TL;CR MEME

[retellers]

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.

Comments

[exercisms]

Ochakoooooo! Also, in case anyone cares, I'm going to talk about spoilers for the ending of the Mob Psycho comic in here. This includes parts that haven't been adapted to the anime, but also probably never will.

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.