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giveasmuchlove · 4 years

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About Norman

Okay so I’m definitely late to The Promised Neverland but I couldn’t just not write out my thoughts on Norman (and, as it turned out, I touched on everyone else too). I just find him to be one of the most heartbreaking characters with one of the most bittersweet arcs. I know some people are a bit iffy on his character in general but I hope you enjoy my breakdown of his character either way!

I’m gonna try to organize my thoughts here into the following sections (hidden below Keep Reading because this is long and I don’t have a side blog):

Gracefield House & The Escape from Gracefield Arc

Lambda

King of Paradise & The Imperial Attack Arc

Post-Imperial Attack Arc

This post will contain spoilers up through Chapter 179.

To start off: Gracefield House & The Escape from Gracefield Arc

It’s pretty clear throughout the story that Norman’s goals are solely to keep his Emma and his family alive – which aligns with the rest of the characters: Ray’s goal is to save Emma and Norman and then later to protect his whole family, Emma’s goal is to save and protect her whole family. While all of our main characters have the same goal, they each go about it in different ways that evolve as they grow up. As a baseline:

Emma sees things from an idealistic standpoint and she continuously plays to the strengths of those around her. She’s willing to take risks to get a higher reward. She’s not naive in that sense because she’s aware she’s taking these risks. Yes, she faces moments of doubt but as her focus has always been entirely on her family, she’s the character who tends to be more inclined to include them in her plans.

Ray – at the beginning of his character arc – sees things from a more hopeless perspective in which he can only save a few people. His priority is Emma and Norman and then the rest of his family. One could argue he doesn’t actually start to think of any of the other children as family until the end of the Escape from Gracefield Arc but that’s for another essay. What’s super cool about him is that he’s less self destructive as time goes on and, once they do escape, he takes on more of Emma’s ideals. He’s not necessarily against some of the more morally dubious plans but he has faith in Emma’s more hopeful plans because he’s been shown that they work. (in general, I need to write our a full breakdown for Ray)

Norman exhibits similar self-destructive tendencies as Ray when push comes to shove but he never plans his own death, so to speak. At the beginning, always intends to do what he can to make Emma’s more idealistic hopes come true. He focuses on the best result and does whatever it takes to get there (literally, whatever it takes). Early Norman is a nice mix between Ray’s more realistic thinking and Emma’s idealistic dreams.

Some of my favorite Norman panels during my reread were these from Chapter 4:

If I were to pinpoint the first character beat in Norman’s early characterization, I would say this is it. This is where we can see the building blocks of how Norman will react to particularly challenging situations. Which is, essentially, to use himself in any way necessary so that Emma and his family can live. It’s important to note, though, that he doesn’t exclude himself from his hopes for the future until he feels like he’s about to die. Throughout the whole story (well, at least through chapter 179), Norman wants to live.

However, since he’s both – as Emma says – very smart and very kind, when Isabella tells them that Norman is being shipped off, he doesn’t do anything to save himself or live alongside them. He prioritizes saving all of the other children and sees any attempt at two separate escapes as futile. And this is what I would consider his second big character beat:

This moment is a catalyst for everything he will become. Essentially, once he learns that the escape was successful, his choice to sacrifice himself is cemented as a ‘success.’ And the interesting thing here is that he’s not exactly wrong. While it’s possible that they all could have escaped together, Norman’s ‘death’ gave them the cover they needed for Don and Gilda to train the rest of the children without Isabella realizing. To him, sacrificing himself/shouldering the burden for his family is a viable option moving forward cause it worked the first time. Which brings us to:

Part 2: Lambda

We don’t see a lot of Norman in Lambda, but there are a couple of key points that I think are super important for his choices later on:

Norman is kept in isolation, more or less. We do see him interact briefly with Vincent through the cube in one of the flashbacks but other than that, he has no true connection to anyone while inside of Lambda.

Norman’s goals while in Lambda are solely to survive, escape, and reunite with Emma and Ray. However, he doesn’t know what he has to do to stay alive.

