Back to mha_hater_No1's Profile mha_hater_No1's Profile

Words cannot describe my hatred of this show. It has a sinister way of of pulling you in with promises of the kind of animation and world-building that you saw in Season 1, and tricks you into watching a garbage self-insert wish fulfillment fantasy full of malicious intent. What is the intent you ask? The intent is visible every time the musical score rises to make you feel things for the detestable MC, it is visible every time yet another small crying girl is animated in suspiciously ridiculous level of detail. It is visible every time it desecrates god-made sunsets, sunrises, mountains and deserts by ... animating it and attaching it to scenes of what it thinks should evoke in the viewer feelings of hope, longing, growth, adventure etc. The malicious intent is apparent every single time you are inadvertently pulled out of your unwilling suspension of disbelief and reminded that the story primarily depends on the action of a person most people would personally bully/murder/mutilate if they ever met someone like that in real life.

It takes a LOT of intelligence and hard work to animate beautifully, not just money, or even the UAE or Switzerland would have a world-class animation industry. It takes even more creative vision to create worlds that make you want to explore them in detail and figure out their hidden quirks and intricacies. This entire anime series is the equivalent of a Ponzi Scheme. You invest more and more of yourself after seeing season 1, because you keep telling yourself, "Hey, I can get past the fact that they are trying to normalize evil behavior the same way Sweet Baby Inc does in gaming, but I can move past that and appreciate the care that went into the other aspects of the show". But you would be mistaken, there is no grain here to be separated from the chaff, it is but the concerted effort of an entire studio, a company that, in the pursuit of wealth, has denigrated the beauty of human potential. creativity, and talent to what can be described as an obese dung beetle's wet dream.

Well, let me tell you that this "cour", as many recalcitrant anime nerds that infest this website call it, is just complete and utter garbage. I would go so far as you say that any person who rates this nonsense as peak should be put on a list (a list that the FBI should be privy to). The writing and dialogue is so banal it reminds of you of the banality of evil itself. The animation team was not provided 10% of the budget or time it was afforded in the 1st season. The sound design is alright.

This show is the equivalent of a CIA Psyop. It will literally rot your brain as it reprograms you to think that literally any kind of person deserves to and is capable of "growing" and "maturing". People like the MC in this show only deserve one thing in this world - to face the wall blindfolded, or to be taken on a Chilean helicopter ride.

Turning your brain off would be the biggest understatement of the year. The sheer number of plot holes, inconsistencies, and sheer breaks in logic would require you to turn your brain off to the point that getting a lobotomy would be an upgrade.

The story is absolute trash. The tone is just very strange, it's as if an Alien made this show, someone who has no idea how the human world operates. I cannot believe how this could have been greenlit. What a waste of a budget.

The characters are caricatures of caricatures. I'm more than willing to suspend the critical part of my brain once ... I understand what theme the show is going for, is it serious? is it supposed to be funny? Entertaining? something that makes you think? The Answer? It's supposed to be all of the above, except they mix it up so much that the resulting dish is as unrecognizable as an inuit-italian-chile fusion food dish.

The music is supposed to be going for a light tone at all times, but it seems to have not been merged with what's happening on screen.

Please don't waste your time with this show. I'm almost ashamed to include this in my watched list.

I did not like this show.

Japanese people are going too far to commodify the act of tugging at someone's heartstrings. It's not genuine. It feels fake. I'm so extremely tired of anime coming up with cool concepts and resorting to give it the treatment that is mostly likely to bring in popularity in terms of anime ratings (because most people do not understand what makes a story good).

It's when you are reading about a new anime which has a cool concept that then you find out it is set in a high school and now you know for a fact that it will have misunderstanding, ... love triangles, a school fest, beach and hot bath spring episodes, killing your excitement.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with those anime, after all, some people like to eat the same breakfast every single day till they die, but I think I belong to a part of the anime community which wants something more, something more fleshed out, a story not writing by someone trying to complete a deadline in a redbull induced fever dream. We want substance. This anime has none.

I'll be honest, the more anime I watch, the more I realize how different anime is from what I thought it was, and how disappointing it is so view the cultural differences that exist between mine and the Japanese anime culture. The differences that allow such anime to be produced and broadcasted to the world.

