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TL;CR MEME
1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.
1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.
Mob
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Anyway. Mob came from a canon point where he was a little inclined to be distrustful of people, whether anyone believes that or not. His way of being distrustful is to be perfectly polite and kind to people but quietly feel unsure. Izumo is someone he was unsure of. Their first conversation she was a little harsh to him, and she criticized him for trying to reassure her. He acknowledged she wasn't wrong, but also felt wary.
But that actually led to him thinking very highly of her, because when she met Yuki, she was immediately so kind and gentle, and concerned about her well-being. Yuki at that point was not even necessarily a real living cat to him, but more of a symbol of the type of terrible thing that can happen when people are cruel or untrustworthy. People's reactions to her, their decisions to be kind to her, was very important early on in how he saw them as people. And for Izumo, it was especially important because he'd taken the 'people can be cruel, be wary of them sometimes' lesson and applied it to her, and she wasn't an awful Minori person at all, but just a blunt girl who is kind to animals. It made him feel ashamed for distrusting her and able to evaluate their conversation in a new light. I think between those two interactions, he very quickly pegged her as essentially a good person who holds others and herself to high standards because she's been let down before.
Knowing that, he appreciated her a lot. He likes people who are willing to scold him or push him to grow. He knows he has a tendency to be passive and just go along with things if he doesn't actively push himself outside of his comfort zone. A lot of people in this game were very kind to him, but wanted to preserve his feelings at the expense of pushing him. He developed a lot of fondness for the people who weren't willing to do that.
Seeing her memories only reinforced that opinion. He saw that she was consistently hurt by others, but that she was the person she could rely on. He's been able to avoid being hurt because he had people to depend on, but she's been doing it on her own and protecting her sister as well. To a kid like him, who has a lot of guilt and shame about the fact that his own brother has needed to be so aware of his emotions and manage how dangerous he can be, he felt a little jealous of her strength even though he knows he's lucky to have had lived the kind of life where no one has made him become that strong.
By the time of her CYOA, he thought extremely highly of her and a had a lot of trust in her. For everyone else, he felt like he had to talk them into agreeing to give up their wish. But for her, he felt like that would be sort of insulting - she would know even better than he did the importance of taking responsibility and doing what needed to be done even if it was painful, so he wasn't about to lecture her. He was willing to just trust in her, that she would understand the choice and make the right one no matter how painful it was. It's sad, but he also admires her a lot for who she is.
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Okay, so I remained blind to Kano's deal, but the impression I got was his attachment to Mob was based on his stated inability to be a fake smiler. I think their CR probably would have gone a wildly different direction if Kano hadn't just come up to him and started talking about how awkward he felt and complimenting Mob for being brave, but. Because he said that, he felt automatically at ease with him and comfortable being honest about his feelings! He's just an awkward and shy boy and when other people acknowledge they feel awkward, it makes him feel much better.
But then Kano said a few things in a row that, as advice, really appealed to him? He told him it was okay to be himself, and that he'd be able to get along with people by doing that without having to change himself, and he encouraged him to express his feelings to people. It was nice and encouraging!
So after that, he just had this view of Kano as a big brother type who was a little strange but would look out for him and give him advice, and it was hard to shake that view no matter what cursed things Kano did in his general vicinity. He just saw him as a nice person who happened to act very strange or concerning sometimes, and was content to just ignore whatever odd things he was doing while still being his friend.
That sort of changed in the Cater and Sharon trial. When Kano started being obstinate about stripping and others started suspecting him, it became obvious something was wrong and he was clearly going out of his way to be particularly dishonest or antagonistic. He honestly did contemplate that Kano had done one of the murders, but didn't know one way or another. It just was clear Kano had none trust of everyone and that was likely to get him killed, and he was also clearly keeping a secret, whether it was murder or just an effort to protect himself from everyone prying into him. So he stopped just ignoring and writing off his behavior and started trying to help. It seemed at the time like the problem was Kano's feelings of isolation, so he wanted to try to convince him to at least trust him, and then maybe they could figure out how to handle what happened. (This early in the game, Mob still believed they'd be able to avoid executions). It didn't work, in part because he had completely the wrong idea about what was really going on with him.
