"Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?"
In 1986, life was good for Japanese neurosurgeon Kenzo Tenma. He was an accomplished doctor living in Germany, had the favors of the hospital director, a hot fiancee (daughter of the same director), and a promising future. But one day, the guilt of primarily attending to the wealthy patients and leaving poorer people in need of his skills drives him to first operate on a child who was hurt in the murder of his adoptive parents rather than the mayor of Dusseldorf. As a result, the child lives, the mayor dies in the hands of less talented surgeons, and Tenma is demoted by his superiors and dumped by his fiancee. Even though his life is now in ruins, Tenma still believes that he did the right thing.Suddenly, the hospital directors that demoted Tenma die in very mysterious circumstances, leaving a vacant position that only he can fill. At the same time, the boy that Tenma operated on escapes from the hospital with his catatonic twin sister. Although none of the deaths can be directly attributed to the good doctor, a certain Inspector Lunge is not very convinced of his innocence.Nine years later, Tenma is still working in the same hospital when a criminal patient escapes in terror because he doesn't want to be killed by a person he calls the "Monster." Tenma follows him to a parking garage, only to see him mercilessly shot. His horror increases when he sees who the killer is: the same boy he operated on nine years ago, now a young adult. Johan, the boy in question, confesses that he was the one who killed the directors years ago as a way to give him thanks, and abandons the scene leaving the doctor alive.Tenma, horrified to find that he is responsible for the existence of such a monster, abandons his work and his life, and devotes himself to finding Johan again and killing him once and for all. Following Johan's blood trail, however, becomes tricky and absorbing, and as Tenma's hunt becomes riddled with clues from the boy's childhood, finding the truth about Johan's past becomes as imperative as finding Johan himself. The quest is further complicated when Johan's crimes are ascribed to Tenma, and Lunge, convinced beyond a doubt that Tenma is the perpetrator, begins a chase of his own.The series, written and drawn by Naoki Urasawa, one of the most popular mangakas in the business, has received several major awards and substantial critical acclaim; it is painstakingly drawn and thoroughly researched, with an extensivecast and a complex, multi-layered story. The adaptation is almost identical to the original, differing only in several scenes that were cut and several that were added.Not to be confused with the Oscar-winning film starring Charlize Theron, even for a minute (although that one is also about a serial killer).The anime was a fan-favorite on SyFy's Ani-Mondays block. It's also available on Huluhere., Netflix (subbed), and the new Manga Entertainment app for Xbox360 (dubbed).Monster has also been green-lit for a live action adaption, courtesy of HBO and director Guillermo Del Toro.
Absence of Evidence: Johan's crime scenes are devoid of feeling. In one arc, this enables Lunge to determine that a certain murder was committed by a copycat and not Johan.
"Look at how big the Monster inside of me has become!"
"Humans... Can become anything."
"Welcome home."
Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Dr. Heinemann involves himself in dirty dealings, has complete disregard for human life, and steals candy from children. He pays dearly for that last one.
Thanks for killing Heinemann, Johan. Oppenheim and Boyer were pretty despicable too.
And Blue Sophie. Oh, and the corrupt cops in Prague.
Well, one of them, anyway - the other cop had made a heel face turn and living happily with his wife and step-son, and genuinely remorseful for what he'd done. This, coupled with Redemption Equals Death, took him out of being an asshole.
The Atoner: Franz Bonaparta as the most obvious example, but also Wolf, Schubert, Rosso, Bernhardt, and many others. Also given inversions and subversions, temporary and otherwise. Atonement and redemption are arguably two of the series' key themes.
Tenma himself could fit the mold fairly well - as kind-hearted as he is, he sees his absolute biggest mistake as being something he alone can fix. And despite numerous opportunities he gets where he could abandon his self-set mission, he refuses every time.
The series' favorite method of ending people. Probably justified in that most of the murders are committed by experienced killers who don't like to risk leaving anyone alive. Johan manages to get shot twice in the head by two separate people, neither of whom had much firearms experience. One was a little girl, and the other was a hallucinating alcoholic. It's like his brain is a bullet magnet.
A bit of shown their work on that one. Johan is supposedly The Antichrist, and according to some legends about The Antichrist, he is supposed to suffer two head injuries before going on his ultimate rampage.
