Information
In Character Information
character name: Johan Liebert. Sort of . (Well we don't really know his name.)
canon source and the point from which they're taken: Monster, manga. Final volume, between the drunk father shooting and Johan's actually being hit.
character's age: Early 20s. Best guess is 22-23 at the time of the series ending.
canon powers, skills, pets and equipment:
Genius level intellect. An excellent tactician, charismatic enough that people regularly proclaim him to be a savior and are willing to die and kill for him. Apparently quite good with guns. Speaks several languages perfectly. Manipulative as all hell. Has an excellent head for business, even though he uses it for evil. Is able to sense and use people's emotions against them - this isn't really a power so much as an absurd skill - he can grab the smallest seed of negativity and turn it into a garden of hatred.
non-canon powers:
Empathic blockage: This is really more practical than anything else, but it involves always giving off the feeling that his motives are pure, even to people with say telepathic or empathic abilities. Call it emotional illusion-casting. This doesn't mean that people will insist he's innocent even if he shoots someone in front of them, but it does mean they won't tend to suspect him of wrongdoing unless they have a very strong reason to suspect it.
Illusion-casting: Johan can cause people to see, smell, hear, touch, and taste things that do not actually exist, and can mess with their senses such that they will perceive things differently than they normally would (for example, if he wants them to see an apple as a rock, they won't notice that it's lighter and smoother than it looks - they'll feel edges and weight that doesn't exist.) This can affect an area (about the size of a room) or a single person, but it's notable that this isn't illusion casting in the sense that he's blanketing an area in an illusory mask - the images are projected into someone's mind, so they might see the rock, but if there's another person in the room they'll still see the apple (unless Johan is hitting them with the illusion, too). He doesn't need to know precisely what the thing looks like - eg. if he wants to show someone their daughter, he'll give them the suggestion that they see their daughter and their mind will fill in what she looks like/feels like/etc.
Monster Affinity: Monsters like him, and are somewhat less inclined to be hostile toward him. Call it recognizing one of their own. He can also make requests of them, which they may or may not do - it's not mind control. It's a request. His presence soothes them.
Background: He grew up in a town like something out of a fairy tale. Ruhenheim, a village in the mountains with old stone buildings and spiraling towers. There he was raised by his mother, a young and beautiful scientist who had been chosen as the unknowing subject of the eugenics experiment that resulted in his birth, as well as the birth of his twin sister. The child who grew to be Johan was incredibly close to his sister. So close, in fact, that he spent much of his time wearing her clothes, copying her, wearing a wig to simulate her look. This way they were mirror images, impossible to tell apart. When they were alone, he picked flowers for her, told her the world belonged to only her. Together they lived, together they were told stories too, sitting at the knee of Franz Bonaparta - the Nameless Monster, the God of Peace. The stories reordered the children's world, seeped into their minds.
This is where the tragedy begins.
His beloved sister was taken one night by Bonaparta - given up by their mother, a sacrificial lamb. She returned bloody and terrified with a story of death, murder - dozens of people laughing, dozens of people drinking red wine, dozens of people dying in front of her face. She ran, then, Bonaparta's words echoing in her head - you can become anything. In the dark of their home, sister tells brother this story, and brother absorbs it, takes it into himself and makes it his own. Brother is irrevocably changed.
And so they run. Together they find shelter, they find help. In a field of grass, brother smiles, tells sister he has a good plan. The next day they depart, leaving corpses amid the flora. They move from family to family, and where they go, death follows. Sister does not understand - Brother keeps a knife in his pocket. They wander together, hand in hand, two halves of the same whole, until they are found nearly dead along the border between one nation and the next. The twins are separated. Brother is given a name from a storybook he knows well, Johan.
Johan is placed in 511 Kinderheim, an orphanage of sorts - the training ground for monsters. He is not created here. The directors find quickly that their would-be student is, in truth, their teacher - a child capable of far greater destruction than a thousand guns. In this atmosphere, he sharpens his tongue, learns and teaches and pulls every string. He meets a common soul in Christof Sievernich, another monster, another empty soul. Soon he sits atop a throne watching his colleagues tear each other to pieces, watching his 'mentors' be devoured, and devour. One of the architects of Kinderheim asks him what he's done. Johan drops fuel on the fire, sets a spark to the hatred already existing anywhere where people gather. He doesn't smile, but he watches them burn. When the embers cool, he leads Christof from the wreckage, but does not stay for long.
