Fans of Monster, pls help me

Flevalt said:
I will mention that I never read the manga. I only watched the anime.
So my response might be a complete miss. I'm not sure how closely the anime and the manga overlap. I did love the anime though, so here are my thoughts on it.

Johan is built up in the story to be a highly enigmatic, untouchable, ominous being so elegant, influential and charismatic that he is compared to a monster by the story and feared and left in awe by the characters he meets.
The story wants to let Johan sink in as that entity that a normal person can not begin to grasp.

The story does so for several reasons. For one, it needs Johan to be inexplainable so that he can serve as the main driving origin of the horrors that Monster shows. Fear is far easier to impose when something is not understood.

Secondly, to show the actually quite realistically huge impact that a single individual can have on society, which was already true for persons like Hitler throughout history, but is even more true for the few people that hold power in our society today.

The message of this second point uses the build-up of Johan as an untouchable being beyond human understanding to turn the delivery of the message into an imprinting climax in 2 phases. 1st, Johan's build-up, a seemingly Mary Sue character that is beyond any realistic human capabilities. 2nd, the transition of something seemingly impossible, namely the monster of a character that is Johan, into the frame of our real world, where such people on a high podest, seemingly inhumanly intelligent and incomprehensible to the average person actually do exist but rarely compared to average persons, e.g. when someone says the name Einstein, it's less of a human and more of an idolized figure, where just comparing yourself to someone like that would give off the impression you're arrogant to even consider it. After all he isn't considered anymore as "just a human". This transition is done by showing Johan to be vulnerable, his relationship to his family in particular his sister and his mother, where his pitiful past shows to the viewer that Johan was merely a product of his upbringing and environment and not actually a monster since birth, as the show repeatedly tried to make the viewer believe through the narrations of 3rd parties who described Johan as already a genius and evil as a child, hammering in deeper that impression that the viewer was left with as early as episode 1. And also showing his imperfection and mistakes and thus turning him into a still frightening, unpredictable, intelligent and dangerous yet far more authentic existence that is suddenly far less unimaginable in our world.

"Did Johan have multiple personalities?"

The series was full of misinterpretations of Johan's character by other characters trying to understand how his mind worked, but failing to do so, due to Johan leaving misleading hints to play with their minds. And also due to the unique and utterly horrifying experiences Johan gathered throughout his lifetime - most of which he initiated himself and which caused him to rapidly learn about the human mind - that an average train of thought couldn't possibly reach without going through what he did.

We were given the story of the monster with no name and you were probably even supposed to fall for making that false interpretation of that story to represent Johan's multiple personalities. What the story actually represented were himself and his sister. Both are shown to be the same monster with no name at first, as they were twin siblings with the same upringing up to the point where their mother had to separate them from each other. Once they went their seperate ways, they made different life experiences and turned out differently.

/* ---------------------*
* Johan's Character
*----------------------/*

Now to understand Johan as a character, how and what he thought.

First of all, Johan was the result of eugenics experiments. That is, he was created as result of Bonaparta trying to create superior humans by combining the DNA of humans thought to be superior. Not much unlike how selective breeding is used to create new species of animals (a common practice for domestic and pet animals. Many breeds of animals that exist today didn't exist before humans created them). So in the eyes of many of the Germans, who believed in this concept of eugenics, Johan truly was an exceptional superior human being and not just another human. Hence why many characters when they meet him see him as someone meant to rule etc.

Johan lives an incredibly confusing life for a child, where his mother forced him and his sister to not develop a distinguished individuality (thus creating the first foundation for an identity crisis), the opposite of what you want twins to do. She dresses them up the same, has them behave in the same manner and only ever takes 1 out at a time into public to hide the fact that she has 2 children, as anyone that sees one of the 2 children in public would assume that they are the same. She does this in the hopes that she won't have to give one of them away. If I remember correctly she believed this because initially Bonaparta expected there to only be 1 child and the twins were unexpected.