These two factors essentially destabilize him as a person. Emma, Ray, Gracefield – they all gave him something to rely on or someone to trust. Even once the truth about the farms is revealed, they vaguely know what it takes to stay alive and they can lean on each other. Within Lambda, that’s gone completely and, by the time he does escape (which seems to be about a year after the Gracefield escape. They mention that everything he builds is done in about six months), he’s not used to being emotionally vulnerable. This is only exacerbated by the children he saves looking up to him as a godlike figure.

Essentially, from Lambda up until the moment he reunites with Emma and Ray, Norman is making all the hard decisions and shoulders the burdens of them alone. He’s the one who saves the children from other farms, he’s the one who pulls the lever to kill the non-sentient children, and he’s the one to plan the demon extermination. He has help, but his whole life is focused around the harm caused by demons and the harm he causes them. None of these factors set him up to be willing or able to take a more idealistic approach to saving all the children in the demon world.

Juxtapose this with Emma and Ray. While they’re absolutely not having a great time either, they are together with their family. They find Mujika and Sonju who save them and teach them about the demon world, they find parental figures in Yuugo and Lucas (and then they loose them *cries*), they expand their family and are relatively ‘safe’ for probably around 6 months to 1 year after Goldy Pond. Since they’re focused on saving everyone through the Seven Walls, they aren’t seeing the atrocities happening inside the experimental and factory farms. They simply aren’t as hardened by the world around them

Shout out to this cover for juxtaposing these two worlds and making me realize Norman was probably in Lambda for quite a while after the escape arc:

King of Paradise & The Imperial Attack Arc

These arcs are where people tend to get a little iffy on Norman’s character because of the genocide plan, the plan to kill Mujika, and his lies to Emma and Ray. But I actually really enjoyed them casting him in this antagonistic protagonist light. I mean his experiences in the year and a half since the escape are just so different that it only makes sense he goes a different way.

I’m gonna start off this section by talking specifically about how he distances himself and his plans from Emma and Norman. Since they were so important to him in Lambda, him disagreeing with Emma and refusing to slow down his plan can feel a little jarring. But on a reread (I’m telling you TPN is so satisfying to reread), I realized something I hadn’t before – he thinks he’s dying throughout both of these arcs. It only makes sense that he doesn’t get too close to Emma and Ray because they’re the ones who always made him want to live.

I think the turning point from him being the type of person who would listen to Emma and change his plans according to her wishes to someone who will stay steadfast on the route he’s already on, is when he realized he wouldn’t be able to live:

From this point on, to me, his goals became less centered around “I’m gonna get out of here alive and see my family” and more centered around “how do I ensure my family is safe once I’m gone.” To that end he can’t take unreasonable risks. He can’t try to make a new promise with the demon lord, he can’t try to get all demons the cure under the hope they won’t eat humans once they don’t need to.

So when Emma asks him to do that, he not only is making a decision based solely off of whether or not it could work or based off of everything demon’s have done to the people he cares about – he’s also making a decision regarding what plan will ensure his family is safe once he is no longer there to save them. It’s an arrogant way of thinking but for a character that believed his initial sacrifice allowed his family to live, it’s not unreasonable for him to think he can create a world that will be safe for them when he dies.

As for why he doesn’t tell Emma or Ray that he is sick, that’s a little more murky. I would consider this lie to be equal to the lie he tells during the escape arc where he says he’ll run away and doesn’t. On one hand, he doesn’t want them to worry about them – if he’s dying anyways he might not want them to focus solely on that. On the other, he’s convinced his plan is the best one and likely believes they’ll stop him if he tells them. Given that he also says he’ll become a god or a devil to save Emma, it’s likely also part of his god/savior complex (which is why he doesn’t tell those from Lambda).

A final quick note about his motivations during this section, that comes back in chapter 179. Norman does not believe that the human world will accept them and, given that he won’t be there to help protect everyone, he closes that option off to go with the more certain ‘kill all the demons’ choice.

It’s only when Emma and Ray call him out on his fears and essentially see right through him, that anything starts to change. While Emma tells him she can see through him in chapter 128, since there isn’t a more feasible option (in his eyes) for saving everyone, and because he still needs to be strong for everyone from Lambda, his actions don’t change. However, the story increasingly points to this not being the way he wants to go from this point on. Basically, I love chapter 128 because it is the start of Norman realizing himself that the path he’s on is not one he particularly wants to be on even if he doesn’t see another way out.