Martin mocks a guy for not shooting someone in the head. That someone was him.
Broken Ace: Our resident twins. Johan is psycho and Nina is damaged and repressed.
Bring My Brown Pants: The Baby, as Nina points a gun at him. The Baby is terrified and notes that she is most definitely Johan's sister.
But Not Too Foreign: Despite being set in Germany, the main character is Japanese.
Butt Monkey: Tenma at the beginning, detective Jan Suk, Otto Heckel, Eva and ALL of the children that show up in the story.
Care Bear Stare: Tenma. Also done by Grimmer, including on Lunge, of all people. Nina, when not in a bad mood. Dieter's is a major one, and undoes Johan-induced damage.
Cassandra Truth: Tenma has a lot of trouble getting people to believe his story.
Chekhov's Army: Many of the major supporting characters take a few episodes after their introduction before they take an active role in the story.
Chekhov's Gun: Lunge packs a rifle and a pistol before his fight with Roberto. During the fight, he loses the first, but reveals the tiny gun.
Chekhov's Gunman: Wim's father, who is introduced as nothing more than Ruhenheim's town drunk, is the one who ends up shooting Johan, thereby saving Tenma from the Sadistic Choice of either abandoning his ideals or watching Wim die.
Commie Land: Much of the story can be traced to communist East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Used earlier as an incredibly black brick joke after Tenma complains of the politics of his hospital to a supposedly unconscious ten-year-old Johan.
Before Johan suddenly wakes up and just stares at Tenma.
Cool Guns: Nina's use of the four-barreled COP derringer.
A Day In The Lime Light: Very frequent. Chances are, if you're a side character in this series, you'll get your "very own episode" or your "very own series arc". Also an Inverted Trope, in that the title character (if that's how you see Johan, anyway) gets comparatively little air time.
Debate and Switch: Is all life equal? The only thing equal is death? Is it alright to save one, then? Do some people deserve to live more than others?
Defictionalization: The Nameless Monster was turned into a real children's book with a holographic cover. However, it is out of print.
Defusing The Tykebomb: Mostly played with, though not for laughs: Tenma gets his intervention in early with Dieter, Nina attempts this retroactively with her brother, and Grimmer tries with Pedrov's boys, misguidedly as it turns out.
Dirty Cop: The two detectives hired by Johan to kill Nina's adopted parents, Commissioner Hamrlik, Chief Detective Batella, and Detective Janacek.
Dogged Nice Guy: Lotte is a gender-flipped example. Unfortunately for her, Karl is pretty damn oblivious and she suffers quite a bit over her relationship woes (or the lack of). Jan Suk plays the trope straight, though it's brutually subverted in the fact that the sweet girl that he's been crushing on turns out to be Johan in disguise. There's also Lipsky, who seems to have a thing for Nina, but he ends up in a happy relationship with someone else in Another Monster.
The Dreaded: Everyone who knows and works with Johan , with the possible exception of Roberto, fears him to an extreme degree.
There are even occasions where people figure out that Johan is nearby because of the overwhelming fear that suddenly overtakes them.
Driving Question: What is Johan planning? And does he even know himself?
Drowning My Sorrows: Tenma's alibi against charges of klington promotion, complete with public staggering and ranting. Generally a source of trouble elsewhere (Eva, Richard, Martin, and Wim), though not anviliciously so - best beer ever is all part of Grimmer's and Reichwein's positive outlooks. Just be careful with who you drink with.
Earn Your Happy Ending: Despite almost setting itself up for a downer ending, most of the surviving characters definitely end up with this. Lunge gets back in touch with his daughter, Dieter seems to be living happily with Dr. Reichwein, Nina is well on her way to becoming a successful lawyer, and Tenma has joined Doctors Without Borders. Eva kicks her problems and seems to get her life back in order. Even Johan, depending on what you consider a "happy ending", gets one.
Evil Is Not a Toy: So many people try to take advantage and use Johan's evilness for their own means. They all find out, far too late, just how evil Johan is.
Evolving Credits: The end credits gradually progress through the story, "The Nameless Monster", until the final episode where there's simply a static shot of the empty bed where the supposedly comatose Johan was previously.
