2.0 KiB
[RT] The Promised Neverland 103
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Author: u/gbear605 history’s greatest story*
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Score: 9
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Created: 2018-09-16T20:44:21
Post:
Comments:
u/callmesalticidae [+3] writes worldbuilding books (3 hours later)
I feel like the story has lost something lately.
u/None [+5] (21 hours later)
Agreed. IMO it started as a story of how to reason and plan in the face of uncertainty while acting from a position of weakness, via modeling the actions of the opponent and acting accordingly (the initial arc where they were all confined to the "orphanage"). It also had a bit of creeping horror of the unknown, as the reader was fed hints of what happened to the kids who "graduated" and what the rest of the world looked like.
Since then, the manga has traded fear of the unknown for a direct threat (the demons), and IMO traded down because the stakes are always so low. Far from being superhumanly terrifying enemies, the protags skate through basically every encounter with the demons without a scratch. The stakes aren't anywhere near as high as they were during the orphanage arc, where a loss meant the timer went to zero and their friend/leader figure got taken away. Plus, the demons are a textbook example of aliens that look a bit different but for all intents and purposes are just evil humans. There's nothing "alien" about them other than their diet - no alien reasoning/behavior, no orange/blue morality, etc.
Also also, rather than revolving around mind games and "I know you know" battles, the plot is now just the protags running around a kind of dangerous but mostly bog standard fantasy world while sometimes getting into gunfights. Complete tonal shift.
I didn't even consciously make the decision to stop reading, I just found my desire to click on the newest chapter slowly getting eroded in favor of "anything else" as time went on. Unfortunate.