|
"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | There's nothing special about being born. Not a thing. Most of the universe is just death, nothing more. In this universe of ours, the birth of a new life on some corner of our planet is nothing but a tiny, insignificant flash. Death is a normal thing—so why live? | „ |
| ~ Johan projecting his nihilism onto Milos. |
| “ | Dr. Tenma. For you, all lives are created equal; that's why I came back to life—but you've finally come to realize it now, haven't you? Only one thing's equal for all... and that is death. | „ |
| ~ Johan expresses his misanthropy while provoking Tenma in shooting him. |
| “ | Dr. Tenma. There's something I want only you to hear. That time, long ago, when the monster appeared in front of me—was my mother really trying to save me that day, or did she confuse me with my sister? Well, which is it? Which one of us didn't she need? | „ |
| ~ Johan's last words to Tenma. |
"Johan Liebert" is the titular main antagonist of the manga and anime series Monster and the overarching antagonist of the light novel sequel Another Monster.
He is a ruthless, seemingly emotionless, and near-psychopathic serial killer whose life was saved by Kenzo Tenma as a child. He is also the twin brother of Anna Liebert, aka Nina Fortner. Johan has stated that his one true goal is to be the last one alive when the world ends—but upon rediscovering a children's book that appears to have played a pivotal role in his monstrous nature, he instead set his mind on committing the "perfect suicide", i.e. dying without leaving behind any evidence of his existence (with the exception of Dr. Tenma and Anna's memories of him in order to destroy their faith in humanity).
He is voiced by Nozomu Sasaki in the Japanese dub while in the English dub, he is voiced by Keith Silverstein.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Heinous?[]
In General[]
- For most of his life, Johan had been working towards the very end of human society step by step through his corruptive influence over others, and be the last human alive at the end of the world.
- He frequently torments Nina psychologically to subvert her sense of identity, disguising himself to feel what it is like to be her and use it to further his plans; killing her adoptive parents; and attempting to corrupt her into a killer just like him.
- Johan is a manipulative psychopath who frequently shows superficial kindness and empathy to keep a low profile and/or to manipulate and corrupt others, such as with Christof Siervenich and Roberto, which were done so Johan can corrupt them into fellow criminals like him.
- Despite multiple horrid events in Johan's life, he refuses to take any chance offered to him by Tenma and Nina to help him and change his ways as many other villains in the series have while working to strip himself of anything that makes him human in his words "to be as dark as possible" and shatter Tenma's idealism, who he knows was piecing his entire life story together to strike him down in cold blood.
- In spite of the horrible events he goes through, in contrast to Nina who refuses to let herself be defined by her bad childhood and aims to become the best person she can be, he chooses to become the worst person possible and dish out all of his trauma on everyone else.
- Overall, he lives up to the manga/anime's name as a living force of evil (complete with parallels/allusions to the Antichrist as opposed to the Messiah that Tenma symbolizes) which brings out the absolute worst in people, spreads as much evil and suffering as possible, and champions the downfall of all human society and morality.
Backstory[]
- With alarming premeditation and calculation for his age, he murdered his caretakers in cold blood despite being homeless due to wanting no one to find out where he or Anna was.
- He infamously caused the 511 Kinderheim massacre, once more as a child, by insidiously manipulating and provoking the orphans and instructors into inciting chaos—which culminated in the orphanage burning down and Johan tossing an oil rag into its fires, ominously watching as dozens of other children die by either killing each other or burning alive.
- He murdered his foster parents, the Lieberts, before successfully prompting a traumatized Anna to shoot him herself.
- He tortured Helmut Wolf by organizing an event where his wife, children, and friends all die one after the other, all the while forcing him to watch. This reduced Wolf to a broken and paranoid wretch just to make him experience the same solitude that Johan did—even though Wolf saved him and his sister from a near-death experience. Although Wolf was a neo-Nazi, what he was subjected to was not only irrelevant to that, but as the story unambiguously portrays, is cruel even for him.
Present[]
- He murders Tenma's boss and coworkers Director Heinemann, Dr. Oppenheim, and Dr. Boyer with poisoned candy, ostensibly as a "favor" to Tenma for saving his life, simply because Tenma had unwittingly told Johan that Heinemann would be better off dead—despite this declaration stemming from anger and resentment rather than genuine malice—thereby incriminating Tenma for the murders due to his severe demotion before this.
