Monster (might be a bit of a SPOILERY review, and obviously Monster isn't something you want SPOILERED even a little bit)
Set in a relatively realistic depiction of 90s Germany and all tangled up in scraps of cold war history (though I can't comment on the veracity of these aspects). Monster is a huge and sweeping mystery thriller like no other. It shares one of its central themes - whether murder is ever justifiable for the greater good (and does one bear responsibility for saving the life of a murderer) - with Trigun but there's so many more layers of complexity and strangeness here, even though Monster's morality is ultimately no less idealistic. The central mystery is wrapped up in wonderful atmosphere, a melange of foreboding dread and human warmth that I found as comforting as it is disquieting. Spun in the gloomy greys and rustic earthy tones of German and Czechoslovakian cities and countryside, it can be bleak but often beautiful too. It's the characters that really make this show what it is though, populated with broken, damaged, heart broken souls, but almost everyone is afforded a detailed background, sympathy and complex emotions.
At its heart Monster seems to actually be about self identity, the importance of holding on to that sense of self, that individualism, that nub of humanity at our core. In the Earthsea books the true names of things give people power, but in Monster it's the losing of names which give those damaged people their powers in exchange for their humanity, as if people can become anything, can be become monsters, by becoming nothing. And this is contrasted to wonderful effect with all the scenes of the opposite, people rooted in their identities, communities, humanity, both in beautiful and heart breaking ways. Turkish and Vietnamese migrant communities attacked and discriminated against, but also coming together to fight that hatred. And all the wonderful meal scenes (which Monster really excels in!) lovingly depicting all the specific regional cuisine, all the little local cafes and pubs with their specific staff and owners. It's full of as much human joy as pain. I find this aspect of the show expressed most touchingly in the character Grimmer. A man who walks around with a massive smile and who never fails to profess his enjoyment of what he's eating, or bring the best cheese and wine to picnic with. But it's all a performance he's carrying out in the hope that he might one day actually feel that joy, because he can't feel anything, relating more to a fictional character than a real person. His story brought me to tears.
Funnily enough Tenma's backstory is perhaps filled in the least, we're given a few scraps, but he seems to be a somewhat unrooted person with something of a void in him himself, but an example of the flipside of the coin to Johan. While the latter tries to starve his humanity completely out of existence, Tenma fills himself up with the world's. And maybe that's also what Urasawa was doing. In fact in many ways, despite the setting, I find it hard not to read Monster as Urasawa wrestling with potential discomforts he had with Japan.
The show scrupulously reserves sympathy and at least the possibility of forgiveness for everyone, no matter how much of a mass murdering maniac they are. Some may find this hard to swallow, but I suppose that's the point of Monster, that there are no real monsters or devils of demons, at least not born that way, there's just people who could have been anything but were destroyed and distorted by the warped culture around them.
