The Promised Neverland Season 2
This is how the promised neverland season two handles its main character meeting god, one eight-second panning still frame. Look it's already over Emma just made a Faustian bargain to rewrite the rules of reality in less time than it's taken me to describe that if you're behind on the anime, I'm sorry to drop that on you out of the blue. But I could think of no more perfect way to illustrate why absolutely no one should bother catching up unless you want to read the manga. I do recommend doing that and I won't spoil anything. The show hasn't already.
I Hate The Promised Neverland Season 2
Sadly, that ain't much I've been disappointed by anime before scene shows. I love to pieces, fall to pieces before my eyes, but never like this. The night it premiered the promised neverland season 1 instantly became one of my favorite anime ever Yazzie, and I have watched it and re-watched it more times than anything else, including re-zero, which is a lot of times, and only part of that is because we were Mining for precious fill content and a twisted maze of carefully hidden subtextual story secrets to rival the lore labyrinth of dark souls. Item descriptions go on. Ask me about owls, I dare you the promised neverland's many unanswered yet tantalizingly solvable mysteries have made it a more rewarding series than most to re-watch and or re-read magnifying glass and notepad in hand, but it was also quite simply a very well-told story, an impressively directed Chilling work of horror and a thought-provoking piece of allegory, so there are plenty of good reasons to revisit it, even if you're not trying to track the off-screen movements of a juvenile mega genius and his red-headed adoptive sibling, slash best friend in order to gather evidence and Ultimately bust them, for, oh god, am I candace Flynn, hey where's, carol, no seriously where the hell was carol in the last two episodes.
Did they forget about her? It sure seems like they forgot about it. He sure seems like they forgot a lot of things like how to make an anime feel tense and scary, how to make a human being care about a fictional character, and toward the end, how to link a sequence of events together in a coherent and meaningful manner. To form a story, and that's the real kicker here: it's not just that the promised neverland season 2 speed runs through the source material rushes, it's ending to deliver half-assed closure or fumbles through its third act, with a series of increasingly girthy ass pulls it's the cumulative effect of all of those things and more, the gradient of quality drops from episode to episode, as it goes from being one of the absolute best anime I've ever seen to one of the absolute worst, each dip, lowering your expectations farther and farther until they've fallen. As far as you think they can go and then they condense the one arc that the whole show's been building up to the return to grace field into a single unfathomably, bad episode.
And then they follow that up with an anime finale that isn't actually animated. For over a quarter of its run time, ending on a three-minute slideshow of, what's very obviously just early concept, art for the third season, and or movie that they're definitely never getting now watching. This show was like falling all the way down the Himalayas, only to discover that the base ends at the lip of the grand canyon. And what really boggles my mind is that there was no sign of this, as the season began. Sure.
The quiet, terrifying atmosphere that defined season 1 was immediately blown away by the loud, lumbering ham-fisted, horror of a unity asset store, lesser amygdala, chasing the kids through the woods, but the standoff between Rey and the farm guards was still legitimately tense. How were we to know that would be the last such moment in the entire series and the episode surrounding that was lush, with organic immersive world-building from the tunnels beneath the woods to Minerva's bunker, to the demon, town, and nearby temple of the evil blood to The heart of grace field HQ itself. That aspect does stay strong throughout the series. The manga fan in me was always thrilled to see how the artists at clover's works brought these spaces to colorful animated life, even as the plot connecting them fell apart before my eyes, and the characters within them were reduced to husks of their former selves. But even that joy is severely tempered by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, none of the manga's coolest locations, goldie pond norman's hideout demon capital and especially the seven walls, will ever be animated.
Still, that is a slow-mounting, quiet, sort of disappointment and one that was only really felt initially by those who knew what they were missing. Sure, in retrospect, these episodes are made significantly worse by the knowledge that most of what they set up from Mujica's pendant to the spiritual significance of the Gupta flower and Sanju's desire to eat humans again to the promising anime original concept of isabella leading the demons. In a hunt for her own children goes absolutely nowhere, but as they were airing, these episodes did intrigue and entertain, especially for anime-only viewers and even as we manga fans, were repeatedly wounded by first, the sudden excision of our favorite stir-crazy father figure. Then the erasure of the whole awesome survival game storyline that revolved around him. Then the two abrupt reveal of norman's, not deadness, the cutting of almost his entire crew of badass anti-demon rebels.