Eventually the day comes when they take 1 of the children away, fully aware of the fact that there are 2 children. Johan's mother is forced into a sadistic kind of Sophie's Choice or Judgement of Solomon Choice, where she has to choose one of her children and there is no correct answer.
The only persons that Johan and Anna had all their life was each other and their mother. And at this moment, Johan's perception of the world and life changes in the moment that his mother makes her decision. He witnesses how she struggles to make a choice because she apparently is unable herself to distinguish the 2 children from one another, showcased by how she first chooses one child, but then changes her mind quickly, implying that she didn't have as much trouble deciding which child was more dear to her, but actually trying to figure out which child was which.
Johan is torn apart by this experience because, first of all, his mother being so quick to choose (implying that she knew exactly which child she wanted) but being unable to distinguish her own children after supposedly living and caring for them for so long completely stripped any human dignity from how he viewed humans.
And secondly, he still loved his mother and was now left wondering if this love was one-sided, since she obviously wasn't able to tell the children apart at the beginning. So it remains unclear whether she was able to successfully do so at the end when she made her final choice. This means Johan doesn't know which child she actually preferred. And in such a situation it doesn't raise as much of a harmless daily question of comparison between siblings (like which child does she love more?) but actually a question with a far more dramatic implication: Which child did she love so little that she would be willing to give them away?

These 2 problematics were unable to be solved by a child of his age but would continue to plague him for a long time.
Furthermore, to complicate matters, since Johan was raised with a sort of identity crisis between him and his sister and after he started reading his favorite book of the name without monster, he created an analogy from his life to the story in the book once he shortly met with his sister again, starting to think of him and his sister as these two monsters and picturing the future outcome of his life as that which is depicted in the book. While also mistaking Anna's experiences for his own, as he already sees her and him as one and the same.

Johan and Anna escape together to Germany, they're "saved" by someone who finds the book and names Johan after the monster in the book they carry with them. Implying that they were never given names before that time, since they were merely results from an experiment. They are separated again into different orphanages, but sadly for them ones where they were already expected and Johan was used as experimental subject again.
In the Kinderheim he was tortured to the point where he filtered out parts of his memories. He forgot about almost all of his traumatic past, except for 2 things. Anna and the story in the book, just that he now completely forgot that it was just a fantasy story and instead he started seeing it as his lifestory.

From this point on Johan decides to escape from the experimental training facility by burning down the place. This is misinterpreted by the nazi leader of the facility who believes Johan is an apathetic monster that merely commited this as a kind of experiment.

Johan and Anna are then adopted by the Lieberts, where they gain their last names. Johan shows in this part of the story how he is actually still everything but a heartless monster up to this point, as when the Lieberts come to take only him away, he insists that his sister come along too as he doesn't want to be separated from her. Showing that he deeply cares for his sister.

When Bonaparta shows up again under a different name at the Lieberts house, Johan recognizes him, becomes extremely frightened at the thought of his traumatic experience reoccuring, even explicitly stating that Bonaparta came to take them away again (though he doesn't know Bonaparta's name). He can't take it and slips deeper into the role of the monster in his book. He kills the parents before they can separate them (again) and after he commits the act of "devouring them" asks Anna indirectly to prevent the events in the book from occurring by telling her to shoot him. As he is now convinced that his life will unfold exactly as the story in the book, where he will be the only person left standing.

Johan is shot, operated and after he awakes continues on his path of a self-fulfilling prophecy as taken from the book. He is fond of Tenma ever since he was saved by him and this doesn't change throughout the story. I'll go a bit into overdrive mode on the storytelling now or this is just going to get unbelievably long:

He follows what he believes to be his destiny and tries to get Anna involved in it, who now plays 2 roles to him, his beloved sister, but also the 2nd monster in the story that has to eventually either eat him or get eaten. Johan himself lives out the life of the monster. He plays around with the lives of others, with his real memory lost and replaced by the fragments of Anna's memories. A bunch of pretty straightforward stuff happens where Johan executes his plan to finish off all the people he believes to be responsible for his past including Bonaparta and to gain power over the country at the same time in order to aid him with his plan to eradicate/devour everyone.

