Retrospective: The Promised Neverland’s Second Season was Robbed

destructoid.com:

I was the first in my friend group to pick up The Promised Neverland‘s manga. It was late 2017 when I saw an ad for the first volume of The Promised Neverland and decided to start reading and to be honest, it was amazing.

Then, at my behest, all my friends started reading it one after the other until the anime adaptation was announced. Needless to say, I felt absolutely vindicated. I had made a judgment call on a manga, and the world was now taking notice. The anime was produced by an offshoot of A-1 Pictures, CloverWorks, and while this wasn’t their first rodeo, it was one of the first shows I’d seen from the studio.

It was OK. As a whole, the adaptation was serviceable enough for a second season to be greenlit, which led to my friends and I discussing where in the manga season 2 would end. There were several viable moments where a second season finale could leave off and where a prospective third could pick up, but we never could come to a consensus. The Promised Neverland really was a great but oddly paced story.

And then, in early 2021, just before the second season began airing, the news broke that this season would feature an original scenario written by one of the manga’s authors. I was cautiously optimistic about this, as anime original stories are traditionally less compelling than the canon story published in the manga. Still, it was Kaiu Shirai, and surely they wouldn’t steer us wrong, right?

The Promised Neverland’s second season was, for all intents and purposes, loyal — to a point. It begins to diverge after episode 4 and proceeds to cut upwards of five entire story arcs from the manga in favor of wrapping up the story by the end of season 2. 

I thought it was bad that they decided to axe what is arguably