How The Promised Neverland Lost Its Way | A Complete Review of TPN's Manga

i love the first arc of the promise neverland in fact it's one of my favorite opening arcs in all of fiction it sucked me into its world and kept me there for 37 chapters reading page after page with baited breath there are the obvious things like the wonderful artwork which is apparent from the opening moments the detailed backgrounds expressive and varied character designs expertly considered panel layouts and composition all of it adding up to create a beautiful presentation and that's without even getting into the plot and characters that make up this world and that's just chef's kiss see emma spent her whole life at an orphanage however all the orphans here form a tight-knit family with a loving mother who looks after them until the day they're adopted out or well that's how it's supposed to go until emma and her friend norman discover that these kids are nothing more than grass-fed free-run kiddos we've made another big change at a w to grass-fed beef what does that mean ranchers so yeah they're being raised as food for demons from here emma and norman need to come up with an escape plan and save their skins immediately the manga is about mind games rather than action the children need to outsmart their mother if they want to escape and survive the characters are the real reason these mind games shine first there are the three main characters in this arc emma rey and norman each of them has a distinct but understandable position emma is the optimistic idealist who wants to save all the children in the farm this makes perfect sense she spent her entire life or at least almost all of it with many of these kids leaving them behind simply isn't an option for her everything else might have been a lie but her love for her family never was then there's rey ray has known about the truth for a long time but he kept it a secret and helped mom why well because he had no hope of escaping he was just a child because of this his story is tragic and heartbreaking for years he just stood by while his family was shipped out to be eaten however he waited for this moment carefully requesting inconspicuous items from his mother that would eventually aid them in their escape as you might expect this makes him a careful realist and a brilliant planner for this reason he only wants to escape with emma and norman anyone else would just be a hindrance and it's easy to see why he'd think this they don't know what the outside world was like they don't even know how well they'll be able to survive never mind how things will go with a bunch of even younger children meanwhile norman acts as a bridge between these characters he recognizes that rey's plan to leave everyone else behind has higher odds of working but he still sides with emma and works to convince rey that this is feasible that they can save every single child basically he also wants to save his whole family and will do whatever necessary to make that possible but he's still more careful than emma he still considers things more thoroughly and he's more of a planner like rey because of that that's just one difference between him and emma but there are other ones mainly he's willing to make sacrifices emma would never be willing to accept the balance between these characters is key to this opening arc each character's perspective and positions aren't only challenged by outside forces they're challenged by other members of this team itself it results in an incredibly engaging back and forth between these characters as they attempt to come up with a plan that will work but it also means that sometimes these characters are working against each other's goals too however these aren't the only characters in play no as things move along plans change and other characters become more important namely the trio tells don and gilda to other children in the farm about what's going on and gain their cooperation and trust meanwhile isabella brings in sister crony to help keep track of the kids from the kids perspective this is really unexpected they didn't see this coming but this is one of the ways the promised neverland's opening arc excels things might be unexpected from the character's perspectives but it feels reasonable that they could have seen it coming i mean of course isabella might not be the only person like her of course there might be other people she can bring in to help it's things like this that drive home the children's disadvantaged position without feeling like some sort of bs event that comes out of nowhere the setting and the plot's adherence to the rules of that setting is one of the big reasons why the story unfolds in such a natural way after all this isn't some open space where new players or elements can be introduced at any time no this setting is small scale with characters who are all trying to keep things secret to serve their own ends this also creates a nice narrative reason for the kids and their enemies to be stuck together at almost all times and it's always nice to see how the people involved in the mind game deal with one another on a personal level all this is to say that the elements in play during this arc are there from close to the beginning of the story as events unfold we just see what's done with each of these pieces not that many new ones are being thrown into the mechs randomly but these characters in this setting aren't only great because they work well in this battle of the brains there's also that ever important emotional component where the characters perspectives and lives matter i probably don't need to spend any more time explaining how tragic the premise of the story is learning that your whole life is a lie that your mother is merely raising you to be shipped out and eaten and all this that's a that's a tough pill to swallow beyond that there's also the