#also serizawa has no poker face and i live for it

[russenoire]

i think he's aware that something's wrong, OP, but it's just part of him at this point. he lives with it and is quite functional despite it, to the point of giving no outward signs even to those who know him. outside of his interactions with shigeo and the others he meets through him, reigen's life doesn't have a whole lot of color to it.

it also explains why he's annoyed, not transfixed, by the ikiryō (one's unprocessed emotions taken spirit form, wreaking havoc on others' lives) of that depressed man in s3e1.

remember this guy?

the one who lives in roach-crawling cigarette-perfumed filth, who's convinced he's cursed because everything and everyone he's ever loved has forsaken him? whom both shigeo and serizawa can relate to maybe a little too well?

reigen's all too familiar with the voices that urge him to give up on life where he stands, but he keeps moving forward anyway.

Hi there. I want to talk about Reigen's depression, specifically in the outro of season one.

I just want to start this by saying that Reigen has by far been one of the most accurate and absolute gut punch of a representation of depression that I've ever seen... especially if I got into him having ADHD and depression... but maybe that's for another day.

I've finished the show now, but even from the beginning, I kept saying that there feels like there's just this sense of something being wrong or off in the outro. It truly feels like the morning routine of a depressed person who's just... continuing to go through life. Because that's something that makes his depression so important to me-- that it never feels like a plot point that comes up whenever it's really intense. It's just... always there. Lingering. Changing how he views the world.

This can be seen in the stylization of the outro. It's all black and white, and everything is shaky, hazy almost. As if he's not fully there.

Everything's so quick to fade. It's so apathetic. He does this every morning. Makes himself look presentable, gets the hit of stimulant from the nicotine in his cigarette, and then everything fades again.

Then there's the commute to Spirits and Such. He leaves his apartment, and it still has that same shaky, hazy feel. It very much feels like he's not fully present for that walk. Literally, it'll jump/fade between different parts of his walk. It's like there's a fog around everything he's doing, but he'll remember the little things that stuck out. The little things that broke his routine (the people running, the cat).

Then, finally, he sees Mob. This is kind of an obvious thing to point out-- but at the end of all of that routine, Mob is the one who brings color into his world. I think it's also interesting that we never see Reigen's actual face in the outro. We see him from the back, and we see him smoking, but that's the closest we get. He's at a distance, everything hazy and disconnected.

This is how depression is when you've been living with it for so long.

Reigen still has to go to his job, still has to "be an adult", so it's caused him to just live with this depression. It's that feeling of emptiness that's so hard to describe to anyone who hasn't been depressed. Like you're just going through the motions, unable to connect with the world around you. You don't even know anything's wrong, because this is just how things are. Living life becomes apathetic. I think that's what stuck out the most about the outro.