Yes, hello, I love your blog, you're my only window into what the fandom is doing and I could always completely skip the manga and just stick to reading here. So, about your poll of popular theories, I saw something about the demon world being underwater, would you mind elaborating, please? It's for research. For a fanfic 👀
[The poll in question]
I'm always going to advocate for reading the manga, not just because of what happened with S2, but also to see all the gorgeous detailing Demizu puts into her work that's lost in the transition to TV animation, along with her playing with perspectives/proportions in relationship to power dynamics.
(Chapter 1 | S1 Episode 1)
But thank you! <3
My understanding was the theory of the demon world being underwater was introduced by @couldnt-think-of-a-better-name, who was mainly active during the series' heyday (February 2019-July 2019, between the releases of chapters 123-142 during the King of Paradise and Seven Walls arcs and when S1 premiered in Japanese and English).
• Main post about the theory
• Secondary post about Lambda-7214 being a coordinate
• Neat edit of chapter 7's, chapter 16's, and chapter 2's cover art
• Volume 13 Special Edition mini-artbook art hinting at the trajectory of the series
I think it's interesting in how the Seven Walls search party traverses what we're presented with as the entire demon world to find clues about Cuvitidala and the Seven Walls, yet the largest body of water we see anyone interact with is a pond. Nothing close to an ocean that would present them with difficulties such as building a boat or buying one from demons.
Shirai also confirmed the elevator at Goldy Pond takes one to "a certain forest in Australia" (out of 458 forest communities).
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 3 Q&A)
While the stairs under Grace Field headquarters seem to land one somewhere on the east coast of the former United States of America.
(Chapter 178 | Chapter 179)
There's the imagery of the Statue of Liberty, leading me to believe the North American headquarters for the Ratri clan are located in (former?) New York City, but I don't know if I would necessarily say they wash up on the city's shores since Mike takes a jet out to meet them and the children aren't freezing in the November weather there. There's also the impracticality of after coming back from the demon world to transport goods or just traverse between the worlds you conspicuously land out in the open on the beach, so I believe it was the demon god's meddling that sent them to this beach, and the proper exit in one specific, singular location like the Goldy Pond one is somewhere else in the area. Two specific locations located in opposite hemispheres in our world, yet in the demon world you could potentially travel between the two passageways on foot in approximately a week based on the time it took the kids to reach the shelter at B06-32 (one day of initially wandering through the forest, five days traveling with Sonju and Mujika, and one day walking through the wasteland) and how long it took Yuugo, Emma, and Ray to reach Goldy Pond (four days) if it was a straight shot.
(Chapter 49 | Chapter 60)
It all leaves me very curious about how large the demon world is compared to the human world and how the demon god decided to split the two worlds up.
It's also interesting how despite all the water imagery in the series, we don't see any rain in the manga outside of the chapter 28 cover art (mentioned in the fourth post of that list):
But the anime chose to have a very light rain overlay during the second episode while not animating the ground or characters getting wet:
It rains in the light novels.
(TPN Light Novel 1: A Letter from Norman [June 2018] - "The Day Emma Cried")
(TPN Light Novel 4: Films of Memories [December 2020] - "Operation Stormy Night," originally published in Minerva Confidential Report Report Volume 1 that was packaged with the first volume of the Japanese S1 blu-ray in March 2019)
And we see the children playing in the snow in the past.
the promised neverland is like. red string of fate. fantasy imagery corrupted by its horror setting. everything is whimsical and fantastical and is going to eat you. the red string is choking you. fire as a force of destruction but also rebellion. fire as cleansing. fire cooks food that you eat and eating is a cycle of life that requires death. capitalism and class divides as cycles of abuse. cycles everywhere. food as horror and food as a symbol of community. the social hierarchy enforces oppression for the benefit of those at the top. eat the rich or they will literally eat you. community and collectivism as sanctuary. self sacrifice as betrayal. also Parvus is there and he looks like this
"The Promised Neverland read with English-American Literature" by Kei Toda
Partial translation of chapter 3 "Gender- Masculinity/Femininity"
Link:
The book was released shortly after the manga completed (August '20) and was promoted by Shueisha , I only translated the segment that was highlighted in readers' reviews.
while I don’t think s2 is made “intentionally” bad (intentionally short probably, but intentionally bad is imo a different cup of tea since length is made by a few people, execution is an entire production team and I feel unjustified in calling the staff/animators/composers/etc. lazy or un-caring because most of it isn’t downright bad), it does give me a bitter taste to “reward” the decision to cut things short and rush everything by investing more money.
