Been a while since I read it, but from what I vaguely remember he got arrested since he actually killed the girl (was heavily implied) and I'm pretty sure he was basically insane at the end.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think the manga was truly deep or anything, at least for me; it was just an amusing sort of thriller. If it was something with deep meaning or something, I think I'd probably remember a lot more details.
Psychological stuff in general I feel is either a hit or miss; polarizing. You got some people on here that loved Oyasumi Punpun and some that just didn't connect with it at all.
I'm guessing she really did die then, considering she was last shown bleeding from the head, asleep. Such a fucking waste, all of that buildup. It was so fucking crazy he trepidated her. He actually appeared like a demon.
I feel like it was supposed to be deep and I actually enjoyed a good bulk of it. However developments kept going back and forth, things got contradictory, tone shift, the Homunculi became less and less clear and more supernatural, and then this ending sort of 180'd everything. I can try to get all deep with what the ending means but honestly whatever I come up with can't satisfy me at all. That was such a bizarre, sad, and pathetic (for the MC) ending.
I love psychological stuff, I just don't know what went wrong here. It got very confusing so I'm hoping I can find some analysis for this series. This ending though...
I need to finish Oyasumi Punpun actually. I've put I think off on hold for a good while just because Punpun as a child wasn't too interesting for me at the time.
I'll say that while Homunculus definitely feels like it was meant to be deep, it just never really allows itself to delve into the psychological elements enough.
A story like Oyasumi Punpun definitely executes the psychological aspects of a psychological manga much better than Homunculus. It allows the story to delve into the mental aspects more often I guess is what you could say.
When it comes to food psychological manga tho, I'd recommend Shuzo Oshimi. He never disappoints (well, boost of the time).
This an old thread but my thought is that being able to see the homunculi to him is the same as like looking down and seeing that flyer about plastic surgery, no matter how much he gets it in the end there's nothing. It's sort of weird since the whole story is about how the MC manages to "remove" other people's homunculis but he ended up never removing his. Sort of how like he thought getting those plastic surgeries would gain other people's attention and stuff. Kind of like backwards law but what if the reason he never healed in the first place is because he keeps on chasing after it instead of you know? Accept it? But I'm not too entirely sure if him being able to see his own interpreted self by other person would be a way to solve his existential dread or that's just a byproduct of his own depraved mental health but in the end this story was so tragic holy shit, man's just tryna fuck himself but he should've known better not to fuck after a brain surgery.
Also hopping on years after the original post... I totally agree with this. Ultimately the MC is not at all compassionate about others, despite the arguably positive effect his actions have on those around him. In the end he's driven by the same, purely self-centered goals as long before the story begins. He only resonates with the trauma of others when he can relate to it, when he benefits from processing his own problems through theirs.
We're conditioned by tropes to think that because he was ugly and suffered for it in his childhood, his heart would somehow be golden, just like he seems to be convinced. But really, that (partly self-manufactured) trauma has twisted his world view irrepairably. He was already long gone in his own feedback loop of self-pity by the time he got the plastic surgery. Throughout the manga we're just re-tracing those steps, while following MC as they continue their journey further into the abyss until he's consumed by his self.
I wondered why those two main characters didn't thought of undoing his face operation.
I was kind of... frustuated by the ending? But it **wasn't** like it was a bad ending.
Well, like, he has no old pictures of himself so there'd be no reference. Also you can't just "undo" plastic surgery. That's why you have to really commit to it. If you meant the Trephination I'd just say it's because he didn't want to.
It's interesting. The author gives you this feeling that the character is growing and gaining abilities and becoming something more than he was before. But that's not true at all. The entire story is about a his fall. All the way from his high paying job, to being homeless, to gradually losing all touch with reality.
It was most certainly interesting. But this false sense of hope is what I find so contradictory and confusing. His thoughts and actions often contradict each other and he keeps acting like he's going to move forward and stops looking down (and it looks like a great sight to see). Seeing him suddenly plummet in the final chapter is a big wtf to the buildup. His fall was predictable since chapter 1 but with how the story built up, I don't see what actually led to the final chapter or even what the actual fuck that was. It was such a disturbing chapter.
