#noremma

[sseevvvvyy]

ITS SO THEIR TROPE GUYS THIS TROPE IS LITERALLY NOREMMA

[h0lymanteca]

Miss them so much

[puppygirldanhowell]

i don't understand how some people interpret norman and ray's relationship as like. this vaguely competitive thinly veiled rivalry for emma's heart. or even that theyre not friends at All and only tolerate eachother for her. like did we watch the same show??? i know our brains have been rotted by lame heteronormative 2/5 star romances but yall.

Ray did not spend six years planning an escape and literally staking his life on the escape of a guy he tolerated. i guess i understand how people can think theyre not Really friends like they are with Emma from the scene where Ray gets revealed to be the traitor. but Norman's initial thought to use Ray wasn't some plan he'd just been Waiting to use to get his rival out of the way, it was just logic. Norman relies on logic above all else as a default, which is why he needs Emma, but thats a whole other conversation. Anyways- if nothing else, the time between it getting revealed that Norman's getting shipped, and him Actually getting shipped shows just how Much they All care about eachother. Ray was willing to break his arm and get sick to save Norman, he abandoned all logic for their makeshift plan to save Norman. Not to mention Norman's little speech about how he couldn't bare to have either of them die in his place. oh yeah also all the grief when Norman realized what Ray planned to do to trigger the escape. it Is a little more subliminal in the anime though so i can get that being missed. i know i missed it the first time i watched it

[jet-apologistmybadhomies]

norrayemma Part 3 🎇 noremma!

she will always be stronger and thats amazing

[urloyalpartner]

would you rather kiss, marry or kill?

[kate7h]

reviving some old fic for noremma because I can and nobody can stop me. Maybe I'll actually finish it at some point

[mistamorgana]

No I will NOT shut up about them

[fullscoreshenanigans]

I’m never going to be over Ray and Emma both having visions of Norman when they both desperately needed the comfort of his presence.

I could have gone with manga panels for both of these for uniformity, but yet again CloverWorks takes advantage of the medium shift to add such beautiful nuance to (hallucination!)Norman and Ray’s exchange in the S1 finale—Norman speaking to Ray so, so gently in both the English and Japanese dubs with his final remark featured here, Ray being so overwhelmed by everything that’s happened in the past hour already and now topped with seeing one of the two people who was most important to him reappear, after he thought he’d never see him again, that he nearly cries at his words. I can’t express how much I adore the way they handled this scene.

By turning out to be a hallucination/dream as opposed to a ghost, we’re shown Norman’s departed spirit isn’t actually guiding them as its own independent entity with an agenda in another incorporeal form, but instead how they both internalized his character and personality and, most importantly, how they wished to see him again that manifested his appearance (see this post for further differences between their perspectives of him on this particular night).

Ray has spent over half of his life utterly loathing himself for the choices he made in order to save Emma and Norman. So much so he built up a bravado around the act of his self-immolation for years, resulting in the manic fervor he displays when giving his speech to Emma in the few minutes before the clock strikes midnight on his officially listed birthday (this is also fueled by his fraught relationship with Isabella, but that’s for other posts). He not only believes he deserves to die for his actions and perceived inaction, but that he should do so in a violent, agonizing way.

Ray knows Norman, knows his sense of rigid morality well enough to account for him discovering his alliance with Isabella and using that to his advantage, to further push Norman away so he’ll be more comfortable with using him (he even chides Norman for not keeping his original plan to do this a secret) and so his death will hurt him and Emma less. And for roughly the entire back half of October 2045, Norman did genuinely hate Ray for his betrayal in the same way he hated Isabella, his reaction so visceral at being deceived and hurt by people he had loved all his life. He would have been willing to sacrifice Ray if not for intervention from Emma, which opened him up to directly confronting Ray and, in turn, led him to discover Ray’s true motives. He was so humbled and taken aback by the depths of Ray’s love and loyalty he returned to his original categorization of him: a dear friend who needed to be saved from his intended fate in their cruel world. Even if saving him came at the cost of his own life; even if he desperately wanted to live.

One could argue Ray hallucinating Norman up on the wall was to assuage his own guilt at being unable to save him as he originally planned (something that, on his darker days, I think Ray himself would believe), but I prefer to view it as the final marker of his truly internalizing one of the deepest desires in his heart that he had locked away for so long. After living under that oppressive reality of dehumanization and exploitation and believing that there was nothing else for him, that this was all there was, that things would never get better and after everything he did up to that point, he didn’t deserve better, on top of Isabella throwing him completely off balance by shipping Norman out early and just being this incredibly conflicting and painful presence in his life, to have his siblings come together for this escape plan and without putting it explicitly in words convey “you’re worth saving, Ray, and we love you,” and that they gave him hope back

(Chapter 36)

it fucks me up something fierce.

Emma’s hallucination of Norman is much more brief during this time.

No words are exchanged, but none are necessary.