So a part of me kind of wants to not read the manga out of pure spite.
I will do it, after all I always planned to read the manga after the anime; but now it feels a little tainted. While I disagree that anime is just made to promote the source material (it’s its own contribution to the overall brand imo), reading it now feels like I’m affirming what they did with s2 from an outsiders perspective.
Like, it worked. It “made” me invest more money in the overall brand, in this case the manga.
And idk something just has a bitter side-taste about that.
On the other hand, I don’t want to pirate or strike either, because I love TPN and any money going towards the brand can hopefully only be a good sign to who-ever out there.
(credit to @/ShamsTahsim on twitter who has provided the links)
This is a one-shot works by Shirai that tells a story from the POV of a boy named Haru Inoue. Haru had just gone through a heart transplant surgery due to an accident. But there’s something strange, he keeps dreaming of a memory that he’s unfamiliar with. The memory of another person named Ashley Goeth. One day, he sees a girl that keeps appearing in his memory the hospital he’s at, behaving wildly and screaming that “they” (the hospital workers) are going to kill her soul.
Now, long story short, here’s the twist: There’s never an actual heart-transplant occurred. The hospital Haru is in is actually a place called “Terminal 609,″ some kind of a prison for minors. Except, none of them are going to jail. Instead these “bad kids” would have their memory replaced by an artificial one (in this case, the criminal Ashley Goeth’s memory is replaced with an artificial person named “Haru Inoue”) in order to “reshape” their whole personality.
Here’s a the exact idea that Shirai had used:
Our protagonist, Haru, managed to find a close truth behind it all. Although he thinks that those fake doctors really did a transplant to him using organs of the “bad kids” that they had killed.
Now, where’s the connection to “The Promised Neverland”?
Well, for one, the idea of replaced memory is similar to the reward part of the TPN storyline. Which ended with our protagonist, Emma, suffering from memory loss.
Now, secondly, I think we can see it in this particular panel:
This panel is intriguing to me because of the exact word that Shirai used: “Paradise.”
I've always think that "The Promised Neverland" is a poetic title. Neverland. A place of happiness. A "paradise." Yet, referring to the Neverland of Peter Pan story, there's a cost to all of it. And in this "Neverland" that Shirai creates, it seems like the cost is faux happiness. An artificial paradise.
It feels to me that in both works (Ashley Goeth no Yukue & The Promised Neverland), Shirai is saying to us:
"There's a whole another world beyond what you know, would you choose venture further or are you satisfied with the happiness given?"
The concept of both works are dark and tragic. Yet, in my opinion, it still feels like there's an optimistic tone to it: The protagonists in both works are both give the chance to explore the truth. The difference is “Ashley Goeth no Yukue” ends on a tragic note, with the Haru’s failing to see the truth until the end and his memory being wiped again. While “The Promised Neverland” ends on a more optimistic note, with Emma succeeded to discover the whole truth and eventually bringing everyone out of the “Neverland.”
Well, personally, the idea of there’s hidden truth beyond what we can see is an intriguing one. Shirai Kaiu is an awesome writer, I think.
In the most recent chapter Peter Ratri, in a last ditch effort to spite Emma and the children he’s decided to attempt killing Emma in order to void the promise to let them all escape. While this may seem like Peter’s pathetic last stand, there’s a chance that he might be partially successful. He might fatally wound, or even kill Emma. However, even if he does manage that the promise itself will not end. Because here’s my prediction, in order to use the promise to cross back itno the human world, Emma was always going to have to sacrifice her life.
1. Emma’s Most Precious Thing
As any deal with the devil there was a clear condition that came with forging a new promise with the nameless god. A deal that comes with fine print is always suspicious, but it’s especially so to the reader in this case because we still do not know what Emma promised as a reward for the nameless entity in order to allow the children to return to the human world. However, there are enough clues in context to give an idea of what Emma might have to sacrifice.
The first is that the god deliberately separated Ray and Emma. Nameless always knew that Ray and Emma were going to come and find them. They speak of knowing and anticipating their arrival. It’s also specifically Ray’s common sense, his inability to let go of his own sense of internal logic and bend his mind the way that Norman and Emma do in order to imagine the impossible.
However, it’s because Ray is the more conservative and logic one that he would never allow Emma to do something too risky, or sacrifice too much in order to forge the promise. If Emma were to try to sacrifice herself, Ray would have stopped her right then and there. Therefore if the god is trying to take a reward from Emma, it makes sense to separate the two of them.
