An Invite to a Meeting
~Simply Put, I Just Want to Be Popular~
Japanese Title:
集いへの誘い 〜簡単に言うとモテたい〜
Tsudoi e no Sasoi ~Kantan ni Iu to Motetai~
Original Air Date:
25 July 2016
The Body Improvement Club engage in their daily jog, with Mob far in their wake. He collapses. It's been, like, five minutes.
Tome Kurata plays Go with Inukawa and eats sour grapes over Mob's 'refusal' to keep her club official. But they still get to keep their old club room—the Body Improvement fellows only needed it to store equipment. Musashi Gouda, the club's president, enters to ask the Telepathy Club to look after Mob while they continue to train.
When Mob comes to, Kurata asks him why he joined in the first place. The boy explains: he wants to become a more appealing person, and reckons he relies too heavily on his ESP. She doesn't believe him, however, until he slings a full rack of dumbbells around like ping-pong balls in a wind tunnel. Seeing an opportunity here, she asks him to help her achieve her dream of contacting aliens with telepathy. Mob is unmoved. Kurata then suggests he read girls' minds if he wishes to be more popular, so he brings it up with Reigen later.
Mob heads home, lost in thought, but a lady wearing a creepy smile mask over her head and shoulders interrupts his reverie. She convinces him to come to her (LOL) religious group meeting with a promise that he'll be popular.
A couple hundred similarly-masked people are in attendance. On stage, he joins a weary-looking man and a girl. The girl—his classmate!—introduces herself as Mezato. Soon after, the group's leader Dimple-sama emerges, preaching (LOL)'s gospel. Dimple orders all three newcomers masked to fix their unhappiness, but Mezato resists; she's investigating this group for her school's newspaper and charges him with brainwashing. He shows her the now-laughing weary man from earlier as evidence of (LOL)'s benign intent. Mezato walks back her accusations but gets masked anyway.
Unamused and over it, Mob politely but tersely excuses himself. The cult leader challenges him instead to a staring contest with three of his 'smile leaders' and an offering of milk. Mob stays... for the milk. He wins handily, but Dimple still refuses to let the boy go home in peace. He cruelly throws the next challenge with adulterated milk and claims victory.
The choking, spluttering teenager's ire—strong enough to break the congregation's hypnosis—says otherwise.
At this, the man regains his control over the room and doubles down on bullying Mob, manhandling the teenager's face and enlisting his faithful flock to physically restrain him. Mob patiently explains that he couldn't laugh if he wanted to, but Dimple now taunts him in lecture form. Mob's counter is leaping upwards pretty quickly now. Offered one more chance to go along with the crowd and escape a horrible fate, he claps back.
As the child sheds his limiter, grateful that his target is an evil spirit and not a living person, Dimple loses it. He commands his followers not to let Mob leave alive and dumps his human host on the floor. The entire congregation then dog-piles Mob, crushing him: 100%.
Mob explodes in rage.
The teenager plasters the cult members to the ceiling while he curb-stomps Dimple. He then leaves, shaken and haunted, to confide in his mentor. The phony psychic's reassurance and explanation of the cult leader's ruse comfort Mob, resetting his counter.
Mezato and the bewildered cult members come to on the floor after the fight. While she documents the now-trashed meeting hall, they conclude that Mob is their true messiah and resolve to find him.
The next morning, Mob wakes up to an incredibly annoying sight...
Tropes appearing in this episode include:
- Art Shift:
- Boxing Lessons for Superman: Mob joining the Body Improvement Club in order to become 'more appealing as a man' and because he feels that he relies too heavily on his ESP.
- Brutal Honesty:
- Mob's blunt response to Dimple's suggestion that he is 'missing out on life' by not laughing. He retorts that everyone seems to have a different opinion of what this actually entails, as his father has said similar things about smoking.
- Reigen's similarly-blunt brand of comfort after the whole experience (see Jerk with a Heart of Gold example below). It calms Mob.
- Cherry Tapping: Mob exorcising Dimple with a tap to the forehead.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Mob meeting Dimple again. Somehow he's not dead after being spectacularly obliviated...
- Cold Reading: The (LOL) Cult member who gets Mob to join her tries a clumsy, transparent version of this on him. It works anyway.
- Comically Small Bribe: Mob agrees to Dimple's laughing challenge because milk—his favorite beverage—was involved.
- Crowd Surfing: How Mob ends up on stage at the meeting.
- Damsel in Distress: Mezato sneaks into the cult meeting and is brainwashed into being a happy zombie.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The cult's modus operandi. Almost certainly a comment on the Japanese political party-cum-religious movement Happy Science.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Reigen reveals this side of his character. After hearing of Mob's misadventure with the cult and how he ruined their fun, he assures him that cults like that don't guarantee true happiness and Mob was in the right to do what he did. He also assures him that he's the protagonist of his own life and should be proud of the choices he makes.
- Living Emotional Crutch: Reigen to Mob, who relies on the former's wisdom and advice to a fault. It's implied that Mob doesn't actually feel comfortable enough around other people to confide in anyone else.
- Lovable Jocks: The Body Improvement Club. They're welcoming, kind, and very supportive of Mob.
- Minor Insult Meltdown: Mob after Dimple tells him to 'read the room'; his difficulty in reading social situations brings him deep shame.
- Power Makes Your Voice Deep: Mob when enraged in this episode, courtesy of his Japanese VA Setsuo Itō: his voice takes on a quiet, throaty contempt—quite a contrast from the teenager's normal quiet deadpan tenor.
- Snark Ball: From Mob in response to a veiled threat from Dimple.Dimple: I'll give you one last chance...Laugh.
Mob: Use your psychic powers and make me. - Suspiciously Specific Denial: The cult member who invited Mob to the meeting mentions, unprompted, that her group is not at all suspicious.
- The Gloves Come Off:
- Mob's acknowledgment of Dimple's true evil spirit identity. He says that he is grateful Dimple 'isn't human'; the implication being that he can exorcise Dimple without remorse or pity.
- Dimple's response to Mob catching the Snark Ball. He dumps the cult leader act and his host's body on the floor of the meeting hall.
- Tranquil Fury:
- Mob clenches his fists at his side at Dimple's derision; his voice drops half an octave as he returns the cult leader's contempt in spades, and he barely moves as he parts the spirit from his limbs over and over. The teenager's fury here is all the more unsettling for how calm and composed it is... like the eye of a tornado.
- Though he has many tells if one is willing to look, Mob's body language is not the biggest indicator of his rage: it's the property damage that accumulates around him. Even as he becomes more emotionally expressive over the course of the series, his anger never loses this quiet edge.
- Wham Episode: This is the first episode where we see Mob lose his temper or hit 100% and get sense of why he actually behaves the way he does, drastically changing how we saw him up until now.
