YMMV / The Promised Neverland

• Applicability: Many readers of the manga series and viewers of its anime adaptation have debated whether the story is a Marxist commentary on abuses under capitalism, a vegan allegory of the meat industry and factory farming, both, or a non-political tale that people are reading too much into.
• Ass Pull: In the last chapters, Leuvis pulls Deus ex Machina by revealing that he was Not Quite Dead and turned out to have had a second core, suddenly appearing alive and well to save Mujika and Sonju and reveal the conspiracy to the demon public. Although the first one has a minimal foreshadowing in the form of Never Found the Body (a shot near the end of the arc where he was supposedly killed shows his hat and a bloodstain where his corpse should have been), the others have no foreshadowing at all and contradict the earlier explanation not too long ago that having a second core like Queen Legravalima is a very uncommon phenomenon.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Touch Off" by UVERworld is a pretty rocking and electronic track fitting for the journey that the orphans embark on.
  • "Zettai Zetsumei" by Co Shu Nie is a rock piece telling of breaking away from despair to move forward, fitting the series' theme about the cast escaping from the orphanage.
  • Isabella's song. It also turns out to be the same song that plays when Emma and Norman resolve to escape from the farm, and lastly (in Season 1), when the kids successfully escape.
• Catharsis Factor: The main characters are cute children living in a Crapsack World so it's pure catharsis to see them triumph over their antagonists.
  • After Isabella appeared to be a step ahead of the kids at every turn, and Norman was apparently shipped out Emma managed to completely fool her into thinking she had given up while planning an escape plan under her nose. By the time Isabella realized the plan, it was too late to stop it.
  • Lord Bayon and the other evil aristocrats gleefully murder children in their hunts (Bayon reveals he had done so for centuries). So it's very satisfying to see the children they had been hunting fight back. This finally sees the kids kill the demons who had been oppressing them after previously only surviving by running.
  • Emma, despite her injuries, gets back up and fires off a flashbang that blinds the otherwise unstoppable Leuvis, allowing a hail of bullets to finally bring him down.
  • Andrew survived Yuugo's Taking You with Me and continued to pursue the kids for no apparent reason other than spite while belittling them as livestock. He takes a bullet through the arms before getting eaten by a demon himself.
  • Legravalima and the Five Regent Families were revealed to have been ensuring demons would need to rely on eating humans to stay sapient while hoarding the best meat for themselves. Fittingly, Legravalima gets the single worst death in the series with her body literally melting down.
• Complete Monster:
  • Queen Legravalima is the hedonistic ruler of the demon world. Legravalima's desire for power led her to murder her own father in order to usurp his authority, feeling it was only natural for her to reign supreme over the demons. Eventually, after Legravalima and the rest of the royal family began to keep all of the high-quality meat to themselves, many citizens of the demon world began to devolve back into monsters due to the low quality of the meat they were receiving. When one of the heads of the Five Regent Families, Geelan, sought to use Mujika's blood in order to help stop the demons from devolving, Legravalima banished him and his family into the wilderness to devolve and die. Afterwards Legravalima had most of Mujika's clan slaughtered so that she could use the farms to control the demons, not caring about the well-being of her own people even in the slightest. Legravalima also took some of the blood herself so that she and the royal family would never devolve.
  • Lord Bayon is an upper-class demon and manager of the Grand Valley plantation. Missing the thrill of hunting humans, Bayon used his connections to have children smuggled out of their plantations and delivered to be slaughtered and eaten by him. When discovered by Peter Ratri, Bayon and Ratri secretly establish Goldy Pond, an illegal hunting ground initially intended to provide as shelter for escapees. Throughout the years, Bayon had countless children taken out of their plantations and forced to fend for their lives against Bayon and several other upper-class demons participating in the hunt every two to three days. When Lucas's escape group comes across Goldy Pond, Bayon has the entire group slaughtered with only Lucas and one other escapee surviving. When Bayon finds out that Emma, a premium grade human, is in Goldy Pond, he breaks his own rules and starts a hunt ahead of schedule. Bayon is shown to have no compassion towards his fellow demons, congratulating Gillian and Nigel when he finds out that they killed Luce. He then wounds Gillian and tortures her in an attempt to get Nigel to reveal where Lucas is. When Bayon is about to be killed, he feels nothing but excitement over the bloodshed and attempts to kill Lucas before dying.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Emma suggesting that they delay Ray's shipping by breaking Ray's leg? Not really funny. Emma suggesting it with a big grin on her face? Kind of funny. Ray loving the plan and excitedly hashing out the details with Emma? Hilarious.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • Sister Krone after the reveal that ultimately she was another victim of the farm system, demonstrating that her ruthlessness was a product of trying to survive as best she could. Her flashback as she's about to die, while she spends her last moments admiring the beautiful sky thinking about all the events in her past that pushed and led her to this point, is surprisingly poignant.