Nameless specifically outlines that they always want something important as the reward. In the case of Ratri’s descendant, they took his future to be free of the demons essentially, by chaining him and his family to working with the demons in the second world for the rest of his life.
Emma’s something important could only be a few things. The most important thing to her is the happiness of her family, but killing all the children she considered her family would make the point of reforging a new promise moot. Her dreams? Her dream was for her family to escape to the human world where they could be happy and alive. Emma herself is an admittedly selfish person though, always thinking of herself, her love for her family, and her own dreams first before anyone else’s wishes. Her big flaw to overcome was for her to become aware of her own selfishness, and ask the rest of her family for help in dealing with Norman. A future where everybody escapes without her would be an ironic punishment, and a sacrifice that Emma herself would make.
There are also two reactions themselves which inform us that the nameless god was asking for a lot as the reward. Emma knew that they were going to ask for something as a reward and was mentally preparing herself and even after that, what they asked her took her completely by surprise. We see her shock and horror in her expression, and the story uses the art to inform us of a lot that’s not directly spoken. After all, Emma’s true reaction to Norman’s plan was foreshadowed for a chapter with her horrified reaction when Norman announced it, before Ray got the answer out of her.
The second hint is Ray deliberately thinks to ask what the reward they have to pay is, but then Emma avoids the question. She even says she’ll tell him what it is later, but it’s been chapters since then and Emma has remained mute. It’s likely Emma herself is planning on telling everyone right as they’re about to leave so they have no choice but to go without her. As if Ray did know Emma was planning on sacrificing herself he would definitely stop her.
The cost of everybody else escaping is most likely Emma’s own life.
2. Emma and Norman Saving Each Other
Norman and Emma are character foils, set up as two halves of the same whole person since the beginning of the manga. I go more in depth with their foiling [here]. While Norman and Emma both seem like opposites, Emma the dreamer with her head in the clouds, and Norman the tactician willing to get his hands dirty they’re actually far too similiar. Norman’s main flaw is that he will always take the entire burden on himself. Emma’s flaw is she puts her whole family’s needs before her own. They are both people who consider their own lives expendable, but cannot accept the sacrifices of other people.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that Emma would go so far to stop Norman from sacrificing himself a second time, only to be planning to let herself die in order to forge the promise. Norman’s death is an unaccpetable sacrifice to Emma. She can’t bear to lose any of her family. The pain of losing them will always be worse for her than the pain of losing herself. Even when Emma is talking about the future she wants, she never really mentions what she wants for herself. She just mentions how she wants to save the others around her.
Emma and Norman share the same fatal flaw (literally in this case), they will both always choose to kill themselves. Their needs will always come last. They are both people who are incredibly reckless with their own lives and unable to see the importance they have to the other people around him. This is even something that Norman realizes about Emma early on when he was trying to sacrifice himself for the first time. That she’ll throw everything away at a moment’s notice, rather than face the pain of losing someone else.
If the choice is between killing themselves and killing someone else, they’ll always kill themselves, over and over again. Norman does it by shutting down his true feelings, whereas Emma does it by her total recklessness and refusing to value her own life.
The greatest cause of tension in Norman and Emma’s relationship is that both of them want to sacrifice themselves for the other. Neither of them realizes how important they are to each other. They both unvalue themselves against the other, which is why every time it looks like they’re going to get close they fight like this again. Which is why despite Norman knowing what his feelings are, and Emma losing Norman once, neither of them can let their feelings for the other grow and mature into anything romantic. They are both people who are terribly afraid of losing people, and self-sacrificing to a fault.
Emma and Norman are both fatally unable to realize the importance they have to one another. That neither of them can just disappear and die without leaving a permanent wound on the other.
Norman and Emma even have parallel sequences of saving the other at their lowest point. When Norman has succeeded in slaughtering the nobles, and stands over their corpses he sees Emma’s childhood self come to retrieve him. Norman who was speeding off to his own death because he reufsed to tell the others that the experiments had significantly shortened his lifespan is found in a pitch black void by Emma’s childhood self, who tries to lead Norman back to his own childhood.
In Goldy Pond, Emma has a similiar and parallel experience. When she is stabbed by Lewis and about to die, once again a death caused by her own recklessness and disregard for her own life by charging ahead in order to finish the fight. Emma falls away from her body and sinks into a pitch black void.
When she is falling away from herself, and from life it’s Norman who appears to retrieve her. He’s the one who leads her back to the surface by taking her hand.
