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This Week in Anime - The Promised Neverland is Only Getting More Intense




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Eddy564



Joined: 14 Sep 2008
Posts: 340
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 12:53 pm Reply with quote
Definitely one of the strongest offerings from the current Shonen Jump line up. The writing is smart, unnerving, and the worldbuilding has largely been excellent. For manga readers in particular, it’s even more agonizing knowing that the best content won’t be adapted for some time because the series gets better with age.

I also really enjoy seeing female protagonists take the forefront in stories like this.
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vonPeterhof



Joined: 10 Nov 2014
Posts: 729
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 1:51 pm Reply with quote
Nick wrote:
And that gets even more intense when it turns out Daylight Savings Time still exists in the demon world and Norman's getting shipped out ahead of schedule. Whoops.

Andy wrote:
Losing that hour really creeps up on you! Sometimes the obvious details are the easiest to miss.
Um, is "Daylight Savings Time" used as some sort of metaphor here, or did I miss some explicit reference to DST in the anime itself? I mean, I assume the reference couldn't be implicit since DST hasn't been a thing in Japan since the 1950s (and even then only for a few years). Either way I'm not sure what "obvious details" are being referred to here. Was Norman's schedule switch (and/or Isabella possibly having lied to Ray about there being no shipments planned for the month) foreshadowed in any way?
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TheTsunami



Joined: 19 Jul 2004
Posts: 147
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 6:10 pm Reply with quote
vonPeterhof wrote:
Nick wrote:
And that gets even more intense when it turns out Daylight Savings Time still exists in the demon world and Norman's getting shipped out ahead of schedule. Whoops.

Andy wrote:
Losing that hour really creeps up on you! Sometimes the obvious details are the easiest to miss.
Um, is "Daylight Savings Time" used as some sort of metaphor here, or did I miss some explicit reference to DST in the anime itself? I mean, I assume the reference couldn't be implicit since DST hasn't been a thing in Japan since the 1950s (and even then only for a few years).


Reading too much into it. It was nothing more than a joke referencing Daylight Savings Time's "spring forward" with Norman's delivery time being moved up.
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Kyo Hisagi



Joined: 01 Jul 2017
Posts: 255
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 7:22 pm Reply with quote
Eddy564 wrote:
For manga readers in particular, it’s even more agonizing knowing that the best content won’t be adapted for some time because the series gets better with age


Highly debatable, Escape Arc is the best imo.
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kotomikun



Joined: 06 May 2013
Posts: 1205
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 8:55 pm Reply with quote
I'm still following this show partly out of a desire to understand why it's so popular and highly-rated, but so far I can't think of much. Good visuals and (usually) direction. Music is also good, feels like people complain about the OP a lot but it seems fine to me, it's a rare case of one that I never skip watching. It's nice that it has a female protagonist who isn't some sort of doormat, though she still gets to do less than Ray and Norman (and don't even get me started about Don and Gilda's dynamic.)

Once you get into the details, though, even ignoring the whole racism issue... mainly, it's just that I find it impossible to have any suspension of disbelief whatsoever while watching this. A perfect happy orphanage with absolutely no outwardly-visible unusual characteristics, except the world is actually ruled by man-eating demons! They look like every nightmarish shape you can think of crammed into one body! And the adults are all in cahoots with them! It's the type of setting that could only exist in fiction; it's way too specific, built around such refined established tropes and semi-universal human concepts, to be seen as a plausible alternate reality. Like a combination of what an extremely nostalgic adult imagines childhood was like (overly-idyllic, but you and your friends are geniuses and grown-ups are stealth-jerks) combined with an equally-cliche concept of what kids' nightmares consist of (big scary whatever in the shadows that eats you!).

I feel like that's precisely why it works for everyone else, though. The Krone-gets-eaten-contrasted-with-kids-eating-breakfast scene is a perfect example. You guys, apparently, saw this as super dramatic and well-edited. I uh... literally laughed out loud at that scene. More than once. Not because I hate Krone or anything, but because the goofily blatant juxtaposition killed any tension the scene might have achieved. That's the most extreme case (so far), but watching this show is mostly like that for me. Entertaining, but for the wrong reasons.
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Eddy564



Joined: 14 Sep 2008
Posts: 340
PostPosted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 11:48 pm Reply with quote
Kyo Hisagi wrote:
Eddy564 wrote:
For manga readers in particular, it’s even more agonizing knowing that the best content won’t be adapted for some time because the series gets better with age


Highly debatable, Escape Arc is the best imo.