Expy: A few characters are based on members of Osamu Tezuka's "Star System". The most obvious is Dr. Reichwein, who is a clear homage to beloved Tezuka character Shansaku Ban, right down to his trademark moustache. Johan also has too many similarities to Yuki Michio from Tezuka's suspense-thriller MW to be coincidence. Dr. Tenma shares his name with Astro Boy's creator, although he's actually closer to Black Jack. Urasawa would later go on to create Pluto, a remake of a story arc from the Astro Boy series. And Grimmer is clearly the Incredible Hulk.
Fan Disservice: There are several instances, like when a kid searching for his mom ends up in a red light district, sees a prostitute bent over a trash can servicing a patron, and is paid to watch. Also, Roberto. Another being Nina in first half of the Prague arc being revealed to actually be Johan in drag.
The Farmer And The Viper: Don't be kind to Johan. It never helps. Though it possibly did in the end.
Gone Horribly Right: Kinderheim 511 was trying to create emotionless, vicious, Super Soldiers who would kill with no qualms. Johan took to it so well that he got everyone else in the orphanage to kill each other.
Gone Horribly Wrong: Petr Capek's attempts to cultivate Johan into the next Hitler end up destroying himself and his organization.
Good Times Montage: Nina, Dieter, and Lipsky "making happy memories" in Prague.
Gratuitous English: The Japanese books have the subtitle of "HORRIBLE STORY". You can probably guess why Viz didn't carry that part over.
Gratuitous German: Well, it's set in Germany, but this trope still applies because they switch off between using Japanese and German honorifics all the time.
Half-Identical Twins : Johan and Nina. Their mother even used to dress Johan up to resemble Anna while the children and she were in Prague. As young adults, Johan masquerades as Nina while he's in Prague, and when Nina gets there, she's confused by his female identity and how everyone seems to know "her."
A major plot point is whether Anna (the twins' mother) dressed up Johan for his sake or for his sister's sake; Tenma ponders on the conclusion that she wanted to get rid of one of them, but who?
It's almost impossible not to love Nina, even when she's frightening enough to make a Neo-Nazi piss himself.
Heartwarming Orphan: Nina, Dieter, Karl, and Grimmer. Subverted with various other Kinderheim 511 alumni, and for Johan. This being Monster, though, everyone, gets an ordeal.
He Knows Too Much: With rare exceptions, knowing anything about Johan's existence is enough for him to kill you.
He Who Fights Monsters: What Johan hopes Tenma will turn into. He comes close, but it doesn't work out.
Heroic BSOD: Several, particularly after Nina regains her memories. Tenma even has to talk her out of suicide.
Hollywood Psych: Mostly averted, but some questionable approaches to both theory and security are left in place even when officially rejected, e.g. on the issues of dissociative identity disorder, recovered memories, hypnosis, Epiphany Therapy and inferring psychology from physiognomy. Also, "Transcendental Criminal Psychology", Dr. Gillen?
Humans Are Flawed: Tenma and Johan draw polar opposite conclusions from this, testing each other's convictions to the limit.
Incest Subtext: Johan has quite the obsession over Nina. It doesn't help his case that she's probably the only person in the world that he cares about to the extent that people wanting Johan to join their cause have attempted to capture Nina merely because they know how important she is to him. And he's the one who sent the anonymous "romantic" emails to an initially amnesiac Nina, who thinks she's been receiving emails from her "Prince Charming."
I Never Said It Was Poison: Tenma catches on that a couple of police officers work for Johan when one of them calls him "Dr. Tenma", despite the fact that he only introduced himself by name and didn't mention his profession.
Inspector Javert: Lunge, to the point where he takes a vacation to search for Tenma, at least while he thinks that Tenma is guilty, only to finally come to the realization that Johan was the mastermind behind all the murders
I Owe You My Life: The main reason why Johan has spared Tenma's life. Subverted in that Johan is keeping Tenma alive to kill everyone from his memories so Tenma can suffer alone.
It's for a Book: He just wants to interview you, Detective Braun! Richardreally should have known better than to fall for that line too, considering that he already suspected Johan of being a murderer and Johan introduced himself by name. Someone with that kind of critical information shouldn't allow the person they suspect of being a killer anywhere near them, no matter what story the person uses.
