Should I read the manga or watch the anime first?

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Reading the manga is faster but anime is a good adaptation.
>The 74 episode anime version of Monster is a faithful adaptation of the entire story. It is mostly recreated shot for shot and scene for scene compared to the original manga. The few subtle differences include short snippets of additional dialogue and slight re-ordering of scenes in places.

The anime drags the pacing out way too much and it makes the craptastic ending more disappointing.

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Both are good, but the anime moves at a snail's pace while the manga reads faster. Depends on your patience.

>18 volumes adapted in 74 (!!) episodes
Honestly that sounds like it has a lot of fucking padding in it.

I've watched most of it over a 3 day drinking binge. Made it pretty enjoyable.

it doesnt matter, theyre both terrible. urasawa creates this effective atmospheric thriller about the mystery that is johann and never delivers. i dont know how else to explain it, it's like going into kakegurui expecting gambling shenanigans.

A little question.
Does Nina have romantic feeling for Tenma?

No

Yes, but so does Johan.

The anime first and if you feel like the story is going to slow switch over to the manga.

It's more about psychological than thriller.
When everyone who knows you is murdered, the proof that you exists is disappeared, which means your existence is erased. That alone makes me depressed.
Urasawa Naoki is really good at delivering these impressions through a nihilist such as Johan Liebert.

I want to rape Nina and kill her brother

Who is best Urasawa girl

alright ill bite esl-guy
the issue is not whether its psychological or thriller, perhaps i did miscategorized it. the issue is, urasawa built this huge expectation around johan and the supposed genius of his character, and yet there is little proof why he deserves his notoriety. no satisfying description of his methodology, no credible backstory as to why he is what he is when the fact is nina went through a lot more than he did. "he's just that good", would be the accurate description. it's unsatisfying, frustrating.

Isn't that the purpose of the whole thing?
Are monsters born or created? The answer being both.

if he was born, i want to know how he does the spectacular things he was shown to be capable of. the entire character is basically"it's magic, i aint gotta explain shit"

Neither, they're both bad.

But that's not the purpose of the story.
Anyways, you could blame it on his superior genetics and/or twisted personality.

dude it does not matter how much of an outlier he is in terms of genetics. my question still stands, there must be a method to how he does them, but it was never shown. genetics manifest itself in ways we are able to asses, it's not hypnotism or occult. i guess you could say i dont get the point of the show, just like kakeguruitards defend it by saying its not meant to be viewed as a gambling anime, but that's a weak point and you know it.

I disagree completely. The less we know about Johan the better.
Dedicating 20 episodes to learn how he handles this game would just turn him into another generic villain.

The problem with Johan was we learned too much and his motivations were pathetically retarded. He became such a nihilist sociopath because his mom had to make Sophie's choice and he was the one she saved but he was torn over "what if she didn't mean to save me?!" This motivation was so fucking stupid and it would have literally been better if he just was either a monster from birth or the kinder warped him mentally.

im and i appreciate your effort. seems we reached an impasse then, monster is just not my cup of tea. for something so popular and highly rated i thought it wouldve had a broader appeal. more for you i guess

>mother is crazy
>makes you dress as your sister
>has a though time deciding which sibling will be sacrificed
Deep down Johan knew her mother mistook him with his sister, this probably why he took Anna's memories as his.
The series makes it pretty damn obvious Johan isn't exactly what you call mentally stable.

Johan is supposed to be an enigma. It's not necessarily about what makes Johan what he is but what the existence of something like Johan means to the world around him. Johan is essentially a supernatural entity, he can't be completely understood, that's why his abilities are never revealed, cause then he stops being something we can't understand and just becomes a normal villain.

things don't need to make sense or have a big impact behind it to twist someone's psyche. that was one of the points desu.

That whole thing was important to the question of what makes a Monster. Was he warped into one at Kinder? Was is the results of the experiments to create the perfect human? those would make it more exciting, but in reality it could have just been simply not being loved by your mother. That's much more realistic, people actually do become messed up because of parental abandonment, kinda emphasizes how fragile humans actually can be.

if that's the case then the execution is definitely lacking. like said there's nothing compelling about his backstory and the last 1/3 was just padding

His backstory is supposed to be just dead ends. The seemingly important stuff like Kinderheim that would be a major character defining point for normal villians are actually pretty irrelevant in turning him into a Monster, basically just to show that everything isn't so cut and dry.

