Review of Monster

I don't usually write reviews, but watching this and looking at the inexplicable 8+rating this show has been given annoyed me so much, that I just had to. Let's see what it's about. Monster aspires to be a philosophical suspense thriller, full of suspense and intrigue, but what it actually is a muddled soup of pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo, paired with an unappetising, bland main course of a plot that doesn't really really go anywhere, and a side of one of the most poorly characterised protagonists that I've ever seen. Going with the food metaphors, we have Dr. Tenma, the blander-than-bread main protagonist, who keeps finding himself inhot water throughout the series. The main antagonist is Johan Liebert, also bland, but *gasp* evil bread, who does various evil things evilly and convinces everyone he meets to do various other evil things because he's evil. Why do they agree? Since they're not the main character, they obviously don't have any free-will, and are at the writer's mercy when it comes to agency, that's why. Beside how else would you show how dastardly Johan is?

Story (loosely speaking): Dear Dr. Good Bread, has a successful career as an over-powered surgeon, but is perpetually miserable because he is being forced to marry Eva, due to being indebted to her father. Because she's rich and beautiful, she is also insufferable, and somehow is in love/obsession with Dr. Tenma, despite his previously mentioned bland, miserable personality. Tenma, being who he is, decides to grow a backbone, to save a child's life, and suffers the consequences: the child turns out to be evil and frames him for murder! This could be considered a spoiler, but it really isn't. That is the problem with this story. Since they got the suspense out of the way early in the story, disgraced Tenma visits various places in Germany, on a kind of danger-tourism trip, in lukewarm pursuit of the evil boy, getting into trouble everywhere he goes, exchanging sappy stories with irrelevant characters, and constantly saving lives. He almost runs into Johan, but doesn't. Rinse and repeat for remaining episodes. There are 74 of them. The main tension of the plot is supposed to be Tenma being wracked with guilt for saving the supposed manifestation of true evil. Even the way it ends is stupid.

Characterisation: oh, I forgot to mention, Johan has a twin sister. She's the good twin. I cannot for the life of me remember anything about her. She's really spunky in the way only poorly developed female anime characters can be. Tenma is good, selfless, kind, and everything else nice, but is constantly dour and is a miserable character to accompany the viewer through this yawn-fest. Eva is rich, greedy, and beautiful, tempered by an awful personality. Johan is evil because everyone says so. He has almost supernatural abilities to convince people to kill themselves and other people because of his evilness and master manipulation. It's very unconvincing, because we don't much see any evidence of it. Apparently, he can bring down nations by making silly mean remarks and snide comments to people, which makes me question whether the actual mystery lies in why the background characters are so suggestible and malleable. I can only assume that the backdrop is set in an Idiocracy-like world where the rest of the characters are so dumb, that Tenma, the reptile inspector and Johan appear to be the sharpest tools in the story. They also really emphasize the fact that he's stunning. A handsome boy, but evil?! How tragic. He's got a tragic, tortured past too. But he seems to have been the one who did much of the torturing. Then there's Dt. Lunge, a reptile of man, who is in lukewarm pursuit of Tennis. There's a lot of lukewarm pursuit you'll be watching for 74 episodes. The other characters are filler and don't really matter. I found this show remarkable in how outlandish every character can be made by attributing random quirks to them, while still managing to make them as cliché and uninteresting as possible.

Animation is ok, I guess. Music, I didn't care about and don't remember much. The show was upsettingly boring, and also infuriating to watch, due to how smug and self-indulgent it was. I can see why a lot of people liked and enjoyed it, seeing how it is accessible and easy to follow. Hell, I could have slept through a dozen episodes, and the story would still be going nowhere. And overpowered main characters have always been popular in anime. The forced in philosophical rambling about the existence of absolute evil, ends up amounting to nothing but a repetitive refrain of how this bishounen is so evil.