Kenzo Tenma

> When you’re in the darkness, you only sink deeper into it. Keep the light shining.
>
> Dr. Kenzo Tenma

## Summary

Dr. Kenzo Tenma (天馬 賢三, Tenma Kenzō?) is the primary protagonist of the Monster series. Formerly, he was a genius neurosurgeon and a rising star at the Eisler Memorial Hospital, considered to be one of the best in the field, until he disobeyed the Hospital Director's orders to perform brain surgery on Mayor Roedecker, choosing instead to operate on a newly-orphaned boy, Johan Liebert. Since the boy arrived first, he decided to risk his promising future to do what was morally correct and save Johan regardless of the consequences. Unfortunately, the mayor passed away and so did Tenma's favored standing at the hospital while the boy, along with his twin sister, went missing...

**Name:** Kenzo Tenma

**Origin:** Monster

**Gender:** Male

**Age:** 28 (beginning of story) | 37 (rest of the story)

**Classification:** Neurosurgeon

**Alignment:** **Neutral Good**

## Tropes

* A-M
* N-Z

* **An Aesop**: In-universe, he gives some of these.
* **Action Survivor**: Dr. Tenma is initially an average person, insofar as a well-known brain surgeon can be average. The series' circumstances force him to become a hardened survivor.
* **Adaptational Attractiveness**: In the manga, he starts off plain and downright funny-looking. The anime takes its cue from the later chapters' more adorable Tenma.
* **Adrenaline Makeover**: Ahem.
* **All-Loving Hero**: This is both a large advantage and similarly a large disadvantage to him because of the complex location on the **Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism** that Monster inhabits.
* **Badass Pacifist**: He can take a beating, jump off a bridge to avoid confrontation, and save people's lives while avoiding **the police** and criminals alike.
* **Barbarian Longhair**: **Subverted**, he's not, by any definition, a barbarian. But by most persons in the series, his long hair is perceived as ugly.
* **Beard of Sorrow**: He is normally beardless, but after he learns about Johan's true colors, he attempts to grow a beard and overly disregards his appearance.
* **Beware the Honest Ones**: Tenma's idealism turned out pretty bad for his money-grubbing boss.
* **Big Good**: This is particularly evident in arcs where he is offstage or not the main character. In keeping with his nearly **messianic** role, by the end, nearly all the characters would do anything to protect him.
* **Beware the Nice Ones**: Tenma is kind and righteous, but false accusations force him on a path to become much more assertive.
* **Break the Cutie**: By all accounts, he's sweet and adorable, but his entire life was ruined by the actions of a former patient.
* **Care-Bear Stare**: He frequently does this, illustrating his initial idealism.
* **Celibate Hero**: Post-Eva, although there is some subtext involving Nina that may avert this. In *Another Monster*, it is explained that he was still quite the celibate during his high school years and even purposely didn't get together with a girl who liked him (and the feeling was somewhat mutual) merely because he was friends with her (cheating) boyfriend.
* **Character Development**: He begins as a well-respected, compassionate doctor. Over the series, he becomes more driven and relentless.
* **Cheaters Never Prosper**: **Averted**, though not soon enough for poor Gillen's complex. He cheated on a test in medical school, which made him excel, and caused jealousy in one of his classmates. This acquaintance later becomes an important character.
* **Chronic Hero Syndrome**: Despite his goal of hunting down Johan, he'll never turn down helping a stranger, even if the person's a criminal.
* **Clear My Name**: **Averted**. His reason for hunting down Johan isn't to clear his name, but rather to correct the error he made in keeping Johan alive.
* **Combat Medic**: "This is the carotid artery. Even a ballpoint pen could kill him, if you pierce it in the right spot."
* **Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones**: Played with. As kindhearted as Tenma is, he can't stand people who have no regard for human life. He's capable of summoning enough righteous anger **to wish his money-grubbing boss dead**, and he's even willing to chase after a **serial killer** to enact some vigilante justice. However, Tenma can also let go of grudges fairly easily. He no longer hates his boss once he **actually dies**, for starters. But what about Johan, the killer he brought back to life? He ends up saving his life. Again. After trying to kill him for three years.