Are you sure you remember what happened? His mother was part of a eugenics experiment but when she was released she birthed twins instead of a single child. She dresses him as a girl so the neighbors think they have only one kid because if the people who ran the experiment knew she had twins they would definitely take one if not both of her children. It's literally never been clarified and if left vague which child she chose to save because it's an impossible decision which is why she hesitated. Johan was picked but he's haunted by "what if she meant to save her instead!" which is the stupidest thing and not to mention he internalized this with a nihilistic world view when he was a small child.

This single moment caused him to become a monster and that is a fucking stupid motivation that would have been better had it never been included particularly since it goes against the whole "are monsters born or created" by specifically stating this moment created the monster he becomes.

That doesn't stop it from being fucking stupid and non-compelling

They have logs from the kinder that say he's fucking absolutely warped by the time he arrives and his own flashbacks dictate that the very moment she hesitated broke him as a person permanently. There is zero question left they spell it out that that moment created the monster.

Why didn't she cut her daughter's hair instead of making her son wear a skirt? You are also forgetting that the mother was full of hatred at some point.

You're over simplifying what that point meant. That one point doesn't give Johan the ability and motivation to manipulate and exploit everyone he comes across. He may emphasize that point in his head, which is interesting considering everything else he went through, but he was very much innately messed up beyond repair. If he was born like that then that moment would't have made him a Monster, his sister was also a part of that remember and she isn't a Monster. But also if that never happened would the dormant Monster inside of him never have emerged? That's the point.

Long hair covers their features better so you can't spot any minor differences especially since dresses will cover up body type differences better. Either way choosing which gender to disguise neither is "more sane" than the other she had to do it or else they would take her children.

She was under duress during the decision and was hateful because the man she loved was a piece of shit to her and the children then she was told "choose one child because the other is going to be trained to replace Hitler".

Nothing she did was insane what the fuck are you on about? The only crazy thing she did was participate in the experiment to begin with but she had her reasons.

They're twins, and kids. They don't have distinctive features to hide.
You can say this didn't affect Johan since he still dresses in drag as an adult.

So? A kid wouldnt understand that.

She swore one of her kids would take revenge.

You can't be exactly identical twins if you're not the same gender you stupid fucking idiot.

He still had his own fucking personally and was allowed to be himself at home. They literally never even imply having to dress as a girl fucked with him, you are just inferring this from literally nothing.

She swore one would want revenge because she abandoned one then most them. No fucking shit she thinks that.

Wearing that stupid ass dress was the thing that made him believe her mother didn't want him.
I can't believe you are too stupid to get something as simple as that.

Two twins aren't the same fucking person. Her not snapping from going through trauma and just repressing it compared to her brother utterly breaking because he DIDN'T have to see something so traumatic is fucking idiotic. It also makes his retarded nihilistic view pointless and unfounded because "the world is so cruel and uncaring" yet he himself was cared for and was saved either via his mother's choice or by luck (the world dictating what will happen). Both go against his fucking childish ideology that he preaches.

The way you fix this was you leave it vague about what broke him or you have the mother reveal she was trying to save Nina. Then you leave it either a mystery OR you spell it out that it broke him because he then had a reason to become nihilistic because his mother officially chose his sister and not him.

They stomp it into the ground that night broke him so either leave it vague as to why, spell it out, or better yet have them BOTH witness the fucking event and react differently raising the question did the event make him a monster or was him becoming a monster was an inevitability. The execution for the last act for pretty much everything except Lunge is handled incredibly poorly.

what? It's cause he thought she got them mixed up because they were dressed the same and meant to give Johan away. You really think it's because he hates dressing up like a girl? Did we even watch the same show
?

Meant to quote

>no raping and killing both
pleb

How about you read the chain of replies and post again? It was the combination of all things that made Johan believe his mother didn't want him.

Neither, Monster is boring and meme'd into being high quality by the right wingers at ANN.

I should, i've watched it years ago..

