In this episode we talked about the anime and in passing the manga of The Promised Neverland written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday, my cohost’s Adam Wybray and today we're talking about the anime The Promise Neverland.

(Intro music plays)

Ren Good evening, Adam.

Adam Good evening, Ren. That was a very gentlemanly way of saying it. I feel like I've been delicately introduced. Good evening. How are you feeling?

Ren Umm. (sceptical noise) I am not the most prepared I've ever been. I have just finished watching the series that we're talking about, so on the one hand, it's fresh in my mind. On the other hand, it was a bit last minute.

Adam You made the exact sound I imagine a squiggly face smiley makes.

Ren Yeah (repeats sceptical noise)

Adam And when I got back into my laptop -- I've talked about Frankenlaptop before, it’s really being held together by plate metal as put into place and screwed on by my dad, after the hinge broke, and this laptop really is on its last legs now so the screen just goes black occasionally as it fancies — But, I feel generally quite guilty about buying electronic devices even though I try to get them second hand, so I'm really putting off getting a new laptop. But anyway, what happened listeners, is that my laptop screen went black. I said to Ren that I had to put the screen down, which meant disconnecting the call and when I reconnected Ren was — I don't want to say squawking, that sounds really rude — but it was. It was an arresting sound. You say you were doing your Duolingo, which I don't think means doing an impression of Duo, I imagine. What were you practising?

Ren Well, German as ever. We're currently talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Adam Oh wow. I mean, your German must be pretty advanced because I remember you reading Goethe in German when we were at universities. Like slogging through Elective Affinities.

Ren Yes, uh, I wouldn't say I understood every word. It was more of an overall impression of the Goethe that I was getting, but I did read a fair bit of Goethe in German.

Adam It’s much better than my Czech where I could probably say like: I have a potato. I mean, it's all you need, but still.

Ren Speaking of potatoes, I don't know. I don't, I don't think there are any potatoes. Sorry,

Adam I think that's an audacious transition!

Ren If we were watching Attack on Titan, I know there's like a potato subplot and there's one of the characters who's really into potatoes. Like her whole thing is eating potatoes.

Adam Cool. Maybe I have to watch Attack on Titan.

Ren I’ve been thinking about it because it also has a high wall in it.

Adam Yeah, I should probably mention in my animated horror book because, like, those giants are pretty grotesque, right? The cannibal giants.

Ren Oh yeah. I mean, I actually kind of stopped watching it because I found I found it too grotesque.

Adam Wow. OK, so has it got BFG energy? Attack on Titan?

Ren I would say it has BFG energy, yeah.

Adam Yeah, so we are we are talking about another anime. It's been a while. And manga, so I've read quite a few volumes of the manga. Did you just watch the anime?

Ren Yes.

Adam Of the promised Neverland!

Ren The manga ran from 2016 to 2020 apparently, and the anime started in 2019. We've only watched the first series because apparently it gets bad.

Adam Yeah, it's almost universally slated. I think it tries to compress a lot of the latter part of the manga into just one season, and that can really kill an adaptation.

Like one of my favourite visual novels of all time is Umineko which I think probably is the best visual novel. It’s quite a claim, but to be honest, there are a lot of bad visual novels.

It is a bit like saying what's the best PowerPoint presentation, which is Daniel Hayes PowerPoint adaptation of Jeff Brundle's computer in The Fly, where he replicated the whole computer in PowerPoint form, creating a PowerPoint that was too big for his laptop to load without crashing. But still, it was the best PowerPoint I have ever seen by a long, long way. Like, I think about it quite regularly because it’s the pinnacle of the form, frankly.

But anyway, Umineko is the pinnacle of visual novels but the anime is rubbish because the visual novel’s about as long as — I think someone worked it out and it's basically the same as reading The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings 2 1/2 times through or something.

Ren Wow.

Adam It's very long and the anime is not, and I think the same to a lesser extent with The Promised Neverland. It's a long manga and I think it compresses a lot into the second season and as such kind of flattens out a lot of the nuances of the characters and rushes the plot, apparently. So I know a bit of what happens later. But I'm actually not that interested. I think this works as a really good self-contained, almost prison break narrative. So do you want to explain what the Promised Neverland is about?

