Tried drawing my first fanart of this series! Starting Emma!

Emma

Some tarot card designs I drew based on The Promised Neverland characters ☀️

The TPN kids as fluffy animals cause I like drawing fluffy animals!! Anyway Emma and Norman live to wreak havoc on Ray’s life

So I finally caught up on The Promised Neverland and I already can’t wait for the second season

Stylish guys 

I’m dumping this here until I regain myself

unfortunatelyuncreative:

couldnt-think-of-a-better-name:

Divine Comedy in TPN?

Apologies for the radio silence this week, I had to do a load of overtime at work unfortunately to meet a deadline, ugh

So@just-to-comment-in-fanpages I had a bit more of a think about Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as @vobomon drew my attention to other parts of it as well that I was forgeting about.

The Divine Comedy by Dante has 3 parts:

1. Inferno or Hell where the souls of the damned stay in the greatest horrors. This one is a big hole in the ground on the lands of the Northern hemisphere with 9 circles of it, each deeper than the other.
2. Purgatorio or Purgatory where people who have sinned in life, but are not damned forever can take a spiritual journey of suffering to purge their sins and get to Paradise. This one is a mountain on the ocean of the Southern hemisphere, with 7 terraces, each higher to climb until you reach the Earthly Paradise at the top.
3. Paradiso or Heaven, where the souls of the pure and faithful reside. This is a series of planetary bodies (7 “planets” + 3 other types of places) in the sky, ending with a meeting with God at the Empyrean.

I still don’t think that we have or will be seeing any of the deadly sins. However, if instead of looking at the details like the different levels of Hell etc, you look at the Divine Comedy on the whole: it is a journey of spiritual growth and suffering across a surreal and confusing landscape separate from a normal existance, leading to a meeting with God, in order to save a loved one (in Dante’s case, this is his love Beatrice).

I think thematically speaking that is very similar to what Emma and Ray are goimg through and trying to achieve. So perhaps there is a parallel, but not just with one book, but all three.

Inferno is the most well-known and widely referenced work out of the three. There are a huge number of elements to it, and we haven’t seen many things in TPN that could be related, but I find the following similarities interesting:

After being chased by monsters in a dark forest, Dante arrives at the gates of Hell, which bear an inscription that famously end in “Abandon all hope you who enter here”.

Emma and Ray do also encounter a large gate in a forest setting with an inscription that warn them that they can’t easily return if they cross it. There is some vague visual similarity to Rodin’s famous scuplture of Dante’s gate of Inferno, as you can see.

As Dante traverses Inferno, he encounters horrors beyond mortal comprehension, and some of those he meets he recognises from his life as souls of the dead.

Emma and Ray also find themselves in a place that must feel like hell to them. In a house where they were destined to die if they didn’t fight, and they see faces of people they know or believe dead, making them experience horror.

Dante has to descend down deeper to reach through hell, but from the depths of Inferno, he will move to a new area: the mountain of Purgatory where he needs to climb each terrace.

I find the two opposite cones an interesting imagery, since we see Ray traverse a land with two unexplained cone shapes across the horizons. Could they signify the journey across Inferno and Purgatory as a whole? Rather than breaking them into levels.

Also, to get here, as you pointed out @just-to-comment-in-fanpages , Emma and Ray does climb DOWN. So perhaps the control room is the depths of Hell?

The other thing about Dante’s Purgatory is that it is a place where you can only progress by facing your sins, and suffering to purge them with their opposite virtues. Actually this is the place where the Seven Deadly Sins (and the Seven Virtues to combat them) are properly defined, not Inferno. It is meant to be a long and difficult journey to Paradise at the top of mount Purgatory.

We don’t know what exactly happened to Ray and Emma just yet, but it does seem like Ray has suffered a lot, and he is on a difficult and long journey.

I don’t really know if these parallels are intentional or a coincidence, but if Shirai-san is really using the whole of the divine comedy, then I think we can expect a couple themes to make an appearance when we move into the Paradiso part:

• Dante meets Beatrice at the top of Purgatory after believing her to be lost to him. This is in the Earthly Paradise where Adam and Eve was banished from.
• They fly together into the sky and see various planetary bodies in the celestial heaven. It’s interesting that TPN put an emphasis on the Moon (there is even a cover where Emma, Ray and the kids fly in front of the Moon…), since that is the first planetary body Dante encounters.
• Later they fly by the Sun and stars as well, other symbols that we have seen in TPN.
• Dante meets and converses with God at the Empyrean:

• Before Dante is allowed to enter the Empyrean, he has to face the test of 3 divine figures: St. Peter, St. James and St. John. The 3 trials are faith (Peter), hope (James) and love John.

Now, what I find interesting from my anslysis of Biblical references in TPN is that we also have a Peter, James and Son-Ju… What is more, Dante has likened himself to St. Paul, and my Biblical analysis post concluded that Emma was an analogy to St. Paul.

It might all be just a coincidence, but if we suddenly see Peter, James and Son-ju test Emma before she encounters demon!God… Well, I would take that as confirmation that the Divine Comedy is being referenced. So I wonder what will happen.

Now, even if I am completely wrong on the Divine Comedy reference, I am pretty sure about the cupboard in that panel I put in of Ray traversing a desert. That is a reference to the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe written by C. S. LEWIS (!). In case you missed, the previous chapter did have a lion plushie, as well as the extra page does this chapter…

Why do I say that it’s a definite reference? I have actually read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (finally something that I didn’t need to wikipedia!), and the story is that a group of kids go to a fantastical land where they grow up, die, and then they return home to their original world, life and age…

Well, since that wardrobe makes zero sense to use otherwise and would look really random, I am pretty sure that Shirai-san is giving us a hint that Ray and Emma may age, ane even die in this fantastical land, but they will be returning to their original bodies and ages afterwards, just like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

You know how Ray has aged and become old in the same chapter we see the wardrobe?

This is why I am not worried at all about Ray aging.

The aging definitely works, though in the Narnia books, the children would stay dead if they died there, they just find their way out before that happens. 

You are absolutely right, and I apologise. This is what happens if I skip doing the wikipedia research and try to do it all from memory, I get some details slightly off.

The fact is still that they grew old and then got back to their original world (when they encountered a lamp post… I wonder if the lanterns will play some role in TPN in getting back) where virtually no time has passed, and they were back to being children again.

So I think we can still expect a similar thing for Ray and Emma, the wardrobe reference is a very obvious hint I think at least.

Emma: Ray gave me a “Get Well Soon” card today.

Emma: I’m not sick, he just thought I could do better.