My Goodreads Review of The Promised Neverland, Volume 20 (and the series as a whole).

 My farewell to this series. There is always a sense of reward and sorrow when a good series you read or watch come to an end and you are done with it. That is me now with The Promise Neverland. My love of manga is partly because of the franchise so I feel I owe a debt to it. So here are my thoughts:

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 20 by Kaiu Shirai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Around now, seven years ago...
I was drawing the prototype storyboards of The Promised Neverland that I would later submit to the Shōnen Jump editorial department. I was confident about my idea. But there were many elements of the story that didn't have the standard "Jump" traits. It had a female protagonist, and it was plot driven instead of character driven.
Even as I look back on it now, I strongly believe that depending on the editor, my submission could have been rejected on the spot." - Kaiu Shirai, October 2, 2020

Aquí se Puede

[I will get to the actual volume in this review, but this is the meta-portion:]

The Promised Neverland, along with One-Punch Man & Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to read manga after spending so long avoiding the format despite being an anime fan for most of my life. Now manga makes-up the near-majority of the sequential-art that I read. That was not true in April 2019 when I decided (very correctly in hindsight) not to wait for a second season of the anime and read the manga from where the first season ended. This story was a very interesting look into the dystopian/horror genre in anime/manga. It was also a very interesting look into two things that I tend to note on in anime/manga/light-novels: the depictions of Black people in the format and the use of involuntary servitude (e. g. slavery, serfdom, etc.). The use of those elements in the plot were different and predictable in this story.

To quickly address the former: Despite the standard-line of manga abiding by the artistic concept of Mukokuseki (無国籍), which is to say of no one ethnic o national origin, it has always been clear that in-practice this just meant making characters look generic and white (interestingly, you don't see a lot of characters drawn with "Asian" features unless they are from China or Southeast Asia). When Black characters did appear in the early days of anime & manga, it was usually in the blackface minstrelsy style. This only started changing in the 1980s—and it was a slow change. Nowadays, it is expected of Japanese illustrators to draw more realistic depictions of Black/dark-skin characters—but every so often there are relapses. While I think that the artist Posuka Demizu did a good job at drawing most of the Black characters in this book (this was a very ethnically diverse non-mecha series), I still can't get my head over why she retreated back to the old stereotypes for Sister Crone. The character was dead before I started reviewing the manga, but I was planning to lodge my complaint on that when I reviewed the series in-full.

I have to say I was more fascinated in how it depicted slavery. Technically, it does not really depict slavery as the kids are technically raised as livestock on farms rather than chattel on slave plantations, but the way that places like Grace Field were organized in the story were plantation-adjacent (especially when we learn what their true purpose was). I think The Promised Neverland, along with Shadows House (can't wait to review this book on Goodreads one day. Another dystopian/horror series that uses serfdom instead of slavery), are some of the better analogues to involuntary servitude as oppose to most depictions you see from series originating from light-novels (a Japanese media format with much less quality control) that tend to depict slavery through the lens of male power-fantasy. I think the display of how othered and de-humanized the humans in the demon world were was especially well-done.

[Ok, now on to the actual volume]

With all that said, the finale was less about a final battle, but with the final reckoning of the price of freedom for the stories heroine. While most of the resolutions for the characters are satisfactory (unless you're Isabella), Emma's luck of getting out of all obstacles in the story unscathed ends here, and she is forced to give-up something substantial (view spoiler)[her memories (hide spoiler)] to the deity that controlled the over-arching events of the story in order to obtain the passage of the humans from the demon world to Earth (which in the current day of this volume is uncomfortably looking like where our current world is headed). Despite this price, Emma agrees that the bigger goal of liberation is the most important. The last line from that other comic—The Complete Persepolis—rings true here ("Freedom had a price"). I may have wished for something happier and not bittersweet, but the ending we have here is solid.

I think that The Promised Neverland will always have a mixed reception because of the second season of the anime. If you only watched it through the anime, than you view it along with the Matrix sequels as the sequel tainting the whole franchise or season 2 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as one of the great disappointments of anime. But if you only read the manga, or like most people, watched season 1 then read the manga it is one of the greatest series of the 2010s. The "Goldy Pond arc" of volumes 7-11 was the highlight of the series to me (and why I was so disgusted with season 2 of the anime totally cutting it out). While I do think I have read better manga since I began this series (that I have not yet covered on Goodreads), this is the second series where I covered most of it on Goodreads after Demon Slayer which I finished last year and one of the best manga I have covered so far.


