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I talked about this once before but didn’t tag it back then because I didn’t know that the manga had a fanbase here.
But anyway what I find incredibly wild about commentaries on, reviews, analyses, whatever of Monster is that they seem to…miss all the themes of the story? Now it’s been a hot while since I read it and I’m sure I was way more thorough and coherent the last time I wrote this, but the story is very clearly about mercy, right?
Even when it looks like the story IS heading towards the unavoidable, towards Tenma having to “learn that sometimes you have to be ruthless” or whatever cold-blooded lesson you want to picture here, it doesn’t. Tenma does not kill Johann. Tenma is a doctor. His hands are not meant for killing.
The story clearly has an anti-revenge narrative but you still kinda begin to expect someone to fucking murder Johan. Like be it Tenma or Nina, you expect someone to end up killing him, possibly ending the whole thing in some sort of tragedy. That’s how it goes, right? That’s how grimey dark stories for grown-ups go. That’s how stories with villains who do horrible things go. But this never happens.
darkheart-despairs
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