I Wished You Were Dead: Tenma wishes the hospital director and his underlings would die, while venting to a supposedly unconscious patient. Aforementioned patient gladly obliges.
Thanks to an edited version of the first ED song beyond Viz Media's control, and with such a grateful fanbase as this series has, there's a good chance that there will never be an R1 Monster DVD Volume 2. It also doesn't help matters that Naoki Urasawa's works have never been successful in the United States.
The Killer in Me: Lunge thinks Tenma has a Split Personality and is committing murders without realizing it since Johan does such a good job of staying invisible that the only clues he is able to find point to Tenma.
Laser-Guided Karma: Provided Johan escaped, he faces the same life as a fugitive that tenma did due to the testimony of Lunge, Nina and Tenma
Lampshade Hanging: The basic premise of the story is a stretch to believe (though Urasawa pulls it off), and every so often, someone in-story will helpfully point this out, usually at the expense of Tenma (or anyone who has come around to his view). See also Scully Syndrome.
Let Them Die Happy: Subverted. At the brink of death, Roberto asks Johan to "show him the landscape of the doomsday." Johan stares gloomily at his shoes and replies, "You can't see it."
Loads and Loads of Characters: The last half of the manga collections include flowcharts with running updates to help you keep track of who's who and how they're related.
The Man Behind the Man: Franz Bonaparta, the one in charge of the experiments at Kinderheim 511 and the readings at the Red Rose Mansion.Except he isn't the main villain.
Maybe Ever After: Do Lotte and Karl get together after all? How about Tenma and Nina? Sure seems like there's interest on both parts near the end, but there's no clear answer aside from the subtext.
Meaningful Name: Johan, Ruhenheim, and what's up with Franz Bonaparta?
The Messiah: Kenzo Tenma - the guy helps immensely everywhere he goes, even if he's only in a town for a few days.
Nina makes friends basically everywhere she goes. Even when Johan dresses up as her, everyone in "her" block is giddy to have met the beautiful young lady.
Subverted by Johan, who is remarkably good at being barely noticed everywhere he goes. Most of the people in the series think that the bastard just doesn't exist because he is just too unreal. He is a Messiah for the worst people imaginable, though.
Mexican Standoff: Gratuitous with a capital G. The whole series is made of this trope.
Mighty Whitey: Inverted. Japanese Dr. Tenma is the youngest and most skilled surgeon in a German hospital.
Mind Rape: Happens quite often, usually thanks to Johan. Bonaparta has a whole pedagogy founded on this.
More than Mind Control: Johan's modus operandi. Roberto even seemed in love with him. ("You have such nice eyes. Just like Johan.") He also reminded Roberto of his only memory: how much he loved the hot cocoa served weekly.
Tenma, after he realized what he brought back into the world when he saved Johan and when he thinks he killed Roberto.
Milch, when the guards carrying him and Tenma to prison run over his brother, who was supposed to pretend collapsing on the road in front of the car like Milch had taught him in order to aid their escape.
Baby's first appearance is immediately recognizable as inspired in the Twin Peak's "dwarf" character because even the music is similar to the one used in Twin Peaks. The piece that inspires the scene is in the end of this sequence.
No Name Given: So many characters that a major theme in the series is how it is not to have a name. Others live with multiple aliases. A character who goes by a nickname for the entire series dies before his real name is revealed. Johan and Nina's true names were never given; Tenma learns their real names in the end, but the audience doesn't.
Not So Stoic: Out of all people, thanks in part to his Character Development, Lunge gets angry when Roberto starts talking about his failed marriage and how his grandchild doesn't even know his biological grandfather. He gets another one soon after when he starts up a Shut Up, Hannibal! moment.
Also, Lunge gets very giddy when he learns that Tenma saved his life.
A third one by Lunge bringing a beer to Grimmer's grave as they promised each other in a heartfelt moment, and informing his fellow mourners that he was able to gain contact with his estranged daughter and grandson by email, even recognizing that they barely knew each other at all to begin with.
Off the Wagon: Subverted with Richard Braun. Averted with Eva.
Oktoberfest: Notable for being completely avoided. Monster is one of the most realistic portrayals of post-reunification Germany found in non-German fiction.
One Steve Limit: Averted. The series gives us three Martins and two Ottos. And two Adolfs.