Anyway, he was never really angry with anyone for scapegoating so much as sad and disappointed he hadn't been able to help show the others the version of Kano he knew. When he found out about what Hikaru did, though, he was pretty angry on his behalf - he knows he'd feel horrible if someone used magic to force his feelings to change, and based on their conversations, felt like Kano was similar to him in that.
He was always planning to use his pain removal gem on whoever was executed. The fact that Kano used that as an opportunity to hurt Jeanne, another person he cared about, didn't really change his impression of Kano, though. It more made him feel like he'd made a mistake by not understanding Kano enough to foresee that. It's important to him to try and understand other people and their motives, so it made him realize there was a lot about Kano he didn't understand. This impression was furthered when he eventually talked to Jeanne about this - he was upset about how many people were hostile to Kano, and he assumed Jeanne would have felt the same, but she pointed out there were sides of Kano he didn't know and Kano was a lot more murderery than he knew.
So by the time he got to the graveyard he was very like - I actually don't think I understand this person, and I'm not sure I'll be able to. They might have talked more if I hadn't been dead irl, but I actually think he mostly felt like it was better for him to just enjoy Kano's company rather than rehash all of these complicated things he felt he wasn't well equipped to deal with. If at any point he felt like Kano needed his help or wanted to share more with him, he would have been receptive, but I think he also had it hammered home that the sides he sees of people aren't always the whole person, and he has to learn to live with that contradiction and continue to enjoy the person who is kind to him and helps him while understanding other people experience things differently.
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The first couple weeks, he was really lost, and Mob is someone who is very used to having people he can rely on. He specifically, when he's unsure or scared or grappling with something upsetting, is very used to having adults he can go to with his problems. So he made a lot of CR early on that was based on filling that space. He appreciated Chiron because he was so patient and kind. He'd let him run his ideas and fears against him and would give him gentle advice that didn't coddle him.
Kano's execution really shocked him because of that. He is really not down with murder, and is innately a forgiving person, and the mentor whose shoes Chiron was partially helping to fill is also extremely anti-murder and violence. So it was just shocking to him, that Chiron was willing to hurt Kano, someone who Mob actually cared for a lot. Before that point he had taken it as a given that he could forgive these terrible things that were happening because the Realm was forcing these things to happen. If Jeanne killed Kano, or Kano killed Jeanne, it would be another terrible thing the Realm forced to happen. But Chiron's threats against Kano were the first time he realized that some of the people here would use violence even when the Realm didn't force them to, and coming from someone he trusted and admired it was a pretty blunt wake up call.
I think it's important that he wasn't exactly angry with Chiron. When he's angry with someone, he's inclined to speak his mind, which he did at the execution. But when he feels disappointed or confused by someone's actions, he tends to withdraw. That's especially true when it comes to mentor figures - something he's aware of in himself is how much he overly relies on mentor figures to tell him right from wrong and how to handle situations. This is a kid who, back home in his ordinary life, has an incredible amount of power and is very afraid of making mistakes as a result, so he has a tendency to prefer people who seem wiser than him to tell him what to do. But when he gets an inkling that someone he's been relying on to tell him what to do actually has values that are different than his or may do things he doesn't agree with, he's pretty quick to cut out that reliance because of his fears of making mistakes; he doesn't want to rely on the wrong person. That has nothing to do with whether or not he cares about the person.
As a result of that decision not to rely on Chiron as a mentor anymore, as well as his disappointment and confusion about what happened, he avoided him for a while. He just doesn't know how to have a conversation with an adult he admires and likes that basically goes 'you let me down.' He's got a lot of anxiety and doesn't have a lot of faith in his ability to clearly express those thoughts, and tends to approach personal conflict very passively when it's not a situation he feels like he needs to say something to prevent others from being hurt. He has a tendency to wait for people to come to him instead, but it didn't really happen.
