Saturday 21 July 2018

Why I dropped #2 - Monster manga

Monster by Naoki Urasawa


Monster starts out alright by introducing the main character, young genius brain surgeon Tenma, who lives and works in Germany. He lives his life until he decides to disobey an order of his superior and saves a random young boy's life instead of keeping the mayor of the town or whatever the hospital is in alive, resulting in obvious trouble for his superior.

*facepalm*

I call bullshit.

A children's life is not worth more than that of an adult, but actually LESS. First, while an adult has numerous social connections, a circle of friends, a partner perhaps, a child is only really loved by his parents and grandparents (if at all). Children's so called friendships are flimsy as fuck, so they clearly don't count. Teachers generally hate children - and that is pretty much the entire periphery of a child as children aren't allowed to interact with any other grown-ups in this day and age because those could be creepy pedophiles (so let's treat all adults as such because of a small minority. Logic yay)!

Second, adults generally have a job and hence contribute to society in some way or another (unless they are coppers or politicians or some such wastrels) - while children are in school and thereforae are a COST to society until they become old enough to work.

Third and unnecessary to even mention, the world is cruelly overpopulated. At a certain point in time, an adult might already have had the audacity to spawn his seed into the world in a purely selfish way, while a child decides on whether or not to breed only later in life. In other words, the mayor in the example above pretty likely already had sired children if he had the wish to do so, essentially preventing any ADDITIONAL burden to mankind. Saving the life of the boy means he might put additional burden on mankind later.

So for any logically thinking person, saving the mayor's life as per the order of your superior would have been the morally right and sensible choice. However as the mangaka feels he has to degrade himself in order to appeal to the sickening sappiness that blots out reason in the deranged minds of the general public, Tenma is of course an IDIOT and saves the child, called Johan. As some sort of cosmic comeuppance or divine justice, that mistake turns out to quickly ruin his life, costing him his girlfriend and promotion. However, Tenma's enemies are ruthlessly killed, causing an excentric police investigator (who has a really stupid gimmick) to try and pin the blame on Tenma somehow.

Now this is where I initally stopped reading a long time ago (6-10 years) because I had seen Death Note right before and I really couldn't take another criminal vs policeman logic battle story then. However, Monster isn't actually about any of that but about Tenma and Johan's twin sister (who initially seemed an ok character, but it turns out she was the one to shoot Johan in the head and from then on everything goes downhill) chasing after Johan who is actually a split-personality serial killing motherfucker responsible for many many murders (for example Tenma's bosses and many of his and his twin sisters' foster parents even - who ironically adores Tenma for saving his life when he was a boy!

That storyline is bearable for some time, but at some point the author randomly decides to throw the laziest and most uncreative villains possible into the story - Nazis (*sigh*) - and the bullshit spirals out of control. So the Nazis plan to burn down Little Turkey in some German town - of course the author handles all of this in the most stereotypic black-and-white way (evil Nazis, good Turkish immigrants - he even invokes the dreaded "hooker with a heart of gold" trope) and never asks himself what right hordes of Turks unwilling to integrate have to occupy a foreign country in the first place. Clearly Urasawa couldn't have pulled that stunt in a story set in his native country (the Japanese themselves would never allow great numbers of foreigners to settle in their country). By the way, Hitler himself declared the Japanese (his allies in the war) "honorary Aryans", so the Nazis beating up Tenma wasn't really the smartest thing to put in the manga (well maybe they just didn't know that tiny tidbit, huh). I'm certainly not claiming the Nazis were any kind of good guys but to just put them into a story as a generic villain whose motivations aren't even explored the slightest bit is just the textbook definition of laziness. And to not look up the situation of Turks and their unwillingness to drop their primitive and harmful beliefs primarily motivated by their cancer of a religion - Islam - is doubly insulting. But of course that bullshit sells stories and wins awards cause it doesn't require any kind of thought on the part of the left-leaning reviewer or manga reader - right?!

So of course the FIRE storyline turns out to be utterly useless - nobody dies, at least some of the Nazis are arrested (they weren't important to the story in the first place... yay), the Turks are left free to further spread the boundaries of their parallel society in a Western country, Johan murders some guys - the "good guys" neither win or lose even the slightest thing (and the morally ambiguous smuggler sidekick Tenma picked up even has to lose the expensive carpet he stole so that "evil isn't rewarded" *facepalm* - And guess how he loses it: a 100000 DM carpet is used to extinguish a fire in lieu of e.g. Tenma's shirt *double facepalm*). At this point, I gave up on this asinine timewaster and looked up the further development of the plot on Wikipedia. That was around chapter 40 of 100.

Turns out that the rest of the story is just a REPEAT of events happening earlier! Johan kills people, the "heroes" chase after him, and in the end Johan's sister shoots him in the head AGAIN and Tenma, complete fucktard that he is, operates on Johan AGAIN and saves his life AGAIN, only to allow the murderer to escape from the hospital AGAIN (allowing him to probably kill even more people in the future).

*facepalm*

So this manga really was little more than realising you have gum stuck in your hair, a storyline that turned useless as soon as a boy decided that his life's work was to kill a lot of mostly random people for no reason and COULD actually execute that, a setting that is first established just to be discarded chapters later and a total bullshit nonsense ending.

On the plus side, the German names mostly were well chosen, having a brain surgeon main character was actually quite interesting, the drawing was also quite well done. And on a side note to the author, women in Germany do NOT all wear skirts at all times (because skirts are stupid). From reading the mangaka's Wikipedia article, it doesn't look like he has ever lived in Germany for longer periods of time.

Avoid unless you really like your main characters behaving in the most illogical ways, going out of their way (!) to keep the FUCKING POLICE from solving the murders and catching Johan (I mean it kinda is their job, you know! They aren't ALL about waylaying drivers) and your villains as - well fuck it, those two points are enough to make a super sane man cringe and review a truly shitty manga.

Sunday 27 May 2018

Interactive fiction review #14 - George

George by Cody Sandifer

A hoax demo

George is an extremely short game set in a zoo. Apparently it was part of a hoax, which explains its duration and abrubt, unfinished end.

The plot involves two friends (or lovers), who appear to be drugged up and ready to embark on a dangerous mission (which is a combination always good for netting one a Darwin award). The game text breaks the fourth wall in one or two places, referring to the non-existent full version.

If this was but the beginning of an author's debut game, George would be a promising venture, but in its existing form this game is not worth the time it takes to download it.

2/10