- While Director Heinemann and his subordinates were thoroughly repugnant for their corruption and disregard for the lives of their patients, Johan did not kill them solely for this reason, but to invalidate Tenma's belief that all lives are equal, as Johan brings it up when Tenma tells him that killing is wrong, and tells Tenma that his career was only salvaged thanks to the murders.
- He encourages Reinhard Dinger and other serial killers to commit murderous acts with little to no effort, seemingly bearing a corrupting influence on a nearly supernatural level.
- He organizes a successful money laundering business only to abandon it, which in turn instigates another massacre.
- He hires serial killers from all around Germany, including Adolf Junkers and his two partners, to dispose of all of his former foster parents—only to backstab the trio by disposing of them once they've outlived their utility. Junkers initially survives, but only to later be executed by Johan due to Junkers being a loose end, just as he was on the path to redemption and recovery.
- In doing so, Johan also torments and possibly attempts to corrupt Tenma—a purely good character—by insinuating that the blood of Heinemann, Oppenheim, and Boyer is on his hands and that their deaths benefitted him due to his promotion to fill their place, suggesting to Tenma that disposing of those in one's way is acceptable.
- He habitually murders his subordinates or any he sees as loose ends or outlived their usefulness (e.g. Horst Grossman later on) or neglects their potential deaths (e.g. his sole surviving disciple, Christof); even his most loyal henchman, Roberto, is not exempt from this callousness when he dies before an indifferent Johan's eyes without having his end of the bargain fulfilled, as he is ultimately nothing more to Johan than a pawn.
- He blackmailed Detective Messener and Michael Müller to murder the Fortners, Anna's (now Nina's) new family, upon luring her out of their domicile. This would also lead to Jacob Maurer's death as he was there to investigate the Fortners when Messener and Müller went to kill them.
- He corrupts children with his worldviews and convinces them to jump from rooftops as a game, which they're told to try again should they survive. It's likely that many of them were either critically wounded or did not survive.
- He is a being so utterly dangerous and misanthropic that when offered a chance to join a gang of Neo-Nazis in a meeting with Professor Goedelitz, Johan murders them all to drive home how he has no interest in the Nazi ideology due to looking down on all humans with equal contempt.
- While he does help Karl Neumann reunite with his father, Hans Georg Schuwald, even though he could've easily claimed to have been Schuwald's son and the latter would've believed him, it's almost certain that Johan intended for this to be an opportunity to gain Schuwald's trust.
- He initially plans to have Schuwald assassinated by his hitman, Roberto, so that he may seize control of Germany's economy, manipulating murderers to target those close to Schuwald to get closer to him by taking their place and earning his trust, in addition he killed Edmund Fahren and made it seem like a suicide after discovering Karl's existence. His reason for nearly subjugating the economy is to set his aforementioned apocalyptic initial plan in motion.
- When recovering alcoholic and detective, Richard Braun, is hired to investigate Fahren's suicide and begins to draw connections between Johan and other unsolved murders, Johan retaliates by meeting Richard in a bar and, veiled as research for a college thesis, confronting him on the latter's execution of a 17-year-old serial rapist and murderer, citing various sections from the Convention on the Rights of the Child to put the detective in the wrong—initially under a neutral, understanding façade.
- This façade gradually erodes as instead of simply luring him somewhere so he could kill him, Johan does so while slowly and ruthlessly hammering away at Richard's psyche by planting seeds of guilt, asking Richard how he intends to look at his daughter, Rosemary, in the eye the next day when her father is a murderer and a coward, and finally manipulating him into drinking again—which is followed by Richard either jumping or falling off the rooftop Johan has lured him to or being pushed off despite Johan's knowledge that Richard was to see Rosemary the next day for the first time in years, with his wife and daughter grieving his death afterward. This is done not to deliver justice for the otherwise morally upright Richard's past crime, but simply for his interference with Johan's plans.
- After murdering Blue Sophie, Johan gives drug money to a prostitute near the crime scene for seemingly no other reason than to further ruin her life by having her abuse more drugs, and possibly also pragmatism to dispel suspicion by rendering her an unreliable witness due to her addiction, if not simple hush money.
- He sets the highly occupied Munich University Library ablaze while instilling terror into Schuwald, killing a few and injuring many while burning myriads of books simply because of his loss of interest in murdering Schuwald. Since he refuses to abandon his plans for Schuwald without ruining the business tycoon's life in some way, he spitefully traumatizes him and shows him scenes from Hell—both in the library and in Johan's very eyes.
