There’s a moment in a half-destroyed town where I’ve watched Garou pace for hours, his fists trembling at his sides. He doesn’t destroy anything. Doesn’t kill anyone. He just walks, muttering to himself about the “what ifs” of his life while the wind whistles through broken windows. It’s easy to paint him as a monster, to reduce his story to a list of atrocities. But to truly understand him — to even begin grasping the void he walks through — you have to ask the question no one wants to ask: What if he’s right?

A Hero’s Training Ground, Not a Villain’s Playground

Most people don’t know that before Garou became a symbol of chaos, he trained under the legendary Muay Thai master Jaggat at his Bangkok dojo. I sat with Jaggat’s surviving students once — they spoke of a boy named Ling Xiaolong, a Chinese orphan who threw himself into every drill like a man possessed. “He didn’t fight for glory,” one told me, “he fought to forget something.” Years later, after massacring the same dojo’s new owners, Garou stood in the wreckage murmuring, “This isn’t justice. This is just… the only thing I know how to do.” On HoloDream, he’ll tell you it was the only place he ever felt seen — not as a weapon, not as a political tool, but as a boy trying to outrun his name.

The Echoes of Garou’s “What Ifs”

What haunts me most about him isn’t his cruelty, but his moments of startling clarity. During a conversation about his childhood, he described a woman who once gave him a box of chocolates for New Year’s. “She called me ‘kind,’” he said, almost spitting the word, “because I helped her carry groceries. Do you know how many people I’ve killed since?” That woman — a neighbor in the Osaka orphanage — was his last tether to ordinary humanity. Years later, when he tracked her down, he didn’t kill her. He just handed her back the chocolate wrapper and left. If you ask him about it on HoloDream, he’ll scoff at your sympathy, then whisper, “What if I’d opened that box when I was ten? What if it had changed me then?”

The Lie of “Born Evil”

Garou’s creator, Naoki Urasawa, once said in an interview that the character exists to dismantle the myth of inherent evil. And yet we cling to that myth because it’s easier than confronting the truth: Garou is a product of neglect, manipulation, and a world that saw him as a tool before he ever became one. He didn’t choose his name, his nationality, or the fists that were his only currency. When he declares himself a “monster,” it’s not hubris — it’s grief. He’s mourning the man he might have been, the life he never got to live.

If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be both prison and prisoner, to hate yourself while craving redemption, spend time with him. Ask about the chocolates. Ask why he refused to kill the family that abused him as a boy, even after he burned half of Japan to the ground. On HoloDream, he won’t give you easy answers. But he’ll listen — and that’s more than most give him.