Oh noes! It’s season’s end and I suddenly find myself without a Sunday episode post for you guys. Luckily, The Promise Neverland is the gift that keeps on giving. So I get to milk this amazing anime for content at least one more time! Probably a dozen more times n the future, at least!
I’ve been binge watching the Game Theorists lately. Too much. It’s made me pay way too much attention to unimportant random details. You know, more than usual. It’s also made me a bit over earnest in a lot of ways. For instance, when Animated Andy took a fun loving jab at the last episode of The Promised Neverland in Crow’s Twitter thread, my mind went straight to analysis mode instead of enjoying the joke. And now I’m bringing you all down with me.
The very first thing I thought of when seeing that comment was, exactly how wide is that breach anyway? I have never been that great at judging distances and animated perspectives can get tricky but it didn’t seem quite that insurmountable. Not to mention he was throwing at a downward angle.
An intensive search failed to reveal the exact dimensions of the gorge. I mean, it wasn’t in the first three Google results. At least I don’t think so, I skimmed them. So let’s get to some deeply flawed measuring.
I chose Isabella as a yardstick because she’s taller and I figured it would be a bit less manipulation. Can you believe I use to have a laboratory job. Me neither! Ok so here we go:
The kids have just escaped and Isabella looks on longingly alone on her side of the wall. And now, this masterpiece:
We know that Isabella is 170cm tall. So five of her would be 850 cm or 8.5 meters (isn’t the metric system fun!) That’s also 27.8871 feet if that helps anyone. But does that make any sense? Would anyone have an 8.5 m ditch as a means to keep children from escaping?
Well, yeah. We know that the maximum age of children in the plant is 12 years minus 1 day. Google tells me that the long jump record for children that age is 5.51 meters or 18.1 feet. Which is way below the require distance. They are jumping at a downwards angle through which would give them a bit more distance but you also have to consider that long jump provides for a good running start of a straight forward track. Considering what they have to work with this is more like a standing long jump and there, even the adult all time Olympic records stay below 4 meters.
As such, we can say this is a decent sized cliff to use as a physical deterrent to the escape of children.
I did say fractions were for chumps earlier, didn’t I. Ok, ok, let’s make that distance 9 meters. At this point, I’m pretty sure no human, child or adult could jump it unassisted, even if they somehow could manage a straight on running start.
Alrighty then, we’re all agreed on the dimensions? Great! Let’s see if Don could have thrown that rock across. Once again, I remind you that the downward angle of the throw does allow for some extra distance but for now I’m going to ignore that since the angle has been somewhat inconsistent from one screencap to the next. Just bear that in mind.
Don, and most of the children, have been training pretty intensely. He’s also the biggest and seemingly strongest of the bunch. It would not be unreasonable to think that his throwing distance is over the average to his age. Let’s see what that actually means.
First I found this dandy chart which seems to relate to baseball averages. For a 12 year old pitcher, 175 feet is considered average. I also read through this thread of people arguing and boasting about their football throwing capacities at 12. It seems that 48 yards is the most reliable estimate for average football throwing distance at that age. Just for fun though, I also went through this collection of supposite averages. This had a much more reserved baseball distance average of 45 feet and 40 to 45 yards for a football.
Let’s say we stick to the lower and more reasonable averages 40 yards for a football and 45 feet for a baseball. Or 36.6 meters for a football and 13.72 meters for a baseball. (Footballs are aéorodynamic AF!) To be even more precise, that’s 21 and 1/2 Isabellas and 8,07 Isabellas, respectively. This would mean that even the lower end averages are more than sufficient to clear that 9 meter wide jump.
This is a good news bad news situation. Good news, there’s a small chance all of of those kids are going to escape to some semblance of safety. Bad news, Don didn’t really need to train that hard and could have taken easy for all these months… Live and learn!
But, that wasn’t the initial question now was it. My encyclopedic knowledge of football had me wondering what NFL stood for (I know now) so I had to do yet some more digging.
I got a lot of random information here and in game stats are normalized since passes are often thrown to specific players rather than the longest possible distance. As such I got numbers ranging for 50 yards to 80 yards. I’m feeling generous so let’s say the average quarterback can throw a football 70 yards (37.6 Isabellas).
In other words 55 meters farther than the distance we saw Don throw that rock (i.e. 7 times the total distance all together). I haven’t gone back to watch all the Neverland episodes yet, I’m really just going by this last one. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, we really don’t know that Don can throw a rock farther than a NFL quarterback can throw a football.
But if he can – I’m gonna say: spliced in Demon DNA and sweet sweet demonic antibiotics. You need to keep the livestock healthy after all!
