Keep The Light Shining

my little corner of the internet dedicated to Dr. Kenzo Tenma - pages: 21 -

[kurokibatoras-deactivated201506]

Don’t worry. Just hang in there. I will save you.

[zetmanrider]

[dear-dr-kenzo-tenma]

[char-aznable]

I want you to do whatever you can to save the Mayor. He has promised this hospital a huge increase in subsidies in the next review of medical facilities. We can`t have him die just yet. So I want you to do this. I`m counting on you, Tenma. ↳ Dr. Heinemann

I… I have a surgery to perform in the other operating room. Don`t worry. Just hang in there! I will save you!! ↳ Dr. Kenzo Tenma

[medakakurokami]

[8of-spades-deactivated20150409]

[dailynietzsche]

“A little decent food often makes all the difference to whether we look into the future hopefully or hollow-eyed.”

—Human, All Too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” §184 (edited excerpt).

[cloverinblue]

I honestly spent a couple minutes just staring at these damn panels. They’re just… Tenma’s just… so cute

[dear-dr-kenzo-tenma]

He is. The fact that he can be playful like this, or like when he helped the little kid fly his kite, is great. So is his gift buying habit. It’s precious and heartwarming how he pays attention to people’s wishes and interests and buys gifts for them accordingly.

[cloverinblue]

[dunnetwins]

However, his last test was in his weakest subject, Medical Law. If he failed this test, then all of his efforts would go to waste. So he resorted to desperate measures. Measures he thought would put him back on top. But he was caught. The Japanese student never told anyone about what he had seen.

[scpnightwing]

[dear-dr-kenzo-tenma]

The head/brain is considered the place of the mind where thoughts, beliefs and mental illnesses reside. And Johan has dark thoughts, twisted beliefs and mental illness there. He has the “scenery of a doomsday” in his head. So it is interesting and symbolic that he always points at his forehead, and takes bullets to the brain. It’s like he is pointing at the source of the pain and even sometimes experiences that pain by the physical representation of it in the form of actual bullets in his head.

The same symbolism is true about Tenma as the healer. He is a brain surgeon, who removes and cures the ailments of the head. I think if Tenma had been made any other sort of surgeon and Johan had been shot in any other vital organ, the main plots and themes of Monster would have still worked fine. But Tenma being a brain surgeon is symbolically very fitting and further highlights Tenma’s healing attitude and abilities as a man and as a doctor. Because it’s like by operating on Johan, especially for a second time as the ultimate act of care and forgiveness, Tenma removes BOTH the physical and the mental sources of pain and illness from Johan’s brain. He heals the head, both in the physical and in the abstract/mental/spiritual sense of the word.

[plutojester]

Takeshi Kaneshiro // Kenzo Tenma

[cloverinblue]

[fuckyeahjohanliebert]

[dear-dr-kenzo-tenma]

[dear-dr-kenzo-tenma]

Just some thoughts I’ve been having on Tenma and his confrontations with Roberto.

It seems that Roberto is the sort of person that enjoys psychologically tormenting and manipulating people. Not that it is a surprise. He gathers personal information about them and uses it to hit them where it hurts. He did it to Verdemann about his father issues. Did it to Lunge in Ruhenheim when he was bleeding and talking to Lunge about Lunge’s relationship with his family. He also did it to Tenma by posing as his lawyer and going to him when he was in jail, telling him about his plan to kill Eva, taunting Tenma about his helplessness. Although I sometimes wonder whether that was merely an order by Johan Roberto was carrying out or it had a touch of personal revenge to it too. Tenma had shot and wounded him in the library after all.

Talking of their confrontation in the library, he does this to Tenma there too, when Tenma is trying to shoot him in self-defense. When he turns around and sees Tenma has got hold of his gun and is aiming it at him, he remains still for a few seconds, eyeing Tenma, maybe wondering if this is it for him, but the moment he finds out Tenma is hesitating, he is confident again and starts the torment and the manipulation: “You can’t do it. You are just a doctor” etc. etc., trying to undermine Tenma and to talk him out of self-defense. Unfortunate for Roberto, he underestimated the good doctor! 

I have watched the scene Tenma shoots Roberto several times, and my understanding is, even when his life was in danger, Tenma couldn’t bring himself to go for the kill. You can see how he is trying to talk himself into shooting by repeating, “I have to shoot.” He shoots only when Roberto holds up his rifle to Tenma’s face and not a moment before that, and he first shoots Roberto in his shoulder. All this indicates to me that he wanted to stop Roberto not to kill him. (And that’s why I think the “I have to kill you” line after saying “I have to shoot you” in the dubbed version may be the wrong translation. I don’t know any Japanese, but in the subbed version of the anime, both times Tenma’s line is the same and it is subbed as “I have to shoot”, which makes more sense.)

Even the second time, he purposefully doesn’t shoot Roberto in any vital organs while he could have easily done so. His target was very close to him, and even beaten and bruised and yes shaking, Tenma did have a firm hold of his gun. He could have shot Roberto in the face or in the head. But the second bullet, as revealed later, was inflicted near the shoulder too. All this proves that both times Tenma shot Roberto to debilitate him not to kill him.

At first I thought it was something Tenma did subconsciously, but the more I watch the scene, the more I am convinced Tenma purposefully and consciously avoided shooting the guy in the vital organs. It is only after the force of the second shot makes Roberto fall off the balcony and into the fire – which was not part of the plan – that Tenma begins to think that his shots must have caused the hitman’s death. He kind of even says so to Grimmer later, when he first meets him, during their picnic: “I shot someone for the first time…he probably died.’ Probably being the key word. 

All of this leads me to believe that even when self-defending, Tenma couldn’t bring himself to just kill and finish off the aggressor and went for disarming/debilitating rather than for the kill. And I don’t think that questions Tenma’s self-preservation instincts at all. He did shoot Roberto in self-defense, not once but twice. It’s just that he did his best not to kill. 

All this also shows that Roberto surviving was not something Urasawa came up with later. When I first watched the episode where Roberto appeared again, I thought Urasawa had suddenly changed his mind about Tenma killing a person and had decided to bring the Roberto guy back to life. But watching Roberto’s “death” scene, it is clear it was something Urasawa had planned from the beginning, In addition to everything I mentioned above about the way Tenma shoots Roberto, pay attention to the fact that he falls off the balcony dramatically, but we are never ever shown any shots of his dead body. 

Anyway, Roberto is among my least favorite characters, and as I had mentioned [here] before, I am glad by having Tenma shoot Roberto, Urasawa made his position clear about the right to self-defend. The only reason I was happy Roberto didn’t die was because it meant Tenma had not killed anyone, because I knew how taking a life would affect him even if the killing was in self-defense and justified. 

Although, from a storytelling perspective, I do sometimes find myself conflicted about Tenma’s “kill” being negated, but that’s another discussion for another post.