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fullscoreshenanigans · 1 year

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Love the way the anime adapted this bit of the exchange between the trio in chapter 27 and chapter 28 where Ray reveals he hasn’t experienced infantile amnesia.

You can feel the profound weight of a lifetime of suffering and loss on his face as he grapples with trying to keep his emotions out of what he’ll say next, because he never brings up how what happened in all the years prior made him feel, not even when Emma provides him with an opportunity where she prompts him with speculation about what it must have been like seeing dozens of their siblings off and being powerless to do anything about it in episode 5

(Chapter 181.1)

when she remembers how shaken up Ray was when they were younger (even going so far as to say "but…Ray is never happy" in the "NER in Bird Cages" short story in the first light novel, though in perplexity as opposed to being passive-aggressive about it) and now finally has a devastating answer as to why.

But Ray never explicitly colors his recollections with emotions when discussing them with Emma and Norman, how what was happening around him and what he and Isabella did made him feel, and only displays the full anguish of what that did to him when he's speaking with Emma on the night of January 14th. While the two knew Ray intended to kill himself to serve as a distraction for them to escape, Emma never knew how deeply he internalized his self-loathing and the belief that he deserved to die for his actions and inaction until that eventful night, otherwise she would have asked one of the other kids to go talk to him, if not just have said “fuck it” and did it herself, Isabella's watchful eye be damned. She would not have let him suffer to that degree so long on his own; it goes against every fiber of her being.

Ray keeps all of that inside though, because he doesn't want their pity. He doesn't believe he deserves any when he actively chose to become Isabella's informant and which children would be shipped out early due to his experimentation with the trackers, least of all from the two people who are firmly categorized as genuinely good and worth saving in his mind. He loves them enough to squash down his humanity and die for them.

Yet there’s also that desperate (and what he considers selfish) desire to not be alone in this anymore.

I imagine among the vast array of emotions he was experiencing on the day of Conny's shipment was a guilty sort of excitement at being able to talk with them about the truth of the house, though he would never admit to it during this time because he deems his wants as irrelevant and unworthy.

But even after so much is out in the open between them now—how he tried to poison them against Don and Gilda and the other children by implying one of them was a traitor, how he experimented on at least one other child to ascertain how the trackers functioned, how he’s been Isabella’s dog for half his life—they still care about him and believe in him, and are earnestly reaching out to connect with him.

In a raw and selfish moment—because he's been steeling away his heart for years so that his resolve doesn't crumble—Ray gives in to those wants and reaches out to meet them. (There’s the argument that he’s desperate and willing to concede almost anything to strengthen his credibility with them so he can get his plans back on track and secure his end goal, but I like to think it’s mixed with this too.)

There's more focus on Norman than Emma during this part, likely as a callback to the tense confrontation they had during episode 5 where Norman was very cool and trying to quell how hurt he was by Ray’s betrayal and deceit. Now he’s taken what Emma said to heart, and it led him to the realization that Ray was willing to suffer in silence and die for them, willing to poison his relationship with them so they would distance themselves from him and so his death would cause them less grief.

(Chapter 29)

This is also after Norman’s fully committed himself to dying for Emma and Ray (and the other Grace Field children) and lied about what he plans to do the following day, so there’s this need for as much honesty between them as they can give because he hates leaving off on such terms. Unlike the time where he instigated a confrontation between them and went in combative in the event Emma was wrong, here he’s approaching Ray with a genuine desire to understand him. He wants to give him a chance to vent, know more about the him that he kept under such rigid constraints for so long, and to try and internalize what Ray’s saying to draw strength from the next day as he walks to the gate. This also why he verbalizes Ray’s struggle of six years of collecting parts for the deactivator and the focus switches to it as a physical manifestation of Ray’s hardships and love he holds in his hands (with the anime altering the manga's order of events so Ray gives him the tracker before discussing his memories of Grace Field Headquarters to facilitate this).

The lighting leaves such an acute awareness in Norman’s eyes and such a haunted look in Ray’s while the former is more illuminated and the latter is in shadows. I love that Norman holds Ray’s gaze during this entire exchange and doesn’t look away even during the brief bit of silence, letting Ray know that no matter what he says, he won’t shy away from sharing the weight of his reality. He wants to understand him after he spent a lifetime of not being able to be honest about the things that hurt him the most. There’s layers of tragedy to that, one being that they’re both still holding back at this point, but there is some progress on the front.

Likewise, how Ray’s eyes are obscured when he reveals he’s always known, and the way Norman doesn’t suppress his reaction as the light shimmers in his and the skin around them and his brow crinkles in muted grief. He vowed to himself not to look away at Ray’s suffering, but just like he quickly realizes the implication of Isabella being at the gate and how that’s reflected on his face in episode 1

the gravity that’s implicitly woven into those three words is heartbreaking, and it strengthens his resolve that he's making the correct choice. Ray has carried this burden for so, so very long; now it's his turn to bear it (though the perceived cost is unfathomably cruel to expect of anyone, least of all an eleven-year-old).

And on Ray’s end, we have the perspective flip of this reflection:

Because he remembers the years of Norman’s love and kindness when all Norman understood about the situation was that one of his two best friends was sad.

While he won't give up all his secrets to him and Emma, in this moment where they're on the precipice of potentially losing Norman if anything should go awry, he exposes another painful layer of his past.

It's a double-edged sword though, because while it does bring them all closer together emotionally, Ray assumes that by additionally appealing to Norman's logical side with the information he can provide him about headquarters, it'll convince him that hiding out in the forest for a few months is a viable option. In actuality, Norman's already made his final decision.

#The Promised Neverland #Yakusoku no Neverland #TPN #TPN S1 #TPN S1e05 #TPN S1e09 #Escape Arc #Full Score Trio #Norrayemma #Noremray #TPN Ray #TPN Norman #TPN Emma #Pre-Canon #TPN 181.1 #Emma #Norman #Ray #TPN Meta #FSS Chatter #Long Post #just some little changes that have a big impact on making the viewing experience enjoyable. to me.#recycling this from discord so some people might see it twice sorry </3 #big thank you to all the animators who worked on that frame of Ray in the shadows they are my heroes that shot fucks me up so bad _(:△」∠)_#the gif version of Emma looking down when commenting on how tough Ray's experience was #would not upload without being dithered to hell and back with my rudimentary gif-making knowledge #so still frame it was lol #also now you can see how bad my edit on that Ch181.1 panel is to fit along the left side of that last pic

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