In this anime, you had an interesting concept, which they thought could tolerate coating with rising soundtracks and idol-singing (which is one of the most vacuous forms of pop music to have ever existed) to "answer questions about purpose and humanity" and such things, when it really has the philosophical depth of a puddle. I mean I imagine that if young teens saw this anime, they might enjoy it, so maybe I'm just the wrong demographic, but so often I feel tricked as a consumer to watch anime that promises things that will interest me, only to bamboozle me into watching something that has no soul, no personality, a wholly focus-group tested, empty, sterile, canned, microwave-dinner-esque rendition of the story I thought I was going to get to watch. It's so extremely frustrating to be baited with a spoon of ice cream and to have pineapple pizza shoved into your mouth. It really should be a crime to do this. The only reason that they keep getting away with it is the fact that the people who enjoy this kind of anime drown out anybody else's voice.

Anime has stopped being a medium of art, and instead has become more like the various grades of sandpaper or steel that are available in the market. Just how you wouldn't use steel meant for spaceships in a fork, you cannot criticize shounen anime because they are meant to be brainless, you can't criticize shojo anime because the very aspects you have problems with are the aspects that are adored by millions, you can't criticize seinen anime for having mindless death and violence because that's what you're supposed to expect. In the end you have anime that make sure to fall squarely into some or the other genre because it will be protected by self-appointed guards of that genre.

The people who made this anime, they played it very safe, and this anime has a high rating on MAL. But I find the rating disingenuous. It's not real, it's objectively NOT a good story, it has plot holes, weak story writing, inconsistencies, it fails to properly develop the world precisely because doing so would require them to write a waterproof storyline, and as it stands, they could do whatever they wanted. Nice visuals and well-performed music (however soulless) doesn't a good anime make.

Be kind to yourself, don't let flowery visuals and music out of a figurative wine-box with a tap tell you how to feel, how to think, and how to assess anime. Don't let this colour your expectations of the media you want to experience. Be kind to yourself, respect your brain, don't let anime producers tell you that this is good enough, it's not, it never has been, and it never will be. But they will keep trying, and so must be, as consumers, to expect better from the industry we support, and to put forward brains and talent of the highest order, or we will forever be kept hostages by these charlatans and quacks who pretend to be artists and writers.

Warning: The following review is quite lengthy and is focussed on the quality of writing of the story. Also, a disclaimer that the thriller genre isn't really my preferred avenue of entertainment and I only ever watch it when people recommend it to me.

I was really excited to scroll through top rated anime on MAL and find Monster. Older fans of anime seem to really like it and I am not that young but I never really had a chance to watch it as my exposure to anime was limited because I hail from a third world country. However, my experiences of a life ... lived in such a country imparts a certain flavour to my perspective of anime that I feel is lacking in other reviews which are written by people coming from (relatively) safe and secure societies with limited exposure to crime and violence. As such, my perspective might resonate with you better if you also have that specific background.