  • Despite how manipulative Mama was, her point of view chapter in Chapter 37 portrayed her as a woman who wanted to survive as much as the kids did. Her backstory actually managed to move some readers.
  • Nous's reaction to Nouma's death has had people feel bad for the demon, especially since he runs up and cradles her dead body, Big "NO!" to boot.
  • Right before his death, Peter reminiscences about how he's always fought to uphold the Promise, sacrificing everything for it, even his own brother, as much as it pained him to do so. Upon seeing Emma prepared to live peacefully with him even if she didn't forgive him, he felt he no longer deserved to live.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Anna, one of the kids who escaped from the Grace Field House alongside Emma and Ray, has gotten barely any focus, but wound up being ranked 10th on the first popularity poll and increased to 5th on the second.
  • Sister Krone placed in the top 10 in both popularity polls. Not bad for someone who had been dead for several times longer than she even was alive by the time the first started, especially since the anime which would expose people to her character again had yet to start!
  • Phil is easily one of the most popular characters (coming right after the main trio in popularity polls) and is something of a Memetic Badass, despite his importance in the first arc being ambiguous until the end and barely appearing after said arc.
  • Gillian, one of the children of Goldy Pond, became very popular because of her adorable design and perky personality... and because of the scene during which she gives Luce his well-deserved Karmic Death after at one point dual-wielding submachine guns. On the second popularity poll, she was ranked 9th. By comparison, on the same poll, Gilda and Don (part of the Three Plus Two main cast) are 14th and 19th, and the only other children of Goldy Pond in the Top 20 (Oliver and Violet, who both have more importance in the story) are respectively 18th and 20th.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: AUs where Emma never escapes and becomes a Mama following in the footsteps of Isabella like the latter offered are a popular point of interest.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "The promised keikaku", due to how absurd the feats during the Escape Arc are.
  • The unnamed bunker man has been given the placeholder name "John" in some places due to a misinterpretation of a few panels and the term "John Doe", or an unidentified person.
  • "Scribbles" has become the dedicated name for the demon god whose name is unpronounceable and unwritable.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Fans of The Promised Neverland loathe the second season of the anime to the point of pretending it doesn't exist. This is because it is a VERY Compressed Adaptation, trying to adapt all of the nearly 150 remaining chapters in 11 episodes and skipping over some of the best story arcs in the process. Consensus is that if you don't feel like reading the manga, you should pretend that Season 1 is the entire show (as it does end at a good stopping point). The fandom phrase is, "There is no second season of The Promised Neverland."
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Despite the different tone, readers of Dr. STONE and The Promised Neverland get along and enjoy reading both series due to them being very creative Sleeper Hits from the same magazine. They also got released a few months apart from one another, making them sister series in a sense.
  • You can also find many Death Note fans being fans of The Promised Neverland because they are often compared to each other.
  • Fans are practically drinking buddies with Tokyo Ghoul fans due to how their respective series' second seasons botched adapting the original manga.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Reveal that demons need to consume human meat to stay sapient puts a number of already horrifying scenes in an even worse light.
  • Grace Field makes food only for the highest class of demon society, and it's defended like a high security prison. We later see a factory farm, and its security is nowhere nearly as tight. The demon aristocracy has invested far more into the security of their own food than the commoners', which gives the implication that they don't care about them. We find later that in fact the highest ranking demons don't care about the commoners and their solution to famine caused by lack of human meat was to let people starve until the population drops down to sustainable numbers again.
  • The more animistic demons become far more horrifying with the reveal that they were once ordinary people, denied the human meat they needed to stay sapient, causing them to degenerate into mindless beasts.
• Iron Woobie: The main trio go through an awful lot, and it's hard not to feel bad for them at points. Emma in particular has taken more trauma then anyone else, yet remains a Determinator all the same.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Not counting the First-Episode Twist revealing the existence of the demons and Grace Field being a farm where children are raised to be eaten by them, it can be hard to discuss the events of the second arc onwards without spoiling the big reveal that Norman has not been killed.