Ren Yeah. So spoilers for the whole of the first season, we always kind of spoil things.

Adam We do.

Ren I never really mention it, because I don't really care about spoilers.

Adam I think we're similar. I used to really upset my my film students and I upset my secondary school students actually with it too. Really annoys me because it upset them with Romeo and Juliet. They're like: Oh, he said they're going to die! It says it in the prelude! It says it in the introductory monologue! These star crossed lovers are going to die. Pay attention.

Ren So our settings is this orphanage with thirty-eight siblings. They're not actually related, but they grew up together as siblings. They're all numbered with a five digit tattoo on their necks. And all of them will leave before they turn twelve.

But no one who leaves the orphanage, ostensibly going to a foster family, ever writes back. And they never hear from them again

Adam Because they're having such a nice time.

Ren Because they're having such a lovely time. Yeah. And it's this quite pastoral setting, these scenic grounds. But also their learning system is quite high tech and a bit Minority Report-esque. So it's a combination of some old fashioned setting alongside technology.

Adam But they seem to be having quite a lovely time. And I guess the manga takes slightly longer with this than the anime and so it's maybe a bit more convincing on this front, but like, a lot of the kids look small. I mean, one thing I appreciate here is that the toddlers look like toddlers, right? There are some pretty adorable chibi little kids in this.

Ren Aw yeah, the little chibis.

Adam And yeah, in the opening chapter, they're frolicking about playing games and tag and hide and seek, and they're really affectionate with each other. I think it does a pretty good job establishing this as at first, a safe and happy place.

Like, you never quite buy into it because you know you're picking up a horror manga, but, I don't know, it worked for me. There's something seductive about it and the kids look so cute. Yeah, I don't know. To me, even knowing that something bad was going to happen. I kind of bought it.

Ren Yeah. And I feel like maybe the setting of the house can go both ways because in one sense it’s quite gloomy and it's all dark wood and corridors and heavy doors. But on the other hand it can be quite charming and sort of farmhouse. The protagonists are the oldest kids. They're eleven, Norman, who is white-haired and intellectual, Ray who is dark-haired and cynical and Emma who is orange-haired and enthusiastic. And they are the top of the class. They have these tests, something to test their intellectual capacity and those three are always top of the class.

They have been told never to go to the fence or the gate that’s past the woods where they live because it's dangerous.

Adam Yeah, it has a very clear kind of boundaried setting that you know is going to get crossed in the same way that you get in fairy tales, right? A bit like Bluebeard. Oh, there's one room that the wives cannot go into and you know that they're going to try to get into that room - or don't stray from the path and the kids stray from the path.

Ren Yeah. But when they start, it doesn't seem like they have, but then little Connie who’s about six, is being adopted. So they're saying goodbye to Connie, and she promises to write when she leaves. She'll never forget about them. And she's dressed in her little boater, and her little blazer.

Adam And you know, it's important here, right, that the artist and the animators in the anime really sell Connie adorably cute and they do.

Ren Yeah, yeah. But she's forgotten Little Bunny.

Adam Oh no, it’s awful! This really cute bunny teddy!

Ren So Emma and Norman run after them so that Connie doesn't leave without little Bunny. And they go past the gate and they find an extremely dead Connie in the back of a truck. With some kind of flower growing out of her chest, it was a kind of blood-red hydrangea I think.

Adam And holy heck, that's my texture of the week. So let's just get out the way Texture of the Week because that there is mine.

Adam and Ren (scraping noises) (grotesque voices) Texture. Texture of the week, of the week.

Adam And listener, I gasped. So I read the manga first before I watched the anime. So you get, I believe, I'm trying to remember if it's a full splash page, but you turn the page and you see a very young, very dead child with a flower rupturing, sprouting really unpleasantly out of her body.

And I don't know, I just wasn't expecting something that nasty! And obviously I've read The Drifting Classroom which was also written for young teenagers and they had a lot of child deaths. So like I was aware going into it — The Drifting Classroom is from the 1970s. So I was aware that there's been decades of manga, you know, written for pretty young readers, or at least young teenage readers that probably go harder than you would expect in Western comics. Basically that are more graphic, or certainly more willing to kill off young children.