There is one important scene where the viewer is first introduced to the book with its story after Johan picks it up and screams in shock. From there on Johan remembers that the the story in the book is just that, a fictional story. And he remembers about his past.

Johan eventually meets up with his sister, he tells her "his" tragic background story from the experiments in the mansion, which are actually her experiences and not his. He realizes that his life has been a sad joke. He "no longer" believes in his destiny from the book (arguably he never did as he constantly played around with his own life, asking his sister to kill him, walking on the edge of a roof, making "jokes" about wanting others to stop him) and only wants himself and Bonaparta to be finished at this point.

He lures out Tenma and Bonaparta and the final showdown happens. Bonaparta dies, Johan is shown in a moment where he remembers the life with his sister and he gets to spout his quote about death being the common denominator of humanity.

I'm not sure how this quote of his is to be interpreted. Either the author wanted to highlight the irreversible evil through irrepairable damage that Johan represented at this point of the story because this quote embraces death. As opposed to Tenma's key viewpoint in the story as a doctor at heart, that life is precious and death something to be prevented at all cost. But I don't think so personally because Johan is shown to be redeemed at the end of the story (everyone lets him live and we see him recovering in the hospital).

The other interpretation would be that this was an actual lesson to Tenma and the viewers that death is actually not something to be afraid of. Since the entire story revolves around 2 characters (Tenma and Johan), who both go out on a vendetta of sorts. And Tenma's character development, despite never having him shoot someone, still had him mentally prepare to do so, meaning he actually had to convince himself that killing was the right thing to do under certain circumstances. And death in such vendetta stories plays the important key role, because it is seen as the means through which justice is enforced. And equality (a form of justice) is, as Johan put it, something that death will take care of.

My absolute favorite scene in all of Monster is the ending because it has this moment where Johan lets Tenma in on the traumatic experience with his mother that ultimately was the major turning point in his life for all future turns of events.
We've seen all the characters in this story, many of which were not exactly heroes in any sense of the word. And good-hearted people like Richard Braun were either killed or taken advantage of.

And then Johan asks Tenma who the real monster in this entire story was.
It's a great question to ask at that point and in particular with regards to his mother and himself. Although Bonaparta is the one who initiated all of it with his experiments, he's not responsible for the mother's behavior. And the behavior of Johan's mother, although it was despicable, was simply human.
This part of the story, to me, says a lot about how Urasawa views humans.

Although the story is kept perfectly in line with the conventions of decency, he slips in so many characters with grim, but realistic stories. And with this scene he just boldly hammered in what he otherwise subtly showed through his characters: Humans are monsters.

I'm sure, no I've even read many of the interpretations of the ending of Monster by people, so I know that many people didn't fully or even remotely understand that this ending tried to convey the bleakness of the story. And that just because Tenma didn't break his vow as a doctor to not harm life, this wasn't a happy ending. It was a perfectly fitting horror ending for a thriller story like Monster.

Flevalt said:


No problem, I enjoy my time writing on things I'm passionate about and Monster was just an amazing story.
Please take what I wrote with a grain of salt though because

1. I haven't read the manga and as you surely know, usually the manga is more complete (sometimes even completely different) than the anime.

2. this is just my interpretation of it and it's been a long time since I watched the series.

Not sure if I'll ever read the manga either because I was quite satisfied with how the anime was told and if the manga played out differently, I'm not sure if that would take away some of the experience of the anime for me.

Kyotosomo said:
Ugh Monster was easily one of the most disappointing shows I have ever seen. It started off great the first third and I love psychological thrillers so it seemed right up my alley but then the other two thirds were so horrendously boring and slow and nothing even happened the entire time especially that total whimper of an ending ugh this thread gave me PTSD.

Zerefina said:


:(((( I personally didn’t find it boring at all, I thought everything about it was so interesting that I couldn’t stop reading. Although the ending was a bit anticlimactic, I was still satisfied with how it ended.
But hey, we all have our own opinions :D