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The Unfulfilled Potential of The Promised Neverland Anime




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BlackPoint.



Joined: 23 Oct 2015
Posts: 708
PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:30 am Reply with quote
Welp the anime was pretty much doomed to fail the moment they dedicated that this was gonna be the final season and as mentioned in the article with the mangas already pacing issues there was just no way this would end good...Quite a shame to ruin such an series that made many surely to pick up the manga after 1st season only to stab them in the back in the end Neutral
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Brent Allison



Joined: 01 Jan 2011
Posts: 2444
Location: Athens-Clarke County, GA, USA
PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:55 am Reply with quote
On the one hand, this sounds like a great opportunity to have students compare and contrast the manga and the anime adaptation while exploring the conveyance of social messages in a popular narrative. On the other hand, I have terrible reactions to anything from the horror genre, so this was a no go. Ah well, at least Moriarty the Patriot happened to be a detective thriller that also explored social injustices, so I got something I could work with.
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 12:09 pm Reply with quote
While it's a shame that S2 ended up being a failure, as someone who only watched the anime, I don't think I would have liked a more faithful adaptation. The idea that the show becomes a semi shonen with guerrilla warfare is not one that I find interesting in the slightest. It double down on what I found to be the least interesting aspect (the demon being constantly shown to be incredibly dumb and getting out witted by a bunch of kids) while not really bringing anything that hasn't been done before.
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Sven Viking



Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 1034
PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 12:44 pm Reply with quote
When 7SEEDS released and I said:

Sven Viking wrote:
Trying to cram an average of 1.33 volumes into each 22 minute episode would be madness with almost any manga, let alone something like 7 Seeds. At the same pace, the Promised Neverland adaptation would have been 3.75 episodes long, for example. The plot would have similarly become a ridiculous mishmash of disparate elements with no emotional weight.

I didn’t mean I wanted to see it demonstrated. Sad

Brent: The first season is more thriller than horror apart from about three scenes throughout and works pretty well as a stand-alone story imho. While the arc comes to a satisfying conclusion, though, treated as a final conclusion the ending would admittedly be ultra-open-ended.

Personally I found the whole spoiler[stab your kid brother to death for being a bully] thing seemingly being presented as Morally Ambiguous in Moriarty more horrific overall.
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Beatdigga



Joined: 26 Oct 2003
Posts: 4352
Location: New York
PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 1:36 pm Reply with quote
I am morbidly curious as to how Amazon Prime's apparent take on this show will go, and if they'll learn the obvious lessons about the second half.
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malvarez1



Joined: 17 Nov 2008
Posts: 1628
PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:22 pm Reply with quote
meiam wrote:
It double down on what I found to be the least interesting aspect (the demon being constantly shown to be incredibly dumb and getting out witted by a bunch of kids) while not really bringing anything that hasn't been done before.


I have one more reason to hate the anime now...

The demons are NOT dumb at all in the manga...that was just in the anime. They're not a cake walk in the slightest in the manga, it's a genuine challenge, taking on the demons.
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dm
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Joined: 24 Sep 2010
Posts: 1346
PostPosted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:36 pm Reply with quote
I didn't have time to watch this second season when it was airing, so now I guess I'll skip it. I'm not too surprised it was disappointing --- I really haven't cared much for the manga after the escape from Grace Field House, either. I think it would be hard to have a "good" adaptation because the situation is pretty untenable.

I think the writer had a great idea, but that it only went up as far as the escape from the farms. After that, what do you do? Where do your characters go next? I suppose there were possibilities (e.g., instead of two disaffected demons, an entire sub-class of demons teetering on the edge of rebellion, perhaps?), but I don't know if that could be made to work out, either.
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taster of pork



Joined: 11 Nov 2008
Posts: 594
Location: My House
PostPosted: Wed Mar 31, 2021 1:49 am Reply with quote
I've watched the First Season and I've been reading the manga. After really enjoying the story It really sucks to hear that ending isn't good, but I still plan to finish the manga since I've only got one more vol to read. I'm just really hoping that Isabella shows up one more time.
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Sven Viking



Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 1034
PostPosted: Wed Mar 31, 2021 9:24 am Reply with quote
taster of pork wrote:
I've watched the First Season and I've been reading the manga. After really enjoying the story It really sucks to hear that ending isn't good, but I still plan to finish the manga since I've only got one more vol to read. I'm just really hoping that Isabella shows up one more time.

I haven’t finished the manga yet but I’ve seen people who do like the ending, by the way, so it isn’t a universal opinion at least.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4564
PostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2021 4:13 pm Reply with quote
This was a fascinating read. What I find most interesting is the assertion that, even if the anime had made an attempt to faithfully adapt the rest of the material, the choices made in adapting the first season would have caused issues later on. Now I'm left wondering what I would have thought of the story's change in direction, because just based on the snippets presented here, I'm not sure I would have been a fan. I mean, the idea of the kids running around packing heat as guerrilla fighters sounds patently absurd, and not at all in line with what made me fall in love with the series in the first place. Maybe that first season was like catching lightning in a bottle: it took the source material and honed it to a razor's-edge masterpiece of tension and looming horror. Regardless, I'm still lamenting the fact that I'll never get to make that determination myself, and instead am stuck having to suffer through whatever the hell this season actually is.