But it still got me. Like, I don't know why, but I just wasn't expecting such a cute, young child to be killed that quickly. And to see it like that, it genuinely shocked me. How about you?

Ren Yeah, no, me too. I think it's just so abrupt. There’s no ceremony.

Adam No, I think that's it. It's just it's there, there's a really vertiginous moment, but. Yeah, it's not even the most gory image, but I genuinely found it very shocking. And that's partly why I do think this is a horror series. Narratively, as I say it works more like a kind of prison break narrative, you know. It's quite thriller-y, I suppose, despite these supernatural elements. But because that happened so early, it just feels like all bets are off after that. You're like, right, any of these characters can get killed and it can get nasty.

And so after that, it just creates this incredible sense of fear and tension because you just know it's a completely merciless universe they're living in. Yeah, possibly a bit of an exploitative narrative mood, but it basically makes the whole rest of it work, I think.

Ren Yeah, I can't remember what the film was, but I remember watching a film where the rich people have gone to live on a moon or something. And down on Earth everything's very dystopian. But there was a point in the film where a child was about to die, and they didn't kill the child. And it was like a real narrative cop out. It was like, this would have been so much stronger if you had just killed that child. So, I mean, I've got to respect the absolute willingness to just kill the child. Narratively.

Adam Yeah. I think narratively it can be really effective because it can give you that sense that this is unsafe, right? That it’s not going to play by rules that certain characters are too young to die, like for me seeing Hereditary in the cinema, without wanting to spoil it too much for anyone who hasn't seen it, but there's the only film where I've sworn out loud in the cinema.

And if people have seen it, they'll probably know which scene.

Ren I haven't seen it, but I know the moment.

Adam Yeah. And I just wasn't expecting it. You know, I thought that the film was playing by certain rules, and then it wasn't. And after that I found it so much scarier because I was like, I have no idea what's going to happen, I don't know what set of rules this is playing by now.

And yeah, I think for me. That's why the mother and the other adult figures, or seemingly adult figures, you know, whether they’re adults or they’re demons, it’s kind of unclear from the reader's perspective for a lot of it. But that’s why they're so frightening. I mean, that does get resolved, but at first you're not quite sure exactly what or who these adults are. But you know that they are willing to kill our main characters.

I don't know. For me, say with The Demon Headmaster, which obviously I love. You're never quite sure if the demon headmaster would be willing to do that. I feel like he's clearly willing to do it indirectly, to put the kids, say with the shovelling snow, he's clearly willing to put the kids in very unsafe situations. And his minions are willing to do it, but with the demon headmaster you get the sense that he doesn't want to get his hands dirty. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I guess it's it's an interesting question: how threatening should you make the antagonists in a piece of children's horror?

But yeah, at this point the demons are also introduced. So do you have a texture?

Ren Umm. Yeah, it’s a bit of an odd one, but Sister Crone’s evil pirouetting? We'll talk about her. She's very flamboyant in her movements and talks to herself about her plans and she's obviously meant to come across as a bit insane. But while the mother is very buttoned up, Sister Crone is much more flamboyant.

Adam Yeah. It's very much like a lawful evil and chaotic evil, who end up somewhat plotting against each other. But the mother, as you say, is very much this sort of fascist authority figure, whereas Sister Chrome is clearly meant to be unhinged, basically, and is much more of a cackling villain, I suppose.

Ren Yes, the way she dances and pirouettes in this sort of reverie of her schemes I guess I found quite…

Adam She's kind of appealing! It's really tricky because, I mean, we will talk about her more, but she's a really problematic character. But she's also kind of likeable for some reason.

I mean, how do you feel about the kids here? I like Emma. I guess it's that sort of enthusiastic tomboy kind of character. Like, you know, you get in Enid Blyton.

Or what's that awful one that I had been interviewed about as a kid and I said I didn't like it very much — Swallows and Amazons. She's kind a bit of a classic children's book character, you know, like Anne of Green Gables or Pippi Longstocking. This red-haired, enthusiastic character who can be a bit brash, but her heart's in the right place. And she's a likeable character.

