Monster

“Monster and the second value”
The thing I like the most (among many of them) about Naoki Urasawa's "Monster" definitely is the inner fight between the ideologies of Tenma and Johan. To Be more specific I am talking about the contrast of the subjective, caused and imposed morality. I can’t even describe how much time I have spent thinking about it and discussing it with other people. Being honest this unique piece of art made me go much deeper into philosophy and the amazness of humanity. Many people (most of them are the typical battle shounen fans) think of “Monster” as just a complicated story of a psychopath and the good guy. And I know I sound very obvious here and like a total pseudo-intellectual but if you focus only on it the true beauty of Urasawa’s “Monster” is never shown to you.
But analyzing deeper of what I have said on the start of this review; as “Monster” shows few different ways of thinking about morality, we can see how contrastive the individual human’s brain “rules” can be.
Subjective morality: This one may be considered as weird, because obviously everybody's morality is subjective so to be more specific I would want to say the primal, unusual way of considering what’s good and bad. I want to refer to psychopatic people, or the “murders with cold blood”. We can take Peter Jurgens as a good example. He didn’t have a choice in his life (from our knowledge) of not seeing other people's lives as valuable. He was born this way. We, humans, consider people like this as psychopaths.

Caused morality: In this subsection I am talking about the functioning of the brain that is not primal, it’s not from the newborn times. It was impacted by outside factors. You probably already know who I will refer to. I am obviously referring to Johan Liebert here. Even tho, we know he was born specifically, that is not the main reason he started killing. We know he wanted to prove to Kenzou Tenma that all lives aren’t equal to show him the scenery of doomsday. Make him see the same thing he was seeing as a kid. I won’t go deeper in that part right now, because it was already analyzed by a couple people but I hope you do understand the impact from the mother of twins and actions made by Franz Bonaparta to the child’s brain.

Imposed morality: We can also say it’s natural because of the standards that humanity handles right now. Things that because of law, social status and many other things are dividing actions on good and bad. The key to humanity. This aspect is obviously perfectly represented by Doctor Kenzou Tenma. His eternal faith in humanity and the fact he recognizes the good and bad actions are critically shown in through the series. I do know that this belief was very hypocritical and Tenma’s character is much more complex but Tenma doesn’t realize that. Even though he forgives all criminals, he sees what is considered as good or bad.

We are coming to an end now. Through the emotions and actions we can see how amazing is the inner morality fight shown by “Urasawa” and the dynamic between the entrenched beliefs. It’s getting more incredible and mysterious, every time you think about it. The story may even help you understand your own view on many things. I honestly recommend rereading “Monster” as many times as it needs to because the symbolism and psychology (not only moralities problem) is amazingly pictured in this piece of fiction.
31/01/2022
shenido