(Now that I stop and think about it, there's more than a little overlap between what happened here and how Berserk has been treated in animated form.)
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HoshizoranoUtage



Joined: 20 Jul 2020
Posts: 53
PostPosted: Sat Apr 03, 2021 4:23 am Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:
This was a fascinating read. What I find most interesting is the assertion that, even if the anime had made an attempt to faithfully adapt the rest of the material, the choices made in adapting the first season would have caused issues later on. Now I'm left wondering what I would have thought of the story's change in direction, because just based on the snippets presented here, I'm not sure I would have been a fan. I mean, the idea of the kids running around packing heat as guerrilla fighters sounds patently absurd, and not at all in line with what made me fall in love with the series in the first place. Maybe that first season was like catching lightning in a bottle: it took the source material and honed it to a razor's-edge masterpiece of tension and looming horror. Regardless, I'm still lamenting the fact that I'll never get to make that determination myself, and instead am stuck having to suffer through whatever the hell this season actually is.

(Now that I stop and think about it, there's more than a little overlap between what happened here and how Berserk has been treated in animated form.)


I'm almost done with the manga. The "shounen battle"-type arc wasn't really something I liked much, but after that it gets interesting again. Emma gets much more character development, and is one of my favorite manga characters now.
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Palewanker



Joined: 05 Apr 2021
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2021 12:06 pm Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:
This was a fascinating read. What I find most interesting is the assertion that, even if the anime had made an attempt to faithfully adapt the rest of the material, the choices made in adapting the first season would have caused issues later on. Now I'm left wondering what I would have thought of the story's change in direction, because just based on the snippets presented here, I'm not sure I would have been a fan. I mean, the idea of the kids running around packing heat as guerrilla fighters sounds patently absurd, and not at all in line with what made me fall in love with the series in the first place. Maybe that first season was like catching lightning in a bottle: it took the source material and honed it to a razor's-edge masterpiece of tension and looming horror. Regardless, I'm still lamenting the fact that I'll never get to make that determination myself, and instead am stuck having to suffer through whatever the hell this season actually is.

(Now that I stop and think about it, there's more than a little overlap between what happened here and how Berserk has been treated in animated form.)


Agreed with the kids packing heat stuff, i mean the fans were bigging up as "non generic battle shounen" but in the end it was all the same, so ironic lol


Sven Viking wrote:
taster of pork wrote:
I've watched the First Season and I've been reading the manga. After really enjoying the story It really sucks to hear that ending isn't good, but I still plan to finish the manga since I've only got one more vol to read. I'm just really hoping that Isabella shows up one more time.

I haven’t finished the manga yet but I’ve seen people who do like the ending, by the way, so it isn’t a universal opinion at least.


The ending isn't bad, its just anticlimactic, same with SnK
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Palewanker



Joined: 05 Apr 2021
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2021 12:12 pm Reply with quote
meiam wrote:
While it's a shame that S2 ended up being a failure, as someone who only watched the anime, I don't think I would have liked a more faithful adaptation. The idea that the show becomes a semi shonen with guerrilla warfare is not one that I find interesting in the slightest. It double down on what I found to be the least interesting aspect (the demon being constantly shown to be incredibly dumb and getting out witted by a bunch of kids) while not really bringing anything that hasn't been done before.


dm wrote:
I didn't have time to watch this second season when it was airing, so now I guess I'll skip it. I'm not too surprised it was disappointing --- I really haven't cared much for the manga after the escape from Grace Field House, either. I think it would be hard to have a "good" adaptation because the situation is pretty untenable.

I think the writer had a great idea, but that it only went up as far as the escape from the farms. After that, what do you do? Where do your characters go next? I suppose there were possibilities (e.g., instead of two disaffected demons, an entire sub-class of demons teetering on the edge of rebellion, perhaps?), but I don't know if that could be made to work out, either.


Its a common beliefs that the original author only plan for the first arc, and he couldn't keep up with the weekly pacing to improvise.

That's a big flaw for a weekly manga author
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Sven Viking



Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 1034
PostPosted: Mon Apr 05, 2021 1:00 pm Reply with quote
There are a lot of manga like that :/. In the case of something like Berserk, the author just frequently takes multi-month breaks, but very few people have that kind of luxury. (Plus to be honest that type of extreme may be taking things too far in the opposite direction, to a point where it actually becomes counterproductive.)

In a perfect world he would have been able to write an improved plot for the anime, having had more time to think on it and the benefit of hindsight. Clearly there’s nobody to pay for something like that, though Sad.
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