  • Many fans can often talk about Isabella being Ray's mom.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!:
  • A common criticism of the final chapters is their fast pacing.
  • The second season. Everything after the Grace Field arc is skipped or rushed, with what should have been the next arc, the fan-favorite Goldy Pond arc, being omitted entirely, and the story being rushed to end similarly to how the manga did, meaning that the skipped arcs can never be adapted unless the anime gets a full reboot.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Out of the Grace Field kids, Ray is the coldest to the point of being callous, wants to leave most of his siblings to die in the name of pragmatism, and veers into outright antagonistic once it's revealed he's the traitor. He's also the only one of the bunch with a Dark and Troubled Past, and though you won't catch him angsting about it, it becomes clear that it really screwed him up.
  • ETR3M8 is a flat-out Jerkass in his debut who's trying to get the kids killed for selfish reasons, but as Emma notes, he's essentially suffered everything they did but up to eleven, having dealt with a pleasant combination of being the Sole Survivor turned The Aloner with a side of Survivor Guilt.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Isabella was once a child raised in the Farm system, chosen to become a "Mama" to raise other children to be fed to the demons. Upon realizing that some of her charges have learned the truth, Isabella requests a helper in Sister Krone, before constantly outplaying the children and foiling their plans. Setting up Krone to take the fall and eliminating her when she proves too ambitious, Isabella initially defeats the kids, but manages to secure the life of Norman by giving him to a secret group. Gracefully acknowledging her later defeat, Isabella is put in charge of all other Mamas and eventually inspires them to rebel against the Farm system, overcoming and defeating their oppressors to seize the future.
  • Archduke Leuvis is a demon who lives for the thrill of combat. Latching on to Emma as his worthy adversary, Leuvis shows himself to be fully willing to offer up his own weaknesses and to arm his opponents to equal the playing field and once his comrades are dead, engages Emma and her friends with a shockingly display of combat instinct and battle tactics, completely seeing through everything Emma's team does while countering until he is finally cornered. Even upon dealing Emma a seemingly fatal wound, Leuvis is courteous and respectful to her, thinking how much he loves humans for their ingenuity, unlike his fellow demons who consider them lesser beings and only fit for food. Returning from the dead, Leuvis manages to diffuse the rage of the demon populace, helping to end the oppressive system and place Mujika on the throne. A demon of shocking charm and charisma, Leuvis proves why he is the most deadly adversary yet encountered by Emma and her friends.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In Japan, a meme surfaced in 2017 that briefly crossed this series over with Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. An edited image◊ of Zenitsu being scared witless of Sister Krone made its rounds on Japanese imageboards, to the point where Sister Krone was somehow voted the 59th most popular character in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba for its first official poll, while Zenitsu was voted the 29th most popular character; the meme persisted in 2020, as the series 2nd official poll still got its votes for Sister Krone, even rose to 49th place. Going even further, the meme was recognized by Shueisha itself in 2019, as they made a gigantic mural with hundreds of Shonen Jump characters being all over a school building. Zenitsu and Sister Krone were paired together alone, creating the same effect of him being scared of her as she looms behind him.
  • The series being compared to Chicken Run because of their similar premises. Comparisons to Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee are also pretty common.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Legravalima and the Five Regent Families are revealed to have crossed it 700 years in the past when the factory farms weren't supplying enough food to sustain the populace. When Geelen suggested using their own stocks of human meat and tried to investigate Mujika as a solution, he was stripped of his status and left degenerate into a animal along his entire clan. Everyone Mujika cured was hunted down was killed and eaten to ensure the nobility didn't need human meat to retain their sapience, but they still insisted on keeping their stock of human meat to themselves.
  • Andrew initially comes off as an Anti-Villain enforcing the Promise. But then when Emma tries to reason with him he states the kids trying gain their freedom actually gives him more incentive to kill them because they are just cattle who don't deserve the same rights as normal humans. If he hadn't crossed it then, he definitely did when he beats some of the children to death after they showed him mercy he makes it clear he's not even out to protect the Promise, he just wants to kill the children out of spite for the injuries he took.
• Narm:
  • Episode 12 of the anime is very tense, with the kids finally escaping and running away while Isabella has a dramatic flashback that explains her backstory. However, near the end of the episode, during the climactic scene where the kids run into the forest, we are treated to a shot of one child◊ whose face is especially small compared to the rest of his head. It is jarring.