When he reached out to Chiron, none of this had been cleared up for him; he still felt the same way. He just had a reason to talk to Chiron other than his confused feelings, so instantly did. But it later did get cleared up for him, because he had a conversation with Jeanne about it. Mob basically trusted Jeanne an incredibly high amount for various reasons, so when Jeanne explained to him that she wasn't against what he did, and there were circumstances where she also would have killed Kano even if the Realm hadn't forced her to, he actually listened. Jeanne pointed out to him that there were sides to Kano as a person Mob wasn't aware of, and that he'd never really asked Chiron why he'd done what he'd done. In addition to that, around this time, he was getting to know Chiron as a Rabbit. They were all dealing with the need to kill, and Chiron was so protective and kind to everybody. So considering that, and considering that everyone was dealing with incredibly hard decisions, he made a decision to try to understand better and not judge people before asking them their reasons.
And then he died, so I never really got to follow up on that! But after that point he always felt like he made a mistake to pull away from Chiron and went back to trusting him. He also still thinks that they probably have different values and wouldn't rely on his advice without questioning it, but he's gotten much better this game at taking advice from people and considering it for himself rather than listening to it blindly, so that's kind of okay.
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Anyway Mob is kind of an odd duck in that he's an awkward and shy teenager but he's also an innately extremely powerful psychic and for him this is the most normal thing in the world. The result of that is the qualities that like impress and intimidate him in people are really out of whack. If you have good social skills or are good at interpersonal relationships or give good advice, or have some mundane skill you've worked hard at and are really good at, he's a little starstruck. But if you're just an intimidating broody ghost king with an eyepatch and cool powers, absolutely none of that is compelling to him at all. He has met so many ghosts who have gone on and on to him about how cool and powerful they are, and all of them he's basically swatted like flies, so it's just like. Okay, okay, sure, if you say so. But after he was so unimpressed at HC the ghost king, he basically told him what he really believes - being powerful or impressive isn't important at all. The only thing that matters is the way you treat others.
That's why his opinion on HC changed so much in the CYOA. He could not give a single shit if HC is dangerous or powerful or particularly badass. But the fact that HC was protective of all of them and worked hard to help them and was strong enough to carry Izumo mattered a lot. It made him like HC. Also, he's a big romantic and the fact that HC's big secret was just that he wanted to kiss a boy was relatable content. So after that he was an HC stan even if they never got to talk about it.
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A lot of their early CR was funny to me because Vezda kind of. . . misunderstood him a lot? He kept emphasizing what a naive kid Mob is, how he's going to be hurt by people and take advantage of. They had a whole conversation about how people have tried to kidnap him and his brother, and Vezda treated it like a situation of helpless little kids getting targeted, and tried to convince Mob his strict pacificism was not viable in that situation.
The thing is Mob is not a strict pacifist. He beat the absolute fuck out of those people who kidnapped his brother. Mob is a person who has a lot of anger in him, and when he becomes angry, he lashes out and wants to hurt people! None of this is obvious from the surface, because his emotions are so repressed, but it's the reason he holds himself to such high standards. He is very aware that given how powerful he is, he can't give into anger so easily and needs to remember to hold back. The thing that is difficult for him in a kidnapping situation is not defending himself but holding back enough to not seriously hurt someone unnecessarily.
But he's not able to explain any of that in terms anyone would understand, because he's grossed out by people who brag about how powerful they are, and thinks his powers are uninteresting, so would just never explain his insane powerlevels to someone. That was always going to be a memshare week reveal. And he's also fairly ashamed of his anger and capacity to hurt people, so it's not something he brings up out of the blue.
The other advice Vezda kept giving him was to not be too trusting or naive. And that one also was advice he totally rejected. Bucky got a little taste of Mogami, but Mob spent six months in Mogami's world before this game, and the lesson Mogami tried to teach him was exactly that - the world is full of cruel people who will hurt you, so stop letting others take advantage. Mob couldn't remember most of the game how that arc concluded, but he did push back pretty hard every time Bucky said that because an asshole Raven already yelled at him about it a lot while gaslighting him and he wasn't into it.
Despite that, he really liked Vezda? The main thing Vezda said early on that he liked was he talked to him about how the line between doing the right thing and defending yourself and others is hard, and the important thing is to keep trying to do right. This was something that really resonates with him, because he's all about trying to become a better person than his past mistakes. I think he saw in Vezda then a person who is also trying hard to be better, and that's what he respects most in people. So after that he was pretty fond of Vezda and kept coming to him for help with things even knowing they had kind of different worldviews.
