Leuvis: Hunting children bored him; he wanted someone who could kill him

The Goldy Pond arc is one of the darkest stretches of The Promised Neverland manga, and the anime did not adapt it. After escaping Grace Field, Emma follows a lead to an abandoned human town that a group of demon aristocrats, the Poachers, have turned into a private hunting ground. Children bought from the farms, or who stumbled in by accident, are released there to be hunted for sport. Most of the Poachers enjoy the killing. Their most formidable member does not. Leuvis, an archduke of the demon royal family and the younger brother of the queen, finds the hunt boring: the children are too easy, and he has been killing for a thousand years. He becomes interested only when he meets prey with the will to kill him—first a man the children call Mister and his friends, years earlier, then Emma. He fights her fairly, lets her and her allies use whatever means they have, and thanks them for a worthy fight. The series makes him almost likeable. Criminology would describe him differently: as a predator in search of arousal.

// The theoryBoredom as a risk factor

The low-arousal theory of antisocial behavior has roots in Hans Eysenck's work in the 1960s, which linked extraversion and the search for stimulation to a nervous system that needs more input to reach a comfortable level of activation. Its strongest modern evidence comes from Adrian Raine and colleagues. The single best-replicated biological correlate of antisocial behavior in children and adolescents is a low resting heart rate; low skin conductance, another index of arousal, points the same way. Raine's longitudinal studies found that low arousal measured at age three predicted aggression years later. Two explanations are proposed, and they are complementary. The fearlessness account says that people who feel little physiological fear are less deterred by danger and punishment. The stimulation-seeking account says that low arousal is an unpleasant state, experienced as boredom, and that some people relieve it by seeking intense experiences, including risky or violent ones.

// The subjectA thousand years of killing

Leuvis's history makes his boredom understandable, which is not the same as acceptable. A thousand years ago, before the Promise, he slaughtered hundreds of humans fighting to end the war between the two races; the only survivor, Julius Ratri, asked him to take him to the king to make a deal, and the farms were born from that deal. Leuvis stayed away from politics; he was a fifth son in the royal line and court affairs did not interest him. Centuries later he watched his colleague Lord Geelan framed and condemned for a rebellion he knew was a sham, and did nothing. In the story's present he joins Bayon's Poachers in Goldy Pond, killing children he finds uninteresting and fixating on the one who resists. When he finally fights Emma and Lucas, he respects their courage and kills without hesitation the other children who get in the way. His fairness and his indifference come from the same place: nothing matters to him except the intensity of the fight.

// The crackA heart rate does not build a hunting ground

The low-arousal theory is one of the best-supported biological findings in criminology, and also one of the easiest to misread. Low heart rate is a risk factor, not a cause: most people with low arousal are not violent, and many become surgeons, pilots, mountaineers or bomb-disposal experts—stimulation-seeking channeled into legitimate risk. What turns the trait towards harm is environment: opportunities, models, the absence of other outlets. Leuvis's environment could not be more favorable. He belongs to an aristocracy that treats humans as livestock, has access to a hunting ground built for his entertainment, and answers to no one. The theory explains why he wants intense experiences; the society of the demons explains why the experience available to him is hunting children.

The second limit is that biological explanations can make an offender sound like a victim of his own physiology. The Promised Neverland resists that; it gives Leuvis a code, a choice and a history of choices. A predator who is bored by killing children is not less responsible for killing them, and the fact that he respects the one who fights back says nothing about the dozens who could not. What the theory adds is a warning about environments: places that give people with a craving for intensity a legitimate outlet produce mountaineers; places that give them a hunting ground produce Goldy Pond.