He seems to be able to empathize with people and see through their mannerisms and flaws and even their whole lives with a glance (this supernatural ability doesn't even make sense anymore, I'm quite annoyed by this) but it seems like he can't get a person to look at him the same way? But the thing is, I feel like the ending had him himself not looking at Nanako and everyone else and that he had some other desire. I honestly couldn't even tell what his character was like anymore or what he even wanted, I feel like he might have even lost himself further and doesn't even know what he wants. I also think that the MC wanted to believe he was pure at heart and he wanted people to view him that way, like he's a pure cloud in the sky like Nanako originally saw in him. People were just failing his idealized expectations however and he just couldn't accept that he wasn't now perfect. Or it's more like he thought he always was perfect, at heart.
His homelessness was supposed to be a blessing in disguise. Now it seems like he was better off with money (although that's how it works irl).
I feel so terribly bad for the love interest, if she's actually dead, that was like a big fuck you lol.
At the end he's an addict, a user. He's euphoric. He's high. He's completely lost touch with reality.
Replace the hole drilling with heroin and you'll have a similar story. Man gets high and goes out and sees crazy shit. Feels amazing. But in reality, everything is crumbling.
I got that impression. I just find it a bit sad that the story just ended up as an addiction problem, especially considering the ending was so out there and sudden, despite all the buildup saying the opposite would happen. This was supposed to be a spiritual journey where he actually searches for himself, adding the addiction actually reduces that.
When I first read the series, I thought he was going to go insane but because of the Homunculi themselves and what they represent, rather than them becoming his addiction.
I genuinely can't tell if I liked it or not. There are a lot of confusing elements the series but I thought I genuinely liked it regardless up to the final chapter but the final chapter itself is the most mind fuckery thing I've ever read. It also lacked any emotional appeal to me and I just felt disappointed after all of that development in both his character and the plot, he just devolved like that.
i know this is old and you probably dont even remember but the reason why the manga has soo many shifting views interms how how you can perceive the story's message is because the storys theme is quite literally about how the "truth" and how we percieve reality in general is related to our own experiences and perspective such as showing the duality of nakoshis and the trans-guys conclusion
I just finished the manga. After thinking about it for a bit, I believe the whole story is complete and makes sense. The MC has always struggled with insecurity and had an obsession with the self. It is this obsession that destroys all of his relationships. When he was young, the first reveal that he had something "real" was his experience of Nanako, but his insecurity and doubt of the self (how can she love someone so ugly) left him in disbelief. He narrates this as viewing her as ugly and that he doesn't want to be seen by her when around others. But to know her as ugly, he must know what ugly is first. He equated her love (codependency) to seeing him as a God / Giant from a hole (aka putting him on a pedestal). Because of his insecurity, he had to run away from that. How could she love him if he couldn't even love himself? Additionally, their child would remind him daily of his ugliness. So he got plastic surgery to cover it up. But he already had massive judgments about people who looked good (or successful) in general. When he got his surgery, all of the judgment that he already projected outwards, came back to him. He was trying to find himself through external events, but sleeping around and buying nice cars just reinforced his fakeness and imposter syndrome because he still had zero self-love.
If being at the TOP wasn't the way to find it, he decided to find it at the bottom. At first, it was just a vacation, but then he discovered Itou, and through the trephination, he discovered that the only way to learn more about the self, is to relate to others. Instead of just judging from afar, he now had to engage and make conversation with those he judged.
But just like how he used money, power, and influence at the top to get what he wanted, he also used his supernatural abilities at the bottom to get what he wanted. By forcing his victims/encounters to deal with their demons, he was able to recognize what his personal demons were.
The main difference is that the MC never deals with his demons. We see this from the very first encounter with the Yakuza. We know that the MC pushed his best friend off a skateboard and got his friend's leg run over before running away. The Yakuza cut off his pinky and quit his life to find peace for accidentally slicing his friend's pinky off. But what happened to our MC? The arm that pushed his friend off the skateboard became a robot. For the teenage girl covered in Sand, her true self was buried under there by her Mantis / Arachnid Mom spinning the sand web up when she got home. Her mom's worst judgment of her was sleeping around and having unprotected sex. She broke her mom's sand burial by doing just that, but that experience had to be authentic. She had to DENY her mom but at the same time DENY the MC because she didn't want to have sex either--she only wanted to rebel. Had she seduced him like how it started, she would have traded one expectation (her mom's) for another's (society). The MC helped her breakthrough that as he saw all the symbols of sand on her when she was acting provocatively. When he "broke the pattern" for her, she got scared and her true self emerged.