The revelation that, instead of getting to watch Emma mentally transcend time and space in a tesseract pocket dimension, she would be fulfilling her anti-genocide agenda by slowly strolling through the woodsman. The seven walls could have been so good, but even through all that disappointment, we - or at least I had to begrudgingly - admit that the narrative flowing through the disconnected remixed manga chapters we did get to see animated was at least coherent enough to satisfy those seeing them For the first time, heck I'd go so far as to say that the way the show handles Emma and norman's conflict about how to deal with the demons and the hatred driving the lambda kids in episodes. Six and seven was pretty damn good in a vacuum. If you can ignore how much less weight there is behind Emma's naive convictions when we haven't seen her actually put them to the test in the goldy pond, okay, there were still quite a few cracks in the reconstructed narrative, but as of the end of episode 7, it Wasn'T completely broken yet and if the long-promised anime original storyline, this was all supposed to be leading up to proved to be golden. It could have kin soogied in all those cracks to form a beautiful new hole by the way.
If you don't know what kintsugi is, you should have watched my japan, syncs 2020 review or just watched japan, syncs 2020, but that video is really good like one of the best we've ever made, and not enough people have seen it yet sorry to get distracted honestly. I'd just rather be thinking about literally anything else like shaman king did, you know they're bringing back shaman king, giving it the old brotherhood treatment. Hope they don't take 20 years to do that with this show anyway. Netflix has that. So if I keep talking about it, I'm only going to make myself a different kind of sad.
The really cruel thing about tpn2 is how it managed to stay just good enough to leave a little hope alive, that it might turn itself around right up until it barreled straight off a cliff. I don't even hate episode 8 mate. I think the way that its anime original plot puts norman in the middle of his own monstrous scheme and forces him to actually bloody his own hands if he wants to carry through with his cause, is a more compelling way of exploring his inner conflict than just Having Emma talk him out of it in the final boss chamber, the episode's depiction of the human experiments at lambda is legitimately chilling. The escape norman leads thrilling and it's cool to see Rey Emma dawn and Gilda, putting their heads and all of their skills together to track down Sanju and Mujica. Some of the scriptwriting surrounding that is exceptional.
Though like despite how the whole second episode is spent developing Emma's tracking abilities, specifically as a connection between her and Sanju. The only reason they actually managed to reconnect is that a random monster attack causes Emma to drop. The pendant Mujica gave her in a clearing that their peaceful demon pals just happened to double back through which i immediately thought would be the most contrived anime plot point I'd see all year until norman started having second thoughts mid-genocide because you not Here an adorable little demon girl who he was about to stab to death in front of her kindly blindly grandpa happens to be named Emma. What does that mean? Why did it doesn't belabor that ridiculous point to the same degree as a hack, Snyder's dialogue, but any time I'm comparing a script to batman v superman?
Something has gone very wrong and it only gets more contrived from there as an episode. 9 begins. Emma finishes talk no Jutsu and norman out of doing a genocide. Then he reveals that he's dying due to the experimental drugs he was force-fed at lambda. The other lambda super kids, who are also dying, are less enthused about quitting the genocide route, but norman is ultimately able to reason with everyone except vincent, and it turns out to be a very good thing that they spare the demons, especially other Emma's grandpa because 15 Years ago he happened upon a dying man who just happened to have a memory chip for the kid's holographic pen computer.
That just happens to contain a recipe to cure all the lambda symptoms. You know the symptoms caused by all those experimental drugs which i guess they finalized the formulas for 15 years ago. Damn the demon FDA sure do be thorough even more conveniently somehow. The chip also contains a full blueprint of grace field house, complete with guard postings that are also miraculously still up to date, despite the very publicized escape that every demon is still talking about two years later and norman's, subsequent raids on other farms. This is particularly well-timed because isabella and peter ratry, the new head of the rattry clan, who took over when Minerva, went on the run, have just hopped on the radio to announce that they'll be shipping Phil and the rest of Emma's family to lambda tomorrow.
So it's now or never for the rescue plan that they needed that exact document for. However, even those advantages might not be enough because in the cliffhanger ending vincent calls up rattry to make a deal just kidding one minute into the start of the episode. 10. All of the potential tension his betrayal might have caused is sucked out of the room when it's revealed to be part of the plan and attempt to distract peter ratry from their real infiltration efforts by the way buckle up for this episode. Summary there's a lot to cover vincent's claims, they'll be using hot air balloons to disperse demons, degenerating drugs over the farm and the sociopathic rattree takes this.
Kid, he's never met at his word adjusting patrols accordingly, while a deeply fearful, Phil packs his bags and then moves out in the dead of night with his oblivious, younger siblings, a fleet of hot air balloons descends on the farm, the guards bring them down with spears. Only to discover that they're decoys loaded not with drugs and kids but bombs, then an attack force consisting of Sanju and the lambda kids ambushes. Those guards by leaping from other balloons that weren't shot down. Because, under the cover of all this chaos, the gracefield kids return to the burned-out ruins of their long-abandoned home, taking less time than the ed does to reflect on that dramatic moment before descending into an old. Well, that leads straight into the sewers.