Only a Flesh Wound: Mostly averted. A few people escape shots to the shoulder, but gut and thigh wounds kill several people. Averted when a character's shoulder's shot which cripples his arm for the rest of the series.
Johan gets shot in the head TWICE and gets away with little neurological damage the first time; not known the second time, though.
Roberto is only known as such for the majority of the series; the audience eventually learns his name when it is revealed to some characters, but no one bothers to tell him.
The twins' real names are revealed to Tenma, but never to the audience; it's not known whether they learn their own names themselves, given that at that point it doesn't matter anymore.
Papa Wolf: Near the end of the series, Win's drunk, alcoholic father, shoots Johan in the head when Johan threatens Tenma with Win's life. See Spanner in the Works below.
Parental Abandonment: There is a mystery behind what happened to the Liebert twins' biological parents. It's implied that their father was killed, but it's later revealed that the mother turns out to still be alive.
Parental Marriage Veto: According to Another Monster, this was a major reason why Eva broke off her engagement with Tenma.
Not really. Her father was only one reason. She also said that she wanted a man that would make her happy, and with the evidence given in the series, being happy entailed living luxuriously and having high status as the director's wife. As Tenma was demoted, she could not achieve that with him. Breaking the engagement was just as much her decision as her father's.
The Patient Has Left the Building: Johan is supposed to be in bed after brain surgery for a while, but Johan sneaks out and takes his sister with him. This however gets on a later stage with the locksmith, which becomes the first victim we see Johan execute in the series (the doctors he murdered are on another issue, that is indirect and as a "favor" to Tenma).
Pet the Dog: Eva has a straight moment, while Johan loves to subvert this for all it's worth. Roberto has a retroactive one.
Photo Op With The Dog: Played straight as far as Heinemann's motivations are concerned. Otherwise, not so much.
The Profiler: Dr. Rudy and Lunge. Several other characters show elements of this as well.
Public Secret Message: A former college classmate needs to get in touch with Tenma, so he puts an ad in the paper that simply says "Let's discuss our memories of cheating" (on tests).
Lunge figures it out pretty easily.
Rare Guns: Tenma uses one of the rarest guns in existence—a one-off prototype sniper rifle which was turned down by the German army for being too expensive. Because the gun never got past the prototype stage, it was never given a true name.
He never fires it at anyone and is presumably destroyed in the library fire.
Rescue Romance: This trope gets a pretty rough time of it, subversion-wise.
Not counting that Tenma rescues a mountain of people, who end up loving Tenma in one way or the other and their main drive is to prevent him from killing Johan or anyone for that matter.
Nina wants to kill Johan primarily for killing her foster parents, though he's also killed almost every adult who has been kind to them since they were children. she later wants to kill Johan so she can prevent Tenma from doing so; this is mutual.
Eva wants Tenma to rot in prison for life out of spitefulness due to the latter dumping her and later attempts to get revenge after Martin's death. She gets over both.
The twins' mother Anna warns Franz Bonaparta that she will get her revenge on him through her children. Cue almost twenty years and hundreds of corpses; gallons upon gallons of blood on the hands of a man that almost stopped everything because he fell in love with her. Way to stick it up to him, girl!
Room Full of Crazy: Johan likes to leave messages on walls. And bits of derelict industrial sites. He also goes to some trouble to set up a Room Full of Crazy based on someone else's childhood trauma, all for More than Mind Control.
Rousseau Was Right: Tenma's conclusion, and arguably that of the series itself.
Scully Syndrome: Virtually epidemic, if understandable. Lunge is the most standout case, but nearly everyone tends to come down with a dose of this when they first hear the main story. Check out the late-arriving cops in Ruhenheim's reaction to Gillen's explanations.
Serial Escalation: Just how bad does a person have to be before you, the viewer, stop sympathizing with them?
Serial Killer: You have three seconds to make a guess who. Though he's far from the only one.
Shaggy Dog Story: Arguably, but a rare non-negative example. Tenma's outlook on humanity by the end is more important than whether or not he kills Johan. When he went all that way to let him live again, one can say it made the buildup pointless, but it showed that Tenma felt that he wasn't necessarily wrong in the first place.