So when Vezda got angry with him after Kano's death and then stormed off and avoided him without confronting him it really surprised him. Before that, he had trusted Vezda quite a lot and saw him as someone he could depend on, and that included assuming that if he did something wrong, he could trust Vezda to tell him. This is very, very important to him - it's a fear of his that he'll make decisions that hurt others and no one will be able to scold him or stop him. That reaction actually hurt him quite a lot.
Zuko explained - pretty offhandedly - that Vezda is just someone who gets angry and lashes out at others, though, and Mob was like 'oh okay that's just a character trait he has, makes sense.' That's the reason why Mob approached him later and pushed him into openly expressing his anger. Normally, Mob would just ghost an adult who he felt confused or disappointed by, but since he thought he had an explanation for the actions he was willing to try to fix it.
That said, although he fully forgave Vezda for hurting him, he never forgot and never stopped seeing Vezda as someone who will hurt people. That's why he became so lecturey and a little pushy with him. He doesn't really care about people hurting him but will stand up against someone if he thinks they're going to hurt someone else. Vezda remains on his babysit list forever.
Even so, he still likes him and even relates to him. He thinks of Vezda as pretty kind. He liked a lot how he was never really a threat to Taako in his execution, and he didn't lash out at people in the lead up to that. In the graveyard, though, he saw he was back to lashing out at other people and wasn't fuckin' impressed. But he cares about him and wants to see him do better, and I think recognizes that they have a lot in common with the anger issues and subsequent angst about it, whether or not Vezda realizes that.
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love this grown ass man being on a teenager's babysit list. love him disappointing a teenager bc he's in an angst spiral. incredible.
But also, clutches my heart. Truly he doesn't know quite how much they have in common re: anger issues or that Mob sees him as kind, but I am cherishing this fact with all my little heart. 😭
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One of my favorite moments was them at the truth or dare party. For a variety of reasons that party really just hit him horribly in the insecurities. I mentioned the Ochako confessing about Claude thing, but also he generally has pretty deep insecurities about situations where everyone is laughing together and having fun. That's just not a type of social interaction he can participate in or understand, because his psychic emotional repression makes him unable to laugh, and he's too sensitive to understand why embarrassing others is fun. But whenever anyone tried to give him a gentle dare, it also hurt, because it reminded him he doesn't fit in. On top of that it was especially horrible because he knew Elsa and others would die, and everyone was pretending it wasn't happening. He understood it was just people's way of taking their minds off a horrible situation, but he couldn't relate to that and it made him feel pretty alone.
I just mention all those sadboy feelings because he definitely had a moment where he just felt trapped there and wanted to be allowed to leave, and he confided in Alex and let her give him an easy dare he could just accomplish and bolt. He basically looked around the room for a person he knew would be kind and not make him feel embarrassed and who he could trust to rescue him and that was Alex. So he felt extremely endeared to her after that.
She helped him in much more serious situations too! She was really kind to him when he struggled week 3, and she was one of the people who was nicest to him after Kano's execution. But that dumb one that was more dumb teenager feelings than anything stuck out.
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Their initial threads were so funny, because it was just so obvious she would not like him. She's a tough girl who expects the worst and he's just the softest soft boy imaginable. But he could tell she was very afraid in their first thread, and so hilariously offered to stay with her to protect her, which got them off on the wrong foot. For him, that was kind of a big deal - he doesn't think of himself as the type of person who is able to protect others or capable of fighting, but he's been learning to recognize that in himself. So it kind of took some courage to express that outloud except he didn't know he was nerfed at the time and couldn't do shit.
Anyway, they just were very different people and he felt so nervous every time they interacted like she might yell at him or something. Even though she was never mean to him.
He remained kind of intimidated by Clem until Week 4 when they memshared and his impression did a 180. He got to see the more gentle side of her that was dealing with really difficult things and was doing her best to protect a little kid. That's the kind of thing he really responds to - he knows he's kind of soft and useless and not very reliable, but the people he admires most are people who are both kind and also the kind of person others can count on and depend on in tough situations. So seeing that side of him made him really like her a lot. And she also got a little clarity from his mems on why he is the way he is.