Soon, his hand holds his sister's again. She is Anna now, and together they are one. They are found together by a wealthy, childless couple - the Lieberts, who take them in. With their new parents, they flee West Germany, and move to Dusseldorf. But in the night, Bonaparta comes again. Johan sees him, the demon from their past. He takes a gun, devours them - gunshot to the head, gunshot to the heart. Anna finds him, and suddenly it all makes sense. She asks if he is the reason everyone who has ever been kind to them has died. Johan does not cry, does not smile. If he dies, it does not matter for he is she and she is he. He points to his forehead. He says, "aim for the head."
Bang.
But Johan does not die. The police arrive, the ambulance arrives, and the twins - dying Johan, catatonic Anna, are taken to the hospital. If it had been one night earlier, one day, this story would have a different ending (indeed, it would simply have an ending). But on this day, on this night, brilliant neurosurgeon Kenzo Tenma has a revelation. All life, he thinks, is worth saving. All life is equal. And so he throws away his career, his engagement, and turns from the ailing Mayor to the dying child who arrived at the hospital first.
It is good decision, he thinks. A humane one. Johan survives while Anna wanders the hospital halls whispering, Kill. Kill. Kill. Tenma's decision costs him dearly. His is demoted, abandoned by his love, left to rot in a career with no hope of advancement. Sitting at the side of the comatose Johan, he wishes those who harmed him were dead. As he leaves, he tells Johan to appreciate the life that Tenma bought for him with his own future.
It is nothing, really, a moment of weakness at the side of a boy who is not awake to hear.
But he is.
So when Johan awakens entirely, his sets poisoned candies within the sights of those who harmed his savior. In an instant, they are gone… and so are the twins. Vanished together like ghosts, or fairy tales, back into the mist from which they came.
Anna is taken in by another family, the Fortners, and renamed Nina. Johan promises to find her on her 20th birthday before he disappears.
The next ten years are a blur - Johan meets with Roberto, another survivor of 511 Kinderheim albeit an earlier class. He promises to show Roberto the end of the world. Johan creates financial schemes, Johan manipulates serial killers, Johan becomes the beast. His charisma and beauty, his brilliance and vision, his perfect Aryan looks bring him to the attention of neonazi groups - they want to create him into the next Hitler, the next Stalin, and they pave the way for his ascension. Johan lets them, because it is useful, though he wants nothing to do with their petty racist schemes. Johan wants nothing to do with them.
Johan wants nothing.
He lives with couples, childless and alone - he brings them comfort, he brings them death. Ten years after his brush with mortality, he hires a group of petty thugs to handle his latest victims. One - Junkers - ends up in hospital - the very hospital that once saved Johan's life - under the care of Tenma himself.
Johan collects his lost errandboy - poisoned candies to the guards at the door. Tenma tracks them too, and there sees for the first time the creature he has raised from he dead. Johan murders Junkers and smiles at Tenma as he walks away. Tenma sets off to destroy the beast. Johan makes plans for a reunion. They’re 20 years old now, the twins, and Johan sends his sister beautiful notes. A secret admirer. She sees him on the street, and the sight of him makes her faint. He makes arrangements to collect her, has her foster parents killed, has her wait for elsewhere, waiting to meet her prince. But Tenma takes her away, and each of them set off on their individual quests to find Johan, to kill him.
This is easier said than done, for Johan is a chameleon. He uses different names, he travels, he makes use of the seemingly endless numbers of groups who fall at his feet to pave his way to greatness. He does not have his Anna, but he becomes her - a long wig, a dress. In Munich he finds the perfect host family - a couple called Liebert who had lost their child, Johan. They accept him into their home, he brings them peace, he brings them joy. Johan enrolls in the University as a law student, locates a challenge, and begins to take it down. Hans Georg Schuwald, the wealthy 'vampire of Bayern' is his target. A monster challenging another monster. He seeks to isolate Schubert - he kills those Schubert loves and, upon discovering that Schubert has an illegitimate son whom he yearns for, Johan recruits a local student to impersonate that son. But when Schubert's true son appears, Johan befriends him, he kills the impostor (or drives him to suicide). He reunites Schubert and son, plots further destruction. He will line up people like ants and then he will crush them all, just to watch them die. At the last minute, however, he changes his mind (after a fashion). He burns a library to the ground with hundreds of people trapped inside. They survive - barely - with the help of Tenma. In the flames, Johan presses his finger to his forehead and waits for death before he walks away.
