I swear I just wanted to talk about how much I love Tsubomi and then it turned into a 4,000+ word dissertation on her, Mob and why I think Tsubomi is so important to mp100’s narrative despite, or maybe because of, being a very minor character.
I haven’t counted, but I think Tsubomi shows up in less than 30 pages throughout the entire comic, plus a single omake. That’s really not much, especially considering half of those appearances are just to point out that she’s present in the given scene.
In other words we never get to know much about her and she has no character development to speak of (unless you want to call her remembering that Mob exists character development). Normally that would annoy me to no end - Love interests that only exist to be love interests and the “guy gets the girl in the end (as a reward)” trope is boring at best and offensive at worst.
I was apprehensive while first reading through the comic because right off the bat it looks like mp100 sets itself up to follow the “guy gets the girl” narrative. However, ONE did a pretty clever thing with the trope by both taking advantage of the expectations we have for it and completely discarding them.
“Middle school boy tries to impress the girl he’s in love with” isn’t exactly an adequate description of mp100’s plot. Anyone can see from very early on that that isn’t what the story is about at all. But to Mob? To Mob that’s exactly what it’s about. Everything Mob does that doesn’t involve people being in immediate danger, everything Mob wants to change about himself, is to some degree motivated by Tsubomi. In his mind Tsubomi is the end goal and he’s doing his best to make his life a “guy gets the girl” kind of story.
But, by thinking like that, even after years of never actually talking to her, he has put her on a pedestal where she has become an ideal and no longer a person. Mob never really talks about Tsubomi or gives any explanation as to why he likes her so much, and I guess because she’s the school idol and lots of boys are interested in her, no one really questions it either. Of course he would like Tsubomi, right? Everyone likes Tsubomi.
Tsubomi gets to stay on her pedestal, silent and with almost no sign of a personality, for almost the entire comic. It isn’t until chapter 94 that we get to see her as an actual person, because that’s when Mob, for the first time within the comic’s timeframe, treats her as an actual person by doing something as mundane as handing her a paper tissue because she sneezed. Even Takane Tsubomi sneezes you know.
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