Name: A series to truly get lost within; its characters so deep they manage to distract from the central narrative.
Item: Monster
Rating: 85
Author: Yataboi

Waifra

A series to truly get lost within; its characters so deep they manage to distract from the central narrative. · Waifora

It's easy to neglect what story Monster is truly concerned with telling. At face value, it's the struggle of Tenma to prove his innocence, and yet it's driven home numerous times early on that that isn't Tenma's raison d'etre—so then what's really going on here? It's easy to detach from the central narrative and instead get swept up in its boundlessly deep characterizations. Every single recurrent character has some deeper implications, machinations, and essential strengths and weaknesses to explore, and the narrative seems hellbent on touching on each and every one. However, that still is not the central conceit of this tale; it always was and never ceased to be a story about a Monster. Pretty comical to think of, right? If you're not constantly wondering just what the hell Johan is, are you really even paying attention? Even as the series dangles an explanation, you're meant to meet such an explanation with skepticism, and yet this isn't made clear until the very end when frankly, you're quite tired of being skeptical at all and just want to have your cake and eat it. That there was my fatal falling with this series, and why I'm conflicted in propping it up as a classic as so many others do. On the one hand, I can see now the each and every character was meant to perform a specific function, and yet my cynicism and general expectations of this medium sort of demand such a construct be more easily discernible from the jump; and therein lies what must be ascertained from this musing in general. This series is a mystery. It's meant to be akin to a puzzle being constructed slowly and deliberately for that final, grand payoff at the end; sliding the final piece into place and stepping back to see what was built. Spoilers abound as we move forward.

Spoiler, click to view

The first piece to consider naturally will be Johan himself. On three separate occasions we (the audience) are provided an explanation of sorts for Johan's actions. This boy becomes a cold, calculated, mass murdering genius of unfathomable proportions. From whence does such a monster come? Why, he's a brainwashed super soldier birthed from a human experiment doused in cold war anxiety of course! The first leg of Tenma's trek to uncover Johan delves deeply into this, and the character of Dieter functions as the way to clue us into the invalidity of this reading from the jump. Dieter is subjected to more or less the same treatment which Johan experienced at 511 Kinderheim, and yet Dieter is nothing like Johan at all. I must confess that, despite such a brief glossing of this dichotomy, it's genuinely tough to remember very much of this arc as it was both months ago in my life as well as, frankly, my least favorite part of the series as a whole. I can recall Dieter being distinctly distant and cold towards most everybody, but the important nuance to observe is twofold in that Dieter both eventually sheds this callousness and develops attachment to Tenma and later to Nina, but also a complete lack of Johan's yearning for destruction and manipulation. Dieter, while sullen and depressing, is a normal enough kid, and he acts as a dramatic foil to the nihilism first characterized in Martin, the sickly boy who survived "the rooftop game," which is an essential motif to Johan's character in general. Martin himself is the first glimpse into the essential nihilism of Johan in that life's grandiose existence is reduced down to a game to play; the delicate balance of life or death to become a children's plaything. Martin fails to encapsulate this for much the same reason Dieter rejects the notion, and while this period seemed captivating at the moment, its true impact was lost on me at the time. It seemed only meant to build up Johan as even more of a Monster in demonstrating how he manipulates and abuses children, but its thematic importance runs much deeper than that. This is the core pattern of every character which crops up possessing some impression of Johan. They're all meant to clue us into the inner psychology of the monster and to see him for what he is. Grimmer, Roberto, and Christof are also all examples of these impressions of Johan given that they too are alumni of 511 Kinderheim. Yet each also fails to perfectly encapsulate the dissolution of human emotion which was the stated goal of the establishment in their own ways, although the timeline for these characters' finalizations also do not conveniently align with the timeline of Johan's uncovering.

Thus the second explanation provided for Johan's being was Franz Bonaparta's experiments which similarly sought to dissolve human emotion out of people. While the core blueprint behind 511 Kinderheim, its focus strikes me as being far more precise and targeted specifically at ~~Johan~~ or Nina, as it turns out. Here is where I find my cynicism towards the series starting to bloom proper in that I find it a bit marked by incredulity or incongruence how both experiments coalesced perfectly around Johan both in how each concerned him in particular (with Nina's involvement being the only real caveat aiding this diabolus ex machina's credibility) and in how one seamlessly covers the other. Perhaps that's a fault in my perception of the mystery genre as well, but it does leave a certain unsatisfactory taste nonetheless. Nonetheless, Franz Bonaparta becomes the central fixture of Johan's plotting and insights the burning of the library, a scene whose symbolic power and significance are far more reaching than I'd realized at first confrontation. The library contained the key to Johan's past in Bonaparta's picture books which similarly represent Bonaparta himself; moreover, the library press conference was meant to be part of the Neo-Nazis' plot to install either Johan or Christof into a seat of political power. All of these are things which Johan would wish to destroy given his revelation of his Kinderheim-locked memories, ironically unveiled by the very place he sets ablaze. The act seems to come out of nowhere, and yet in retrospect it's perfectly in line with Johan's character: he obsessively erases any hints of his past so as to preserve his trajectory of life, he wishes to strike down Franz Bonaparta as revenge for his mother's and sister's suffering at his hand, and he no longer has any need to enable the new world order for which the Nazis want to plant him as a puppet figure for. All of this coalesces beautifully as a soft reset for the central conceit of the narrative: no longer is Johan seeking wanton destruction in order to replicate his own existence with no regard for anyone; now it's a targeted mission with a clear objective, albeit this objective is not revealed to us until much later on.

And so the final layer is revealed here marrying these two aspects together, in effect. Johan still wishes to bring about some semblance of an apocalypse, but the central conceit in the end of the show is to prove whether or not he's meant to be alive at all. As we find out, the twins' mother willfully sacrificed one of her children to Bonaparta, and this perceived lack of empathy from her fractured Johan's childlike worldview, which would continue to be pressured and crushed underfoot first by Nina's mistreatment at the hands of Bonaparta imparted onto Johan upon her return, which transformed into his own state of being after 511 Kinderheim wiped away the majority of his memories, which then manifests in his later killing sprees and systematic destruction of any sense of his self. The scene of the massacre of the Red Rose Mansion echoes in both the Kinderheim and Ruhenheim massacres as well. Johan seems to want to perpetuate his suffering and spread it onto others, the ironic twist being that he wants only for people to understand his suffering—to be connected to someone. Moreover, the countless times he faces death and symbolically points to his forehead are times he's playing his rooftop game with life and death; Johan wants to confirm whether he's meant to live or not. The series ends with his confirmation being final as he slips away from his comatose hospital bed into the unknown. Despite only being a single piece of the puzzle, there is so much more to discuss on the topic of Johan that I'll leave for another time. This series certainly is fascinating to ruminate on and I'll simply have to revisit it in some way in the future. It's inevitable. Until then!