The novelty of seeing the anime butcher the Yakusoku no Neverland manga is starting to wear off, and now it’s just kind of boring.  Turns out if you take an ending that was screwy to begin with and cut out all the buildup to it, that ending gets even worse.  If nothing else, we owe the anime for effectively proving that (though it kind of makes sense that it’d work that way, really).

There are really two main problems here, and they’re both whoppers.  First and most simply, the material the adaptation cut is better than the material it (more or less) left in.  That alone is going to wreak havoc with the quality of the show for reasons that should be patently obvious.  The second is as noted above, the already weak third act is even more wobbly without those good bits that came before it.  It’s really almost as if the anime was actively trying to figure out the worst possible course to take, and darned if they didn’t find it.  They’ve made everything worse, and nothing better.

The question now is, do I stick with it?  There is a curiosity factor here, wanting to know just how far round the bend this adaptation will go.  And the stubborn insistence not to bail after 19 eps or whatever it’s been, with only four left to go.  But I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed this episode much.  It had a lot of stuff that was mostly taken from the manga, but with all the context missing even the stuff that should have been the same felt very different.  A lot of that involves Norman, who should have been gone a lot longer and come back a different person that did.  His arc makes no sense at the pace it’s been unfurled.

I guess the one theme that carries over more or less intact from the source material is the question “is Emma nuts?”  She looks even more out of line here, with all the stuff that led her to this frame of mind having been cut,  but even in the manga her POV never really added up for a lot of people.  This highlights some larger problems I’ve always had with Emma as a character, but given all the crazy stuff happening with the anime it feels almost cruel to pick away at problems from the manga.

I don’t know where I stand with this one, to be honest.  I guess I’ll keep going for the reasons stated above, but another episode that leaves me as detached as this one did is going to be a serious test of my resolve.  I’m not a big enough fan of the manga to truly be shattered by all this, but it does strike me as both odd and very sad that a series as wildly successful as Yakusoku no Neverland should have been reduced to this.  I’m having Negima flashbacks.