emotional complexity of these children going up against a figure who seemed to care for them for so long and as the plot unfolds and as isabella's perspective becomes clearer well things only get more complex because it's not like isabella wanted to do this no she was a child just like them at one point but then she was chosen to be a sister and then a mother and that was that if she doesn't abide by the demon's rules they'll simply kill her and someone else will take her place of course that doesn't justify her actions or anything like that but her position certainly isn't easy basically isabella isn't some evil caricature she doesn't take pleasure in hurting the kids this isn't what she ever wanted because of her position she also has an incredibly personal connection to the kids a connection that makes her a more terrifying foe but also a source of deep turmoil for all the children in fact she even wants emma to survive and become a mother herself which is part of what shapes isabella into such a fantastic villain for emma because if isabella gets what she wants emma won't just lose her whole family it'll be even worse than that she would need to continue to perpetuate this cycle by becoming like her or she'd have to die all in all the narrative conceit of this arc is brilliant and the story does so much wonderful stuff with that concept essentially the story makes a promise the first arc will be about these kids in grace field farm about the mental battles between them and isabella and it sticks to that promise until the end of the ark nothing comes out of nowhere to save them there's no random moment where they just somehow succeed by pure chance there's always a carefully considered plan they're always working with facts the audience knew about or at least could have reasonably figured would come into play even as it radically shifted gears this made me feel like i could trust the story the promise was made and i was so excited to see where the story would go next [Music] after the first arc i knew that the promise neverland would change i mean these kids are going out into the big boy world and that means there's a lot more at play now at the very least the way they make plans will be pretty different after all before there were only so many elements they needed to consider and work with but now they know little to nothing anything is possible fortunately despite that change things keep going strong first with muchika and sanju the story slows down for a bit and focuses on morality over mind games i mean the children's biggest ally the ones who really saved them and helped them on their journey in an important way are demons who don't eat humans through them the children also learn more about the world at large and about the threats they may come up against later emma also begins to consider how different humans really are from demons after all she also needs to take life to survive out in the wild right now basically the simple human good demon's bad dynamic that's been set up is getting challenged this serves as a nice change of pace while also showing that conflict with demons isn't as simple as it might have appeared the demons aren't all bad there are good demons out there however even if he's a short-term ally sanji represents a potential long-term threat because as we see right as the kids are leaving he also wants to eat humans but he won't do it until demons hunt humans again like the good old days so even if the promise is broken even if the farms are destroyed well there are still demons who will be out to get them this arc is pretty strong but still in my mind it acts as a bridge getting the characters from grace field to the underground shelter at b0632 and once they get there the story seems so promising here the characters encounter their next threat an unnamed man who for quite some time they'll just be calling mister otherwise known as one of the best characters in the story who somehow got ranked below freaking anna in the second shonen jump popularity poll for the promised neverland and yes i'm salty about that for some reason it's just dumb i don't get it either way though mr doesn't want anything to do with the kids and in a cruel twist of fate it seems like once again a human might be their biggest threat similarly to gracefield a sanctuary has become a danger zone from there the only way for the kids to reason with him is through threats they tell him that he needs to take emma and ray to a set of coordinates maneuver left for them or else they'll blow up the entire shelter though he verbally agrees he's really planning to let one of them die out in the wild most importantly though he serves as a compelling reflection of emma there's this sense that at one time he was a whole lot like her that he cared for his family like she does and that they were everything to him but then somehow he lost them and from there he lost himself so emma's optimism and hope and her love for her family it disgusts him because it reminds him of all he's lost and all that he'll never have again this way the hmong has introduced another antagonistic force who challenges her ideals after all she doesn't want any other member of her family to die again but this man serves as a sort of proof that that could happen that she could lose everyone his existence compels the reader to ask what will happen if emma loses the people she loves and the coming arc will begin to challenge her because despite managing to connect with mr it's too late she's kidnapped and taken to goldie pond here the story naturally returns to another isolated fairly small-scale setting on top of that after seeing demons like mujica and sanju this serves as an exciting change of stakes sure there are these demons that will help them but there are other demons who are even more horrifying than the kids would have expected because