So after that, he just really fucking liked her. If she'd shot Claude when he boo'd them he would've been, like, valid. It's Clem, so, valid. And then it turned out she was a bunny, too. Mikuru had told him, when he asked if the bunnies are all nice (since so far it was Ochako, Hilda, him and Alphonse) that they were, but some might not seem like it right away. So when he met Clem as a bunny he was like "oh!" because that was his exact journey with her.
And then. . . murder. Despite being a bitch who's not down with murder at all, he felt really grateful to both Clem and Hilda? His view of bunny murder the whole time was like, we do have to do this, and it's painful for all of us, but the people who are suffering most are Clem and Hilda and they're suffering so we don't have to. Which is probably fairly accurate! He knew he wasn't capable of doing something like that, and as the week went on he realized more and more he wasn't even capable of being adjacent to it. So it was like - yet another situation where Clem is the one who is brave and reliable and protects others. In the graveyard, he insisted to Elsa that if she's angry with either of them she needs to be equally angry with him.
At endgame, he got to see a little more of a vulnerable side to her and her sadness over losing three buns, and I feel like post-game for them will be about that continuing. He'll start being able to see the vulnerable sides to her, and (especially after he goes home and finishes Season 2) she'll start seeing the less baby side of him and they can become real friends and get fast food together in his fairly gentle world.
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In the first two weeks of the game, he was super shy, but he always felt ease around her because she was so friendly and considerate. Like, right away when they met, giving him permission to not try things that were outside his comfort zone like playing DDR with a girl, but also making it low pressure. Her friendliness applied to everyone - he watched the way she put people at ease, including Rabbit, so he just really admired her. They also had the conversation after her CYOA where she basically didn't want to upset him so didn't tell him much of what happened. He actually did know what had happened from Soo-won, but he also doesn't like to talk about traumatic things so he let it go. But that kind of started him wondering if there was a better way to handle things like that and be a better friend.
One thing that was always interesting to me about their dynamic was that in the world of Mob Psycho, having natural born powers is extremely rare, such that most people think they're the only one. As a result, most people Mob has met who have powers have an intense superiority complex where they think powers make them better or more special than other people, or allow them to treat ordinary people as disposable. Most people with powers in his world want to use them on a continuum of just their own self gain to pure supervillain shit. Mob rejects this notion pretty hard, but he goes in the other direction - he strongly feels that powers don't make you special at all, but he takes that further and also believes powers just aren't interesting or very useful. Throughout the show, he has to teach people who think they're hot shit that they aren't, and that you can't go around thinking you're better than others.
Because of that, he was really inclined from the start to feel kind of iffy about other people with powers, particularly people with powers they're proud of or who use their powers a lot. But Ochako is from a world where having powers is not special at all. Having strong powers is special, but Ochako clearly doesn't see herself that way. She's powerful, but also modest and hardworking. So Mob really responded to the way she would talk about these things. He's frankly pretty disposed to thinking the entire pro hero system in MHA is absolutely bullshit and stupid, since it's so focused on elevating people to be famous and special based on their abilities, and I expected him to feel that way when he learned about it. But the way Ochako always explained it he vibed with - she never focused on how powerful or special they are, and only described it as something she had to work hard to achieve. She also defined what it takes to be a hero entirely around the personal qualities you have, which is something he feels very strongly about and hit him hard. People constantly try to define him and tell him who he should be based on his powers, but he's a strong believer in the fact that it's who you are as a person that matters, and also that powers can really hold you back from developing into a good person because you rely too much on them.
So that conversation is when he really came to see her as one of his favorite people here. He really believed in her ability to be a hero, even if the idea of being a hero in general isn't something he ordinarily would care that much about. When they were both bunnies, that only solidified their friendship. And at this point he also had crush potential on her, which made it very funny how often his own CR would tease her about Claude right in front of him. But crush potential is really different than him having a crush; he tends to get flustered around all cute girls who are nice, but he is actually very single-minded when he decides somebody is 'the person I like' and he wasn't at that point. There were a few girls he got flustered around but also saw them as friends.
