#another monster

[irohsteaa]

Let’s talk about Tenma’s mother

Thanks @plainteacup for the help. <3

Since Another Monster doesn’t have an official English translation and I don’t speak either Japanese or Spanish, I have to rely on a fan translation. If you notice a mistake that changes the meaning of the original text in a significant way, please let me know. Thanks!

That year, his elder brother finally made it into the medical department of a different college, and Tenma thought that the pressure on himself would finally be eased off. But his father was clear in telling others that Tenma would be the successor. His elder brother’s college was a far cry from the one Tenma entered, in terms of prestige and history. During all this, their mother urged the father to give the hospital to the second son. Being Mr. Tenma’s second wife, she was oddly enough extremely considerate and doting upon the two older, unrelated sons, and in contrast, incredibly harsh with her own flesh and blood, Kenzo.

First thing to keep in mind: the Tenma family situation is explained by an “old friend” and, additionally, filtered through Weber’s writing. We can’t be sure how much of it was merely speculation. 

This fragment paints a picture of a woman who’s harsh and cold toward her biological son. Why didn’t she support him? Why didn’t she want him to be the successor of his father? Didn’t she believe in him?

Before I give my interpretation, I’d like to draw attention to Lipský’s mother and her reaction to her son being chosen for the reading seminars and then kicked out:

One day, a man with a big nose and very thick glasses came to my house, asked me some very strange questions and showed me a lot of diagrams. The questions were rather benign, but for some reason, I was quite terrified. After he left, my mother cried. She told me that I had been chosen to participate in a special class. She said that if I didn’t want to do it, she would work things out, but I didn’t want to make things hard for her, so I chose to go.

*

As soon as I told my mother that I didn’t have to go anymore, oh, the smile she made... Our relationship went back to normal at that point.

Lipský’s recollection paints a woman who was aware of the possible consequences of the reading seminars. She was afraid her son could become like his father, so she was relieved when she found out that he wouldn’t be attending the classes.

What if Tenma’s mother had similar intentions and wanted to protect her son? 

She was the wife of the director and formerly an editor for a medical publisher; she knew this life inside and out.

We don’t have a full picture of Tenma’s father, and we don’t have enough information to establish whether he was a tyranical father and husband, the absent type, something in between, or a secret fourth option. One thing is clear: a prestigious position can significantly affect one’s personality. 

Just like the reading seminars.

Was it her way of saying run away, as far as you can?

I also like to think that it was Tenma’s mother who taught him, more or less directly, how to be rebellious.

[mo-nee-ta]

The (fictional) girls from Klaus Poppe’s and Humbert Humbert’s pasts

Disclaimer: since I have to rely on the fan-translation of Another Monster, please let me know if you spot a mistake that changes the meaning of the original text in a significant way. Thanks!

CW: pedophilia, death mention, sexual assault mention

Another Monster introduces us to a certain girl with whom the young Klaus Poppe supposedly fell in love. Everything we know about her comes from rumors: 

Oh yes! I remember, there was something about his father and the girl from the rumors and another boy his age. The son fell in love with the girl, but lost out to a young man in a neighboring village who stole her away… A typical story of passion among young guys like that, but somehow the rumor turned into a story about his father and the girl. Well, you can’t help but get this sort of thing in a small town.

(...)

— What about the rumor of falling in love with a young woman?

It was a rumor that ran through the whole town, and I heard it myself. Although she was young enough to be his daughter, the story goes that he asked to impregnate her. She supposedly lived in this town, but was of both Czech and German parentage. At the time she was probably 18 or 19 and very beautiful… all the young men in town were in love with her, thus giving rise to endless gossip and rumors. In the end, she hastily married a man in a neighboring village, but it was quite a rumor while it lasted.

— The girl in the rumors about his father… the one the son fell in love with (...)

Weber then presents his interpretation of the rumors and states that there is no evidence to support it:

This is all just my terrible imaginings. It’s a story with no evidence or foundation. 

Still, there are some elements that make her character more real: her double parentage (something she could bond over with Poppe), her sudden pregnancy, and the resulting necessity to get married in another place, with Terner Poppe, Klaus’ father, as the possible father of the child. 

The son fell in love with a beautiful girl of German and Czech descent, but the girl and his father fell in love.

While Weber presents his interpretation, he fails to notice the darker undertone of the story—in what he calls Terner Poppe and the girl falling in love, I see a story of an older man taking advantage of a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.

These elements aren’t, however, enough to create a full picture; all we have is a shadow of a character.

Another shadow of a character is presented in Lolita; it’s Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert’s first love.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Her name is an obvious reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee.

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

We don’t get much information about her:

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita (...) Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior.

And she dies suddenly (just like the girl from Poppe’s past suddenly disappears from his life):

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

Much later, Humbert Humbert recognizes Annabel in Dolores, the girl he will later turn into Lolita: 

I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectacles — the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the sea” in my tortured past.