Ren Yeah, I agree.

Adam I mean the three main kids are archetypes and the impression I get from the manga is that their characters get a lot more interesting as the manga progresses because they're put in more difficult, compromising moral situations and some of them have to make some very difficult decisions and then the characters become more complicated.

But at this point they're very much little kids still and I think, I think they're fairly straightforward.

Ren Yeah, Norman's quite preternaturally intelligent, he's a genius boy, and pretty selfless as well,.

Adam Yeah, he's a pretty lawful good, you know, pure good character, basically.

Ren And then Ray’s sort of a bit of an edge lord.

Adam A bit of an emo, yeah.

Ren But. Yeah, he's all right.

Adam Yeah. I mean, the characters are fine. I don't think at this stage of the series it's really about character, I think it's about plot. And that's unusual for me to like because I'm not normally that interested in plot. But I feel like this plot is so well paced and so well structured that I just found it really addictive. So this is the point obviously, where you realise, right, they're going to have to get out of this fake orphanage, right?

Ren I don't think we've mentioned, yeah, the kids are being killed by demons. They are a luxury good. They are human meat. Raised on this farm and sold, well their brains in particular, are sold as a delicacy to demons and this demon that they overhear says there will be some high quality ones soon which means Norman, Emma and Ray.

So that's just quite a lot for them to take in, in this first episode. But even from the beginning, Emma is adamant that they're all going to survive. All of the kids are going to get out of this orphanage, this fake orphanage.

Adam What did you think of the demon design? Because they're weird looking creatures.

Ren Yeah, what do they look like? Longue tongues.

Adam Yeah, they’re kind of elongated. They look quite stone-like, almost. They have these fleshy tongues, but their heads kind of look like these elongated or ovoid stones. Sometimes their eyes are positioned oddly, like one above the other one. And then they have these very long, slightly tendril like claws.

Ren Oh yeah, you don't see a lot of them in the anime.

Adam I think you see more of them in the manga. They're quite odd looking, like it's an unusual design. I think they are quite creepy. I like that they look alien. They seem like they are a completely different species to the humans, I think that's important.

Did you ever read the novel Under the Skin, the film's based on, the Michael Farber one.

Ren No.

Adam OK, so that's about aliens harvesting humans to eat, basically. It follows the main character who's an alien disguised as a human woman as she harvests humans. And then, you know, we get the farm where the humans are kept and it works very effectively. It's vegan propaganda, basically. But one thing I liked about that is you get a description of the aliens and they’re four-legged, I don't know, it's hard to quite imagine them, but they seem almost like a shaggy haired deer or something. But with longer legs. And then the main character, this alien, has to undergo these surgical procedures in order to allow her to go undercover as a human.

And it'd be interesting if they'd done something similar with the demons here, maybe if the demons had to bridge the gap. The demon realm at this stage, at least in the manga and you see less of it in the anime it’s, kept very separate from the human realm.

And on one level I think that works because you get the idea of the demons as this sort of shadowy ‘them’. Like this conspiratorial force who are far above the humans and that these kids are like mice in a maze and the demons just so far above them. But at the same time, to a degree it removes them as a threat.

There isn't actually that much in the first season of the anime, after that first terrifying moment where they have to hide from the demons as they discover the corpse. There's very little of the kids and the demons in close physical proximity at this stage. I think there's quite a lot of that later on, and the demons are more complicated and you get factions and some demons who are ideologically opposed to eating humans. Like you get vegetarians and vegans and so on. But you don't really get that at this stage.

Ren Yeah, the main antagonists here are these two adult humans. So the mom, the mother, she has this very neat uniform. You're not quite sure if she's human at first because it does sort of seem like it could be a costume. But outwardly very caring to the children, but at the end of episode 2, Sister Crone turns up for more security. Because the mother realises that Emma and Norman went to the gate. So should we talk about Sister Crone?

Adam Yeah. So is Sister Crone the only black character?

Ren I think so.