His quest for -- what? Identity? Destruction? Purpose? It ends in Ruhenheim, where it began. Johan sends weapons into the town, stirs dissent, waits for the town to destroy itself, the way 511 Kinderheim had done. Johan waits to watch it die, waits for Tenma to come and kill him, too. In the end, Johan and Tenma meet in the rain, their meeting witnessed by Bonaparta and Roberto - creator and created. Bonaparta is killed by Roberto, but Roberto is already dying. He asks Johan if he can see the end of everything. Johan turns away, says, "you'll never see it."
Tenma is unable to kill Johan, but a drunk man does - or tries to. Inebriated past the point of reason, he sees in Johan's face the beast that lies inside him and - boom - he aims for the head.
Johan hears the crack. Hears the screams. He has only milliseconds to contemplate his own end, and then the world is gone.
Personality: First, we must understand that Johan is exceptionally intelligent and charismatic. Capable of learning languages quickly, perfectly, through simple self-study he is therefore fluent in several. And Johan is an extremely pleasant man - both interesting in his turn and a model listener in others'. Through a combination of his intuitive knowledge of people, his excellent character judging skills, his intelligence and his extraordinary charisma, he sets out to make people feel absolutely accepted in all their flaws and foibles, forgiven for all their mistakes, loved and lovable regardless of what they've done in the past. The ideal companion, soft-spoken and gentle, he is beloved by all who meet him. A golden boy. Perfect.
It is that love others hold for him that makes them so willing to do things for him, and to believe his stories, though sometimes they may defy logic, and to trust his intentions and actions, and to listen when he begins to bring them down other roads.
Because this is all an act, in the end, and when given the chance he will use his charisma, his understanding, his power over others, his brilliance all in the service of destruction - manipulating others, driving them to suicide, or to murder. He sets them up like a line of dominoes and knocks them down simply to see them fall. In the past, he has incited massacres, committed countless murders and worse simply for the sake of it. He has no emotional attachment to his schemes. He has been known to spend years setting up plots only to abandon them for something more interesting. While his schemes are often beneficial to himself, that is actually a side effect rather than his primary intention and he will take greater destruction over greater benefits at any time.
Johan can tend to focus very closely on certain people for reasons personal or practical. He spent years focused on Hans Georg Schubert, for example, isolating him with the aim of destroying him and taking his place (though Johan ultimately grew bored with the plot and changed his mind at the last minute). He has also given attention and focus to Roberto, his primary 'henchman' of sorts, and Christof Sievernich, his acolyte and a fellow survivor of 511 Kinderheim. He also spent a fairly long period of time in a 'romance' of sorts with Detective Jan Suk… while masquerading as his twin sister. However, the two who have received the greatest measures of Johan's continued attention have been Dr Tenma and Johan's beloved twin, Anna Liebert/Nina Fortner.
Tenma's act in saving Johan's life bound them together, and in their first meeting after Tenma saves Johan's life, Johan tells the doctor that this makes him akin to a father. Intrigued by Tenma's optimism and his belief that all lives are equal, Johan spent several years leading him on a wild goose chase with the apparent aim of showing him that the world is cruel and that life is not sacred. In his grand suicide mission, Johan chose Tenma as his executioner, and so the final act would close on Johan's life, and his scheme to bring Tenma despair.
Though Johan may show or hold some degree of attachment to Tenma, it is hardly soft, or sentimental. Such feelings are reserved for Anna, his fraternal (yet nearly identical) twin sister - the one person he loves, and perhaps the only one capable of containing his darkness. With Anna, Johan is protective in his way, and he wants to give her the world. In her he sees his other half, another piece of himself. More than once he urges her to kill him, stating that it doesn't matter if he dies, because she is him, as he is her. But while he would willingly let her kill him, would kill to protect her (and has done so, in fact), his love for her is both frightening and obsessive, not to mention no less dark for its genuineness - as he often wishes to draw her into himself and his world, he has been known to murder those surrounding her in order to free her to live in and with him.
Johan's motivations are both simple and incomprehensible: he wants to destroy everything. Nothing more, nothing less. He cannot see hope without the desire to snuff it out. He cannot see optimism without wanting to show the optimist the face of despair. There is no one too old or too young to elicit this desire in him. And he is patient, infinitely so, and more than capable of waiting to see the light go out in their eyes. What these things bring to him is unclear - he doesn't appear to act from passion or compulsion. It is not even malice. What he does brings him pleasure but more along the lines of distant amusement than true happiness, aside from which it also brings him despair in nearly equal measure. Perhaps it doesn't matter what he gets from it, as he has no intention of doing it forever. Johan's life is, in many ways, a long prelude to suicide. He wants to destroy the world, look at it's wreckage, and then follow it into darkness.
He wants to be the last one standing, but he doesn't want to stand for long.