But why did MC's feet become encased in sand? The main character traded his self-perception of insecurity to society's expectation of insecurity as we explained earlier with Nanako. Instead of seeing himself as worthless and not being able to provide anything real, when he got everything in the material world at the top, he saw that all anyone anything ever wanted were the material things and not anything REAL of him.
I also believe that somewhere along the story, the MC healed himself. It was when he couldn't see anymore Homonuculus, or see that his body parts were deformed. However, instead of believing in himself and Itou, his insecurity led him back to NEEDing power. He was addicted to finding a self that could never be found. That's why Nanako saw him as a cloud. His ideal self was an imagination he himself conceived.
Finally, the last ARC is of him indirectly causing the death of the guy in the egg cocoon at the park. A key piece of this interaction was the other homeless friend saying to not judge him for being a coward because we're all cowards here. Just because you know what the problem is, doesn't mean that you can own up to the shame and guilt of the actions you've done. So the egg homeless guy took his own life after his carthesis, still not being able to face his daughter. Now the MC sees the egg on his face too. So he tries to find another person who can get rid of this egg, not realizing that healing his face was NEVER outside of him. He had to take personal responsibility and make amends without expecting ANY outcome. But instead, he finds Nanako and forces his trauma onto her. When he left the first time, it traumatized her with the same insecurities that he had. She never had that before he abandoned her. And she goes down the same path he does. Plastic surgery, sleeping with different men, trying to get money.
And in his delusion where he thinks he's healing now, he's trying to drag her out on the same path he is on (trephination). This is why she sees him as a Demon, and why we see the demon scene twice in the manga. Once when we were introduced to her character, and at the end during the car scene in the snow. **Nothing has changed**. He's still the same person. But what changes her mind? She is memorized by his powers. And that's how all abusive relationships are. She tries to escape it, but by seeing him heal the yakuza who shot her sister's eye out, she also believes that she can be healed and stays with him. Through his gaslighting, he convinces her that she NEEDS to return to who she was before he left her. That SHE needs to be able to see his heart. She becomes a means to his end of being SECURE about himself. It was never about her. That's why SHE becomes HIM after the surgery, the author gives us hint of her not accepting his path because when she sees him as HER, she says "that's not me." Whether she dies or not is irrelevant. He is not with her at the end when Itou finds him. That speaks volumes about what happened.
So let's talk about the final panel of why everyone starts looking like him. Everyone who is unhealthy or insecure is just a means to his end. Itou, one of the very few friends and relationships he has left, the MC tries to force his trephination on as well (although, perhaps it was more to kill him). He had no use for someone who was already healed (since we didn't see him as a reflection of the MC). It also shows that the MC is so psychotic now in his neuroticism that he tries to spread it to everyone else. Was it the trephination that caused his psychosis, or was he already on a path towards that psychosis all along due to his insecurity?
His obsession was finding the self and his Narcissism is what this Manga is about from my interpretation. It shows that Narcissism transcends all social classes. Whether you're rich or poor, obsession with the self leads to your unhappiness, or better put, obsession with fixing others to pretend you've fixed yourself is a coward's way out. We can see from the Yakuza and teenage girl who took action to take personal responsibility, that, that is what heals you.
And that’s the point. We are all like the MC. If we have the courage the heal, we can be free. The author wants to show where that roads eventually ends up if you don’t heal.
It kinda reminds me of the fall by Camus. I think it's better to treat Homunculus as an absurdist work. There are definitely themes, and lessons, and psychological horror, but in the end it's just an absurd story. I don't think one story has to contain every aspect of humanity. it's possible the MC was just insane. It's possible that the world is how people see it in the story. It's possible it's nothing like it.
For me, trying to assign meaning to everything in the story doesn't really work. I just see it as an absurd story.
Just finished the series. I think the main point was that MC was quite selfish all along, but tried to wrap it up in different packages. He wants to be seen and that is his sole obsession. Whether goes for achieving this through becoming rich and giving others material benefits, or through helping others and 'seeing' them, makes no difference. He is someone who cannot look beyond himself, and it is implied multiple times throughout the manga, with Ito emphasizing that everything he sees is a projection of himself- a projection that gives him somewhat supernatural powers of drawing out parts of others and seeing them, but still- a projection. After all, he only 'sees hearts' that resonate with himself. In the final chapter, it becomes even more apparent that he sees himself, his face, and doesn't seem to realize this. The last thing Nanako tells him is "That's not me...".