  • While many fans acknowledge it's for narrative significance if anything, the fact that the kids in Lucas's group and Lucas himself never say ETR3M8's name once, always calling him "that guy" or otherwise, has stretched their disbelief a little farther than they hope for. It's somewhat justified when they talk to Emma, as an extra scene in the manga shows that Emma herself refuses to hear his name from someone else than ETR3M8; but it can become really silly when Lucas seems to purposely avoid using his name in his flashbacks and inner-thoughts.
  • Speaking of characters' refusal to call their friends by their names. When things get serious and the antagonists start to rack up a body count, most of their victims (save for Yugo and Lucas) are part of Goldy Pond's extras. To the readers, these kids are nameless Red Shirts; but in-universe, they are companions with whom the characters have spent one-year-and-a-half (and even more for their fellow Goldy Pond children). However, for some reason, the characters adamantly refuse to use the characters' names when they refer to their fallen comrades, which means evey time they mourn the friends they lost, they're always saying some variation of: "Yugo, Lucas, And the Rest"...
  • Season 2, Episode 8 has a moment with Norman about to kill a little demon girl when suddenly her grandfather appears calling her name "Emma", causing him to hesitate. The whole thing reminded people of the Martha scene from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
• Never Live It Down: The way fans talk about it, you'd be forgiven for thinking Ray was a fire-obsessed arsonist whose first instinct to every problem is to set something or someone on fire. Never mind that Emma was actually the one who set fire to Gracefield House.
• One-Scene Wonder: Conny, no thanks for starring in the series' Signature Scene.
• One True Threesome: The main trio (Ray/Norman/Emma) is frequently shipped together, especially since there's several scenes of Ray's No Sense of Personal Space with Norman in chapter 15.
• Periphery Demographic: The series is a Shōnen, but apparently is very popular with older fans in their adulthood, especially girls.
• Questionable Casting: The live-action movie has Emma, Ray, and Norman's actors being played by teenagers, with Emma's actress being 19. Ray's actor, on the other hand, is 13 and closer to Ray's age in the manga. The film justifies this by raising the age deadline for the orphans getting harvested to 16, but giving the characters an Age Lift takes away a lot of the horror the kids go through.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: A lot of readers weren't fond with Sister Krone when she first appeared and feared she'd be turned into an Ethnic Scrappy. Over time, however, her motives and characterization grew on a lot of them, to the point where a lot of fans were actually a bit upset when she gets killed.
• Second Season Downfall: Season 2 was perhaps the most notorious anime Seasonal Rot example in 2021, being an extremely Compressed Adaptation that adapted the remaining 144 chapters into 11 episodes (by contrast, Season 1 adapted 37 chapters into 12 episodes). Multiple story arcs were skipped entirely and the remaining plots were heavily truncated, infamously in the ending where they're confined to a slideshow flashback. Fanon Discontinuity isn't enough to describe how people were disappointed with Season 2.
• Signature Scene: The First-Episode Twist of Emma and Norman discovering Conny's body and realizing the orphanage is a farm.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • While Season 1 was a mostly faithful adaptation of the Grace Field Escape arc, Season 2 is a heavily Compressed Adaptation which completely skips over most of the story, including fan-favorite arcs such as Goldy Pond, with beloved characters like Yugo being Adapted Out. Supposedly, this is because the author wanted the anime to have a different ending after the mixed reception to the manga's conclusion, but taking out what the fanbase widely considers the best parts of the story in the process has made his decisions rather questionable. Even worse, it's the final season, ending similarly to the manga but without any of the buildup, and in a way that ensures that the skipped portions will never be adapted to animation (barring a future reboot of the anime).
  • Despite what fans may have thought about the manga's ending, many agree that the anime version of the ending turned out worse. At least in the manga, Emma had to pay a price for remaking the Promise, namely that she had to sacrifice her memories before being allowed to cross to the human world, resulting in a Bittersweet Ending. In the anime, Emma's journey to remake the promise is completely glossed over, and in the end she is able to reunite with her friends in the human world without having to sacrifice anything.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • A frequent criticism is that only a few characters outside of the main trio receive any spotlight.
    • The Goldy Pond kids are generally considered the worst offenders, considering they've gone through even more than the Grace Field kids, have cool designs and backstories, have no in-universe reason to be Satellite Characters to Emma and co., and yet rarely get to contribute anything meaningful after their debut arc.
