Monster

“So this is what true sadness feels like. It’s sort of like happiness”  When you stare into the eyes of the devil, you expect to see the most heinous of evil, but all there is is uncertainty, it pierces through his cold and inhuman veil to leave you with the gut wrenching feeling that all of this is real, but it isn’t the end, you take one footstep, then the next, then the next, and then without you really even knowing it you’re already living with that uncertainty, but you are still living  This show is more about identity than anything really, or at least that is the main driving force of “evil” in this show. It’s a theme that urasawa would continue to delve into in 20th century boys, but for monster he looks at how identity from our earliest of experiences shapes partially how we see ourselves and the world, but what we do with that perception of our identity is what makes who we are. The entire show really is just mainly johan and Nina remembering who they are. For Nina it helped her become a better version of herself, but for johan it only made him more confused and that confusion turned to nothingness. He viewed everything with a sense of nothingness and most importantly himself, he viewed him self as nothing and more than anything wanted to prove that he was right because from his earliest memory he wasn’t sure if was even loved. All he had was Nina and so he became Nina, the real johan had been lost for a long time. The real point of this series to me is the will to live, and the respect of humans, whether it be other people or ourselves, there is some point to living, and that while our bad memories are part of ourselves they aren’t the end all, there is room to grow for everyone even the monsters that haunt us in our worst of times. All of us are created equally and we all deserve to live, that is what tenma has always advocated for and ultimately was the fact that he always knew, that he had forgotten throughout the series, is what saved him despite seeing true nothingness. I can talk so much about how amazing this series is and just how intricate it is but honestly the final image of an empty bed does all the talking for the emotion of this series, the most poetic way to end and convey a message that urasawa could’ve done, the feeling of helplessness but also of hopefulness have never been so part of one another in any one piece of art that I’ve ever seen, life always wins out. One of the most monumental pieces of art ever created