Review of Monster

If you've ever wanted to see 74 episodes of two people driving in circles breaking their shoulders patting themselves on the back about how awesome they are while some jackass runs around killing people, this is your show. Watching it, I found a pervasive sense of juvenility. Not in the sense that Johan was doing Fortnite dances and telling Tenma about the latest episode of Skibidi Toilet but it felt like a self-loathing anime fan's favorite anime. Not in the sense that it helped them with their self-loathing or even that it let them revel in it, it's more like the anime for people who are ashamedto be avid anime watchers.

I swear to God, at least half of the adult cast is divorced and/or widowed. It was such a meme that by the time some guy (involved in the Johan manhunt) actually had a good relationship with his wife, I was actually shocked because the amount of times you hear about someone's girlfriend/fiancee/wife leaving or being killed or whatever, it genuinely could have been in the double digits.

How am I supposed to take this show seriously when there's a little guy named The Baby doing some goofy dance while being the leader of a white supremacist gang

It just feels like it's trying too hard to be ~mature~ that it comes off like a show on Spike TV or something. I won't be so cruel as to compare it to Manswers or a show of that... caliber but something like Deadliest Warrior or 1000 Ways to Die? I mean... it's not inaccurate.

Johan literally sends a kid through the red light district (a recurring setting because prostitutes are so ~mature~ and ~grown-up~ to show) and the kid tries to kill himself because Johan is Johanning out

Speaking of which, why should I care about this story

Neither Tenma nor Anna seem to really care about their lives as long as they can bust a cap in Johan's ass and Johan doesn't really seem particularly attached to his life. Which sure, whatever. But Tenma and Anna keep repeating at each other "No, you're too pure! I'll be the one to kill him!" and they just keep dicking around for the entire series, even when they have a clear shot.

I didn't want to see the protagonist win because I didn't care about the world of Monster so taking Johan out... I mean, sure, that's fine, but it's not like I hated him. Tenma and Anna both seem (nominally) more interested in killing Johan than literally anything else so it's not like I want to see them live happy lives either because if they don't care, why should I?

I didn't want to see the antagonist lose because I didn't really dislike Johan. He's just kind of a nihilistic jackass who points at his forehead and begs people to shoot him. There's an arc where Johan actually makes an extended appearance and he's in the story and involved and it's the worst arc in the show (although I did like Lotte and Karl). This show is better when Johan is either off-screen or just walking past ~menacingly~ as people see the aftermath of what he's done.

Any time you actually have to engage with Johan and his philosophy and the show falls like a bag of bricks.

I did care for a couple of the side characters but that's another problem of the show: they introduce so many side characters, it's hard to care about them, especially when even the ones who consistently matter will just vanish for episodes at a time.

I liked Dieter but eventually, he just got put on a bus playing FIFA on his PlayStation or whatever while the grownups did stuff.

I mentioned Lotte and Karl but after the Thursday's Child arc is wrapped up, they get maybe 20 minutes of screentime over 40 episodes? You don't even get closure on what they end up doing after the story is over, they matter so little. If the story stopped being about Tenma and Johan and it was Lotte trying to slide in Karl's DMs for 50 episodes while the main story happened in the background, it would have been better.

Eva was a loathsome bitch (purposefully, her and Roberto were actually good antagonists). I appreciated her presence in the story.

I also liked Lunge and Grimmer.

But even significant side characters like Reichwine, the criminal psychologist who Tenma caught cheating on his college exam, Verdemann, I couldn't care less about them, and that's not to mention the random bozos who only show up for a couple episodes.

I mentioned Johan and Roberto (and technically Eva but she's not actually affiliated with Johan) but the rest of the antagonists? You're asking me to care about PETER CAPEK? Christof whateverhislastnamewas? Geidlitz? DaBaby?

How about that foreigner couple Tenma went to go get gasoline for? The mom who had a hemorrhage and the town doctor had a crush on? Everyone in Ruhenheim (which is pretty unfortunate given it's a pretty big place in the story)?

I completely forgot about Blue Sophie and Richard Braun until looking something up for this. I also completely forgot Heckel existed until they showed him in the final episode.

I don't really have much to say about Tenma's character... he sure is, but Anna has such a lack of character by the end, it's funny. By the end, her role is reduced to crashing out over memories drip fed to us so we can get little giblets of the plot while Johan Johans all over the place.

For what it's worth, it's pretty decent at building tension. The first, like, 25 episodes are pretty good. If it was that quality, it probably would've gotten an 8 at worst and I'd be like "I see the hype".

Even in later arcs, it has good moments. It just takes so many detours that eventually loop back into how Johan is the most Johan of all Johans and Johans all over the place. That taxi driver who ran over a guy for spitting on him? That's Johan's fault, baby. The white supremacists trying to burn down the Turkish district? They're doing it for Johan. The kids pushing each other off of buildings? Yup, Johan. That asshole cutting in front of you at Walmart? You just got Johan'd!

Johan (arguably for the best) sits back and lets a bunch of henchmen do the work and hype him up as this god of manipulation.

They try bringing in this 511 Kinderheim and later on Red Rose Mansion stuff about how they're trying to manipulate children into becoming übermenschen and I'm sorry, I just could not care less.

They end up detouring and stop-starting and doing so much random bullshit that by the end of the story, I just kind of sat there and thought "do I care?" Obviously, the answer was no, but this story was about how Johan ruined Tenma's life and Tenma (for whatever reason, I'll get back to this in a second) is going to murder him because it's his fault Johan's still alive.

Lunge assumes that Johan's an alternate personality of Tenma's and honestly, I would have preferred to see that show.

Whatever they were going for here made Johan so uninteresting to me that even if Tenma unloaded a whole clip into him, shoved a broomstick up his ass, made him piss himself, hit him with the People's Elbow, then dropped a nuclear bomb on him, the initial hook was already lost on me. I did not care to see Tenma kill Johan anymore.

And for that matter, the police are so bad in this series, if Tenma just said "fuck Johan, I'm going back to Japan", he could've lived his days out in Japan scot-free.

Back to the reason why Tenma wants to murder Johan. It's because... when he was a surgeon, he chose to operate on Johan despite the director's orders and Johan survived. Like, I'm sorry, I'm not a doctor but if someone went up to me and was like "uh... yeah, the guy you operated on is now a serial killer", I'd be like "damn, that sucks", not "oh, I've gotta kill this guy".

And the ending, oh my God.

I can't say much for spoilers but lmao. I actually liked what they did in the penultimate episode but then they just throw their hands up, say "the real Monster is the friends we made along the way", throw in a little Sophie's Choice, and then end on a certain note that I can't say much else about because spoilers.

I do see the vision with this series, I guess, but once it gets in too deep, it never comes back up.

I can't really suggest you only watch the first 25ish episodes either and it certainly isn't worth watching another 50.

And for the love of God, can someone get Johan a copy of Persona 3?