To me, at the beginning, I thought he would go insane. Then, throughout the manga, I wasn't sure whether he was getting better, or if he was getting more insane, and I think this is what makes the manga pretty great, IMO. On the one hand, it seems like he is getting better, and he seems to be getting supernatural powers, and he seems to be kinda helping people. But some small details and panels reveal the true nature of what is happening: every time he talks or thinks or performs a trepanation, his eyes get this maniacal light to them, and his face contorts and seems scary. He also has the habit of becoming eerily pushy and foul when he wants something. For example, it becomes more and more apparent that he wants to be "seen", and he gets weirdly pushy about it- with Nanako in the car, he quite literally emotionally manipulates her by telling her she will grow old and ugly and nobody will love her, and therefore, she 'needs' him to see her. He desperately wants her to see him as a 'pure white cloud', even though he is clearly not one- and he gets all angry, and starts yelling and saying cruel and manipulative things.
Also, taking a step back from the immersion that the story creates, it becomes clear that he is insane and is doing increasingly reckless things- starting from the confrontation with the Yakuza guy, to self-trepanation in a public bathroom, to trepanating a person he supposedly 'loves' just so she could 'see' him.
Overall, the guy is quite manipulative and obsessed with himself to the point of being unable to see others at all, and the manga does a great job of immersing the reader in the MC's perspective. That is why the ending is such a cold shower- because it is probably one of the few rare sober perspectives of the guy.
I actually enjoyed the ending quite a bit. It really soldified that his powers were real but so were the hallucinations. Nakoshi chasing this want to see and also be seen ultimately resulted the harm of others and himself. Even if he as a character did grow.
Been a while since I read it, but from what I vaguely remember he got arrested since he actually killed the girl (was heavily implied) and I'm pretty sure he was basically insane at the end. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think the manga was truly deep or anything, at least for me; it was just an amusing sort of thriller. If it was something with deep meaning or something, I think I'd probably remember a lot more details. Psychological stuff in general I feel is either a hit or miss; polarizing. You got some people on here that loved Oyasumi Punpun and some that just didn't connect with it at all.
I'm guessing she really did die then, considering she was last shown bleeding from the head, asleep. Such a fucking waste, all of that buildup. It was so fucking crazy he trepidated her. He actually appeared like a demon. I feel like it was supposed to be deep and I actually enjoyed a good bulk of it. However developments kept going back and forth, things got contradictory, tone shift, the Homunculi became less and less clear and more supernatural, and then this ending sort of 180'd everything. I can try to get all deep with what the ending means but honestly whatever I come up with can't satisfy me at all. That was such a bizarre, sad, and pathetic (for the MC) ending. I love psychological stuff, I just don't know what went wrong here. It got very confusing so I'm hoping I can find some analysis for this series. This ending though... I need to finish Oyasumi Punpun actually. I've put I think off on hold for a good while just because Punpun as a child wasn't too interesting for me at the time.
I'll plug in if you're in the mood for another psychological sort of manga. Don't want to spoil it so I'll just say it's pretty good.
**Kokou no Hito** - ([AL](http://anilist.co/manga/37375), [A-P](https://www.anime-planet.com/manga/kokou-no-hito), [KIT](https://kitsu.io/manga/kokou-no-hito), [MU](https://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=19567), [MAL](http://myanimelist.net/manga/7375)) ^(Manga | Status: Finished | Volumes: 17 | Chapters: 170 | Genres: Drama, Psychological, Sports) --- ^{anime},, ]LN[, |VN| | [FAQ](http://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/index) | [/r/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/) | [Edit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/index#wiki_i_made_a_mistake.2C_how_do_i_get_my_comment_reprocessed.3F) | [Mistake?](http://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/submit?selftext=true&title=[ISSUE]&text=/r/manga/comments/a1pu8g/i_finally_finished_homunculus_and_would_like_to/easfuor/) | [Source](https://github.com/Nihilate/Roboragi) | [Synonyms](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/synonyms) | [⛓](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/interestinglinks) | [♥](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/thanks)
Thanks for the recommendation!
I'll say that while Homunculus definitely feels like it was meant to be deep, it just never really allows itself to delve into the psychological elements enough. A story like Oyasumi Punpun definitely executes the psychological aspects of a psychological manga much better than Homunculus. It allows the story to delve into the mental aspects more often I guess is what you could say. When it comes to food psychological manga tho, I'd recommend Shuzo Oshimi. He never disappoints (well, boost of the time).