Under the main base, once inside Rey knocks out the canonically super-strong healing factor, demon guards with one lead pipe to the head, and steals their headset radios, I can't overemphasize how much I hate this. It all goes so quick and easy for our heroes that it retroactively trivializes the entire escape arc-like really these hazmat suited goons, are what we were so afraid of. As the kids tie, the guards up Emma escorts some of the younger children to a warehouse where they disguise themselves in shipment day clothes, so they can infiltrate the other groups of kids and deliver messages to Phil and their other siblings. Meanwhile, vincent's been busy hacking into the grace field network, allowing him to shut down the cameras and take control of the security doors, so Emma and the gang can finally begin the attack by shooting the cameras that he just deactivated. This brings us to the episodes halfway.
Point hope that buckle's still fastened the lights all shut down and on Emma's intercom signal, Phil and co start a merry chase through the halls of grace field, HQ which all the other kids agree to take part in because using the sewers and tunnels it takes everyone Less than two minutes to reach the ornate elevator room at the center of the facility, the episode does at least give Emma's tearful reunion with Phil a modicum of breathing room, which is nice. But then it's right back to wind us when oh, no, the elevator doesn't work and oh, no, all the doors have slammed shut, because, oh no, all the moms and sisters are here with guns, isabella walks in dramatically with a taunting peter ratry, not far behind and The kids are forced to drop their weapons, there's a tense standoff between rattry and Emma, where she defiantly declares that she doesn't give a damn about destiny and then exactly one minute and 50 seconds after re-entering the story is a credible threat. That'S been built up to for the entire season isabella and her sisters turn their guns on their boss instantly. Solving the problem that whole bit about her getting back the kids who betrayed her was a lie. If you were excited by the prospect of an anime original strategic rematch between Emma norman Rey and the woman who raised them too badly, it was just a slightly different setup to do almost exactly the same thing.
The manga did with her only faster and worse, but then oh no again reinforcements from the other farms are coming and they're gonna kick all their wait. No, it appears that old man deus ex machina managed to whip his entire town up into a revolutionary frenzy. Off-Screen and they brought a battering ram once Sanju kicks in the control room door like a boss. It'S all over for these grace fields. Chumps rattry gives up upon realizing the civilians have the power of the evil blood.
But while he's despairing about the end of his family's legacy, the always gracious Emma offers him her hand, a gesture that would be incredibly powerful if we knew literally anything about this guy. Sadly, they only started establishing his character with a short flashback two episodes ago. So if you haven't read the manga tough titties, it means absolutely nothing episode. 11 attempts to remedy this by kicking off with a PowerPoint presentation of peter's backstory, the chain of events that led to him, murdering his own brother, and the string of atrocities that followed that before he melodramatically slits his own throat in slow motion. Five minutes in this leaves only 15 to wrap up isabella's character arc, get the kids through the portal and reach a happy ending 14 after they're done, introducing the demon, aristocrats, and queen, whom we will also never see again, they managed to squeeze the kids tearfully forgiving Isabella for everything she did over the course of an entire season of anime into two minutes.
Goodbye to grandpa takes 30 seconds. Then all that's left is a slow, dramatic, elevator ride down to the portal, most of which is spent staring at the ceiling. But hey it's a very nice ceiling plot-important too, or it would be if the plot kept going upon reaching the big stone portal of truth, knockoff in the gracefield basement Emma realizes she can use the magic problem-solving pen. One more time is a key to open it because it totally makes sense that a modern piece of hyper-advanced technology disguised as an only slightly less modern writing instrument would open a 700-year-old magic portal. The really weird bit is that the pen isn't even standing in for a different key McGuffin here.
The portal in the manga was just an open, staircase leading down into an Escher-esque inter-dimensional void. I do understand that they chose not to animate that much cooler thing and repurpose the door to the seven walls here. So they could do the big, dramatic goodbye scene where the door slowly closes between everyone heading to the human world and Emma's crew. Who'Ve decided to stay behind and help with the anti-farm revolution. Her bloodied hand slipping through Phil's innocent unstained fingers at the threshold, real symbolic but uh.
The seven walls portal didn't have a lock either. Why invent a new problem if you're, just gonna write the dumbest possible solution to it, and I mean the pendants right there around Emma's neck being completely useless? I don't understand how it got this bad after that we get to watch all of the kid's sisters and moms settle into the human world and dawn discover drip in a minute and 30 seconds of storyboards. Then, after Emma's done meeting god that the whole revolution, business is encapsulated in one picture of Sanju making a deal with the demon's religious leaders, one nighttime shot of the capital city, one shot of the sun, rising over some discarded flags, one shot of Mujica being coronated. And that's all folks, Emma just saved the entire world, with 30 seconds leftover to walk through the portal to Ellis island on a day that uh Phil just happens to be there on a field trip.