The reason he developed a single-minded crush on her was basically because of the conversation they had memloss week. In canon, Mob's single-minded crush is Tsubomi. For the entire run of the series, it's very unclear why. He never talks to Tsubomi, they aren't friends, he just sees her and says she's cute. Tsubomi was his childhood friend, but he hasn't talked to her in years. However, at the end of the comic, we find out his reasoning for liking Tsubomi. It's basically that, when they were friends as children, he used to play with her and Ritsu using his powers. However, at a certain age, he had a traumatic incident with Ritsu and grew to hate his powers and stopped playing with them. Tsubomi also outgrew wanting to play with him and started being interested in jocks instead of psychic nerds. So, tl;dr, his feelings for Tsubomi are entirely based on his internal struggle for self-acceptance. He has such warm memories of her because they're actually warm memories of a time he didn't hate that aspect of himself, but just saw it as a part of himself that could be fun and useful. He really wants to regain her acceptance so he can accept himself again, too.
I just explain that because in week 4, he and Ochako talked a lot about his powers and her powers. It didn't occur to me to think about how all of the fun things he used to do as a kid involved floating things, but it's very true - he'd always float Ritsu and Tsubomi, or float animals around to impress them. But because of that they had the ability to bond over those memories that are basically the only memories he has of not hating a major aspect of himself. He told her a little about how he and Ritsu used to play with them (he'd forgotten Tsubomi was there by that point), and they bonded over the fact that they both can do similar things and even both get motion sickness when they float themselves, which is extremely cute to me.
But the other thing that happened is she talked to him about how hard she'd been working to train her powers to get stronger. And this was really novel to him, because like. . . kind of his whole thing is working hard at self improvement? He joined the Body Improvement Club and has been working so hard at getting stronger and more athletic, and has been working hard at developing his social skills, too. The thing he values most in people is a drive to change yourself for the better, and the knowledge that you can't shortcut self-improvement, it takes hard work. But it was incredibly novel to him to encounter someone with that attitude about their powers. Mob has never tried to improve his powers on purpose. He just has them, they're there, and when he needs them to do something, he just kind of . . . figures it out and does it. He's only ever tapped into a fraction of what they can do, and has never thought of training to be better with them because he doesn't like them and doesn't think they're important.
So he was kind of confused how to take that, because it's not in his nature to be dismissive of something someone he cares about finds important and has been working hard at. So he immediately felt proud of her when she talked about how hard she's been working. But that forced him to examine some of his feelings about how powers are useless and not interesting. There's kind of an interesting parallel where most of the guys in the Body Improvement Club are naturally super muscular and strong, but they still treat Mob like an equal, because what's important is how hard he works and how much he improves, not what he started with naturally. But he has always conceptualized powers as something you either have or don't have naturally, and therefore not worthy of praise or admiration. It was much more appealing to him to think of them as something you could work on and improve, like muscles. From that perspective, he saw Ochako's powers as extremely impressive because of how much she worked on them and grew, and felt embarrassed about how he's never really put much work into his own, which are powerful but he doesn't have much control over them. He also saw her class, and the lesson about learning to control your powers, and was like, oh, okay. I'm basically a person who has natural strength but no training, and that's useless compared to someone who has strength they built up on purpose. He wound up bragging to a few people about Ochako's ability to lift an elephant, even though he can also lift an elephant, because the way he views these things hers is impressive and his isn't. But unlike his typical view of his powers, his negative feelings here weren't just purely pessimistic, but rather made him feel like he should change and improve.
So that's a lot of stuff to just explain why she wound up being so important to him. She flipped the switch in him that made him realize his drive to improve himself physically and emotionally should also apply to his powers. Instead of just hating them and trying to live a life where he ignores them, he should work on them. This is huge for him. So after this he really had a crush on her, but unlike with Tsubomi, he didn't feel like 'if she accepts me, I can accept myself.' Instead it was like, 'I want to learn how to be better and accept myself, and also I like her' which is much healthier.