I can see why’d you think that but Goldy Pond was a GREAT arc. And what’s currently going on in the manga is very interesting as well.
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Kyo Hisagi



Joined: 01 Jul 2017
Posts: 255
PostPosted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 7:56 am Reply with quote
Eddy564 wrote:
Kyo Hisagi wrote:
Eddy564 wrote:
For manga readers in particular, it’s even more agonizing knowing that the best content won’t be adapted for some time because the series gets better with age


Highly debatable, Escape Arc is the best imo.


I can see why’d you think that but Goldy Pond was a GREAT arc. And what’s currently going on in the manga is very interesting as well.


Um no it wasn't. It was the worst arc so far. spoiler[ so many shonen cliché, fake deaths, kids shooting from the both hands, Emma shooting when she has critical damage. Remember when she screamed and almost passed because of just a broken arm? Good stuff. Now she can aim like a sniper after been hit by a monster who can smash buildings into dust. Basically this whole arc is huge Deus Ex Machina, or Mary Sue, idc- almost every character has immortality and/or 100 luck. It escalated from being prey to being hunter TOO quickly. I can't feel sympathy for this kind of OP characters]
What's happening right now- yes, it's pretty interesting, still not the level of the first arc. Plus I can't judge it by the beginning only, I have to read the whole thing and make my judgment.
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RegSuzaku



Joined: 08 Jul 2018
Posts: 267
Location: Ikebukuro
PostPosted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 9:27 am Reply with quote
There's an episode of an anime that I really like where, basically, the characters who were raised in an orphanage talk about how it was actually not bad and not any worse than anyone else's childhoods, and that they don't like it when people feel sorry for them, or when orphanages are portrayed as horror stories in the media, because it feels like an insult to the people who were so kind to them, and... yeah...

I think about that whenever I see anything about this show...
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Chrno2



Joined: 28 May 2004
Posts: 6171
Location: USA
PostPosted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 12:11 pm Reply with quote
I gotta get back to watching this. But I need my mom to do overtime on the weekends I'm over so I can have access to her 42 inch TV. LOL!!! Now I'm putting in a 2rd Roku device in her home. But hey, everyone else is using my Netflix, 2 Rokus and my 3D BD player.

I watched the first 3 episodes and I was like, whoa didn't see that coming. Glad that I got some of the manga in so hopefully people will sit down and read it now that the show is on.

I was a little worried that this series wasn't going to hit some point of criticism where it was losing ground. Glad to know that is not the case.
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Agent355



Joined: 12 Dec 2008
Posts: 5113
Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready...
PostPosted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 7:59 pm Reply with quote
kotomikun wrote:
I'm still following this show partly out of a desire to understand why it's so popular and highly-rated, but so far I can't think of much. Good visuals and (usually) direction. Music is also good, feels like people complain about the OP a lot but it seems fine to me, it's a rare case of one that I never skip watching. It's nice that it has a female protagonist who isn't some sort of doormat, though she still gets to do less than Ray and Norman (and don't even get me started about Don and Gilda's dynamic.)

Once you get into the details, though, even ignoring the whole racism issue... mainly, it's just that I find it impossible to have any suspension of disbelief whatsoever while watching this. A perfect happy orphanage with absolutely no outwardly-visible unusual characteristics, except the world is actually ruled by man-eating demons! They look like every nightmarish shape you can think of crammed into one body! And the adults are all in cahoots with them! It's the type of setting that could only exist in fiction; it's way too specific, built around such refined established tropes and semi-universal human concepts, to be seen as a plausible alternate reality. Like a combination of what an extremely nostalgic adult imagines childhood was like (overly-idyllic, but you and your friends are geniuses and grown-ups are stealth-jerks) combined with an equally-cliche concept of what kids' nightmares consist of (big scary whatever in the shadows that eats you!).

