has no one to turn to for help, is far less ambiguous in the manga. It's a sign of just how far gone Mob is—and of how incessantly cruel the torment he undergoes—that he can't even spare the headspace to question what's happening to him.
- No Sense of Humor: Reconstructed. Mob pretends not to remember Dimple after his memories come flooding back to him. It's the first joke he cracks in the entire series, marking a milestone in his emotional growth.
- Pretty Boy: Mob, in 100% Courage form.
- Mob comes to realize that not only is his immense psychic power not useless, but saving others with it can point him to the self-fulfillment he seeks. This new sense of purpose, along with his gratitude for this harrowing experience, gives rise to Mob's first 'positive' emotional explosion: courage. Bones marks the occasion by drawing the child as a shoujo manga-style teenage heartthrob with sparkly red eyes; the art shift is so drastic neither Dimple nor Mogami recognizes him.
- Status Quo Is God: Reigen refuses to collect Asagiri's reward at the end of the episode, noting that too many people were injured and that one shouldn't accept payment they don't feel they've earned. Left unsaid, but heavily implied: solving his money woes forever might make his life dull and reduce his dependency on Mob...
- Supporting Harem: Subverted again, as with Emi from a previous episode. Minori is shown with her father in the hospital during the credits sequence. While she appears to have developed a bit of a crush on Mob, who'd saved both of them and never claimed Asagiri's reward, the two children don't cross paths again.
- Villain Has a Point: Downplayed. Mogami is not entirely wrong in saying that the world is fundamentally unfair, nor is he wrong in his assessment that, under different circumstances, Mob's life certainly could have gone down a much darker path. But ultimately, he's just horrifically petty and selfish—far from actually helping Mob like he claims to, all he's doing is torturing the child just so he can gain a powerful follower.
- Wake-Up Call Boss: Mogami—the first opponent against whom Mob uses a completely positive 100%... as well as being the only one to actually overpower said 100%. Starting with him, major villains are now dramatically harder to defeat, always requiring more than simply going 100% and blasting them to hell: it's no longer enough.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: Literal. Mob is only trapped in Mogami's playground for about half an hour, but he endures six months of abject hopelessness inside.
