Mob Psycho 100 season 3 keeps pushing its hero beyond the limits of shonen anime
The third and final season of Mob Psycho 100picks up at a point where any other series would have ended. Protagonist Shigeo Kageyama, aka Mob, has already defeated a worldwide conspiracy of evil psychics and seemingly saved the Earth from domination. What more is there to do? For Mob Psycho 100, this is just the beginning — our hero has to decide what he wants to do with the rest of his life.
Shonen, the genre of manga and anime typically marketed to young boys, has escalation built into its formal DNA. The nature of serialized, weekly chapter releases intended to bring on regular readers, long anime seasons intended to bring on weekly viewers, and expanding merchandise opportunities intended to feed into the manga and anime means that shonen stories are incentivized to lean into regular cliffhangers. Protagonists start with a specific, seemingly impossible goal — Naruto’s quest to become the strongest ninja in his village, Luffy searching for the One Piece, and so on — and spiral outward. Each new foe is deadlier, cooler, and more interesting than the last.
Accordingly, while plenty of shonen series have deep, long-established character benches, it can also be a fundamentally individualist genre. The protagonist, whether it’s Izuku Midoriya, Naruto Uzumaki, or Son Goku, relies on others and builds relationships. Ultimately, their success and growth is expressed by individual strength, often in single combat. Your friends can give you the emotional strength to punch good, but at the end of the day, it’s your fist.
ONE, the pseudonymous mangaka behind Mob Psycho 100, flips this script on its head. His work tends to ask, “What if you already had all the power you could possibly need… and it didn’t make you happy?”
ONE’s
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