A basic principle of writing creative fiction is that you should write what you are familiar with, I am not a criminal or a burden on society by any means, but I am more aware of the mechanics and certain realities of crime and the people who are involved in it, given my background. In this anime, there were several instances in the story where I believe the writing did not do justice to what it was trying to achieve. The Japanese experience of a tame life bereft of crime and violence was rubbing off on the characters to the point that it abruptly took me out of the anime. There is a certain culture of glorification of the act of murder in anime. Glorification in the sense that it is considered to be the ultimate evil, one which fully and completely robs people of their souls and they became conduits of Lucifer himself unless they partake in a journey to seek redemption again. Granted, murder is evil, but the fashion in which it is treated in Monster comes off as silly at best and confoundingly stupid at worst. The forays into the nature of evil and the effects of a troubled childhood on the human mind seem to be quite superfluous because of the limited range of the writer’s experience with life outside of a highly ordered, lawful society. The dialogue and screenplay often follow “the rule of cool” instead of “sensible and pragmatic”. But that’s not a dealbreaker since we are here to have fun, however, I take issue with how the question of “true evil” is treated in Monster.
In real life, most people would agree that generally, “evil” does not exist in a vacuum. Apart from certain statistical outliers, most people indulge in crime and violence only if that is what they are used to. Here, the specific brand of evil that the antagonist embodies is not only limited to him, but also to several other characters, which does not feel right. The story often focusses on nature of true evil and “real monsters”, but also mixes it with its own insight into mental illnesses and the consequences of subjecting people to trauma. This would seem to be a good fit at first but in this anime, this isn’t really addressed to the satisfaction of either topic. Do real monsters exist? Who knows? Does trauma lead to people becoming unhinged psychotics? Maybe. The series is too afraid to answer the questions it poses and asks that the viewer make their own deductions, but given that the topics are dealt with is such a shounen-esque manner, the viewer is simply not given enough incentive to dive into the questions in the first place.
At many points in the anime, (which constantly argues that it is a "serious" look into such topics) the characters make such basic errors, that they destroy the credibility of the writing. More often than not, as anime watchers we tend to forgive such slants onto common sense as eccentricities of the medium, we simply apply another tier of suspension of disbelief to enjoy the series, however in the present case the strange portrayal of the characters in this story comes from not the specific proclivities of the medium itself, but the background of the writers, who have lacked experience in dealing with, well, regular human beings on planet Earth.
I'll grant you an example, at a certain point in the story, the writer, to establish that a certain character is morally dubious, makes the character comment that "all lives are not equal" with a smile drawn to look like the caricature of evil incarnate than a mere mild observation that almost all humans have made by the time they turn 12. No real human being would make this statement, at least not in that way, even if they truly believed it, because making such statements would make anyone sound downright demonic, and nobody wants that. Certain dialogues are inserted simply to drive home a point or a question that the writer wants asked, in the most conspicuous ways that makes you feel like the anime is questioning your intelligence by making it so obvious.
Even the central conflict of the story itself, which propels the protagonist on his journey, feels hollow, since his views on his circumstances come from the last 10 sentences he has heard from the people around him, and not out of the (so-called) brilliant mind of a top neurosurgeon. Several questions, such as the question of whether doctors should offer treatment to “bad people” is deal with by the protagonist, completely ignoring the fact that this “moral dilemma” has been addressed by Medical schools for the past few hundred years. In effect, the writer has managed to create the first quixotic neurosurgeon in media that I am aware of. His explorations into the ethics of murder seem quite impotent as he is limited by the specific flavour of the week that he is dealing with. He is denied the wisdom of a middle-aged professional and is always stuck at the mental capacity of an 8-year-old. As a character the protagonist comes off as a complete whiteboard that only displays what arguments the writer has so far inserted into the episodes up to that point. As he questions his own ethics and morality, he feels sequestered in a role that is not for him to have. Ideally, the character should definitely be affected by the circumstances and opinions of those around him, but in the end, he should have his own specific twist on things. Without that certain twist, the character feels incredibly bland.
He lacks in personality of any kind, and is shockingly bereft of actual character flaws beyond the level of an average quiet middle schooler. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem, as actual real human middle schoolers are quite complex creatures, but therein lies the problem with the writing, the characters are not real in any sense, and only exist to drive the story in a certain direction. This flaw is commonly seen when writers self-insert themselves into the story. Whether this was intentional or not is not important to me, what’s important is whether this lends itself to the story, and it really doesn’t in Monster.

Anime in general is obsessed with “genius” characters. But the problem with genius characters is that the people writing these characters often have little idea of what constitutes genius. This is exemplified in the Sherlock Holmes series on TV, where in the book Sherlock Holmes was simply someone who paid more attention to detail than the average individual, the TV series takes it up several notches to the point that the character can determine the number of hairs on a person’s head by the kind of sandwich he had eaten that morning.

Since actual “super-intelligence” is hard to write, the trick writers use instead is to grant their genius character copious amounts of plot armour and also to make the surrounding characters extremely stupid. This is indeed the case in this anime. Now I would respect the author for making an honest attempt at it, but things have their limits when you have to extend the series to 70+ episodes. I think this anime would have benefitted greatly from being limited to 24 or even 12 episodes.