- When encountered by Tenma at the burning library, he taunts the doctor into killing him by pointing at his forehead.
- Upon embarking to Prague in search of a 511 Kinderheim tape from his youth, Johan murders and deceives people—including Reinhart Biermann, the repenting headmaster of said orphanage who, up until his death, was raising children in a manner opposite to that of his past experiments—while disguised as his sister Anna, deliberately gaslighting and potentially incriminating her.
- In said disguise, he frequents a local bar and acquaints himself with Detective Jan Suk, who is enamored with him due to his convincing appearance as Anna; however, upon extracting the required information from Suk, Johan poisons his boss and other policemen involved with the Czech Secret Police attempting to acquire and sell the tape that Johan seeks, which deflects blame and suspicion onto Suk due to the similar poisoning method utilized by said police.
- To exonerate Wolfgang Grimmer from false suspicion of murdering Biermann, several of the orphans who were previously in the latter's custody band together to find the "mysterious blonde lady" (Johan) who was present at the scene and presumed to be a witness—and one of the boys, Miloš, is successful. What follows is one of Johan's most wanton and reasonless acts of cruelty when still disguised as Anna, he tells Miloš that he should find his lost mother at a nearby red-light district, but bombards his hopes with the notions that his mother abandoned him because he was never wanted and that all life is insignificant; he then sends the boy through said district wherein he witnesses several forms of human depravity, including rape, which—coupled with his inevitable failure to find his mother—tortures the boy enough to drive him to the brink of suicide. Although this is stopped through Tenma and Grimmer's narrow intervention, Miloš is still very visibly traumatized and implied to be corrupted by Johan when he squishes a moth unprovoked, and his fate thereafter is unspecified.
- Even though he did save Grimmer from death and clear him of the crime, it's never implied he did this out of genuine care or respect for him. If anything, it was most likely for pragmatic and/or selfish reasons.
- He burns down the Red Rose Mansion, which contains a painting of his mother, in his endeavor to erase his past and (ultimately) himself. He also met Hermann Führ while doing so, and indirectly inspired him to kill people himself, thereby instigating the events of Another Monster.
- After disposing of his henchman Horst Grossman, he visits the remote village of Ruhenheim where he instigates a massacre by playing on the doubts, fears, and innate greed associated with human nature, destroying its peace and killing many more in the process. He intends to have its entire population dead at its own hands.
- He rejects Anna's forgiveness for all of his actions during their final encounter, immediately before holding a nearby child at gunpoint just to coerce Tenma to shoot him and fulfill his goal of a "perfect suicide" and invalidate his idealism.
- In the ambiguous ending of the story, Johan appears to escape the police hospital he was sent to following his second brain surgery, indicating that in the end, he receives no comeuppance for his long list of atrocities. It is also possible that he is still in a comatose state, but regardless, his ultimate fate is unknown and he likely evaded justice.
- It is even speculated and even implied that he not only rebuilt his life somewhere else, but that he attempted his crimes once again, possibly resulting in the loss of numerous other lives and the corruption of many more people, showing how he never stopped spreading his evil in spite of everything that happened to him.
What Makes Him Inconsistent?[]
- While others suffered similarly and still became better people, he is still far too tragic to be Near Pure Evil due to numerous traumatic experiences in his past that continue to haunt him:
- He and his sister were conceived as a result of a eugenics experiment by Franz Bonaparta to create superior leaders. From an early age he was dressed as his sister to create the impression his household only had one child and given the book The Monster Who Didn't Have A Name to serve as brainwashing. When he accidentally read the book while browsing a library on a whim, he underwent a panic attack as a result of the PTSD it triggered by remembering it, demonstrating that the experiences still affect him.
- He was part of a cruel choice Bonaparta forced his mother into, to keep one of her children and give the other up for his experiment, in which Johan was plagued with the doubt if his mother actually intended to spare him or if she confused him for Anna. This even causes Johan in that his change of plans was focused on trying to destroy Bonaparta as he saw him as the reason for why he is the way he is.
- After Anna was experimented on, her memories were projected onto him as a result of his empathetic bond with her, resulting in him believing he had witnessed the events that she had.
- After the experiment, his mother vanished from the apartment they previously stayed at, forcing the twins to travel alone without assistance and nearly die in the mountains, while Johan was left without proper guidance for his budding violent tendencies.
- Johan nearly lost the will to live as a child when he and Anna wandered to the edge of Germany, nearly starving to death.