* **Expository Hairstyle Change**: Starts off clean-cut, but gets progressively more disheveled.
* **Expy**: *Monster* is based on *The Fugitive* and Tenma is Dr. Richard Kimble — a surgeon wrongly accused of murder on both sides of a Stern Chase (chasing the real killer and being chased by a police detective).
* **Extreme Doormat**: He used to be very submissive to his boss and his fiancee.
* **Forgets to Eat**: Quite frequently. At other instances, he'll bemoan the lack of soy sauce in Western cuisine.
* **Friend to All Children**: The good doctor loves children, and he is perfectly willing to help them. He even formed an **Intergenerational Friendship** with Dieter, a kid.
* **Friend to All Living Things**: He saved a hurt bird in the time he was training as a gunmen. Later, when he was talking with a former friend to all living things, a finch landed in Tenma's arm.
* **Gentleman and a Scholar**: He is a highly-accomplished brain surgeon and an incredibly caring and selfless man.
* **Good Is Not Dumb**: Well, **he's good, and intelligent**. **Heck, he's a brain surgeon**. Beyond fitting the literal trope title, however, Roberto underestimates him at one point because of his goodness and pays for it by losing the use of his right arm.
* **Good Is Not Soft**: **While a genius neurosurgeon**, he is **nice**, **humble**, and compassionate. When Johan becomes a threat, he **takes a level in badass** and takes a journey to stop him. Also, he doesn't hesitate to threaten people with his pistol if their actions endanger one or more lifes.
* **Grew a Spine**: He decides to stop being the doormat of his fiancee and his boss after seeing the immorality of both (the fiancee is not that evil, but this counts).
* **Heroic Resolve**: Kenzo has one in his battle against Roberto.
* **Hero with Bad Publicity**: Wanted for the very murders that he keeps trying to stop.
* **Honor Before Reason**: Though he cares about the "right thing" rather than any type of personal honor.
* **Hospital Hottie**: He has a cute appearance, be well-groomed or not.
* **Humble Hero**: He never takes credit for his good deeds and maintains that all people are equal despite conspicuously being better than everybody else in every imaginable way.
* **Hurting Hero**: He's haunted by the actions of a former patient, who destroyed his life.
* **I Can't Dance**: According to Eva, Tenma claimed to not be able to dance. **They stood and held each other on the dance floor instead**.
* **I Just Want to Have Friends**: According to Eva in *Another Monster,* he was chronically lonely and thanks to his workaholic tendencies, he was unable to make friends other than Dr. Becker.
* **Intelligence Equals Isolation**: His medical capabilities make him isolated among peers.
* **I'm Not Hungry**: When he was captured by the police, he refused to eat for so long they had to put him on an IV. Which doubles as **Fridge Brilliance**, as he was trying to end up in the infirmary in order to get in touch with Gunther Milch.
* **Inconvenient Hippocratic Oath**. All the more so (or not) for being an integral part of what he comes to be about after the first episode.
* **Incorruptible Pure Pureness**: One of the rare examples of this trope being pulled off successfully. No matter how complicated things get, he retains his idealistic views on humanity.
* **Just in Time**: He saves Reichwein, who came VERY close to being killed by Roberto, just in time in episode 30.
	+ He also shows up at the last second to save **Eva Heinemann**, who is precariously close to being shot by Christof Sievernich when she gets in over her head.
* **Last-Name Basis**: People tend to call him by his last name rather than his first name, even when they've got to know him well—including Nina and Eva (though the latter is the one that does it least).
* **Looks Like Jesus**: His long hair and stubble look make him somewhat similar to Jesus.
* **Magnetic Hero**: He's kind, charming, and persuasive.
* **Manly Tears**: He does cry, but it doesn't make him appear weak; it showcases just how horrible his life gets, in spite of how much he tries.
* **Married to the Job**: Noted constantly, one of his fellow physicians tried to hook him up with other loves, but he was more focused on his job.
* **Messianic Archetype**: To counter Johan's Anti-Christ.
* **Morality Pet**: Alongside Anna and Johan's mother, he is one of the only human beings Johan appears to come remotely close to caring for.

