A Man at Rock Bottom, Sent Back 12 Years
✦ The Arc at a Glance
Broadcast and source-material record
On October 2, 2026, Tokyo Revengers: War of the Three Titans Arc began airing. LIDENFILMS produces this arc, and it streams exclusively on Disney+ worldwide, excluding mainland China.
The original is Ken Wakui's manga, which ran 31 volumes and has more than 80 million copies in circulation. In 2021 it ranked third on Oricon's annual manga sales chart, with estimated sales of 24,981,486 copies.
The skeleton of the story is simple. Takemichi, a part-timer at rock bottom, time-leaps back to his middle school days 12 years ago to save Hinata, his girlfriend, who was killed after being caught up in a conflict between vicious delinquent gangs.
That one line is, in a way, a fantasy all of us have indulged in at least once. If only I hadn't said that. If only I had chosen differently. If you've ever had thoughts like that under the covers at night, you can see why this work has sold so many copies.
Psychology has a name for this kind of thought: counterfactual thinking. It means imagining a different outcome for something that has already happened, thinking about what might have been.
Takemichi is a character who doesn't leave it in his head, but actually does it by going back through time.
How Regret Is Made
✦ Upward vs. Downward
Two directions of counterfactual thinking
Counterfactual thinking has two directions. Upward counterfactual thinking, which imagines an outcome better than reality, produces regret, and downward counterfactual thinking, which imagines an outcome worse than reality, brings relief.
"Thank goodness it was only this much" is downward, and "If I had done it then, things would be different by now" is upward.
According to a paper the psychologist Neal Roese published in Psychological Bulletin in 1997, this kind of thought switches on automatically when negative feelings arise. It also tends to focus on the points most likely to have caused the misfortune.
Compared with what actually happened, the feeling gets more bitter, but in exchange it makes you infer the cause and tells you what to change next. Roese summarized the net effect of this kind of thinking as beneficial.
The functional theory that Kai Epstude and Roese presented in 2008 goes one step further. It says counterfactual thinking is best explained by its role in regulating behavior and improving performance.
There are also findings that upward counterfactual thinking raises the intention to take actions that help success. Regret is a painful feeling, but it works as a signal that makes you choose your next action.
Takemichi Is This Theory Put Into His Body
✦ Theory Meets Takemichi
This post's reading
You can read Takemichi this way. He is a person who doesn't stop upward counterfactual thinking at imagination but carries it out in action. The "next time, I'll do it this way" that regret tells us, he realizes literally through the device of the time leap.
You could say he is the character who shows most extremely how regret gives birth to action.
What's interesting is that he doesn't go back because he's good at things. Adult Takemichi is a person who kept running away from the things that ruined his life.
In 2021, while season one was airing, a fan post appeared on the Anime News Network forum saying that this work is not just about doing things right this time, but about confronting the trauma that clung to his back and dragged him down for half his life.
What moves Takemichi is not fighting strength but the resolve not to run away this time.
The official synopsis of the War of the Three Titans Arc runs along the same lines.
After the conflict between Tokyo Manji Gang and Tenjiku ends in a grim result, the final revenge begins in a world that has entered the age of the three titans, with three teams contending for supremacy.
Changing things once didn't end the story, and Takemichi ends up facing the same question again.
What You Didn't Do Lasts Longer
✦ Regret Over Not Doing
The time lag Gilovich and Medvec described in 1995
Regret comes in kinds. In a paper in Psychological Review in 1995, Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec summarized that in the short term 'what you did' produces greater regret, but in the long term 'what you didn't do' is more troubling.
Regret over actions is easy to work through psychologically with thoughts like "At least I learned something," but regret over inaction is hard to find meaning in, so it lingers.
From this angle, adult Takemichi makes sense. He isn't at the bottom because of some great mistake, but because time spent not doing what he should have done piled up. And what he does after going back is nothing great either.
Not running at the moment he used to run. That's all.
When Regret Swallows You
✦ Medicine or Poison
What the research reports
That doesn't mean regret is only good. In a 2005 University of Illinois news release, Roese said that mild regret becomes a force that leads to new action, but severe regret can be the first step toward mental illness.
Rumination, chewing over the same regret again and again, is a problem too. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema reported in a 1991 study that a ruminative style of responding affects how long depressed mood lasts.
In a 2009 study by Roese and colleagues using a nationally representative sample, regret was associated with depression and anxiety, and repetitive regret, regret combined with repetitive thought, was strongly linked to general psychological distress.
To sum up, regret is a medicine, but if you only rewind the same scene, it turns into poison. That's why Takemichi is an interesting character too. In this work, he doesn't stop at chewing over regret but moves to do something every time.
No matter how great the price.
Because We Cannot Time-Leap
✦ Making Regret Useful
Same regret, different ending
For those of us who can't time-leap, the remaining way is to find the use of counterfactual thinking in the next action. The value of regret that the functional theory speaks of lies in choosing the next action.
If it ends at "If only I had," only the scene gets rewound, and if it leads to "Next time, let's do this," regret gains a use. In that sense, one small action you can take today might be a more realistic revenge than going back 12 years.
The War of the Three Titans Arc has only just begun airing. Let's watch together what choice Takemichi makes this time, and where that regret is heading.
Well then, shall we begin today's adventure?
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