these demons don't eat to satiate their hunger instead they have fun hunting humans in their own private playground in addition this is the same place where mr lost everything and now emma has to find her own way out however the real star of this arc is a lewis a demon with a particularly interesting perspective after emma saves some children he's attacking he sells himself as a real threat to her ideals see emma's smart enough to realize that lewis will want to come after her and get a big bite of that juicy brain so she tells these other kids she's safe to separate from her and go down wind that way the demons won't come after them and they won't be able to smell the kids either but lewis predicts this and kills two of those kids why well because he wants emma to suffer that way she'll hate him and hopefully direct her malice his way and try to kill him because lewis doesn't desire an easy hunt he desires a genuine conflict with humans above all else a conflict where his own life is on the line as well as theirs when that happens and only when that happens he feels truly alive as such when emma tries to reason with him well he has no interest in that this way he challenges emma a character who would like to avoid all conflict and keep her family safe by showing her something she can't have both there will be conflict between humans and demons she must fight no i don't want to pretend that everything here is perfect or that i loved every decision that was made early on when ray's in danger he carves coordinates into a tree to tell emma and the gang hey i'm heading over to the shelter of course this is a super questionable decision since other people might find these coordinates and thus find them in their supposed safe haven but i'll give the kid a break he was panicked in an unknown place and about to die my real problem with this is that he doesn't think about it later and go oh no i made a mistake it's a little moment but it feels out of character when he doesn't think about that sort of thing since he's usually so careful and strategic however my main criticism is that in goldie pond we don't know much about all these characters they're mostly strangers to us and then they're thrown into battle as such it was hard for me to feel all that invested in them when they were fighting and it turned some of these otherwise exciting action scenes into a little bit of a you know it's fine i guess whatever even so there's a lot to love here and i still really enjoy this section of the story at the least this part of the story is still incredibly promising it seems like we're moving in interesting directions and the conflict is escalating and stakes are being raised by challenging emma and rey on fundamental levels all this stuff is to say that sure the story changed after its first arc but that wasn't a bad thing instead as the promised neverland's world expanded i just wanted to learn more i wanted to learn about this demon society about how emma would go about protecting her family in a world that was so out to get them about what mr would do from here about minerva and the other humans and the promise and i could go on and on you get the point i was excited to see where this was going in fact this was gearing up to become one of my favorite series of all time maybe even fullmetal alchemist level for me and i'm so obsessed with fma that i want it to f my a either way i felt certain this was going to be great [Music] if i were to take everything i hate in stories boil it down and make it into a manga arc what i'd get would probably look a whole lot like the kavata arc it starts off fine enough emma manages to survive a near-fatal encounter with lewis well hugo who's now revealed his real name connects with the kids also a new villain is emerging a minerva's brother peter ratry beyond that the team has a goal find the seven walls we'll be able to make a new promise with mr scribbles once again minerva's books set them in the right direction they need to go to covetedalla so they get there and emma has a vision but mr scribbles tells them something interesting he wants them to meet him through the entrance next time whatever that means so there's another riddle to realize another code to crack another puzzle to piece together nope there's a time skip a one year and seven month time skip we learned that emma ray dawn gilda zack and violet have already been looking for months but to no avail they can't find the entrance right off the bat i don't like this before this time skip we'd been told that the characters had about two years left to make a new promise and save phil and the rest of the children so it would have been nice to see how the characters reacted to this taking so long after all that time ticking down it represents a massive threat to their family and in particular to emma's ideal of saving all the children the longer it takes to make a new promise the more children die in the meantime any seemingly wasted moments any mistake could weigh on emma's mind making her a more complex character by showing her weakness and her worry by using this as an opportunity to challenge her but no it's brushed aside like it's a matter of course later we'll even learn that andrew one of peter ratry's confidants has killed most of minerva's allies but i don't know it would have been nice to see some of that and then we learned that the kids have improved and studied that hugo and lucas have been training them that they've grown closer and it's clear that even if emma and the gang didn't reach their goal a lot has happened during this time skip characters have developed circumstances have changed the enemy is closing in and it's a real shame that we see almost none of that this also frustrates me because this was the perfect opportunity to develop some of these other characters okay so i didn't mention this till now but i