The Promised Neverland (Episode 14) - Dainiwa

Ray and Emma find themselves face to face with a couple of demons, but the rest of the children are missing. Didn’t someone say something about a meal being prepared? Out of the fire…

The Promised Neverland (Episode 14) – Dainiwa

What happened?

Ray realised that the people who saved them from the demons were actually demons too, and he confronted them about it. That was when Emma realised that the girl said something about dinner and her mind leapt to the worst possible conclusion. Emma and Ray ran off in search of the others and were pleased to find them alive and well, and getting ready to eat.

The two demons joined them and together, they all sat down and had something to eat. After everyone had gone to bed, Emma and Ray approached the older of the two demons, Sonju, who was still up. They asked him about this world and humans and demons. There were a lot of questions and they had made a lot of assumptions, however, they couldn’t have been more wrong.

It turns out that a thousand years ago, the humans and demons agreed to stop killing one another and split the world in two, creating one for the humans and one for the demons. As the demons had agreed to not hunt humans anymore, they decided to breed and farm them from the remaining humans that had been left in the demon side of things.

Sonju and Mujika agreed to lead them out of the forest and offered to teach them all they knew to prepare them for the outside world. They learnt to make fires, cook, and many more things. When Sonju went out to scout the area, Emma asked to go with him. She needed to learn how to hunt and kill a living thing. With her bow and arrow, she successfully hit a bird.

Sonju gave her a grey branch with whither flowers on, telling her to stab it into the bird’s heart. If the flower bloomed, the gods would have blessed the kill. The plant is a vampiric plant that sucks the blood from the still-living creature, which also preserves the meat. Emma realised that Connie must have been alive when she was stuck with one too!

The Promised Neverland Season Two Episode 2 Sonju telling Emma and Ray about this world

What did you think?

I mentioned in my last review about the cliffhanger and how I was expecting it to be a complete red herring and it was. Part of me was a little disappointed if I’m honest, but then cliffhangers are the name of the game when it comes to The Promised Neverland. That said, we didn’t end on one with this episode, just the fact that the orphans were all most likely stunned and then stabbed with the vampire plant or just stabbed while still awake. It paints a pretty nasty picture, but then it’s also a pretty common practice with slaughtering livestock. The animal is often stunned and then bled out.

Sonju also mentioned that the worlds split a thousand years ago so I had a quick look at the year 1046 to see if anything interesting happened that might allude to this. I hoped that maybe there was some unusual event that this might build from, but I couldn’t see anything that stood out. It is possible that Sonju didn’t know exactly when it happened.

The Promised Neverland Season Two Episode 2 Gilda channeling her inner Isabella

What have you learned?

So, there are a couple of things to mention that I have already touched on. The first is taking something like farming and processing livestock and changing things up to make it even more sinister by making it happen to people. It’s certainly an interesting way of creating parallels and showing something in a new and more familiar light.

The second thing is that I love it when a work of fiction ties something back to a real event. It doesn’t have to be that big, but there are plenty of weird and wonderful pieces of history that you could pick up and create entire worlds based on them. The real world really is a crazy place and there’s no end of inspiration. All you have to do is open your mind to the possibilities.