What Do You Think Of Ray's Character Arc So Far In TPN?

What do you think of Ray's character arc so far in TPN?

So, if Emma’s main strength and her flaw is her boundless optimism then Ray’s in contrast is his fatalism. This is a well balanced trio after all. As Ray never really had a chance to be an innocent child and was aware he was livestock from the beginning, this produces two unique effects to Ray. The first being that Ray is constantly in survival mode and only thinking in terms of survival and not necessarily what to do next, and second that Ray thinks his own self is worthless.

When Ray does what he does to survive, he doesn’t think he’s in the right though which is where his second flaw primarily comes from. Having not only to act as if everything was fine the whole time, but also to deal with the guilt that he was helping sell some of the children down the river in order to guarantee his future safety eroded away at his sense of self worth. 

In The Promised Neverland evil does not just take the form of demons who simply eat and hunt children farmed for them without questioning it. It also takes the form of grown up children like the Mamas who have entirely given up on trying to find anything better from the system and instead resign themselves to only caring about their own survival.

Ray is similar to those Mamas, but he is also different because there was never a point where he was a child. He is instead somebody who gave up from the beginning, however because he is still a child at this time there’s still a chance to save him. 

Emma’s boudnless optimism is of course, the counter to this fatalism that damns all of the adults. Even when she learns that Ray btrayed them, and worse knew that people like Connie were dying but purposefully sold them down the line in order to buy them time, her response is not “What you’ve done is unforgiveable” but rather “Never do that again.” Which is where the shoneny part comes in in this manga. 

The ultimate good is Emma’s unwillingness to never stop seeking for something better for not only her, but everyone around her. She genuinely wants to save every kid, even when she sees obvious setbacks or dangers to that ideal. The ultimate evil is just resigning to the world the way it is and instead deciding to save only yourself. 

Ray tries to deal with this contradiction by landing firmly in the middle. His plan from the beginning was always to save a few people by sacrificing himself. This is however, him succumbing to his second flaw, his own self loathing over what he’s done to survive in order to get to this point. As Emma already pointed out Ray had a path in front of him, he just had to stop trying to sell people out in order to benefit the many. However. if Emma was willing to forgive him and look on, Ray couldn’t forgive himself which is where his attitude of sacrificing himself came from.

He’s trying to die a heroic death to make up for what he’s done so far to survive, but in reality he’s committing the same mistake of the adults. He’s giving up, he’s deciding “that’s enough, this is all I can do.” Rather than trying to live on with the mistakes he’s made so far he’s just trying to make one final sacrifice as if that can make up for it.

But Ray himself even says so, that even born into the worst life possible that he was only cattle, aware of it the whole time, and selling out his beloved siblings, he still saw something in his life. Which is exactly why Emma saves him.

However, when Ray gets outgambitted this introduces us to his third flaw. His inferiority to Norman, a flaw which Emma shares as well. Remember as I mentioned in Norman’s post, Norman is the most well balanced of the trio, Emma is emotional and too optmistic, Ray is logical and too pragmatic. Norman being the balancing factor of the trio had all of Emma’s optimism and all of Ray’s pragmatism so to both of them he looks like a better version of themselves. 

So Ray’s intention is to sacrifice himself, but he’s entirely outgambitted by Norman. Not only does Norman get the heroic sacrifice, and plan something even better than the plan Ray has been working all his life on, but he also saves Ray and forces Ray to live in a world without Norman. Which clearly affects Ray a little bit, he full on hallucinates a conversation with Norman who as far as he knows is dead.

So, the next two arcs after this are mostly Emma’s development forcus rather than Ray’s (to be fair basically the entire first 36 chapters was Ray’s time to develop and not Emma’s, Emma starts wanting to save everybody and her only real test of character is losing Norman.) However, Ray has two important points of development and it’s good to look at them from the angle of Ray is forced to live on in Norman’s place beside Emma instead, and he feels vastly inferior to Norman. Number one is ray’s tendency to sacrifice himself and use himself as a diversion has not gone away even though Ray himself is self aware of this quality of his at this point.

The scond is that Ray has met his shadow in adult form. Oddly enough it’s not actually his literal mother, but rather it’s nameless.

Nameless is another adult who has given up and only cares for surviving the world, and not improving it. Not only that but he shows the same cynicism that early Ray shows, that they can only save a select few and everything else gets in the way. 

It’s also Ray’s specific trauma, having to sell out others in order to survive that made Nameless this way. Not only that, but the more charismatic leader of the group, the more hopeful one Lucas sacrificed himself in order to make sure Nameless would live, and not only does Nameless feel vastly inferior but he can’t keep hoping the same way that Lucas did. 

So while Ray’s development isn’t the focus of this arc, he still has a shadow in the form of Nameless who not only reflects his relationship to his past trauma, but also to the inferiority he feels for putting Norman on a pedestal and measuring himself up against that.

Both of these are things that erode away Ray’s identity, which is why Nameless is Nameless in the first place because trauma overwrote who he was to begin with. However, Nameless shares the exact same message that Emma imparted Ray with, that even if he’s done terrible things up until this point he can still live. 

Ray and Nameless’ response to the world is “I can’t live on with this.” and their greatest temptation is to just give into their fatalism and fall to everything they’ve done so far, but it comes from a place of survivor’s guilt. They genuinely believe they’re not deserving of living on, as opposed to people like Mama who were able to sell out everyone for their own survival. However, Emma’s message is different, she tells them it was a good thing that they lived, that it’s a net positive to live, and keep living on. 

Nameless believes his comrades sacrificed themselves for someone worthless like him, and Emma’s response is to say it wasn’t worthless, because his comrades wouldn’t wish death on him, they would want him to live. 

That too is probably what the message is going to be for Ray in his own arc. That he’s not inferior to Norman, that there is a reason he himself has lived to this point and he just needs to look for it the same way Emma does.