A few weeks before Christmas I got very sick with covid. I had to spend the week and a half leading up to Christmas mostly cooped up in my room. Once the worst symptoms had gone away, I needed something to take my mind off of how bad I was feeling so I decided to read some manga. I first reread most of Jujutsu Kaisen before finally giving Chainsaw Man a shot. It was better than I expected, I’m kind of looking forward to the continuation of the anime now. After finishing those two I wasn’t quite sure what to read. Suddenly I got the urge to re-read The Promised Neverland. I remember really liking the manga even though a lot of people seemed to dislike the ending. After reading the entire manga I got a much worse idea. What if I finally sat down and watched the second half of season 2. I dropped it after five episodes because it skipped one of my favorite arcs in the manga but I figured if I were to review the series I should finish it. So now that I’ve read the manga again and watched the entire anime, let’s talk about both. As you might have guessed by now, this post will include major spoilers for the Promised Neverland manga and anime, so beware of that.
First, let’s take a moment to talk about everything the manga did right in my opinion, to kind of get an idea for what I was expecting when the anime announced its second season. After escaping from Grace Field, the children managed to find a hideout that William Minerva prepared for them. There they found another escapee who is much older than them. It turns out he’s lived there for a while already and has slowly gone crazy. After that, Emma convinces him to bring her and Ray to Goldy Pond, where the next clue leads them. Goldy Pond was completely skipped in the anime, which is a shame. Goldy Pond is the name of a secret hunting ground where several noble demons hunt children for sport. Emma is whisked away to this place where she teams up with some of the surviving children there to fight back against the demons. We also learn that the crazy guy, whose name is Yugo, was part of a big group of escapees who found Goldy Pond and were subsequently all slaughtered.
Unbeknownst to Yugo, his good friend Lucas was still alive at Goldy Pond. After an intense battle between humans and demons, which culminates in the humans defeating Lewis, a very powerful demon, Lucas and Yugo team up and everyone goes back to the shelter to regroup. During their time at the shelter, Peter Ratri sends a squad of soldiers to kill the escapees, which turns into a bloodbath during which a few of the young children as well as Yugo and Lucas unfortunately die. The gang then goes on a journey to reforge the promise with a demon deity so that humans and demons can live freely.
After encountering this deity once and figuring out many clues to their current predicament, the children encounter Jin and Hayato. They are other escapees and they’re working directly for William Minerva. This can’t be, since Minerva is supposed to be dead, but the children go with them anyway, after retrieving some medicine from a nearby plant. When they get to the village, they find out that their friend Norman is still alive, and he’s grown considerably. We finally learn what happened to Adam, who is a strong child that was with the Goldy Pond group. The reason he kept saying Norman’s number is because they were both at the Lambda research facility, where Peter Ratri is trying to create the ultimate cattle. Norman and the other Lambda escapees want to kill all the demons but Emma and Ray want to save the demons as well, recognizing that there isn’t really a racial divide, there’s a socio-economic divide that’s being sold as a racial divide. Or I’m looking into things too much, don’t mind me. Either way, Emma’s plan is to use Musica’s blood to help the demons become immune to the degeneration that happens when they stop eating humans and then reforging the promise with their deity so all children are allowed to be free.
To make sure it’s clear that demons come in all shapes and sizes we meet Aishe. She doesn’t speak human language but is loyal to Norman. She, as well as some others, are sent by Norman to kill Musica instead of helping the kids. As they kids travel, they learn that Aishe isn’t actually loyal to Norman, but instead is angry that they killed the demon that cared for her. Her demon was kind and raised her well, and she harbors anger about his death. With some trickery and help, they manage to overwhelm the attackers and reunite with Musica and Sonju. At this point we get to the end of the story and if you’ve read it, I won’t summarize all of it since we’ll be here all day. But to make a long story short, the demons are saved while the nobility is slaughtered with the help of an exiled clan. The populace is given the special blood that Musica has and Sonju turned out to be the brother of the former queen, who is killed by our heroes. They find a strange ally in Lewis, who managed to survive the fight at Goldy Pond due to having a second core, and the promise is reforged, leading to the children and their (farm) mothers being allowed to leave to the human world. Isabella and Peter Ratri die in the process and the system is overturned completely, separating the demon and the human world for good.
This brings me to the unfortunate reality that is the second season of The Promised Neverland Anime. In the anime we skip all of Goldy Pond as well as meeting those escapee children and Yugo and Lucas. Instead we go from the escape almost immediately to reuniting with Norman. Norman’s gone through the same process as in the manga, except on a much smaller scale. He’s just a guy with a few escapees here, not the leader of a massive group of refugees. Jin, Hayato and Aishe are completely absent from the story and instead of trying to kill Musica, Norman straight up lies to his friends purely to get vengeance. A lot of Norman’s goals are the same as in the manga, but without any of the buildup you get when reading the much longer story. The nobles are completely forgotten except for a small mention towards the end, making it seem like there was no real power structure in the demon world, but it was just Peter Ratri farming kids for clout. The promise is forgone as well, making the entire system hinge on pure trust on equal sides, which would never work when you look at the nature of some of the demons. A lot of the anime’s ending ends up not being very sensible. It wants to conclude the story in the same way as in the manga, but we go from narrowly escaping one woman and a farm to torching half the demon army in the span of three episodes. Emma’s naive character is also turned up to 11 and although she’s not a particularly realistic character to begin with, the manga makes sure to properly build her up, making her consistent within the logic set for her character. In the anime she just kind of doesn’t want to kill all demons. The farms mainly get liberated offscreen in what is a throwaway after credits scene and we’re left feeling hollow about what we just watched.
I know many manga readers had umbridge with the ending of the story and I can’t say I absolutely loved every choice the author made. I do commend the author for making a very interesting story that stayed consistent throughout and although it took some suspense of disbelief, I quite liked how everything got resolved nicely, but not without strife. In the anime there are no stakes. Everyone survived, no one got hurt, they defeated the entire demon world in a few days without any sacrifices. How big of a threat were these guys really? The storytelling in the anime doesn’t respect the viewers intelligence and that’s a real shame. This could have been a great anime, running for an extra two or three cours and properly developing its characters. It had a lot to say about society, consumption and reaching across the aisle to those who seem like strangers. Instead it abandons all of that for a terribly rushed season of anime with no stakes, no logic and quite frankly nothing really going for it. I would recommend the manga for anyone who watched the anime and felt disappointed. Even with the spoilers in this review, I still think it’s worth reading it to see for yourself. But that’s me and my opinion. Of course anyone creating an anime is trying to write the best story they can, and sometimes you don’t reach your goals. I wouldn’t want anyone to feel bad about it, but I do want to put into words what I didn’t like about it. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 