* **Nice Guy**: He's very nice and will help even his enemies. This is both a blessing and a curse, considering how dark the series is. It gets him a lot of friends, but it also gets him into difficult situations.
* **No Good Deed Goes Unpunished**: He helped Johan, and then he's framed for murder.
	+ **Johan**: I was supposed to die that night. **You're the one who resurrected me, Doctor**.
	+ This is also the curse that tends to follow Tenma: despite his best intentions, his attempts to solve problems frequently hurts himself. The entire reason he moved to Germany was to force his father to appoint his older brother to hospital director instead of himself... only for Tenma's brother to be inspired to go help small towns in Japan. If he had remained in Japan, Tenma would be a renowned hospital director and his troubles with Johan would never have occurred.
* **Not So Above It All**: Like Gillen, he cheated on a forensics exam at University.
* **Older Hero vs. Younger Villain**: Tenma is about twenty years older than Johan. He's not old in general, only being in his 30s, but since Johan is only 18 it still fits.
* **Parental Favoritism**: It's mentioned in *Another Monster* that his father favored him, **his youngest son**, over his other brothers. **However**, his mother favored his two older half-brothers (who are unrelated to her) more than him.
* **Perma-Stubble**: He grows one during his **Expository Hairstyle Change**.
* **Save the Villain**: At first unknowingly, in the case of saving the young Johan from his **asked-for** bullet wound to the head. By the end, he does it again, this time intentionally, **to defy Johan's point**.
* **Seriously Scruffy**: His ungroomed appearance shows that he is primarily focused on stopping Johan Liebert.
* **Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!**: Thoroughly believes this, when he decides to operate on Johan's brain-bullet and disobey the director's orders to ignore the kid and work on the mayor's cerebral-thrombosis. He starts doubting himself, when he sees what Johan has become.
* **Skilled, but Naive**: Tenma's a surgical prodigy, but it's not his relative inexperience with a scalpel that gets him into trouble in the beginning. It's his inexperience with another aspect of being a doctor: hospital politics.
* **Technical Pacifist**: Although he has no problem pushing, kicking, shoving, and threatening with violence, he has a hard time causing harm to others even if it is to defend his own life.
* **The Atoner**: As kind-hearted as he is, he sees his absolute biggest mistake as being something he alone can fix. And despite numerous opportunities he gets where he could abandon his self-set mission, he refuses every time.
* **The Drifter**: **Justified**, since he's a murder suspect and has to be on the run from the police.
* **The Fettered**: His beliefs frequently make him question his mission.
* **The Heart**: Tenma is the moral center of a morally complex series.
* **The Hero**: He is inaguably the protagonist, and he's very heroic, **motivations** and **rumination aside**.
* **The Last DJ**: Both played straight and **averted**, in short succession. His integrity makes him lose his job.
* **The So-Called Coward**:
	+ "Tenma the Weenie! Tenma the Weenie! He peed his pants, too!"
	+ Even more so considering the full story given in *Another Monster.* After the first time the other boys scared him during hide-and-seek, Tenma decided to go through it again in order to **conquer his fear**. What ended up happening was that they couldn't find him and thought that he just went home, so when one of the mothers told them it was time to go home, they left Tenma by himself. When they found him still hiding in the abandoned yard at night, they probably stopped picking on him simply because he had the guts to do all that.
* **Think Nothing of It**: Does not like to take credit for his achievements, e.g. denying that he'd saved the Turkish district.
* **Thou Shalt Not Kill**: A personal philosophy that looks especially interesting when pitted against his initial tantrums of, "**These people need to die**."
* **Took a Level in Badass**: Early in the series, after receiving weapons training from an ex-mercenary.
* **Trademark Favorite Food**: Heckel notes that Tenma thinks that any recipe can be improved with soy sauce. And if the fandom on Tumblr has anything to say about it, sandwiches.
* **Turn the Other Cheek**: Constantly, over and over again. He does this to his fellow doctors, as well as his enemies. At the end, after spending the entire series hunting Johan to make up for his "mistake", he saves the boy's life *again* and tells him his true name, giving Johan another chance.
* **Übermensch**: By the end of the series, although he starts out as a very clear-cut Last Man. His personal beliefs evolve over the course of the series. He becomes less conflicted, and more willing to do what's necessary.
* **Unkempt Beauty**: He looks like a hobo and still looks very well. Even most fans think he looks better with the hobo look.
* **Unwitting Pawn**: Used, reused, and **subverted**. A lot of his actions, even his **goal** are **propelled and encouraged by** Johan.
* **White-and-Grey Morality**: How he sees the world.
* **Wide-Eyed Idealist**: Determinedly and stubbornly so. Tenma is convinced that all life is equal, and that everyone can be saved. His beliefs put him at odds with nearly everyone, as he's one of the few idealists in the series.
* **Wrongly Accused**: Tenma's goal is to find Johan who framed him in the first place, though he's more concerned about stopping him and less concerned about being proven innocent.

## Powers and Stats

**Tier:** **10-B**, **9-C** with guns

**Powers and Abilities:**

* **Skilled Marksman**

**Attack Potency:** **Human level**, **Street level** with guns

**Speed:** **Average Human**

**Lifting Strength:** **Average Human**

**Striking Strength:** **Human level**

**Durability:** **Human level**

**Stamina:** **Average**

**Range:** **Standard Melee Range**, up to **Hundreds of Meters** with guns

**Standard Equipment:** None notable besides a pistol

**Intelligence:** **Gifted** (Tenma is a very competent neurosurgeon, performing on characters on the fly even under pressure from the investigation surrounding him. He also has developed marksmanship in an effort to take down Johan)

**Weaknesses:** Standard human weaknesses.