Apparently, since neither of the anime screenwriters nor mangaka series. Composer kaiushirai wanted to take credit for the last two episodes. They probably didn't have much say in how it all went down that's important to keep in mind before you start uh, yelling at animators or even studios on Twitter. I guarantee that every adaptation that hurts you personally was 10 times harder on the people who actually had to make it as hackishly slapdash as this finale is. A lot of people probably slept under their desks to get it out the door if they slept at all the anime industry can be like that at the best of times, and given how many animators this production needed to recruit from Twitter, this definitely was not the best of times, of course, most anime don't turn out anywhere near this bad.
So what led to this disaster? Well, I can only speculate, but my previous speculation that the anime would causally cascade into a parallel timeline did prove to be correct. It'S just that. Most of that timeline was condensed into a PowerPoint presentation and shoehorned in after a stripped-down version of the season. Finale they clearly originally planned for I'd bet good money that the last credits were supposed to roll right.
After that, the big stone door slammed shut and I'd further wager that a combination of fan, reactions too and dipping ratings for early episodes is what caused the production committee. Who are the ones who actually have the final say in this not clover works or even Shirai, to cut their losses and turn that cliffhanger into a skeleton of a conclusion? My best guess is that that call was made in the week they bought themselves by gratuitously recapping 17 episodes, which would have left the team with only 6 weeks to rejigger and already have finished ending. That must have been hellish. Of course, the seeds for that were really planted far earlier when they initially opted not to give us the goddamn goldy pond adaptation we all wanted.
This is a massive entertainment franchise from the biggest name in manga publishing, with a lot of money riding on it, not an environment conducive to big creative risks. So the real question is: why did they try this in the first place if my initial theory that caiushirai wanted to use different versions of the same story, to give us different angles on various clues to the show's deeper mysteries is true. That would have been kind of a baller artistic move, but the new anime doesn't really provide many clues not seen in the manga and the ones it does are rendered unreliable by animation errors. Also, you'd think the series creator could come up with a more interesting parallel timeline than just reordering plot beats. They already did in the manga, so maybe there was some other more pragmatic reason for skipping the content they did.
Goldie pond does introduce a massive cast of new characters with speaking roles 19, counting both the demon villains and the human resistance, as does norman's paradise, hideout, which the series writes its way around by sticking to just the main four lambda kids, one of whom doesn't talk Representing all of demon society, besides Mujica and Sanju, with two random villagers, one old guy, and his granddaughter and using red herring cutaways to a recycled isabella in lieu of actually having a new persistent villain for the season. They sure did cut down on their need. For new voice actors alternately, one of my Twitter followers, big Dylan j, suggested that they may have just wanted to avoid animating children with guns, which would also explain why the Minerva, bunker's armory, was empty and would be understandable, given that the first season gained a lot Of its fans through Toonami, that sort of imagery just hits a little different in America and it might have been hard to get back on television with Emma brandishing an assault rifle or it could simply be that with the manga over and financial incentives to produce a Tv anime dwindling, they just wanted to wrap the show up in one season and a movie again, though, we can only speculate barring some behind the scenes. Tell-All we'll never know for sure why this went down the way it went down, but I can say with absolute certainty that I have never in my life, been more let down by anime. The promised neverland season 2 makes the drop from eincrad to alpheim.
Look like a kitty slide. I've been trying to cut down on the hyperbolic rage content because it's bad for my mental health and the anime internet at large is angry enough already, but I hate this ending. I mean really hate it in a vicious personal way, watching it hurt me deeply and complexly like seeing a cherished old relative slowly forget who they are. This is one of my favorite stories. These are some of my favorite characters.
If the fill video didn't clue, you in I am deeply invested in this world, the sheer disrespect that this ending and to some extent the whole season has shown toward all of that is just plain galling, but i can at least take some kind of sick solace In the knowledge that I'm not alone, that it was so bad, even anime only is blissfully unaware of what they're missing can see how thoroughly they gutted this thing. I know some of you still enjoyed it on the whole and I'm not gonna knock. Anyone who does there is even some things to like about the ending. I mean look at Phil. He got so big where the is carol.
Sorry, you're entitled to your sense of closure, just like we're entitled to the gnawing void where our hearts used to be I'm glad we could reach this understanding. The manga has been helping me fill that void a bit, especially with the new epilogue and special insert chapters.
