Kind of hilarious to me how poorly the title "Mob Psycho 100" localized to English-speaking areas. To someone whose first language is English, it scans as:
Mob (Yakuza, Mafia)
Psycho (violent person with "crazy" behaviors)
Thus: a particularly violent member of organized crime.
But in Japanese it scans as:
Mob (background characters in crowd scenes in manga or anime)
Psycho (short for psychic)
Thus: a psychic who looks/acts like someone you'd never pick out of a crowd scene in a comic.
forgive me for bible belt & niche interest posting, but i think part of why me & a few other southerners im friends with enjoyed the southern reach book authority is because it plays subconsciously into the inherent horror & grief of understanding that the ground you stand on will probably be gone or at least entirely changed within a mere few years. jeff vandermeer is a floridian environmentalist, and while you can tell that through his books' worship of ecosystems, i feel you can also percieve it through how area x is a metaphor for its climate change. control is the perspective of a man who, even when moving forward to do what he can (in a government office job), has this inherent disjointed, numb-yet-about-to-panic view of the world he knows being in danger of something unfathomable. he is walking in what will soon be a ghost of a land. maybe, since the colonization of america and his father's family, he always has been. as the first book annihilation says, "desolation tries to colonize you".
the book reminds me of a quote by yuts, the man who created norco (a near-apocalyptic game set in louisiana): "we’re moving back to new orleans this summer after being away for a few years and knowing that it’s not necessarily a place we can settle, or it’s not a wise investment to stay there long term, is a difficult thing to factor into decision-making. but nonetheless, we want to be there for a while. we want to experience it. there’s something inherent in louisiana where you have to be present."
Cronenberg: The film works on such a non-literal level that it’s really irrelevant. What Ballard is saying is not that car crashes are sexy. It’s that there is a deeply hidden erotic element to the event of the car crash. I believe that is true, and that is what we are talking about in the movie. But it’s so difficult for people to get their head around it. Somebody will say, “I’ve been in a car crash, and it’s not sexy.” I heard of this psychiatrist who said, “Yeah, I deal with one of these guys every week. He seeks them out [car crashes] and stands around and gets sexually aroused.” To me this has almost nothing to do with the movie, bizarrely enough. The movie has more to do with the relationship between sex and death — the fact that when we are endangered physically we are also aroused sexually. There’s a very old primordial trigger: members of your species are dying, so you should become sexy so you can mate and procreate. Sex and death. Thanatos and Eros. Understood for thousands of years — not by UK journalists, mind you. It’s a very complex interrelationship. On that level — mortality and death — you find the meaning that makes sense in the movie.
- I've been wanting to get him in that pigeon head from the moment I saw him.
- People do, people do.
- And how nice for once that it's the pigeons themselves that are covered in shit.