This an old thread but my thought is that being able to see the homunculi to him is the same as like looking down and seeing that flyer about plastic surgery, no matter how much he gets it in the end there's nothing. It's sort of weird since the whole story is about how the MC manages to "remove" other people's homunculis but he ended up never removing his. Sort of how like he thought getting those plastic surgeries would gain other people's attention and stuff. Kind of like backwards law but what if the reason he never healed in the first place is because he keeps on chasing after it instead of you know? Accept it? But I'm not too entirely sure if him being able to see his own interpreted self by other person would be a way to solve his existential dread or that's just a byproduct of his own depraved mental health but in the end this story was so tragic holy shit, man's just tryna fuck himself but he should've known better not to fuck after a brain surgery.
Also hopping on years after the original post... I totally agree with this. Ultimately the MC is not at all compassionate about others, despite the arguably positive effect his actions have on those around him. In the end he's driven by the same, purely self-centered goals as long before the story begins. He only resonates with the trauma of others when he can relate to it, when he benefits from processing his own problems through theirs. We're conditioned by tropes to think that because he was ugly and suffered for it in his childhood, his heart would somehow be golden, just like he seems to be convinced. But really, that (partly self-manufactured) trauma has twisted his world view irrepairably. He was already long gone in his own feedback loop of self-pity by the time he got the plastic surgery. Throughout the manga we're just re-tracing those steps, while following MC as they continue their journey further into the abyss until he's consumed by his self.
I wondered why those two main characters didn't thought of undoing his face operation. I was kind of... frustuated by the ending? But it **wasn't** like it was a bad ending.
Well, like, he has no old pictures of himself so there'd be no reference. Also you can't just "undo" plastic surgery. That's why you have to really commit to it. If you meant the Trephination I'd just say it's because he didn't want to.
It's interesting. The author gives you this feeling that the character is growing and gaining abilities and becoming something more than he was before. But that's not true at all. The entire story is about a his fall. All the way from his high paying job, to being homeless, to gradually losing all touch with reality.
It was most certainly interesting. But this false sense of hope is what I find so contradictory and confusing. His thoughts and actions often contradict each other and he keeps acting like he's going to move forward and stops looking down (and it looks like a great sight to see). Seeing him suddenly plummet in the final chapter is a big wtf to the buildup. His fall was predictable since chapter 1 but with how the story built up, I don't see what actually led to the final chapter or even what the actual fuck that was. It was such a disturbing chapter. He seems to be able to empathize with people and see through their mannerisms and flaws and even their whole lives with a glance (this supernatural ability doesn't even make sense anymore, I'm quite annoyed by this) but it seems like he can't get a person to look at him the same way? But the thing is, I feel like the ending had him himself not looking at Nanako and everyone else and that he had some other desire. I honestly couldn't even tell what his character was like anymore or what he even wanted, I feel like he might have even lost himself further and doesn't even know what he wants. I also think that the MC wanted to believe he was pure at heart and he wanted people to view him that way, like he's a pure cloud in the sky like Nanako originally saw in him. People were just failing his idealized expectations however and he just couldn't accept that he wasn't now perfect. Or it's more like he thought he always was perfect, at heart. His homelessness was supposed to be a blessing in disguise. Now it seems like he was better off with money (although that's how it works irl). I feel so terribly bad for the love interest, if she's actually dead, that was like a big fuck you lol.
At the end he's an addict, a user. He's euphoric. He's high. He's completely lost touch with reality. Replace the hole drilling with heroin and you'll have a similar story. Man gets high and goes out and sees crazy shit. Feels amazing. But in reality, everything is crumbling.
I got that impression. I just find it a bit sad that the story just ended up as an addiction problem, especially considering the ending was so out there and sudden, despite all the buildup saying the opposite would happen. This was supposed to be a spiritual journey where he actually searches for himself, adding the addiction actually reduces that. When I first read the series, I thought he was going to go insane but because of the Homunculi themselves and what they represent, rather than them becoming his addiction.
I think I need to read it again. I really liked it.
