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Yes

&

Yes

the show was a nice ride, but the ending was kinda blehh for me...did you finish the series?

Nope

I'm about halfway through, and its great

ah okay, i wont spoil anything then :x

Hi. Monster has a phenomenal story. And I'm also one of the people who happens to love how it ended. xD

Yeah I finished Monster a couple of endings ago. I was fairly satisfied with the ending.

sooo who was the monster exactly? Johan? 511 Kinderheim? or his mother who was forced into this eugenics program / chose Johan to enter the facility? The author of those creepy folk tales???

oh wait the mother didn't choose Johan, but Nina instead x_x

I think that's exactly the message Urasawa was trying to convey - that there are all sorts of monsters in the world, all with their own unfortunate flaws and reasons for being the way they are. In the end you're left with the silent question of who the real monster was, and the ending is deliberately ambiguous so you can draw your own conclusions about what happens to Johan -

whether he succumbs to his injuries or whether he indeed wakes up to recognize that Tenma's once again been merciful despite everything and finally changes his mind about who he deems "worthy of living".

Monster was just rife with insightful commentary on the nature of being human. So good ;-; sigh

ah yea that makes sense. I guess "unsettling" is a better word to describe the ending, with Johan telegraphing what actually happened and then leaving the hospital despite being in a comatose state D:

lol indeed. It's been a long time since I watched this anime, and it feels good re-visiting this provocative show.

I don't think it was directly implied that Johan left the hospital or didn't in the manga - all they did was show a final panel of the hospital bed empty, but that could just as much have been because he had died and been moved out. Iirc the anime was very faithful to the source material, so I think it was the same there. But yeah, Monster = amazing