The Promised Neverland, written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu had an average of about 650,000 copies sent into circulation per month by the end of 2020. In 2021, the average grew by over 120% with the average being 1.5 million (that’s right, people, MILLION) copies monthly. Those numbers rival Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan and that’s a real accomplishment. With a story doing this well, it’s certainly something to pay attention to whether you like anime/manga or not, right? Right!
I picked this one based on the story (as far as I’ve seen, season 1), and with the writing being so incredible, worthy absolutely of the hype in my opinion, there were a number of takeaways from this one as well. The one I’d like to focus on today is a lesson on Foreshadowing. The plot of TPN is mysterious, twisty, and quite the thriller! As such, it’s natural that the writer would need to do a great job of foreshadowing. In my rewatch, I noticed how the seemingly flawless end reveal of the narrative came about: it was all about what we didn’t get to see. In fact, I’d argue the ending of the first season was spoon-fed to us, only in a manner somehow, that we wouldn’t see coming. Sounds crazy and impossible to do, right? Well, stick with me here. Shirai doesn’t particularly misdirect his audience or throw in all that many false clues, from what I can remember. (And, I’ll just add here that these posts are all going to be very informal analyses intended only to learn, so if I get something wrong, do let me know.) In fact, everything we see in the story seems, at least at first, to be very straightforward! However, the real brilliance of foreshadowing in the narrative comes from the holes in the plot. For those who’ve seen it, think back on the conversation between Norman and Emma beside the drying clothes: there’s a hole there, one easily assumed to have been filled in by what comes next, right? We assumed the blank that was their conversation was only following the idea we’ve all heard about when it comes to plans: if a plan will succeed, show it happening, not formulating; if not, we need to know what it was first. Through this and many other explicit blanks in what the audience is shown, Shirai keeps certain developments hidden, allowing us to focus more on what we’re seeing, taking it to be all-encompassing. In a way, information is withheld in this series both overtly and sneakily(yes, I did use “sneakily”) Technically, the audience is misled of their own volition. The steaks of the narrative are high for our protagonists, and so we’re invested in their every move and added risk, enough so that we allow ourselves to overlook that which is explicitly not shown to us, assuming that what we do see is all there is to it because what we see is so incredibly gripping on its own! You’ll notice also in the moment I mentioned, that the view of the audience is focused on hangars. This detail is seemingly harmless, and we don’t pay attention to it in the moment. That’s why it’s so great! Every image, every detail: why Emma is never sitting alone in her grieving period, the constant reminder of the primary threat (trying really hard not to give too much away here!), right down to Norman’s remarks upon finding something (which we are not shown!) under Ray’s bed lay out the foundations of what’s to come: Shirai’s big reveal. So here’s the takeaway before I let myself ramble my way into big spoilers: What is left unseen/unwritten is what provides the foundations of good foreshadowing. Here’s how I see what he did: Shirai knows exactly what’s going to happen, every detail of the plot, whether he allows the audience to see or not. Knowing every element of the greater plot, he hid things. He “faded to black”, so to speak to hide the explicit details he incorporated into his big end reveal. However, he didn’t hide everything. It was done in a way that resembles redacting specific words in a sentence: we miss what gives the sentence its meaning, but, we get to see all the other words. By that same method, the ending reveal essentially gives the audience the pieces they were missing, allowing everything to snap perfectly and satisfyingly, as reveals go, into place. How’d he pull that off? Well, by pacifying his audience, in a way. Because he’d already done the work of investing his audience, those little absences in detail just made the audience curious, but were easily forgotten in the moment because of the incredible excitement and drama of what we were shown. How can we incorporate this lesson into our own work? Write your outline (or your first draft, that’s right, I see you pantsers) to include everything that’s going on. Then, start redacting. Take out those key conversations, events, etc. that will give away the big moment all of those things are working up towards. Be minimalist about it! Remember, foreshadowing isn’t any good if what is foreshadowed felt like it came out of absolutely nowhere. Leave your audience the rest of the sentence, the rest of the scene, the hangars in the basket, the fact that something was discovered under Ray’s bed, so that when the time comes, and you give back those redacted items, your audience will get to enjoy that phenomenal “WHAT?!” to “Oh my gosh” to “OHHH!” moment that we all love in a mystery, regardless of genre or nature.