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My Review of Kimi ni Todoke - Season 3

[I originally posted this back in August to another site that I was using to track my anime & manga, but it got weird as it turns out the moderators there were out of control with their power so I am reposting this here. Maybe later on I will share my interesting experiment/experience this year of trying to interact with the online anime community after 10 years of not doing that.]

Few anime go as long between seasons as this one. In the time between season 2 and season 3, the landscape of anime romances has changed a lot—partly due to the influences of this series. The manga came to an end and a lot of the tropes utilized in this series would show-up in other series. I think the big impact is the way male-targeted romance series got better over time due to the legacy of this show. Shounen & seinen romances like Insomniacs After School, Call of the Night, and possibly the most interesting example for me—The Dangers in My Heart are just some of the series that owe at least a partial debt to this series. And we haven't even talked about other shoujo romance series. As much as I could talk about the legacy of Kimi ni Todoke, lets get to season 3 itself. 

While the hard work of becoming a couple was resolved in season 2, this season was Shouta and Sawako trying to discover what that means. While they come to terms with that by the end of the season, you could argue that the real focus was the deepening ties and relationship re-evaluation between Chizuru and Ryuu. We already knew about Ryuu's feelings, but now Chizuru was made to starkly and painfully reflect over her relationship with him and it's evolution over the years. This dynamic is the near-highlight of the season. And then we get to Ayane. If Gimai Seikatsu thinks that they have anime's saddest gyaru, Ayane here was trying to give her a run-for-her-money. Her ongoing issues with her self-esteem was given much-needed help by season two's ensemble darkhorse turned (male) hero of this season Kento Miura who was the only person capable of getting through to Ayane (well...almost the only person). As Shouta was in his feelings for most of the season, Kento stepped-up as the only sane male character in the show. Shouta was really out of it in this season as he seemed to not understand how to cope with just being the emotional support for Sawako and nearly destroyed their relationship out the gate before he gets some much-needed wake-up calls from some very unexpected places. This group went on shaky-ground this season, but all came out stronger than before. 

Getting back almost all of the original voice actors was a miracle and it really put me back into the series. The series music was good and always matched the mood of the show. Having the staff from the first two season work with modern equipment really makes a difference and I was always impressed that the composition of the series did not lose the aesthetic of the first two seasons. They could've gone for a more "contemporary" look given they had Netflix money to play with, but one always appreciates keeping the original manga's vision. I also noticed that because each episode was an hour, the story lines could be told in intersecting ways that we normally don't get in your usual thirty minute episode.

All-in-all Kimi ni Todoke uses it's simple, to the point, but sincere storytelling to remind everyone why it is still the gold-standard of shoujo romance in the 21st century. Where other series have done too little or too much, it gets the recipe perfect. I hope they adapt the whole manga and the sequel, but until then I am happy with this.

My Goodreads Review of One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes

 Haven't read a Christmas story or any LAngston Hughes in a while, so "two birds with one stone." This story reminds me a lot of At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov.

One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminds me of a story my grandmother told me of growing up poor in rural Virginia. While the rest of the United States was in the come-up of the post-WWII economic boom, her community was as poor as they ever been. The youngest of 10, her mom would tell her and her siblings that Santa Claus tried to get there gifts in the house, but accidentally left the. In the fields and hillsides around the house and they had to search for them there. Of course there were no gifts, but they would look in vain anyway.

While we don’t have an explicit location, by context clues the short story here takes place in small-town central Maryland. The only major city named is Baltimore where they could actually afford to build a movie theater for Black people, this town that the story is set in only has a whites-only movie theater. A severely over-worked & underpaid mother is trying to by something for her son to have for Christmas despite being cruelly-underpaid by her white employer whose home she worked in on Christmas Eve! It is her young-son who has an unfortunate run-in with a Santa at a whites-only movie theater lobby that learns the harder lessons of Christmas in the Jim Crow Great Depression era.

This was a short, but bitter story. Nothing big-traumatic happens, but we do get a little loss of innocence here. One does wonder if Hughes meant for this to be a cynical comedy or serious which I can’t tell, but this story does give me a little to think about.

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