Chapters 154 and 155 are my some of my favorites simply because the emotional payoff of having all of these pieces come to light is just so good. Norman does realize that he doesn’t want a genocide around chapter 148 but still sees it as the only option. Once he has killed the nobility, put poison in the water, and experimented on demons he sees himself as irredeemable. Emma and Ray coming in and still accepting him and reassuring him until he finally tells them everything – including what he wants to do – is the first major step to Norman healing. Can’t resist adding a trio hug in here – also these children are 13, that’s so young:

Which brings us to: Post-Imperial Attack Arc

There are a couple of things I really like about Norman’s characterization once the guise of Minerva/all knowing leader drops. First of all, there are some frames where he looks like he’s the same age as Emma and Ray again. I didn’t talk too much about how Norman is drawn throughout this but I really love how Posuka drew him to look taller/older in scenes where he was more distanced/focused on his plan to kill all demons. There’s definitely some theories out there about how the medication made him age faster as well, so it’s just so nice to see him look young again.

Alright, how much I love the art aside, basically once they get through to him in the Imperial Capital, Norman does become a lot like his younger self however, one of the things I really appreciate about it is that he’s not completely back. In general he does seem a bit more out of it in the Return to Gracefield arc than the other characters around him. While Emma sobs over Peter Ratri, he just looks on (which, who can blame him, that’s the guy responsible for everything he went through at Lambda), he doesn’t hug Phil but rather thanks him for protecting their siblings. He’s also the most unaffected by Isabella’s death of the trio – which would make sense. To him, death is a consistent and very real part of life and he hasn’t been protected from it in any way. It’s little touches like that that allow him to feel like he’s the same person as he was during the first arc and that he’s the same person as he was during the Paradise/Imperial City arcs.

I think this the fact that he has not fully recovered is cemented – in the most heart breaking way – when they’re separated from Emma when they make it to the human world. A couple other people have done great breakdowns on the difference in reactions between Ray and Norman so I’m just gonna lightly touch on them.

For Ray:

It’s been said before but Ray truly trusts Emma. He has complete faith in her and she has never given him a reason to doubt her. They’ve been leading their group together for almost two years and his response reflects that. He thinks he should have done something but he doesn’t think she did anything to break his trust or leave him alone.

For Norman

Norman, on the other hand, pretty much fully regresses in this moment. Not only does he blame himself but he also blames her. This, to me, cements the idea that he is still on what is probably a fairly long journey to a healthy mindset. Because, in his original plan, she would have been fine. What the current scenario relays to him is basically that the first time he truly let go of his plans, it resulted in the loss the most important person to him.

The second part of his thought process is blaming Emma. Which is why I think it’s really important to remember that they just reunited a couple of weeks ago (I believe, feel free to fact check me) after over a year of being apart. During that time, he was not able to share the burden with anyone else or trust anyone (emotionally speaking). So, in this moment, he has no reason to trust that she wasn’t lying to them. On top of that we can add in the idea that he also feels betrayed on an emotional level because he opened up for the first time in over a year because of Emma and, in return, she hid her burdens from him.

Of course, he sets this aside to agree to look for Emma later in the chapter – agreeing that it doesn’t matter why she isn’t there – and I think his last statement “We won’t let you be alone” is a really nice reference/call out to how she wouldn’t let him be alone. In a way, that kind of sentiment helps overcome his more trauma-based inclinations.

Given that there’s only one chapter left after this weekend, I doubt we’ll get a whole lot more on his character – at least in terms of gradual progression – but I do think he has been one of the most fascinating characters in the TPN universe to really think about. And I do think he is on the path to healing, even if it’s bumpy. Here’s all my hopes for a happy ending for all of them!

(If they don’t find a cure for the seizures and he dies I will be devastated)

#tpn spoilers #Yakusoku no Neverland #the promised neverland #tpn emma #tpn norman #tpn ray #yakusoku no neverland spoilers #tpn #tpn: my thoughts #honestly this thing clocks in at 2640+ words

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