Adam I think so too, and to be fair I haven't read all of the manga so it might be that there are more characters of colour introduced. I say characters of colour, I mean obviously this is ostensibly set in Japan. I think that becomes more apparent later. But you know, it's a Japanese series. But yeah, Sister Crone is the only black character.

Ren So there's a certain grotesquery to the animation at times, and particularly to the animation of her. She looms a lot, there's a lot of views of her from from underneath and she's shadowed a lot. But also the way she's drawn her lips are very big, her eyes are very big. And watching it, you're like, well, that is pretty, reminiscent of racist caricatures.

Adam And I think that's also maybe reinforced by the fact that she's in this mother role and she has a maid or nanny costume, almost. And I think for a western viewer it maybe recalls the mammy stereotype. But then I don't know whether that would be something a Japanese viewer would be aware of, you know, obviously there's going to be some Japanese viewers who have seen say — Umm, what’s that film I've never actually seen — Gone With the Wind. Yeah, but definitely there is anti-black racism in Japan and blackface and it does feel at least visually like the character is a racial caricature.

Ren Yeah, I think probably visually more than in terms of her behaviour. She’s quite flamboyantly mad and she has this little baby-face doll that she talks, and at one point she’s talking to the kids, and it’s kind of singing, like talk-singing. So she's quite an exuberant, villainous character.

Adam Yeah. On some level she's the character I — ‘like’’s not quite the right word, but she brings a lot of energy. The mother character doesn't because she's so still. And also she becomes perhaps at times more sympathetic. With Mother — I mean, there's some plot revelations that make her maybe a pitiful character, but still, she's a hard character to feel much sympathy for. Whereas I think with Miss Crone, you do.

Ren You find out in episode 7 that she has the tattoo on her neck and she tells Emma and Norman and Ray that girls who live to twelve have the chance to become a mother themselves, but they can never step outside the farm because they have this auto-destruct device implanted in their chest.

She’s an interesting character, she's shown to be intelligent. She's scheming, she wants to be a mother herself. So she's scheming against the mother of the house saying that she'll help the kids in exchange for getting ahead. And I think she becomes pretty sympathetic in her last episode, in which the mother realises that sister Crone made this bargain with the kids and tells her, oh, you're going to be the mother at Plant 4.

Adam You're getting promoted.

Ren You’re getting promoted, yeah. But in fact she goes to the gate and is the second, well, the only person we actually see being impaled with this flower through the heart.

And then as she's dying we get flashback of her life in this world and she says: Oh, they were in it together, I had no chance of winning from the beginning. And I wondered if there was an implication about race there because it shows her in these flashbacks and how she's always been the only black person in her class, in her orphanage, in the mother training or whatever. And all the striving she's had to do to get to the point of where she was, and how that's broken her I guess.

Adam Yeah, I found that episode quite affecting, it's definitely the episode I found the most moving. So you know, I don't want to outright defend it because if someone else watches it and says: “Nah, this is racist and unpalatable” or just finds it offensive or unpleasant, I wouldn't argue against that.

But I think there is an argument that it's trying to do something. Whether it succeeds, I don't know. But I think that at least might be deliberate.

Ren I think that visually it is like pretty dodgy —

Adam — And it's a shame, because it doesn't need to be right. Like it would be perfectly easy to have her as a character and and not use any racial caricature.

Ren Yeah, I thought it was interesting that when you see her when she's younger in these flashbacks, she looks much more straight forward. She just looks like a kid.

Adam Yeah. She looks like the other characters, basically. The style isn't different.

Ren Yeah, so it's it's like: Oh, you can do it.

Adam I guess the other main narrative is that the three kids and they recruit some other kids, but our three characters are working out the lay of the land, like exactly what the rules are, the geography of the house, there's a lot of map work basically. And precisely how they're going to escape.

Ren Yeah, they realise they have trackers, quite early on and discover because a new baby gets delivered to the house and they check on the baby where this tracker might be and find it's behind the left ear. So they know that they're being tracked and where it is, but they can't do anything about it. But Ray is working on something that will disrupt the trackers.