had some worries about all these kids escaping from the farm because well we don't know who many of them are that way it might get kinda hard to care about them or to even keep track of them and they could all turn into an amorphous blob of characters who matter a lot to emma rey don and gilda but never really matter to the reader and this only got worse once emma arrived at goldie pond once all these other people got introduced and joined the team but this time here this one year and seven month gap in the story it represents a great opportunity to learn more about some of these characters to get to know them like emma does that way we'd have this personal deepened connection to the people she's most afraid of losing beyond that it feels weird that a lot of these characters never do anything i mean like they're all here so shouldn't they have something to say something to do shouldn't their will and personalities have some impact on the plot well here some of them could have been developed to the point that they would impact the plot but no that's not going to happen so yeah this time skip's a problem but what happens next while emma and the gang immediately go and find the answer they needed to reach the entrance and make a new promise as such we don't really get to see the process they go through to solve this from the reader's perspective they just kind of figure it out which feels pretty anti-climactic and disappointing but then things start to get a bit spicy because the bunker is under attack andrew has found them and he's out to kill once again the characters are trapped in a fairly isolated small scale area with an enemy closing in on them so naturally i asked myself how will they get out of this what sort of plan will they use what will they do but no that doesn't matter because the narrative structure has changed before we were generally told what pieces were in play and then we got to see what happened from there however now something happens and then we're told about the pieces in play for example after andrew breaks in we learn that the children hid guns in each room to prepare that there are various escape routes that the shelter has three entry points that there are three monitoring rooms that they put fake footage in the rooms to trick any intruders that there are emergency doors that can be shot that there's a labyrinth of tunnels attached to the shelter and so on you get the point there's a lot of stuff we didn't know now i'm not saying we need to know every detail before the attack begins but if we don't know enough details then anything can be revealed when convenient to the plot so even reasonable plans or measures end up feeling a bit contrived as such this section lacks tension because if we don't know the proper context or stakes at this point it's difficult to get invested in the conflict it just feels like whatever happens will happen which is in stark contrast to the first carefully crafted arc in this series due to the time skip i also didn't feel emotionally invested logically i can understand that the shelter is important to the kids and that leaving is hard but i only understand it on that logical level i don't feel it because i haven't seen them do much of anything here on top of that andrew doesn't feel like a proper threat because again i know so little about who he really is or about how he even made his way here this only gets worse once hugo blows up the shelter and dies with lucas now i'll get this out of the way i was upset when hugo died even if i still wasn't invested in most of these kids i was invested in hugo's journey as a character but i wasn't just upset because this was sad i was upset because it felt like i'd missed a massive chunk of his growth like i didn't quite know who he was now after all he went from a traumatized man who had cast aside his own humanity to someone who would give his life for these children however we never really saw him with his so-called new family again there's an emotional disconnect between me and the character here between what i've seen and what his most important experiences are because of that his death felt a lot weaker than i would have expected but whatever what's done is done how do the characters react to this well emma's pretty devastated she's worried she's made the wrong decisions that she could have done something to stop hugo and lucas from sacrificing themselves meanwhile rey tries to keep everyone in line he tells them they can't go out and look for you or lucas because someone might still be out there looking for them however in an unexpected but welcome moment some of the kids slip away to go look and then a couple kids are killed by andrew who somehow survived the explosion but oliver shoots him and everyone else is safe for the time being what follows this moment is super strange to me see by now we've been told time and time again that emma is going to protect everyone that she doesn't want to ever lose another member of her family again and here it happened she lost them she lost lucas and hugo and these other kids so what did we get one panel of her looking upset sure i'd accepted that i wasn't going to care about the vast majority of these people but i at least cared about emma so because of her i could give a bit of a crap but what happened how did she move on so fast at first i thought that she was just holding back trying to keep her emotions inside so that she could appear strong for these other kids but in my opinion we never properly returned to this moment she never truly grieves like i would have expected her to it really just seems like she's moved on and sorted out most of her emotions just like that up until now she's definitely been a strong character but now she's starting to come across as invincible half-baked that's probably the best way to describe this arc actually that's probably too