(Chapter 31)

After two and a half months of grappling with the real, palpable grief she felt at his death, seeing him around every corner and hearing his voice, and sublimating it into her efforts to ensure the success of the escape, she’s able to find solace in her vision of him before the wall.

(Chapter 119)

It’s why she sheds no tears for him until their reunion nearly two years later.

(TPN Light Novel 1: A Letter from Norman - “The Day Emma Cried”; translated by @1000sunnygo​​)

But up until that point, she repeatedly draws strength and comfort from his memory.

Even before chapter 93, she’s unconsciously reaching for him in her fevered dreams.

(Chapter 45 Side Scene)

Him and Isabella, predominantly in black due to her belief they’re dead, and Ray and the rest of the escapees who she hopes are still alive, predominately in white.

(Chapter 50)

Though she had to compromise on their original plan by only bringing along those over five at its outset, she’s committed to their end goal. She was the spark that pushed them to strive for the ideal outcome instead of settling for the safest one that would be tinged in regrets, and he gave up everything to facilitate it.

(Chapter 53)

The three-panel overview of her thought process ends on her final handshake with Norman. It’s painful enough for this man to be insulting her living family, but when her thoughts drift to the boy who had given his life so they would have a chance to live freely, who came to believe in all those things the man was disparaging, it’s the final straw that breaks her silence. She won’t stand and let her family be disregarded so casually or let Norman’s memory be desecrated like that.

(Chapter 64)

She eventually brings him up to Yuugo in an attempt to connect with him over lost friends, and her framing of it is interesting because while viewing Norman as having agency in making his choice (as much as they can have under the circumstances in that he went willingly, which isn’t much, but from her perspective as a traumatized child), she states simply that she let him go. (Shoutout to the way SKATES delivers said line in the manga dub. Wonderfully heartbreaking. </3)

(Chapter 30)

After she and Ray both knew how much he wanted to see the world beyond their walled existence and live on with them.

So when we get to chapter 93 where she’s on the brink of death, having visions of all the suffering experienced on the grounds of Goldy Pond before finding refuge and strength in visions of her family, the one who catches he when she begins to sink is Norman.

Unlike with the hallucinations at the end of the escape arc that were meant to obfuscate his fate, at this point we as an audience know he’s alive at Lambda, so this is all coming from the perception of Norman Emma holds deep within her heart. Even from beyond, even if it meant being separated from her longer, she sees him guiding her out of the unknown, murky depths so she can continue fighting to actualize their plan. (To say nothing of the way she imagines him delicately intertwining their fingers upon reaching her as the way he catches her. The association with safety and gentleness is always present and yet another valued refuge in light of the violence she’s in the middle of.)

Minor tangent to end on, but it’s interesting to me how when Emma brings up Norman’s name among people she misses, during the only time they privately mention him, Ray takes a beat to gather himself before focusing on what’s still obtainable in this life.

(Chapter 55)

There’s zero chance she blames him for Norman’s shipment, but he’s still not ready to look her in the eye and delve into it where they could potentially draw attention from others when he considers it a failure to his two most precious people after years of meticulous planning.

(Chapter 65)

But Norman’s still in his thoughts too as he adamantly refuses to fail Emma again.

(Chapter 93)

Though he comes very close.

(Chapter 123)

And he’s the one to remind Emma of how special their bond is when she’s having doubts about voicing her disagreement with Norman’s plan.

[whywoulditho]

i'm starting to get real obsessed with damijon and it's hilarious because no matter how much i age there's always a fictional couple of twelve year olds that's consuming my every thought and i can never escape it they're simply better than other ships and i have to live with the humiliation of crying over the doomed love story of literal kids

[blueblauu]

Clothing folds are indeed one of my greatest enemies.

[pheoflame]

goddamn, love 'em

[standreamy]

For valentine’s day here 4 sketches of my 4 OTPs:

Noremma: Norman x Emma (The Promised Neverland) SatoSere/Amourshipping: Ash x Serena (Pokémon) Izuocha: Izuku x Ochako (My Hero Academia) Luuta: Luffy x Uta (One Piece)

I have many ships I love and I would have liked to sketch more, but having no time for it I decided to just do my 4 favorites ever!

A bonus doodle with Uta being a mess at cooking and Sanji distracting from his helping duty because he got beaten by Luffy on love... (Uta is cooking meat with chocolate... apparently Chocolate can be used as sauce on meat and it’s supposed to be good??? So it works for Luffy)

[h0lymanteca]

"Oh no! Locked in with my enemy! How terrible!"

Finished a sketch from last year!

[emmaspolaroid]

twitter said “draw your OTP like this” and —

[officersnickers]

Norember 2023 - Free Day

~ In my opinion, there's nothing more intimate and romantic than waking up in the morning, side by side by your partner. You're still half asleep and dressed comfy, hair's a mess and the lingering freams are still fresh. It takes a lot of trust and love for each other to open up to someone like this, but it can also grant you the most amazing moments of the day ~

[urloyalpartner]

3 polyams walking in public holding hands <3