And there's a lot of back and forth about whether they can really escape with all the kids, which Emma is adamant that they need to but Ray thinks is impossible. And Ray himself is an interesting character, he has an interesting position. Norman realises that there is a traitor in the house somewhere, someone's feeding information to the mother, and Norman lays a little trap and finds out that it's Ray. But then it turns out that Ray's an extra-double-inside-traitor where he's giving information to the mother, but he's only doing that so they can get more information on how to escape!

Adam Yeah, that stuff's pretty fun. And then they start to train up the younger kids under the guise of just play in order to get them ready for the escape, which I quite enjoyed. You get montages of them obstacle coursing their way through through the forest.

Ren Yeah, it's good. There's bits of 3D animation in the series, like in the house. This dark, shadowy house with its doors and corridors. Which I think works pretty well.

Adam I think it's a space that you end up knowing quite well and it is an eerie space. I like the way that it both feels like the kind of boarding school you might get idyllically presented in a kids book, but also very sinister. Maybe like some of the school spaces in Diana Wynne Jones or something like that.

Ren And they find a secret cellar room at one point that’s full of the children who’ve been killed keepsakes, like Little Bunny, which is very upsetting.

Adam I mean, I think that's why I find the series interesting, right? So the drifting classroom, I guess, is different in as much as, the film's obviously very strange, but in the manga there's just peril all the way through. There's not much time for hijinks in The Drifting Classroom manga, because it's just peril upon peril upon peril. It never lets up.

Ren Upon elaborate time travelling schemes.

Adam Yeah, relentlessly dense. And on some level that's amazing. I love it because there's something really hysterical about that and ridiculous and bizarre and I love that. Like it's always turned up to 11. But it also takes the edge off the horror, because it's just constant. Whereas what I find interesting about The Promised Neverland is that it’d almost be easy for the kids to slip into pretending like everything's still OK — and that's what they have to do for the little kids.

So they have to present this scheme to escape to the little kids as though it is just fun and games. And so the little kids are still adorably cute and they're still laughing and smiling and having fun. And so. I feel like there's this really interesting tension created between the facade, which they have to on some level still keep up. And so on some level you're still getting quite a lot of cute imagery all the way through. So you have that, and then you have moments of really quite upsetting horror, like you say, this basement room with the keepsakes of murdered children. So I don't know, I find that really interesting, tonally, because —

Ren It's got range!

Adam It kind of does like because on some level it's a bit of a cosy watch, but it's also really super dark, like quite shockingly dark for something clearly aimed towards a teenage or young teenage audience.

So I find that quite interesting. It's sort of of a piece with other modern young adult fiction. Like I think you could say the same thing really for The Hunger Games, which on some level is a kind of classic adventure story, in as much as it's got characters working together to overcome odds and it's got obstacles and fending of yourself in the wild, but it's also really, really bleak and upsetting and violent.

Ren Yeah. It's got some weird, nasty stuff in there as well. Like I remember, like I think it's in the first book, Katniss and Peter are trying to escape from flesh eating hounds that have the faces of the dead kids.

Adam Yeah, yeah it's really upsetting, like wild, unhinged body horror moments. And when one of the characters I think slowly gets ripped to pieces, I can't remember, that's the first or the second book, but it's nasty. Like properly nasty.

And I guess I found that interesting because I think it used to be that you’d get that in Stephen King, say clearly that's what Stephen King is doing in something like It. Inasmuch as yes, there's the horrible Pennywise, really nasty stuff with kids being murdered, but also there's a lot of kids on bikes nostalgia.

But with Stephen King, OK, teenagers like Stephen King, but he was always marketed essentially as an adult writer. Whereas Hunger Games and Stranger Things, say, are clearly really sold to a teenage audience, like, lots of kids love Stranger Things.

And it's interesting because I'm now finding, and there's been a fair amount of moral panic over this, but lots of kids love Squid Game. Loads of kids in my school watch Squid Game, but in a way that's not surprising, right? Squid Game is only really one step up from The Hunger Games.

Ren Yeah, I mean, it's got this addictive structure, it's not surprising.