And it's a good thing, because she clearly liked Claude! When she first said so at the truth or dare party, he felt sad and insecure, but that was more of a function of truth or dare being his personal social anxiety nightmare, culminating in that. He's not really a jealous person and is able to just kind of look at a girl he likes liking someone else and feel like, oh well, she's entitled to that. All my metatext jokes incel jokes aside, he's really not like that at all. Claude babyzoning him a lot rubbed him the wrong way but he saw Claude as a perfectly fine person and got why she'd like him, it just kind of sucked.
On top of that, he realized at the same time he started to really like her that she'd forgotten the pro hero stuff. As I mentioned, being a hero wouldn't be his goal and it would be fine with him if she wasn't interested in it, but he knows she was interested in it, and it made her feel confident and proud, so it just sucked that she lost it. And he sort of developed the feeling that it would be unfair to try to tell her his feelings when she's missing pieces of herself that are that important. Sad weenie stuff but he felt like he probably had a better chance with her if she was missing her hero-in-training confidence. I don't think that's necessarily true, but he thought so, and that was a big reason why he wouldn't have ever told her while she was still missing those memories. So when hearing on top of that that the teasing was true and she really did like Claude, he kind of gave up and was fine with that! I wrote the graveyard letter he sent to Ochako intentionally to sound like it could have cut off something romantic, but it actually was just purely friendly, because at that point he'd decided to let go of his crush.
However, then they did his CYOA, and she really helped him in that. She immediately understood how to approach him - namely that you have to ignore whatever displays of power he's showing and just treat him like the teen boy he is. So that made him feel really grateful to her and accepted by her. And then they got their memories back, which was one of the barriers he saw to telling her his feelings.
Even so, he was never planning to confess to her in the conversation they had when they got their memories back. It was just that he remembered Tsubomi and his plan to get muscles to impress Tsubomi, and that that was his like, main life goal before he came here. And it really solidified the feelings he'd started to develop after their Week 4 conversation of seeing her drive to improve her powers and become a hero and feeling a little ashamed of himself in comparison. It made him realize he needed to also try to work hard for a better goal of just impressing Tsubomi. And also, like, at that point he realized his feelings for Tsubomi were kind of shallow because he didn't really know her, whereas he was genuinely friends with Ochako and knew a lot about her. So that felt shallow, too.
So that was the point of that conversation, but then he had a lot of confidence built up from getting his memories back, so he asked about Claude and she said that he'd turned her down. If that hadn't happened, I don't think he would have confessed, but his feeling was kind of like. . . I want her to know someone thinks of her that way, and to feel appreciated, even if she doesn't return the feelings. He really didn't expect her to, because when he crushes on someone he only likes that person whether or not they return his feelings, and figured it was the same for her.
It still sucked and was awkward and sad when she turned him down! But the awkward/sadness was just, like, his feelings. Normally if someone turned you down and asked to just be friends, you could avoid them for a day or two to get over feeling sad before you tried to move on. But since it was endgame he felt like he couldn't do that, since they had to leave, so he pushed himself really hard to pretend like everything was fine and they were just bffs now even though it wasn't.
He does value her friendship a lot, so post game he will continue trying to make an effort to be her friend and get over his crush. I think she gets to come hang out in his world and meet his friends and probably punch Reigen, and is generally liked by everyone. The Body Improvement Club would adore her. And I think he goes to her world and would probably enjoy getting a couple lessons on how to control his powers, but would also realize that he kind of hates the concept of pro heroes and the emphasis on powers in her world, and would develop the feeling of like. Ochako can be a hero and will be good, but the rest is bad. (Though I'm sure he also like vibes with Deku and her friends). She can see the side of him that's incredibly stubborn and opinionated when he side eyes all the pro heroes. But it's probably still good for him in the end.
I'll just end by saying that like, the comic ends with him realizing his struggles with self-acceptance and choosing to accept himself, and part of that journey is him confessing to Tsubomi, getting rejected but very kindly by her, and becoming genuine friends with her instead and realizing he's capable of dealing with her rejection because he accepts himself. So I was like very happy to be able to play out some of those themes in this game, too. He never felt like he was dependant on Ochako for self-acceptance because she did accept him, and made him want to treat himself better, too, and get more serious about self-improvement. But it was important to his journey that he was able to confidently put himself out there and be ok with it even if the answer was no, so I was really happy. They were really cute and I had a really fun time playing with them.
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