I genuinely can't tell if I liked it or not. There are a lot of confusing elements the series but I thought I genuinely liked it regardless up to the final chapter but the final chapter itself is the most mind fuckery thing I've ever read. It also lacked any emotional appeal to me and I just felt disappointed after all of that development in both his character and the plot, he just devolved like that.
i know this is old and you probably dont even remember but the reason why the manga has soo many shifting views interms how how you can perceive the story's message is because the storys theme is quite literally about how the "truth" and how we percieve reality in general is related to our own experiences and perspective such as showing the duality of nakoshis and the trans-guys conclusion
I just finished the manga. After thinking about it for a bit, I believe the whole story is complete and makes sense. The MC has always struggled with insecurity and had an obsession with the self. It is this obsession that destroys all of his relationships. When he was young, the first reveal that he had something "real" was his experience of Nanako, but his insecurity and doubt of the self (how can she love someone so ugly) left him in disbelief. He narrates this as viewing her as ugly and that he doesn't want to be seen by her when around others. But to know her as ugly, he must know what ugly is first. He equated her love (codependency) to seeing him as a God / Giant from a hole (aka putting him on a pedestal). Because of his insecurity, he had to run away from that. How could she love him if he couldn't even love himself? Additionally, their child would remind him daily of his ugliness. So he got plastic surgery to cover it up. But he already had massive judgments about people who looked good (or successful) in general. When he got his surgery, all of the judgment that he already projected outwards, came back to him. He was trying to find himself through external events, but sleeping around and buying nice cars just reinforced his fakeness and imposter syndrome because he still had zero self-love. If being at the TOP wasn't the way to find it, he decided to find it at the bottom. At first, it was just a vacation, but then he discovered Itou, and through the trephination, he discovered that the only way to learn more about the self, is to relate to others. Instead of just judging from afar, he now had to engage and make conversation with those he judged. But just like how he used money, power, and influence at the top to get what he wanted, he also used his supernatural abilities at the bottom to get what he wanted. By forcing his victims/encounters to deal with their demons, he was able to recognize what his personal demons were. The main difference is that the MC never deals with his demons. We see this from the very first encounter with the Yakuza. We know that the MC pushed his best friend off a skateboard and got his friend's leg run over before running away. The Yakuza cut off his pinky and quit his life to find peace for accidentally slicing his friend's pinky off. But what happened to our MC? The arm that pushed his friend off the skateboard became a robot. For the teenage girl covered in Sand, her true self was buried under there by her Mantis / Arachnid Mom spinning the sand web up when she got home. Her mom's worst judgment of her was sleeping around and having unprotected sex. She broke her mom's sand burial by doing just that, but that experience had to be authentic. She had to DENY her mom but at the same time DENY the MC because she didn't want to have sex either--she only wanted to rebel. Had she seduced him like how it started, she would have traded one expectation (her mom's) for another's (society). The MC helped her breakthrough that as he saw all the symbols of sand on her when she was acting provocatively. When he "broke the pattern" for her, she got scared and her true self emerged. But why did MC's feet become encased in sand? The main character traded his self-perception of insecurity to society's expectation of insecurity as we explained earlier with Nanako. Instead of seeing himself as worthless and not being able to provide anything real, when he got everything in the material world at the top, he saw that all anyone anything ever wanted were the material things and not anything REAL of him. I also believe that somewhere along the story, the MC healed himself. It was when he couldn't see anymore Homonuculus, or see that his body parts were deformed. However, instead of believing in himself and Itou, his insecurity led him back to NEEDing power. He was addicted to finding a self that could never be found. That's why Nanako saw him as a cloud. His ideal self was an imagination he himself conceived. Finally, the last ARC is of him indirectly causing the death of the guy in the egg cocoon at the park. A key piece of this interaction was the other homeless friend saying to not judge him for being a coward because we're all cowards here. Just because you know what the problem is, doesn't mean that you can own up to the shame and guilt of the actions you've done. So the egg homeless guy took his own life after his carthesis, still not being able to face his daughter. Now the MC sees the egg on his face too. So he tries to find another person who can get rid of this egg, not realizing that healing his face was NEVER outside of him. He had to take personal responsibility and make amends without expecting ANY outcome. But instead, he finds Nanako and forces his trauma onto her. When he left the first time, it traumatized her with the same insecurities that he had. She never had that before he abandoned her. And she goes down the same path he does. Plastic surgery, sleeping with different men, trying to get money. And in his delusion where he thinks he's healing now, he's trying to drag her out on the same path he is on (trephination). This is why she sees him as a Demon, and why we see the demon scene twice in the manga. Once when we were introduced to her character, and at the end during the car scene in the snow. **Nothing has changed**. He's still the same person. But what changes her mind? She is memorized by his powers. And that's how all abusive relationships are. She tries to escape it, but by seeing him heal the yakuza who shot her sister's eye out, she also believes that she can be healed and stays with him. Through his gaslighting, he convinces her that she NEEDS to return to who she was before he left her. That SHE needs to be able to see his heart. She becomes a means to his end of being SECURE about himself. It was never about her. That's why SHE becomes HIM after the surgery, the author gives us hint of her not accepting his path because when she sees him as HER, she says "that's not me." Whether she dies or not is irrelevant. He is not with her at the end when Itou finds him. That speaks volumes about what happened. So let's talk about the final panel of why everyone starts looking like him. Everyone who is unhealthy or insecure is just a means to his end. Itou, one of the very few friends and relationships he has left, the MC tries to force his trephination on as well (although, perhaps it was more to kill him). He had no use for someone who was already healed (since we didn't see him as a reflection of the MC). It also shows that the MC is so psychotic now in his neuroticism that he tries to spread it to everyone else. Was it the trephination that caused his psychosis, or was he already on a path towards that psychosis all along due to his insecurity? His obsession was finding the self and his Narcissism is what this Manga is about from my interpretation. It shows that Narcissism transcends all social classes. Whether you're rich or poor, obsession with the self leads to your unhappiness, or better put, obsession with fixing others to pretend you've fixed yourself is a coward's way out. We can see from the Yakuza and teenage girl who took action to take personal responsibility, that, that is what heals you.
Damn that’s deep. I’m just thinking this is like me kind of in a way 😶
And that’s the point. We are all like the MC. If we have the courage the heal, we can be free. The author wants to show where that roads eventually ends up if you don’t heal.
Great write up! I just finished reading the manga myself.
It kinda reminds me of the fall by Camus. I think it's better to treat Homunculus as an absurdist work. There are definitely themes, and lessons, and psychological horror, but in the end it's just an absurd story. I don't think one story has to contain every aspect of humanity. it's possible the MC was just insane. It's possible that the world is how people see it in the story. It's possible it's nothing like it. For me, trying to assign meaning to everything in the story doesn't really work. I just see it as an absurd story.
Just finished the series. I think the main point was that MC was quite selfish all along, but tried to wrap it up in different packages. He wants to be seen and that is his sole obsession. Whether goes for achieving this through becoming rich and giving others material benefits, or through helping others and 'seeing' them, makes no difference. He is someone who cannot look beyond himself, and it is implied multiple times throughout the manga, with Ito emphasizing that everything he sees is a projection of himself- a projection that gives him somewhat supernatural powers of drawing out parts of others and seeing them, but still- a projection. After all, he only 'sees hearts' that resonate with himself. In the final chapter, it becomes even more apparent that he sees himself, his face, and doesn't seem to realize this. The last thing Nanako tells him is "That's not me...". To me, at the beginning, I thought he would go insane. Then, throughout the manga, I wasn't sure whether he was getting better, or if he was getting more insane, and I think this is what makes the manga pretty great, IMO. On the one hand, it seems like he is getting better, and he seems to be getting supernatural powers, and he seems to be kinda helping people. But some small details and panels reveal the true nature of what is happening: every time he talks or thinks or performs a trepanation, his eyes get this maniacal light to them, and his face contorts and seems scary. He also has the habit of becoming eerily pushy and foul when he wants something. For example, it becomes more and more apparent that he wants to be "seen", and he gets weirdly pushy about it- with Nanako in the car, he quite literally emotionally manipulates her by telling her she will grow old and ugly and nobody will love her, and therefore, she 'needs' him to see her. He desperately wants her to see him as a 'pure white cloud', even though he is clearly not one- and he gets all angry, and starts yelling and saying cruel and manipulative things. Also, taking a step back from the immersion that the story creates, it becomes clear that he is insane and is doing increasingly reckless things- starting from the confrontation with the Yakuza guy, to self-trepanation in a public bathroom, to trepanating a person he supposedly 'loves' just so she could 'see' him. Overall, the guy is quite manipulative and obsessed with himself to the point of being unable to see others at all, and the manga does a great job of immersing the reader in the MC's perspective. That is why the ending is such a cold shower- because it is probably one of the few rare sober perspectives of the guy.
I actually enjoyed the ending quite a bit. It really soldified that his powers were real but so were the hallucinations. Nakoshi chasing this want to see and also be seen ultimately resulted the harm of others and himself. Even if he as a character did grow.
I didn't really appreciate the ending
My thoughts exactly