- He was later sent to Kinderheim 511, a depraved orphanage where orphans were subjected to multiple experiments and where he lost the memories he had of his past in Czechoslovakia. This resulted in him losing any sense of his identity and any feeling of intrinsic value he had beforehand.
- He was psychologically affected deeply by the book he was forced to read as a child in the Red Rose Mansion, "The Nameless Monster". As evidenced by the cassette tapes detailing the experiments he endured, his imitation of some of the noises in the book showed how much the book drove him to insanity.
- Overall, his experiences resulted in him believing life has no value and that he and everyone else was worthless. Several characters in Another Monster comment that had he been raised in a better environment, he would have not turned out the way he did. When told by Nina that she would still forgive him, he looks down solemnly before concluding that he's come too far and he could never amend for his actions.
- In the final episode while in the hospital, he wakes up and tells Tenma of the "profound" experience he had with in his childhood when his mother was forced by Bonaparta and Capek to give away one of her children to be experimented on in the Red Rose Mansion, where his mother first selected Johan, but then quickly changed her mind and selected Anna for the experiments, pushing her toward the two men. He genuinely wonders which of the two she really intended to send away, even starting to lose his cool temper he had for the whole series. It is also important to note that this is the only shown moment in his childhood where he acts like a normal child, as in any other shown flashback to his childhood, he is a nihilistic psychopath or he has gone insane, such as in the 511 Kinderheim experimentation cassette tapes.
- He and his sister, upon being left in the Red Rose Mansion, were abandoned by their mother who left the facility and went onto live her own life, which makes his mother bear part of the responsibility of him becoming a monster and having a messed up life. In the final episode, when Dr. Tenma finds his mother, Viera Cerna, on a bench in Southern France, she even suggests when she asks "Who is the real monster?". She even stated that she "wished revenge" on Bonaparta and the others in the Red Rose Mansion for killing her husband, through the actions of her children, suggesting that Johan's actions may have even been through her will, though his is mainly speculative. Even though it is not confirmed whether or not this really happened or if it was hallucinated by Tenma, it still provides a huge amount of insight on how Johan became the way he is.
- He expresses a twisted sense of genuine care and respect for a few people:
- He cared for Nina in a genuine but also very twisted fashion, as he allowed her to shoot him as a child and murdered Roberto out of concern he might try to kill her, and saved her from the Neo-Nazis. Another Monster also revealed that he cried while looking through Bonaparta's sketches of the twins in the "Vampire House". Another Monster also confirms that Johan would highly disapprove or even kill Roberto for doing such an action, once again showing his care for Anna. He also forced the Lieberts to adopt Anna because he refused to go anywhere without her, showing how much he valued her being with him.
- He claims to respect Tenma for saving his life and says he views him as a father figure, which is backed up by a neighbor he spent time with as a child, who tells Tenma that Johan was very grateful to him and often spoke highly of him. Dr. Reichwein also states in Another Monster that he believes Johan appreciated Tenma for being one person who would never forget his existence. He even helped Tenma get the position of Chief of Surgery at Eisler Memorial Hospital, albeit through killing Dr. Boyer and Dr. Oppenheim, even though he had to reason to, likely doing this out of gratitude for saving his life. However, much like his relationship with Nina, this also a minor prevention at best, considering he goes out of his way to break his idealism many times in the story.
- After Karl revealed that he had lost his mother at a young age, Johan cried and held his hand, as he could relate to his experiences. While initially thought to be ambiguous whether he felt sincere empathy for him or if this was a ruse, the follow-up novel Another Monster revealed this to have been genuine. By Karl and Lotte's own statements in Another Monster, they were certain that Johan felt a personal bond with him due to connecting over their lack of a mother figure, and refused to kill him despite being able to do so and it being convenient for him because of his respect for him. It's worth noting, however, that this is partly only presented as a theory by Lotte, and it's possible Johan was indeed willing to let Karl die in the fire, despite genuinely empathizing with him. While he does partly project his past on Karl, it doesn't change the fact that his care is rooted in his sympathy for him. He was even willing to bring his father, Schuwald, to the Obenberg Forest he once visited, indirectly giving him the hallucination of the once-blooming forest and moving him to tears.
- Though it is never shown, he genuinely loved his mother and valued her opinion and love, as shown with the hallucination Tenma had at the end of the show, where Johan heavily implies the root of his psychopathy being set off was from the indecision of his mother when choosing a child to be subjected to the Red Rose Mansion experiments.