Shout Out: The Magnificent Steiner is a pretty obvious one to The Incredible Hulk. Also the central chase of Tenma owes quite a bit to The Fugitive TV series (as did the TV "Hulk" for that matter). Also, Mr. Rosso mentions that one of his favorite films is Summertime from 1955. The professor in Nina's introductory scene is a shout out to John Houseman's character in Movie/The Great Paper Chase. The backstory of the escape artist who helps Tenma features a shoutout to The Shawshank Redemption. Johan's character also had similarity with another Johann who involved with Nazi.
Actually, The Magnificent Steiner was an actual show that aired in the 60's.
Shown Their Work: The operation scenes are largely accurate, and the renderings of Germany and the Czech Republic are extremely faithful.
Shut Up, Hannibal!: Lunge's response to Roberto's speech about Johan's plan.
Slasher Smile: While he rarely ever shows emotion, right before he asks Richard if he would like a drink, Johan makes one of the most sadistic slasher smiles imaginable once he realizes that he's broken Richard.
Roberto, in turn, rarely stops smiling.
Subverted: Grimmer's default is to smile; he's not a slasher or a bad guy but when he goes over the limit, well...
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The very plot essentially revolves around the question of whether Tenma's idealism and determination to cause good by doing good can survive against Johan's horrifyingly convincing attempts to demonstrate that they're Not So Different and that it's all a Sick Sad World in which an act of human kindness is objectively futile.
Social Services Does Not Exist: Justified (sort of) in the Eastern Bloc sections since Bonaparta has connections in high places, but apart from the Lieberts, none of the twins' (or Johan's) foster parents appear to have gone through any formal process, or been caught, even when registering kids in school or reporting them missing to the police.
Dieter chooses to stay with Tenma while on the run; Nina even suggests that he shouldn't be involved, but the damn runt is tremendously stubborn. For a while, Dieter hangs with Tenma to keep him from carrying out his assassination plot against Johan, though later, no adult that he comes across with even considers trying to do something about him.
as someone familiar with the whole history, Dieter is a potential target of Johan as well.
Johan/Johann, Kenzo/Kenzou, and Runge/Lunge, among others.
In case you were wondering, it's Johan, Runge, Braun, and Schubert (as opposed to Shuwald). It's all in the series, they show it on business cards, posters, and such. Tenma's first name, seeing as everything takes place in Germany, is more accurately transliterated without the 'u'. Despite Johan being perhaps less accurate than Johann, it is still the official name used by Urasawa.
Split Personality: Tenma and Nina draw to the conclusion that Johan has two personalities: his normal self and the "monster" inside him. Lunge incorrectly deduces that Tenma has a split personality named "Johan" who is committing all the murders.
Split Personality Takeover: A frequent outcome of applied Bonaparta-style pedagogical experiments, though some of the claims to it are put in question.
Also The Magnificent Steiner, until the 3rd-to-last episode.
Sycophantic Servant: Johan'shuman tools run the gamut of competence, according to his needs, but some, like Hartmann and various incarcerated killers are this, and at most serve to help him spread havoc and misery.
Taking Over The Town: A variation occurs in the finale; Johan plans to give himself the "perfect suicide" where he and some of his accomplices move to a rural town right before it gets isolated by seasonal bad weather, cut off communications with the outside world, provide guns to some of the civilians and then just watch them go crazy with paranoia and kill each other. He is stopped before casualties get too high, but there were still plenty of deaths from it. While this is a case of Kill 'em All rather than trying to take control, the tactics he uses are quite normal for this trope, and in a way, he is taking over the town by infecting them with his own nihilism and hopelessness.
Tastes Like Friendship: Repeatedly, almost to the point of Food Porn, fortunately at a reasonable distance from the Nightmare Fuel, and with an eclectic range of cuisines. Also used as a connection with others, rejection of nihilism, or undergoing a Heel Face Turn. Bad guys are rarely shown enjoying food, and if they do, they tend to be weird about it.
Tenma's favorite meal is a sandwich, and is so because of Nina; even Dieter learns to prepare them and tells Nina that the sandwiches are Tenma's favorite.
Tempting Fate: "I'm surprised I lived through that." Cue the fatal bullet wound.
Theme Tune Cameo: Occasionally you'll hear the opening theme in the background of a bar or restaurant.