These scenes are perfectly in paralllel because when Emma and Norman boWth try to sacrifice themselves, it’s always the other that pulls them back. While they both want to sacrifice themselves, more than that both of them want the other to live, and to live with them.
Which is what forms my next theory. When Peter Ratri wounds Emma, she’ll tell everyone in the aftermath that it’s fine, because if they all escaped to the human world she was going to die anyway. At that time it will be Norman who saves Emma, by reminding the children of his original plan. Instead of returning to the human world, stay in the neverland and make it into a paradise for children.
At which point all of Emma’s efforts into making demon and human coexistence possible, and stopping Norman from killing all of the demons present in this world will not go to waste as the children decide to stay behind.
There’s one last piece of evidence, in that every single member of the trio has had a climactic moment where they tried to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the other two. For Ray, it was when he tried to burn himself a live to provide a distraction for everyone’s escape. For Norman it was when he tried to go through with his plan to eradicate the demons alone, and then die of sickness so Ray and Emma could live with their family in the paradise for children Emma wanted. The only character of the trio not to be saved from an attempt to sacrifice her life so far is Emma, and because Emma in both cases is the one who talked Norman and Ray down from the edge, it’s their time finally to save her from herself.
Despite my broken heart rn, can I just say that I actually love the direction we're going right now?
I've seen a lot of anime/manga with similar scene and they be like: Character hestitated with the thought of their loved ones, wondered for too long and by the time they decided to kill the enemy, loved ones arrived and stopped them. But instead, we got to see Norman who still have a hint of heart left with what he's about to do, but choosed to move forward anyway and accepted his sin as a genocide planner.
His action just cemented Norman's character further as a changed man who has good intention but simply cannot see other way. He still has his heart for not wanting to become demon, but decided to throw it away for a logical, greater good for everyone.
He just doesn't want to lose his family anymore. Whether it's his family from GF or Lambda. Anyone.
What I'm trying to say is WE FINALLY SEE THE RESULT FROM 129 FOLKS
It's tragic and it's hurtful, but his character is actually consistent and growing. It hits hard for me because he feels real, something I truly appreciate from Shirai's writing skill.
Norman paralleling Isabella makes him even more scary than he already is lmao
I absolutely agree.
In fact, I am very worried about if we are going to get parallels to two very iconic scenes.
If Ayshe is a Krone parallel (and tbh she almost certainly is, after all we also got a backstory from each of them that completely changed our perception of the characters...), then it follows that Norman will have to handle her somehow, like Isabella did with Krone.
I am really hoping that Norman wouldn't go as far as to cause Ayshe's death, but it will have to depend on the situation. For example if Ayshe tries to kill him, or if she directly endagers the plan that he believes would save thousands/millions of lives, then I could see him making that choice.
The other scene that I am really worried about getting a parallel is this one:
It makes me so anxious, because Isabella is shown to hurt Emma out of a desire to protect Emma...
I really don't want to see Norman paralleling Isabella in this sense, but unfortunately with the current way things are, it could get to a similar state in my opinion. It would be both truly disturbing and ironic, since back then Norman clearly opposed Isabella, so him becoming like her now would be heartbreaking.
I don't want to see Norman get to this stage, but Shirai-san hasn't been exactly kind to him recently. He is under an awful lot of pressure and expectations, and pretty isolated as well, so he could easily crack, and take drastic steps. Lets hope that it won't be at least directed at Emma.
The other irony of the situation is of course that Isabella has taught him, so using the same methods as her is not such a surprise. There was a point made about this in the escape arc.
I don't think that Norman consciously wants to become like Isabella, or is even aware of acting like her, but given that he learnt by observing her, it makes sense that he would use similar methods to her. At the same time, when he realizes; he may be horrified of himself. But perhaps he has already accepted that he would dirty his hands, when he stated he was willing to become a demon...
Actually this reminds me of another parallel:
Back then Norman called Isabella a demon, and stated that she has declared war (by using the tracker openly, to intimidate them). It's ironic that now he is willing to become a demon himself, and in fact, he has declared war now (on the demons).
Of course, even if Norman goes further down the path of darkness, I don't think he will be completely lost or irredemable. Isabella wasn't either.
Shirai-san really likes to make our hearts hurt, so I think he will have Norman sink further into the Isabella parallels, before he will let him be redeemed. I do think it is coming though, Emma and Ray have both stated that they will fight tooth and nail to save Norman, and I trust them.
They will help and support him, even if they need to save him from himself and his own darkness. He will overcome it, together with their support, otherwise the message wouldn't really fit SWJ.