This is why this anime has a lower level of writing that I expected, because the writer trapped themselves in a situation where they had to write a story involving a character while employing every available trick to make the series last till the end. I have seen this particular brand of writing in several anime and even manhwas. I cannot stress enough that quality is always better than quantity. What could have been a scary thriller anime now feels very dated and almost childish at times.
I would still say this anime is worth a 6/10 because of the sheer amount of effort put into this project, in terms of art and animation. Also consider that your degree of enjoyment would rise the younger you are in general. If you are the kind who tends to dissects plotlines, I would ask you to give this a pass. But if not, then by all means, go ahead.

I was onboard with this anime at first. I "got it", the tanuki are carefree, and they accept being eaten by humans. I understand that people adapt to the realities of their lives if it is all normalized by their society. I got all that. HOWEVER, I stopped getting it when they Tanuki react to their trials and tribulations as would any normal human being, except when it comes to being vengeful or hateful.
I understand that many Japanese people believe that being hateful is wrong, but hatred and vengeance is a staple of human society, the reason is purely evolutionary. It exists in all creatures, ... not just humans. When someone does you wrong, you hate them because they hurt you of course, but the evolutionary reason you hate them and want to harm them is to PREVENT MORE harm being done to you or your family again in the future.
As antagonist and protagonists go in this show, you have to turn off your brain to watch this anime. In many cases, you have no idea what goes through their minds at times. I will not post spoilers but I'll give you a story. Imagine your brother gets mutilated and skinned alive by someone in your city, then you go out for a walk with that guy knowing that he might go and mutilate more people, forevermore, and you treat him as a friend, including all the people who help him, or try to push you down to get ahead in life. I am down with Tanuki being accepting of being eaten, but I am then not down with you trying to make me feel sorry for an organism that has the defense mechanism of grass.
There is so much cognitive dissonance in this show I feel that the people who wrote this show were smoking lead fumes when they wrote the story. This truly has so much potential and yet it is an infuriatingly frustrating show. The first few episodes were fine and by the end watching more episodes was like pulling teeth. If anyone you know liked this show, just never speak to them again. They might be walking next to you as you get mugged and then they might want to go get a few beers with your mugger.

The pacing in the anime is such that I firmly believe that the studio believes they will be making more episodes than Naruto. Story is extremely half-assed and it seems the creator hates the heroes.

The main villains are always spared damage and the heroes take serious damage over and over again. That in itself isn't a bad thing but it is handled almost with comedic relief. The death of villains is handled with care and respect while the death of heroes is handled as a very funny joke. The creators have a sense of humor that makes it feel like it all written by ... NEETs who hate the world, and use the anime as an excuse to destroy characters who have an actual life.

The sound and the art is great, I don't mind the fan-services. The middle episodes feel like a fever dream to me that exist only so that they can plausibly stretch out the anime further. So many characters receive backstories in the middle of combat that I just skip over the BS now. None of it matters, no matter how many power-ups the heroes get, it's all utterly useless against anyone except grunts or the power-up is purposely such that it can only be used as a deus ex machina which requires the heroes to take immense damage before the hero can actually do anything. This season feels DRASTICALLY different from the first season. It's NOT more of the same. They've lost sight of what makes this anime great. If not for all the zoomer normies who watch this anime, it wouldn't have had such a high average score.

I hope this never gets a S3.

Like you, I was waiting for the unknown entity seen in the "????!!!%" state in Season 1 to somehow be expatiated upon and it wasn't. This season was incredibly unsatisfying and lost it's reputation of breaking tropes and instead made the decision to follow every single Shounen trope. No ground breaking themes or events in this season, sadly.

Every single villain in Mob Psycho's universe starts out with certain convictions and beliefs. Maybe this is a disadvantage the Shounen format has, but I feel the writers really took the worst of the format's issues and exacerbated it beyond belief. Every time a villain shows up, you ... know for a fact that they are going to end up having a change of heart, or start having immense respect for Mob, specially when Mod reks them. Somehow losing makes the villain realize that he had been wrong about every single thing, and a little schoolboy (whose struggles are incredibly generic with loneliness and social awkwardness being the main themes) knows what the real way is to live in this world and enjoy it. The writers fail to understand that everything that bad happens in the world, isn't always going to be related to psychic powers. And not all issues can be explained away by saying, "You don't have the right attitude". Mob is never faced with an opponent that cannot be defeated with powers, or faces issues that actually make him rethink this beliefs or question them.

