#*frothing at the mouth* I! love! MP100's! rejection! and! thoughtful! examination! of! anime! norms!

[brown-little-robin]

When Mob exorcises Dimple for the first time, he taps his fingers on Dimple's forehead and says: 僕は最低だ。That gets translated "I'm terrible" or "I'm the worst" in English.

Those are pretty vague words in English, though, so I paused the show to look it up. (took me a hot minute to find the listing for the word 最低, too, which means I'll probably remember it forever, but that's not relevant, lol.) SO. Mob says "boku wa saitei da"— I am 最低. Turns out that "the worst" is a pretty great translation, because it captures both the aspect of "least (lowest in some category)" and "most repugnant" from the original word.

This is awful. Obviously. No 14-year-old should be calling himself that in full honesty. But that's not the point I want to get across:

The exact moment that Mob uses the word 最低 for himself is worth noting! Dimple has just jumped at Mob for a killing blow, proclaiming that in the battle between them, lived battle experience will determine who's the winner. Dimple is judging himself and Mob against each other on a scale of battle skill. The only variable he cares about is power. And when Mob wipes him out, clearly Mob is the winner of their contest. From Dimple's perspective, Mob should be saying he's 最高—saikou, the antonym of saitei, meaning "the best/highest". But Mob is judging himself by a completely different variable—the ability to control himself. That's why he calls himself the worst. It's a moment of self-loathing, yes, but not out of nowhere—he's correcting Dimple and re-contextualizing their fight as a failure on his part, not a victory for anyone.

#*frothing at the mouth* I! love! MP100's! rejection! and! thoughtful! examination! of! anime! norms! #I've been going through Mob Psycho 100 and pausing whenever I hear an interesting new word or phrase #and looking it up on my best friend and savior jisho.org #mob psycho 100 #mob-blogging #Robin learns Japanese