    • It's also the case with most of the Grace Field kids, save for the main trio, Gilda, and Don. The manga emphasizes several times the family bonds and the importance of teamwork between the Grace Field kids. In fact, the escape from Grace Field is shown to ultimately succeed thanks to a teamwork, because Emma trusted her younger siblings to handle a lot of the practical details. After the Time Skip, several moments are used to show that, while Emma and Ray had been busy with studying the lore and training, their younger siblings have also developed their own talents and actually surpass them in some areas - in foraging or in medicine for instance. However, after the introduction of Norman's army, all the Grace Field kids save for Emma, Ray, Don, and Gilda fade into the background. They stop contributing to the plot, save for being taken hostage by Peter Ratri during the final arc.
  • How many fans felt about Ray and his reduced role after the Escape arc, despite having a complex backstory and the lion's share of Character Development, as well as the series establishing him, Norman, and Emma as a trio whose different strengths and weaknesses play off each other. By the final arc, each chapter's release had fans commenting on whether or not Ray did anything beyond being a background character (especially when there was potential for him to get involved). Ultimately, it didn't escape people's notice that he could be written out of the finale entirely with little difference.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • It's revealed that Norman is alive and being kept in another farm. This could be an excellent opportunity to do a similar arc to the escape arc, only in reverse - last time, the kids were on the inside and knew the layout of the place but not what to do once they were out; it could be interesting to see the characters having to discover what information they could about the new location and to have to work out how to break in to free Norman and then to have to get out afterwards. Instead of anything like that, there's a timeskip and Norman escapes offscreen.
  • Cicero, Barbara, and Vincent are shown to be a huge case of He Who Fights Monsters. Due to what they lived through because of the Demons, they are willing to exterminate them. This could lead to interesting debates and/or confrontations with the more idealistic Emma, who hopes to find a solution to avoid a bloodshed. However, outside of one brief tensed conversation, Cicero, Barbara and Vincent never directly confront Emma. When Norman decides to stop his plan to kill all demons, they are quick to go along with it.
  • The anime seemed to set up an anime original plot where Isabella would be given an opportunity to hunt down Emma and the rest of the escaped children, which would have given both her and Emma another chance to face off and pit their wits against each other. However, the anime simply goes the same route as the manga, where after being punished for the Grace Field escape, the next time Isabella is seen is in the very last episode where she turns against Peter Ratri and is Easily Forgiven by Emma and her friends.
• Tough Act to Follow: While the escape arc was unanimously acclaimed for its tension, twists and intellectual battles, the Goldy Pond arc let down some fans, as it is mostly focused on gunfights against demons, albeit still with heavy strategic elements, and its reveals are more supernatural in nature, which rankled those who liked the more grounded first arc.
• Ugly Cute: "Demon" children and young women are surprisingly cute.
• Values Dissonance: As aforementioned, some fans were put off by Sister Krone's stereotypical depiction. In contrast, Japan hasn't bat an eye about it.
• Woobie Species: The demons, sans their leadership. They are inflicting terrible fates upon the humans they raise for food but they need to eat humans or they will degenerate into animals. What is worse that Mujika appeared with a cure for a way to ensure they no longer needed to eat human meat and in response the royal family and Five Regent Families had all those she helped hunted and killed before eating their meat so they wouldn't have to stay sapient from feeding on humans. All while letting the demon populace suffer from a famine and keeping their superior quality meat stocks to themselves despite not even needing it to stay sapient. As the series progresses, the demons prove that they are just as capable of good or evil as humans but sadly they are suffering under the reign of leaders who don't care about them.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The characters in this series die in very gruesome deaths (and children are generally the victims) and there are various Nightmare Fuel scenes that would give young readers nightmares. It may seem like a series aimed for a seinen demographic, but it's one of the "dark shonen" titles that run in Shonen Jump. Unlike most "dark shonen" titles, the tone of the series is very idealistic by "dark shonen" standards, and the protagonists are young children that are barely before their teens.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: It's very, very easy to read this story as pro-vegan, or at least a critique of factory farming.
• Win Back the Crowd: For the fans who missed the mind games aspect of the first arc and didn't quite care for the mild Genre Shift, the Seven Walls arc's similar feel to the Grace Field arc, what with Norman's return, as well as the moral dilemma it presents, has been well-received.

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