Manga Thoughts: The Promised Neverland 20
Oct. 12th, 2021 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThere was something grudging and unfortunate to my starting to watch the Promised Neverland anime, acknowledging how well its “grade school Great Escape” story worked for me, and winding up calling it a “personal standout” title for a year I hadn’t seen quite as many titles from compared to years just previous at the time. My perpetual petty resentment towards Aniplex of America’s home video pricing strategy (and the “they wouldn’t keep selling anime over here if they weren’t at least making a profit from those fans who will pay their prices, so deal with it” counterargument) keeps getting in the way of watching their shows streaming (as opposed to series licensed for streaming but not released on home video over here at all). However, I could at least start buying the original manga. That’s my usual fallback and fig leaf when dealing with “anime I don’t want to pay that price for” (although, as ever, I can’t imagine it doing any good for the people who worked on the anime to get my attention in the first place.) I read as far into the manga as the anime had adapted, taking my time between volumes, perhaps not getting the same sense of “impending menace” without the anime’s shadows and what would happen now clear in my mind, and wondering whether Posuka Demizu’s artwork for Kaiu Shirai’s story had “character” beyond the smoothed-over animation designs to the point of looking a bit odd. As the escape concluded with the characters standing on the edge of wide-open possibility all over again, I stuck a bookmark in the volume I’d only got a bit into and left it on a stack with its follow-ups, supposing I hadn’t picked up too much of a sense of what might happen next from their cover art. There would, after all, be another instalment of the anime coming.
When there was an announcement last spring the anime’s continuation would be one more series delayed amid general production crisis, though, I turned to my stack of unread manga with something of an “and what if there isn’t a ‘later’ to save this for?” feeling to grapple with. The story did change with the ghoulish intimations driving its first events coming closer to the characters, but I kept reading with interest until I’d got to the bottom of the pile and was waiting for further volumes to become available one at a time. When the anime did show up at last, I was still operating in a “wait until every episode is available to stream” mode, and supposed it would now amount to “a way to re-experience events I’d already read about.”
Over three months, however, I couldn’t help but notice comments that the plot arc a great many had hoped to see adapted hadn’t shown up at all. Then, complaints the anime was racing at ridiculous speed through all of the manga started showing up. When it was all over, people seemed in such a bad mood they were complaining the manga’s conclusion hadn’t been that great to begin with. Without having paid the stiff initial cost of “buying into” the first anime home video release or joining in the drop off the cliff by continuing to watch I might have been in a better position than some to consider myself “pointed to the original source” as other times have had it, but the possibility of that original source being a letdown itself did concern me.
At the same time, I’d still been interested in the manga I’d read as itself, able to adapt to how it had wound up something different than what the anime had made of it such that I wasn’t quite stuck thinking “the beginning was the best part.” I could even see some point to a counterargument or two run across there’d been themes running throughout the anime had brushed by somewhat for the sake of a particular atmosphere. The characters I’d started with had indeed grown up a bit (although the youngest kids to have escaped were still kids such that more characters showing up overshadowed them), and I’d been interested in the developing dilemmas they’d done their best to overcome. After thinking the penultimate volume hadn’t seemed that bad even as the characters had closed a circle with some additional maturity to the point of “maybe they’re just showing they’ve already passed their steepest test,” the final volume showed up at last, and then I’d got through other manga to read (while still stuck wondering if I’m being too cautious about “letting things brought in from outside just sort of sit around before really handling them”) and could read it.
There did seem space in the story to let last events play out at some length, and for all that I’m often conscious these days how “complications in fantastic stories can be arbitrary to the point of their resolutions feeling imposed from the author as well” there was a sense to me of “there are consequences to the resolution that aren’t easy for the characters to just shrug off in turn, but it’s not a ‘that’s that’ ‘downer’ either.” Some other people did seem to have been all right with the manga in the first place. The only issue now might be the familiar one of “it wouldn’t be bad to go through the story again, but I’ve got so much other manga to go through for the first time.”
When there was an announcement last spring the anime’s continuation would be one more series delayed amid general production crisis, though, I turned to my stack of unread manga with something of an “and what if there isn’t a ‘later’ to save this for?” feeling to grapple with. The story did change with the ghoulish intimations driving its first events coming closer to the characters, but I kept reading with interest until I’d got to the bottom of the pile and was waiting for further volumes to become available one at a time. When the anime did show up at last, I was still operating in a “wait until every episode is available to stream” mode, and supposed it would now amount to “a way to re-experience events I’d already read about.”
Over three months, however, I couldn’t help but notice comments that the plot arc a great many had hoped to see adapted hadn’t shown up at all. Then, complaints the anime was racing at ridiculous speed through all of the manga started showing up. When it was all over, people seemed in such a bad mood they were complaining the manga’s conclusion hadn’t been that great to begin with. Without having paid the stiff initial cost of “buying into” the first anime home video release or joining in the drop off the cliff by continuing to watch I might have been in a better position than some to consider myself “pointed to the original source” as other times have had it, but the possibility of that original source being a letdown itself did concern me.
At the same time, I’d still been interested in the manga I’d read as itself, able to adapt to how it had wound up something different than what the anime had made of it such that I wasn’t quite stuck thinking “the beginning was the best part.” I could even see some point to a counterargument or two run across there’d been themes running throughout the anime had brushed by somewhat for the sake of a particular atmosphere. The characters I’d started with had indeed grown up a bit (although the youngest kids to have escaped were still kids such that more characters showing up overshadowed them), and I’d been interested in the developing dilemmas they’d done their best to overcome. After thinking the penultimate volume hadn’t seemed that bad even as the characters had closed a circle with some additional maturity to the point of “maybe they’re just showing they’ve already passed their steepest test,” the final volume showed up at last, and then I’d got through other manga to read (while still stuck wondering if I’m being too cautious about “letting things brought in from outside just sort of sit around before really handling them”) and could read it.
There did seem space in the story to let last events play out at some length, and for all that I’m often conscious these days how “complications in fantastic stories can be arbitrary to the point of their resolutions feeling imposed from the author as well” there was a sense to me of “there are consequences to the resolution that aren’t easy for the characters to just shrug off in turn, but it’s not a ‘that’s that’ ‘downer’ either.” Some other people did seem to have been all right with the manga in the first place. The only issue now might be the familiar one of “it wouldn’t be bad to go through the story again, but I’ve got so much other manga to go through for the first time.”