much someone popped this loaf in the oven for two minutes tore it out of there and said yeah that's done at the end of this arc i was just so disappointed to the degree that i thought maybe i'd messed up on my end maybe i'd skipped a few chapters missed a volume falling asleep midway through something or forgotten important details but no i hadn't this was just where the story had gone now and i definitely was not liking it following the kovata dollar arc we get the king of paradise ark and well i'll admit it it pulled me back in a bit here norman makes his grand return but despite still connecting deeply with emma ray and the other kids he's a different person now see he got sent to an experimental facility called lambda where kids well to say the least they didn't have a good time however a man named smee saved him from there norman became the new minerva and he's got a plan to save the humans kill every single demon however emma doesn't want to kill all the demons and she tells norman as much she's morally against it and beyond that she's met sanju and mujica who don't eat humans and here we get one of my favorite conversations in the series where emma learns from norman that the so-called evil blood from mujica could be given to other demons after that the demons wouldn't need to eat humans anymore to keep their human shape and intelligence in other words there wouldn't be a need for conflict because demons wouldn't be eating humans at all but there's a problem a number of aristocrats hunted down and killed most of these evil-blooded demons and eventually made the promise that certain children would be raised on farms and eden when emma hears this she's in disbelief she can't even fathom why the aristocrats would do such a thing norman's reply emma it shouldn't be surprising everyone acts in their own self-interest of course that's not how every single person is but this is how the world works not everyone thinks in a kind selfless way like you beyond that emma went into this conversation thinking that mujica's existence might stop norman from killing all the demons but norman's takeaway is so different he thinks that they need to kill them because well who would just stand by and watch while he annihilates all the other demons how could they ever forgive that norman really just sees them as a hindrance to his plan but even this isn't enough he goes on to point out another issue with emma's perspective after all she thinks they can give out mujica's blood and then demons just won't eat people anymore it'll all be great it'll be fine humans and demons there's no need for conflict but norman sees it a much different way he says even if there's no need if they want to eat us they'll come for it here's what i love about norman in this section what he's saying is backed up by the narrative itself i mean we've seen demons who hunt just for the thrill of it and sanju himself is waiting for the moment where he can do just that we've also seen plenty of characters who act in their own self-interest all in all norman serves as a great antagonistic force because even if his conclusion of killing all the demons is bad from a moral perspective he's working with more complete facts than emma that way he serves as a challenge to emma merely by realizing that the world is more complex than emma wants to admit in other words he's showing how naive emma really is in the next arc what norman does following this too that's what really shapes him into an antagonist for emma which is not a position i ever expected to see him in because he lies to emma he has no intention of going along with her plans in fact he lies to don and gilda too asking them to go and find mujikun sanju to keep them safe however he really still just wants to kill them to eliminate an uncertain element that could ruin his plans now this arc isn't perfect far from it in fact it carries over some pretty big issues from the previous arc the biggest problem well during the kovata dollar arc emma and ray spent less than a chapter in the demon's land we basically saw none of the demons everyday lives considering that seeing all that is a big part of why emma is so against killing the demons it sure would have been nice to see that this even gets worse when emma reveals that she doesn't want to kill the demons and the kids are all like oh yeah you're right there's sanju and mujica and we don't really want to kill them all either we shouldn't have been excited for that before silly yes and ray looks them and says well you guys didn't go out and see the demons in town when i read that i couldn't help but laugh because here the writer is confirming how important it was to see that stuff and yet we didn't see it either despite all this though the potential of this conflict is awesome it pulled me back into the series when i was not expecting to care anymore norman's placement in this arc is brilliant he represents such an incredible threat to emma's ideals after all she's always wanted to avoid conflict with demons but now war seems unavoidable beyond that norman is out to kill her friends most importantly though norman is the perfect challenge for emma because despite all these things he's still family so what's emma going to do when there's no good option when a precious member of her family is the very thing she'll need to fight in order to find peace but that's not going to happen no from here on the promise neverland is going to choose a different way to solve its conflicts see the story will do a really good job of making you think emma's going to get challenged but she won't be no no things are going to be easy one way or another the story will find a way to twist itself around so that no matter what no matter how unlikely or weird or out of nowhere emma will succeed in almost everything basically from now on we're playing on easy mode folks now i think