Humbert Humbert mentions the princedom by the sea again; we are reminded of the fictional nature of Humbert’s dead bride. Taking this into account, can we believe him when he describes the discovery of Dolores as a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the sea”?

A similar question comes to my mind when I think about the girl from Poppe’s past: is the stolen love that we know about only from rumors enough to explain Franz Bonaparta and his obsession with the twins’ mother?

Let me quote a further fragment from Lolita:

The able psychiatrist who studies my case — and whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascination — is no doubt anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee.

Here, the text openly mocks the belief that everything that happens in Lolita can be explained by Humbert’s incomplete childhood romance—the romance built of too many fictional elements. 

Similarly, the girl from the rumors can’t be the answer to what created the monster inside Klaus Poppe.

While the girls aren’t the answer, they provide us with bits of information that form a more complex picture, and in this picture, we can see more elements that form Humbert Humbert and Klaus Poppe. The mixed parentage; the partially fictional past (due to the imperfect nature of human memory and the very limited point of view); the grieving the loss of innocence; the pain they’re not able (or willing? or both? or?) to let go and which results in even more pain and destroyed lives (countless in Poppe’s case).

Are these elements the answer? Again, no. Both Lolita and Monster aren’t interested in giving an answer. Instead, they show that the richness of the human experience and all the little details that shape it make creating a gapless picture impossible.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

[boredmezzosoprano]

Another Monster Post!!

(SPOILER ALERT‼️)

Is anyone else kinda desperate to know what became of Christof Sievernich? I know he’s a royal skid mark of a human being, but like with Roberto and to an extent Johan, the guy can’t actually help it! Seriously what the hell did they actually do to the boys at 511 Kinderheim?!! Anyway I found him to be an interesting side character. While he probably thinks of himself as being on the same level as Johan (although why anyone would want to be him is a mystery to me as Johan doesn’t actually like being Johan!) but it’s obvious that he doesn’t have Johan’s composure or self control. It’s also interesting to me that he’s somebody’s father! Will he ever get to meet his child and what will he or she think of him considering that he had their mother killed? There’s just so much material there that I can’t help but feel cheated that we don’t know! Now that everyone including the media knows about what went down Johan or "J" as he’s been called (Mistah J 🃏🤡), surely Christof's name must have come up? Also what is his life like now that Eva shot his ear off??? I can’t help but imagine him having grown his hair longer to cover his missing ear/scarred ear, but that’s just me🤷🏼‍♀️ If anyone has any info on this please let me know🙏

[catacat666]

Books. 03/14/2024.

Aquí está, "Another Monster. Informe de una investigación"

Is here, 'Another Monster. Investigation report'

(⁠*⁠❛⁠‿⁠❛⁠)⁠→ @catacat666

[mrhonjo]

Johan is beyond terrifying.

[billie-eilish-the-bard]

Johan Liebert is my soulmate, and my true love.

[brainoffroot]

New chapterrrr :)

[texaschainsawmascara]

Jennifer Tilly playing poker

[ruporas]

need to exist in your warmth (id in alt)

[the-lazyyy-artist]

The Underworld

Monster

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[irohsteaa]

Okay, so I’m still reading Another Monster and something is nagging at me.

It should be noted that I have no way of knowing whether or not the man told me the truth. But I can say this much: the experiment that created Johan still has its adherents. Anyone chasing after Sebe/Poppe/Paroubek will suffer the same fate as Weber.

Perhaps the invisible client used the name of Werner Weber to lure me in and give me a warning: Back off now.

The author of these words is Takashi Nagasaki; he’s Another Monster’s editor and co-author, but in the story he’s a translator of Another Monster.

Nagasaki says that everyone who’s chasing Klaus Poppe will disappear, just like Werner Weber did.

So how can we explain the fact that a few Monster characters chased after Poppe, found him, and didn’t disappear?

Was it Poppe really the reason behind the disappearance of Weber when he tried to find him? Or was it someone else's doing, someone much much higher in the hierarchy than some dude standing in the background while the others have fun and are about to die moments later?

Also, in sympathy and anticipation of Mr. Weber's safe return, the co-author of this book, Mr. Naoki Urasawa, has provided his materials regarding the Johan case. Mr. Urasawa also says that in order to investigate the facts of this case, he is considering going to Bohemia.

It’s very interesting that Urasawa is named as the co-author of this book even though the only thing Weber mentions about Urasawa is the fact that he translated The Nameless Monster from Czech to Japanese.

[mycherrycola]

Abbey Bominable <3

This design is still my favorite out of G3. I've gotta draw her again soon!

[boredmezzosoprano]

What if…

What if in Another Monster, while he was on the run Johan became disfigured somehow (or did it to himself?) and thus was no longer able to tempt people with his looks and slowly from there starts to gain some humanity? Oh the artist who created the bottom picture is called soybeanbokchoi 💖

[cloud-ya]

horned viper

[mrhonjo]

Agent Suk attends with a a colour matching outfit and ordering a jasmine tea screams babygirl attitude.