This anime's basic statement is beat your enemies to a pulp and suddenly their ideologies and convictions will be forgotten, and they will follow your beliefs and respect you. For a show that focuses so much on inner strength and moral platitudes, the moral of the story is always that if you defeat your enemy, they will yield to you. It's like a guy pestering a girl at a party, begging her to sleep with him. Following this anime, I bet if I use physical strength against the girl I'd be able to conquer her in mind, body and spirit. Because being beaten up made her realize that I was very empathetic or had a similar life or something. It is incredibly creepy how Mob treats his villain, instantly realizing their hopes dreams and ambitions and continuing to ignore the villain's convictions in favor of his own path, which requires that he controls his emotions in order to be a better person. The world somehow tends to literally revolve around Mob and what his most recent emotion is. Situations manifest that only serve as a teaching moment for Mob and to realize that great truth about life that you can find on a fortune cookie.

The villains have zero backbone. Even the horrible show that is My Hero Academia has respectable villains that actually touch upon the nature of evil. And how mere defeat and lectures from a school boy aren't enough to sway anyone's heart.

I swear to God if these people talked about their feelings anymore I'd feel I was watching a chick flick. Being a nice person does not have anything to do with how Mob behaves. He sets a very bad example to follow. Even though he is OP, he is hardly ever able to nip any problem in the bud. There are zero consequences to anything that happens in the story and everything works out perfectly in the end. Having empathy is a necessary part of living a full life, but not to the extent that Mob says it does. Sometimes things need to be resolved with extreme prejudice, not because we hate the sinner, but because we want to protect someone or something.
My interest in the second season was piqued by the inner "thing" that resided in Mob. The entity that was from another world. That moment was hair-raising and was amazing. I believe the most viewed videos on youtube have to do with that part of the 1st season. I was really looking forward to that this season and it is basically forgotten. I don't understand why there is a huge disconnect between the studio and the people.
I would understand if the second season was more slice of life and didn't focus too much on fights, but that isn't the case at all. There are dragonballz type fights and action galore but none of them scratch your itch. For once we had an anime that broke the tropes and showed people who were so certain and full of themselves being brought down into the ground by an awkward school kid. There was something very cathartic about that, but that never happens in this season. They literally have to remove Mob from the scene in the beginning of the final arc so that the plot can progress, therefore Mob only ever has to deal with the biggest of the villains, who is also dealt with in a very anti-climactic way.

Addition of so many espers to the show has also dampened the world-building. With every single esper that is added, the world of Mob-Pyscho becomes more removed from the fantasy we live in, therefore we end up caring a little less about the world and the consequences of living in a world with psychic powers.

People are sick and tired of anime MC's getting the ever-loving crap beaten out of them for 15 minutes out of 26 minutes and then having the fight resolved in a couple minutes with everything working out. Just how many times do we have to see Mob getting pummeled into the ground? It's sort of sadistic in the sense, it made me feel that the creators of the show hated Mob in some weird way.

I'm just very disappointed and I am happy that this season is over and I wouldn't have to see this again in my life.

All in all, this anime is one of the biggest examples of "Wasted potential".

When I got through mid season, I smiled because this is the first time I wanted to get through the show just so I could leave a bad review here, to somehow get rid of the bad taste in my mouth.

I hate how cities and everything look so dead. I don't get the design concept of the cities and the world in general. There is very little exposition outside of the characters themselves, and even so their backstories are completely removed.

The anime focuses on feelings way too much. I absolutely detested ... the first fight in the anime. When I watched that fight, I thought, okay, "They're going the realistic route for this anime" and I could respect that, but after that, the end of season fights seemed too outlandish to believe, considering that the level of the fights increased by 2 dragonball z seasons. These people went from human levels to Krillin levels of power in the span of 5-6 episodes. It just didn't make any sense for me.

The only reason I have given this anime a 6 is because the art is phenomenal. Sometimes I feel they focused too much on the art, but the story is absolutely lack-luster.

Pros: Mindless anime to watch when you don't want to use your brain and good art.

Cons: Too much talk of feelings to establish the characters as real human beings, but instead leaves everything too sappy to be taken seriously, especially when the MC is defintely on the Autism spectrum when it comes to human interaction.