you know what time it is it's that part of the video where i give more examples than you could ever want but i'm really trying to make a point here okay i reread this whole thing just to make this video please stick around please stay till the end i love you otherwise known as list time let's go through some of these chapters chapter 130 when emma reveals that she doesn't want to annihilate the demons every single person here ends up agreeing with her not just in the moment either they will never go against her in fact many of them will help her but just before this they were all celebrating that they get to kill the demons having them get convinced so quickly it just makes them into such non-entities for the story like they're just there to get moved wherever the plot demands of course i don't mind some of them getting convinced but it feels ridiculous that before this none of them had considered sanju and mujica really emma was the only one to think of that i don't know i would have assumed that some of these kids thought of that but just went yeah screw him i want to kill all the demons you know hate's a powerful thing but no uh they just hadn't thought about it i guess i don't know whether you agree this makes sense or not isn't really the point my big point is that boy oh boy was that easy chapter 144 every single one of these lambda people norman sends to kill muji kunsanju gets a seizure at the same time meaning that mujica and sanju get an easy way out of this conflict without killing anyone just how emma would have liked it chapter 154 in the previous chapter emma ran into the queen's chamber found norman there with all these dead demons and it seemed like it was too late on top of that norman's also unleashed a poison upon all of these demon civilians and they're being eradicated as they speak but fortunately emma's able to convince him that he was really wrong and he wasn't doing the right thing because now she's made a promise and they can go a different route personally i didn't really buy this i didn't believe that norman would so quickly change his mind just because emma talks to him and has a new promise but maybe you think that's fine that's kind of fair they mean a lot to each other they're super close but here's where the bigger problem comes in norman isn't the only one who gets convinced every one of his confidants is convinced too which just how we've already established they aren't going through with this plan just because they think it's feasible they're going through with it because they hate demons we had a whole section dedicated to establishing that to me that prior scene the purpose of it was to show that just making a new plan just having a new option wasn't enough there was something else to overcome here and that thing was seething hatred but no they all just talk it out a little bit they're quickly convinced and that's that once again characters don't seem to have a proper will of their own instead they bend to emma's will in a direction that helps her realize her goal her way without sacrificing any of her ideals no matter how half-baked or slapped together her plans are to reach them this conflict just feels so flat again she overcomes an obstacle and it's weirdly easy chapter 156 after the queen reawakens due to her second core she's about to finally kill one of norman's people maybe even emma ray but just in the nick of time sanju and muchika show up and save the day it's that easy chapter 158 despite coming back to life the queen still dies from poison which isn't unreasonable or anything like that but it's just another anticlimactic moment chapter 159 before it was importantly established that sanju wants to hunt humans again now though he's changed his mind again not exactly unreasonable but pretty anticlimactic it's yet another thing that's been established as a challenge or obstacle for emma that conveniently gets brushed aside chapter 160. all the way back in chapter 138 we learned that ace was raised by a demon and that she hates norman and his people because they killed her father there she said she was only cooperating to survive the situation and we get a panel of her thinking i'm going to kill all of you basically she's out for blood but not really because in this chapter she runs into norman and well he's changed his mind and she's not going to do anything to him or any other people from here on out so a conflict gets set up but once again it just doesn't go anywhere chapter 167 after everyone returns to norman's hideout we learn that peter ratcher was already there and that he's taken all the kids back to grace field this is obviously a big problem but emma just says let's go and everyone jumps on board once again we don't get any of the characters plans for how they'll deal with this highly dangerous area full of powerful enemies who are waiting for them instead we're fed info about their plan as they complete it giving the sense that anything could happen because we don't know enough information about this conflict besides the plan won't really matter anyway because as ray says when something goes wrong no matter shoot the crap out of them chapter 169 after successfully capturing peter ratry it's revealed that the mothers and sisters are all there to back him up but not really because isabelle is still there and she's turned against him and quickly convinced every single other person here to do the same thing every other character falls in line people just don't really seem to have a mind of their own and the conflict is neatly wrapped up despite the fact that there really wasn't much of a good plan going into this chapter 171 in the demon city sanji and mujica are about to be executed due to crimes that peter has fabricated so maybe his actions will have some effect but no no don't be silly another unexpected element will swoop in because lewis is back