Tomato in the Mirror: Some of Johan's traumatic memories that were supposed to be his Freudian Excuse were actually based off what Anna told him after she returned from the Red Rose Mansion. Not him.
Translation Convention: Japanese stands in for mostly German; on other occasions it stands in for English, Czech, maybe French, and Latin.
This is particularly weird in a scene where Dieter, who only speaks German, needs Tenma to translate what a British couple is saying, even though we hear them all speaking the same language.
You'd also notice that there's an awful lot of locals in Prague, Czech Republic, who apparently speak fluent German (if not all of them).
Truth in Television: A Japanese neurosurgeon living in Germany is actually not as strange as you might think. Japan has roughly the same number of neurosurgeons as the United States, a country with more than twice its population. For that reason, many of them end up going abroad in search of work. The two most common places they go are Germany and the US.
Turn The Other Cheek: Tenma for the most part and Anna/Nina eventually. Completely averted with the twins' mother.
Twin Desynch: Played straight, subverted, and twisted.
Tykebomb: Aiming to build Super Soldiers can backfire on everyone involved not just the subjects, though they tend to get off least lightly.
Übermensch: Johan, Tenma, and arguably Nina/Anna as well.
Underdressed for the Occasion: Eva won't let Martin accompany her into the hotel because he doesn't meet the dress code.
Villain Episode: The Baby gets one of these just before he gets killed.
The Villain Makes the Plot: Notable aversion. Johan is not the only clever aspect of this series. Not by far.
Villainous Breakdown: Despite assuring himself that everything is going according to plan, Petr Capek starts to grow increasingly paranoid after The Baby is killed, eventually killing his own bodyguard in a fit of paranoia. An action which is later avenged by the bodyguard's comrades, who shoot down Capek.
To Karl Schuwald's foster parents, the Neumanns. Though it can be assumed that after Hans Georg Schubert officially accepted Karl as his biological son, Karl's foster parents probably accepted it.
The couple Johan stayed with in Munich. Reichwein warns them that they'll likely end up being killed like all of the others. Whether it happened or not is never mentioned, but it can be assumed that it did.
There's also Gustof, who is never mentioned again after he's taken to the hospital, as is Christof.
The woman pretending to be Roberto's wife is never scene again after she helped to torch the library.
Muller's new family after his death: he kills Roberto's henchmen while rescuing Nina, but there's no knowledge of whether there were any repercussions against them for his actions, as Roberto DID threaten Muller by using his family against him just hours before; Nina might have told them to flee, but it's not known.
Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Roberto favors this approach when it comes to Nina, Tenma, or anyone in Johan's way, but apparently gets overruled.
Wicked Cultured: Johan, Kristof, and various doctors dabbling in eugenics and brain-washing.
Will They or Won't They?: Between Nina leaning on Tenma every two panels and Tenma telling Nina that he has nothing to live for without her, it's definitely there. Even if you're disturbed by the age difference. To a lesser extent, Karl and Lotte.
Regarding Tenma and Nina, after what they've been through together, one is left not really caring about the age difference anyway. In the end Nina is ecstatic when she hears that Tenma is coming back to Germany.
World Half Full: The world of Monster is filled with some very nasty things, but there's a lot of hope if you know where to look.
Nina thinks the romantic emails she's been receiving are from her "Prince Charming." They're actually from Johan.
Suk ends up in the same situation, believing that his story is a romance where he wins over the beautiful girl in the bar. Turns out this was Johan too.
You Meddling Kids: Pedrov/Biermann tells Grimmer the 511 Kinderheim project would have worked out just great, if his successors hadn't let the anomalousEnfant Terrible get out of hand. Also played straighter with Dieter's and the orphanage boys' interventions.
You Monster!: Quite a few characters to Johan. It's right there in the title.
Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: "But you're special, Doctor Tenma. You saved my life. You're like a father to me... I'm really glad I was able to pay you back... All I did was grant your wish." Cue Tenma's Heroic BSOD.
Zen Survivor: There's a nod to this trope in Rosso, Wolf, and other minor characters, though it's never fully played straight.
, Netflix (subbed), and the new Manga Entertainment app for Xbox360 (dubbed).Monster has also been green-lit for a live action adaption, courtesy of HBO and director Guillermo Del Toro
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