- He is played far too sympathetically throughout Another Monster to be considered Near Pure Evil, where various characters, including Werner Weber, the narrator himself, conjecture how he was ultimately a tragic figure shaped by his circumstances. While he ultimately refused to give up his ways, his callousness and cruelty is a function of the nihilistic beliefs he developed due to his horrific childhood of being experimented on in the Red Rose Mansion and 511 Kinderheim. Furthermore:
- His moments with Karl Neuman are also shown somewhat sympathetically through his remorse and genuine sympathy toward his lack of and desiring a relationship with his father as well as the fact that his mother, Halenka Novakova, abandoned him out of protection, mirroring how not only did his mother abandon him, but his father was killed as well. However, Johan never knew of or mentioned his father, so his sympathy for Karl's lack of a fatherly connection was partly genuine sympathy toward him.
- When in the library of the University of Munich, he looks for children's books for the daycare he worked at in the university, and upon finding "The Nameless Monster" he has a visceral and even horrified reaction at the book, screaming and fainting. This shows how even in his adulthood, that book had a profound effect on him.
- His conversation with Nina in Prague in the episode "I'm Home" involves him telling Nina the stories she told him of the torture she went through in the Red Rose Mansion, where he genuinely believed he went through that torture because of his confusion of his mother's preference for his sister or him. When Nina confronted him and told him that this wasn't true after figuring out she was the one who went to the Red Rose Mansion, she states that he "cried and laughed", implying he felt extreme confusion and suffered an emotional breakdown, and while this is portrayed for horror in the way she describes it, it also makes him even more sympathetic.
- It is implied he felt some remorse for his actions in the penultimate episode, before attempting to shoot Wim to goad Tenma into giving up his faith in humanity and shooting him, Nina tells Johan that she forgive him. He told her "some things can't be forgiven", demonstrating that he knows how far he has gone and that there is truly no hope for him to attempt to redeem himself, therefore there is no point in repenting.
Trivia[]
- Johan Liebert is perhaps among the most acclaimed—and often considered one of the evilest—villains in manga and anime. The former may be due in part to his complexity and realism (for the most part) as a villain and his religious allegory; the latter may partly be because of the fact that, rather than only torturing and murdering people, he drags them down to his level with relative ease, reducing them to nihilistic monsters (if not outright insanity) like himself.
- Furthermore, he does not appear to gain much from his actions as he shows few to no sadistic tendencies, which only highlights his malice since not even sadism may be an excuse. Assuming he truly even has the emotional capacity for hatred, his misanthropy appears to be his only drive since it conflicts with his nihilistic outlook; however, given that his demeanor, disturbingly, appears to be far more apathetic than antipathetic, it can be argued that everything he does on his way to fulfilling his ultimate goal (including the goal itself) is purely for the sake of evil—such acts being as natural and mundane to him as breathing.
- Although he is most frequently referred to as "Johan Liebert", Johan is not his real name, but rather one of the many ones he uses over the course of his life.
- While Johan has taken on various identities, he doesn't take someone else until posing as his sister; in fact, when someone tried to pose as the long lost son of Schuwald, Johan arranged for the boy's murder.
- It is clear that the two Bible verses at the beginning of the series (Revelation 13:1 and 13:4) are likening Johan to the Beast. However, Urasawa takes this similarity a step further, albeit more subtly due to not including this verse at the start; this series-opening text skips over the highly relevant Revelation 13:3 - "One of its heads seemed to have received a death-blow, but its mortal wound had been healed. In amazement, the whole earth followed the beast."
- Johan's moral ranking has consistently decreased since him being brought onto the moral ranking wikis:
- Johan was long-considered a poster-child of a Pure Evil villain, specifically noted for being a very complex one, until the follow-up light novel Another Monster was discovered to clarify a handful of ambiguously redeeming qualities in the original and make them explicit, most notably his relationship with Karl, where he then qualified as Near Pure Evil. However, it was found out that Johan was far too humanized in Another Monster, as well as being too tragic to the point of his tragedy being a driving factor into his actions and was thus approved as Inconsistently Heinous.
- Johan was also headlined on August 2021 and July 2024 on the Pure Evil and Near Pure Evil wikis respectively.
External Links[]
- Johan Liebert on the Monster Wiki
- Johan Liebert on the Villains Wiki
- Johan Liebert on the Entertainingly Detestable Wiki