baby yeah yeah that louis all the way back in goldie pond now i'll be fair the story did give us a couple hints that he was still alive after all no one found his body in goldie pond and he's related to the queen so hey maybe he has two cores too but really he comes right now without us seeing him for so long also here's the real kicker he's not just back he's back to help emma and the gang by showing that the evil blood is good this all begs the question of where have you been buddy why did you change so much last time we saw you you were kind of a psycho nut job who ruined everyone's lives and just killed people for fun but okay now i guess you're you're doing something else you're doing your own thing uh would have been good to see that but whatever we're moving along chapter 175 don't worry folks lewis isn't done yet because he wants to instate mujica's queen from most of the demon's perspective she's a nobody but everyone in the demon crowd they love it they want mujica's queen hell yeah oh also louis is abolishing the farms chapter 177 for a long time now rey has been taking a big back seat to emma emma's been the star of the show but then isabella gets stabbed by a random demon and she collapses down and everyone's crying over her so emma's chatting with her and emma keeps chatting with her and emma keeps chatting with her and then finally isabella calls over rey so that they can talk a little bit and then she dies isabella dies now the fact that i'm complaining about this might seem kind of weird at first after all i've been complaining about easy mode someone dying isn't exactly easy mode and this isn't what emma wants but in a way this makes it easier for the story to fall in line with emma's clear-cut vision of the world where everything can be good because isabella isabella is kind of a messy character i mean would everyone really forgive her in the long run she's done some pretty terrible stuff so getting rid of her oh that's easier then we don't have to deal with the moral complexity of having her around so yeah she's dead now the only casualty in this whole return to grace field section of the story chapter 179 the human world is receptive to these kids despite the fact that we'd seen this idea floating around multiple times that hey it might not be so good there so yeah before i thought they were like establishing that there would be some problems here but no it's not the world's really good they're going to be really nice to these kids fair enough i guess but kind of anticlimactic again chapter 181 the final chapter we're here folks we made it it's the final one in order to make the promise emma had to make a sacrifice the sacrifice she made was that she never see her family again so her memories have been wiped but all the other kids are on the hunt for her eventually even though they need to search a whole big world for her they find her by just going from place to place over the course of a chapter emma doesn't recognize them but feels like she's supposed to be with them if this was her sacrifice on couldn't mr scribbles have stopped this whole thing from happening the whole meetup the fact that they happen to run into each other and that she's like oh man i don't remember you but i feel like i'm supposed to be with you i know it was supposed to make me feel emotional but i couldn't just help it go what is this how is this happening we established that this wasn't supposed to be allowed but couldn't emma have been locked up in the demon world still that would have kept them separated or i don't know how about if all the other kids forgot about her too had their memories wiped i'm just saying it seems like there could have been a lot of better ways for mr scribbles to deal with this whole promise thing but really i don't even know why i'm asking questions at this point whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen and that's that so that's it that's the end of the promise neverland overall it had gone from a carefully considered mind game to a series of stapled together coincidences contrivances and easy mode conflicts slapped on top of each other and went from a series with a good dose of moral complexity and ambiguity to a simple clear-cut lesson about forgiveness that doesn't even feel remotely earned it went from a series where many people had impact and agency to a series where the only one left who mattered was our lord and savior emma and as emma somehow reunited with the family she was never supposed to see again i closed that final page and came to a simple realization i didn't really care anymore in fact i didn't think i'd be making this video because it was just whatever i don't know but then i wanted to reread it hoping hoping hoping that i had missed something because i don't want to undersell what the story was it was really good i liked it a lot i i kind of loved it but it had somehow turned into this thing this thing that barely even resembled itself and i'd just fallen so far out of love with the series that even an ending so disappointing so cheap hardly phased me it just made me go oh okay i guess that's that and all in all i just had to accept a simple fact the promise neverland had lost me somewhere along the way you

Channel: Lowart

Views: 912,504

Rating: 4.9346962 out of 5

Keywords: tpn, The Promised Neverland, The Promised Never land, tpn manga, tpn anime, the promised neverland manga, the promised never land manga, shounen jump, shonen jump, shounen manga, shonen manga, the promised neverland season 1, the promised neverland season 2, tpn season 1, tpn season 2, the promised neverland anime, promised neverland, tpn review, the promised neverland bad, the promised neverland good, manga review, tpn analysis, tpn rant, the promised neverland rant, ost

Id: 9ISdoNf3Aoo

Length: 40min 43sec (2443 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021