The Promised Neverland

I'm crying inside. After the first season, my feelings about The Promised Neverland were in 7th heaven and I was eager to stretch them out for at least another 11 episodes. I trusted few anime so deeply (I even bought the manga for my girlfriend, who liked reading it), so the overwhelming out of the blue and growing frustration with dismay after the 4th episode was akin to the proverbial daggers in the back, stealing one's first born, and other similarly equivalent betrayals (even Saruman would feel childish). Not only the creators, but with them the characters began to trade sanity for madness, tearing out pages of the source material by the dozens and trying to tyrannically cram a disproportionate amount of substance into the few remaining episodes with a requisite dose of profanity and pointless manipulation. The tension, the intelligence, the atmosphere – everything boasted by the first season vanished into thin air faster than a bitcoin offered for a few crowns. The hitherto believable developments took an undignified twist and turn for the main characters, the rival world dissolved with the ease and speed of a snap of a finger, and instead of imaginatively rising from their seats at the end to collective deafening applause, you absorb the incomprehensible final minutes of a deadly unmoving Power Point presentation, realizing with each passing second that even your deeply loathed mother-in-law is actually much nicer than this ordeal. Any even slightly passionate fan must have asked themselves at least 10 times the fundamental question "Why and at what cost?" this tragic act took place. But do we want to know? Personally, for peace of mind and sleep, probably not. This anime was indeed just promised; it would have been preferable if this Neverland from Season 2 had never existed. Objectively a nostalgic 2 stars; subjectively I would rate it even more uncompromisingly. (29/03/2021)

A well-deserved exhalation and discussion of things nicer than before. Evil is not everything it seems. It's got that pleasantly Hobbit/LotR vibe, where you travel through inhospitable lands and find a nice and unexpected refuge here and there. I won't give it full marks just because it wasn't anything epic or climactic, but I didn't notice any mistakes. (18/01/2021)

I'll admit that even I was a bit embarrassed by this episode, and I haven't read the manga. The build-up got weird, the kids started committing previously unimaginable transgressions, and the ending didn't make much sense. After I finished reading the manga up to this point, my opinion of this episode dropped a bit more. The author of the manga is in touch with the creators, so I'm curious as to why they made the decisions they did. (04/02/2021)

Total disaster and an explosion on live TV. As a huge fan of this anime/manga, the development of season 2 is heartbreaking to me. (07/02/2021)

So this episode trumped everything. I can't think of a better representation of how to bounce back and get rid of something for good. To pile hours of material into a few minutes full of unmoving slides would be an insult even to the manga, let alone the anime. I have never experienced such a harsher letdown after a first episode. (29/03/2021)