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EP. REVIEW: The Promised Neverland

It's a shame that the series also has one of the sharpest quality drops I've ever seen after said first arc ends, now being maybe among the worst in JUMP imo.

It's a shame that the sourness leftover from reading the current chapters of the manga is interfering with my enjoyment of this, when the first arc is actually quite great.

Although I agree that the manga's current chapters almost feel like they're from a completely different series than the ones that the anime is covering, I think it's important to recognize that JUMP's readers seem to really like the current arc (if the "weekly rankings" that people keep referencing are to be believed).

^Okay, now i'm curious! Is the current manga arc really "bad" or just different from what some readers expected like the infamous "Farmland Arc" in Vinland Saga for example (personally, i don't mind some mild, properly tagged spoilers...)?

BGM?

Most non Japanese portrayed in anime is done with caricature and stereotyping (down to some silliness like all Americans being blond and all Russians silver haired), with some amusing subversions in a few shows like Chihayafuru. The stereotypes are of course worse in the case of people of African descent, though some part (but not all) of that is viewing it through our own shameful history. Note that anime can come in for criticism (at least overseas) for not emphasizing ethnic features and caricaturing enough, as in the case of depicting tennis player Naomi Osaka as a generic anime character without distinctly portraying her half Haitian heritage (and thus implying that she's full Japanese, because that's what uncaricatured anime characters are assumed to be.)

Indeed, the umbrella term "POC" is incredibly useless in the Japanese context. Since the boundaries for what is considered a race are socially determined, in Japan, where ethnic Japanese are an enormous majority (but no real government statistics exist on ethnicity and ancestry as opposed to citizenship, much like France), there's a large racial difference between them and people of Korean and Chinese descent that wouldn't be as clear in an American context (much less the even more useless in Japan category of "Asian" used in the US for such a diverse set of peoples.) Japanese in Japan and depicted in anime are the dominant overwhelming majority, so the term POC shows as being much inferior to the older term "minority" in this instance.

Just couldn't leave the show alone. We had to make up pretend racism just because a character is black. They did this same nonsense with Good Luck Girl, which was a shame. We'd have likely gotten more of that show if virtue signalers hadn't tried to make it about their feelings.