Not him, but wasn't the only reason Nina didn't turn into a monster thanks to Bonaparta? And even then Nina is kind of a psycho.

>stupid and non-compelling
Just like real life

Manga is way better

>Two twins aren't the same fucking person. Her not snapping from going through trauma and just repressing it compared to her brother utterly breaking because he DIDN'T have to see something so traumatic is fucking idiotic.

It's not idiotic. It shows how differently human mind reacts. That part is pretty realistic.

Neither, it's shit.

He is what he is because he's the embodiment of nihilism. The day his mother had to take a choice was the day he became a monster.
Basically Johan's character is summed up when you have that kid playing the roof game and telling Dieter what's fun about it. It's playing against fate, not fearing anything because nothing matters, and if you survive the roof game then you do it again. He then procedes to say that Johan does it on a much bigger scale. Hell, even his appearance is similar to Johan when he was at the hospital(bandages on their head), Johan told Anna to shoot him because he was just tempting fate, and he survived (reason why he cried at the time) so he decided to do it again.
511 Kinderheim didn't have a null effect on him, it messed up his memories a lot especially those regarding Anna. His goal was to bring the apocalypse down to Earth and being the last one surviving, and meanwhile being hunted by Anna and Tenma and see if he can survive (as well as implating his ideals to Tenma's head and make him become the Monster)

When he regained his memories at the library, his goal changed, thus why he dropped his plans on Schuwald, and decided to create the perfect suicide by killing every person related to him except Anna and Tenma who was supposed to finish him
But he wasn't shot by Tenma, he was shot by a random drunkard at a completely convenient spot allowing him to survive, he (unvoluntarily)won against fate again. At the end, he either acknowledged the fact that fate chose him and stopped killing people, or similarly to the roof game, he tried it again

>not raping Johan and killing his sister

You're wrong, not only is it not the point of the manga to be inside Johan's head, but all of his plans (except poison candy, but then again hospital-poison, not hard to connect) are explained through other characters.
And we saw him manipulating Richard Braun to his death, we know that he paid people to kill Anna's foster family and held her, we know that he spent 3 years isolating Schuwald by killing his entourage, we know how he instigated a massacre in Ruhenheim. What happened to 511 Kinderheim is also heavily implied, he "added a little oil onto the fire" and "when people gather hatred arises", so he spread rumors during a period of tensions between the kids and the educators and the educators themselves (confirmed in Another Monster).
Basically what Johan does is pushing people's buttons until they break, that's how he turned severly twisted and unstable guys into serial killers doing his bidding when he was 10

I never gave a shit about what Johan did. The good stuff about Monster is what every other character does. Grimmer, Lunge, Eva, Tenma, Richard, that's the real deal. Also that sniper guy with the coffee and sugar.

>giving a shit about what Eva does
I guess watching her crash and burn was kind of fun.

Exactly.

I liked Johan for what he was but I don't think he was supposed to be read into as much as people in this thread seem to be doing. He was more of a enigma with a confusing backstory that we weren't supposed to really understand all his motives and such. That's why the question about why Johan was a monster is still up in the air. The story was mainly focused on the people around him, and Monster portrayed that part of the extremely well.

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>Shenanigans
Please, that word, don't use it.

>not helping him get his shoes back
what a faggot

Tenma's such a great protag, and one of the noblest I've ever seen. He deserves peace and the best waifu possible.

You should watch the anime even thought it's a snail's pace and also read Pluto if you want to have a quick look on how Naoki stories are before starting watching a longer plot, its really worth 65 chapters.

Tenma's cool but most of his progression as a character happens so quickly, like after episode 15 hes pretty much static. I feel like more could have been done with him.

Well there was the to shoot or not to shoot conflict, which I think was a great show of struggle for a truly moral man; but I somewhat agree, the show for the most part after the early stages was about the reactions of other characters with Tenma and Johan being the thread.

I'm at episode 34, when does it get "shit" like what people here claims because this show is really good.

They stole the shoes when he was busy doing work

Tenma is more like a secondary character after a few episodes

people say the anime got too slow because they didn't read the manga

It doesn't. The biggest complaint is the pacing, from people who aren't used to truly fleshed out work.