I feel like that's precisely why it works for everyone else, though. The Krone-gets-eaten-contrasted-with-kids-eating-breakfast scene is a perfect example. You guys, apparently, saw this as super dramatic and well-edited. I uh... literally laughed out loud at that scene. More than once. Not because I hate Krone or anything, but because the goofily blatant juxtaposition killed any tension the scene might have achieved. That's the most extreme case (so far), but watching this show is mostly like that for me. Entertaining, but for the wrong reasons.

On the one hand, I hear you. My own main complaint on the series is how preternaturally smart the main kids are, to the point where I sometimes feel I'm reading the author's reasoning rather than real (smart) kids thinking things through.

I would argue that the setting and threat of child-eating demons are a fairy tale version of real life dangers that innocent children are unaware of, even when they directly threaten them. When the show started airing, I commented on how the story reminded me of an incident during WWII in which French Resistance fighters helped Jewish children escape across the border of Switzerland using techniques like dressing them up as boy scouts, teaching them to be quiet using mime, and playing a game in which they threw a ball towards the Switzerland border and told the kids to run after it (source: https://www.history.com/news/marcel-marceau-wwii-french-resistance-georges-loinger). It's more than likely that some of the kids weren't aware of the danger they were in at the time and thought they were just playing a game. The biggest difference is that those real life scenarios were organized and led by adults, and the dangers of war and genocide, then and now, are way more realistic, and, IMHO, awful, than man-eating demons.

Children throughout history have been subjected to horrific situations, from war and genocide, to physical and/or sexual abuse, to kidnappings and sex trafficking, to natural disasters. Sometimes they are aware of what's happening while it's happening, sometimes they only realize the extent of their experience in hindsight. Sometimes the adults in their lives try to protect them, even if they ultimately can't, sometimes they are complicit with what causes their children harm, and, most tragically, sometimes people harm their own children.
Children are incredibly vulnerable, and they really do need good conditions to grow up healthy and happy---safety, creating an environment in which they *feel secure,* even if they might not actually be secure, is a particularly tricky but essential component for children's brain development. Study after study have shown that children who experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and experienced them as such can have lifelong negative psychological consequences. (Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean)
Too me, this show puts the struggle to balance healthy childhood development by ensuring children feel secure with the real life dangers they are particularly vulnerable to in stark, old fashioned Grimm's Fairy Tale terms: what if the feeling of safety were only an illusion, as if often is? If the parent were complicit in harm?

I can totally see how the story's scenario can be too black & white and explicit to take seriously or relate it to real life scenarios, though.
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Sakagami Tomoyo



Joined: 06 Dec 2008
Posts: 940
Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia
PostPosted: Wed Mar 13, 2019 9:40 pm Reply with quote
Agent355 wrote:
My own main complaint on the series is how preternaturally smart the main kids are, to the point where I sometimes feel I'm reading the author's reasoning rather than real (smart) kids thinking things through.

All things considered, I don't think it's too much of a stretch. These are the oldest kids in the group, specifically bred for their brains and well educated, where the brightest kids live longest. Still maybe not a completely realistic level of smarts, but with anime generally there's a considerable amount of disbelief you need to be willing to suspend.
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Agent355



Joined: 12 Dec 2008
Posts: 5113
Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready...
PostPosted: Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:34 am Reply with quote
#884745 wrote:
There's an episode of an anime that I really like where, basically, the characters who were raised in an orphanage talk about how it was actually not bad and not any worse than anyone else's childhoods, and that they don't like it when people feel sorry for them, or when orphanages are portrayed as horror stories in the media, because it feels like an insult to the people who were so kind to them, and... yeah...

I think about that whenever I see anything about this show...

Which anime?
To be fair, if the kids weren't being raised to be food, Gracefield would be a paragon of an orphanage---despite only having one adult for...is it 3 dozen kids? (point of reference many states in the U.S. legally require a ratio 1 adult caretaker per every 3 children under 3 years old in licensed daycare centers, so only having 1 adult for such a big group is not likely to work) ...All the kids seem happy and well adjusted!
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