Adam Yeah, so I don't know, I just find it kind of interesting the position that stuff aimed at a teenage audience now occupies. I mean, same with films, right? I can't remember, did you see The First Omen? It's a prequel to The Omen, which came out last year.

Ren No, I haven’t.

It was really good. Well, I thought it was really good. That's not the complete consensus, but personally, like, it was one of my favourite films of the year, I thought it was brilliant. But there were some scenes in that, and one scene in particular where I couldn't believe it was 15 rated. I was like, what? What are the BBFC thinking? That's wild. I was astonished it wasn't 18 rated. Not quite to the degree of writing a letter to the BBFC, but almost.

So, it’s not something I'm massively concerned with, like I listen to Evolution of Horror and lots of listeners on there who seem like well-adjusted happy individuals talk about watching adult horror films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, et cetera, at a very young age. So I don't think it's a massive concern, but I do find it interesting in terms of marketing and what is aimed towards a younger audience because I would have found The Promised Neverland very disturbing as as a 12 year old, maybe even as a 13 or 14 year old actually, just in terms of how unsafe it feels at times.

But then, you know, hypocritically, well, maybe not, I've got copies of the manga and I have copies in my classroom and, kids have borrowed them and like it. It's totally popular with the kids.

So yeah, what did you think of it overall? Like overall, do you like it?

Ren Yeah. I enjoyed watching just the first season as a standalone thing. I feel like I don't really need to watch anymore. They escape. But it's a very satisfying escape narrative.

Adam No, I feel exactly the same. It's funny. Like I know that there is a lot more world-building in terms of how the society came about, that there's been some kind of war between the demons and the humans, and then there's a pact that was made that the demons leave the humans alone as long as a certain number of them are harvested, basically. And some demons are on board with this, others aren't. There's the rich family who came up with the pact and run the farms, etcetera. So, you know, all of this is kind of fleshed-out and the characters get more complex. But I'm not actually that interested in finding out about it.

And I don't know why, because I do like it. It's not like, you know, there's something like Twin Peaks, for instance, which obviously, has more going on, it's a more complex series. But Twin Peaks for me, you know, David Lynch obviously died a few weeks ago and. For me there's never enough Twin Peaks, you know, I've watched the series multiple times, but also Mark Frost’s books, I’ve read The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. I've listened to whole podcasts on Twin Peaks, I’ve read countless think-pieces and essays. It's something that I I have spent hundreds of hours thinking about. And I want all that lore.

Whereas I don't feel like that with The Promised Neverland, even though I do like it. It's good.

Ren Yeah. I mean maybe it’s something like a short story, 'cause I write short stories sometimes and in speculative fiction short stories you don't have a lot of space to do a lot of world-building and all the stuff you would do in a novel, but you want to get enough to get a sense of what this world might be like and to tell your story within that kind of thing. And I think this first series does that quite well. It's like I have a sense of this world, I don't know the details of it, but —

Adam It's enough.

Ren That's enough. Yeah.

Adam So it's available on Crunchyroll here in the UK, if you're willing to put up with some short ads or obviously not if you subscribe to Crunchyroll and I would recommend it. I think it's a satisfying thing.

Ren Yeah, I would agree. I realised — this is not related — that they did a remake of The Witches in like 2020.

Adam Didn't we discuss it?

Ren No, no, I don't think so. Did we?

Adam Didn't we? I've seen it. I didn't like it that much.

Ren Maybe I thought you were talking about the original, because I didn't even realise there was a new one.

Adam I quite like the original. I mean it's flawed, but I like it. Like the one of Anne Hathaway. Yeah. Yeah, it's all right. It's not great.

Ren We don't need to do it for the podcast then.

Adam I don't know. I think there's always more obscure Roald Dahls, we need to do The Minpins, or the Great Glass Elevator.

Ren I’m actually quite no looking forward to going back to The Great Glass Elevator, it's such an atmosphere.

Adam I know, it's so weird! It's proper existential and ontological horror.

Ren Yeah, it is. But we absolutely should talk about it. Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Oh, yeah. Mám bramboru, creepy kids. I have a potato in Czech.

Ren Ich habe ein Kartoffel. See you later creepy kids, bye!

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