Mirai Nikki – BAYOG Spoop Fest Throwback Thursday

Mirai Nikki or Future Diary is a classic I’m certain most of you are familiar with, and can get why this is my TBT contribution for our BAYOG Spoop Fest. For those of you not in the know, Future Diary is a 2011 anime following the life of Yukiteru Amano a standard teenager with a flip phone (they were more popular in Japan until even recently) who was rather dull. Not dull as in stupid, but dull in that he recorded everything he saw in his life, from how many points he scored on darts, to how many rocks he’d see, to other arbitrary details none of us would likely care about. Even more than that, he has a pair of imaginary friends named Deus Ex Machina, the God of Space and Time and Deus’ assistant Muru Muru. Deus one day asks Yuki if he’d like to play a game, and awards him a modification to his cell phone. This aforementioned phone is now a Future Diary (title drop) and enables him to see his diary as if it was written by him in the future, up to 90 days out. Yuki does what most kids would do and abuses the shit out of this, but begins to freak out as he’s cornered constantly by another individual, who reveals herself to be the beautiful but insane (and that is an understatement) Yuno Gasai. In case that name doesn’t ring any bells, see below.

Yup, the most common yandere meme is from this show, and man does it set the pink-haired standard of psychotic lightish-red haired yandere. Turns out Yuki had a horrid weakness in his diary, and that is he does not track anything he himself does. Yuno however has the exact opposite issue, where her diary does nothing but track Yuki. They work together to combat and fight off the serial killer chasing the two of them down, who is revealed to also be a diary holder, and their homeroom teacher. A crucial weakness is revealed that should one’s diary be destroyed, they too die. Deus’ plan is elaborated upon and it turns out the winner of this Battle Royale game shall become the next God of Time and Space, with Yuki (referred to as the First) and Yuno (referred to as the Second) now facing off against 10 other diary holders.

 

One of the most interesting of the other diary holders (and honestly my favorite female character) is the Ninth diary holder, terrorist Minene Uryu. She effectively takes Yuki’s school hostage with a series of bombs (I swear she gets better) and we find out Yuki’s friends are all assholes, who apprehend him and deliver him to Minene. Yuno does not approve of this, and in turn finds the rest of the school expendable, going so far as to purposely trigger a series of explosions and killing her schoolmates as a distraction. Yuki manages to gouge out one of Minene’s eyes with a dart that for some reason he was allowed to have on school property, and they encounter the Fourth Diary Holder, Keigo Kurusu who is a police captain with no intention of participating in the game, and seeking to keep the game in balance from the less stable participants.

So after dealing with and killing some other diary holders, and keeping others alive, Yuno and Yuki continue to survive. The real twist arrives towards the second half when Minene has teamed up with Yuno and Yuki (kinda sorta) and we begin to find out about some corpses located deep in a hole in Yuno’s backyard. At this point, one of the classmate/friends, Aru (who is honestly a real right proper mind fuck of a character) goes to reveal something to Yuki about Yuno’s true nature (beyond, you know, the cavalier and wanton disregard for human life) and is decapitated before anything can be revealed. Turns out a huge reason why the game has to complete is that when Deus dies, all of the universe shall collapse upon itself and end.

Serious spoiler alerts beyond this point.

The revelation is that corpses in the backyard are the Gasai family, Yuno’s parents, and Yuno Gasai herself. It’s then explained that this universe is in fact, the second universe and the Yuno that’s been going around killing folks is the First Universe’s Yuno and that she and Yuki attempted to kill themselves together, but Yuno didn’t die and subsequently became God of Time and Space. However, we find that one cannot be resurrected so to obtain her love once again, Yuno reset the world and tried once more with feeling. She and her Muru Muru reset the world for a second time, however they go too far back, and end up resetting the world about two or so years earlier before all the trauma and horrid events that occurred to make most of the Diary Holders fucked up individuals. Yuno and Yuki then fight it out to respectively kill/save 3rd world Yuno and family, with 1st world Yuno moved that her parents moved to save 3rd world her, opposed to the abusive monsters they grew to be. She then stabs herself, making Yuki the 2nd world God, and he spends 10,000 years floating in nothingness mourning the loss of his love. It’s revealed in the OVA that 3rd world Yuno’s love drove her to become God there, and move on to enter the 2nd world to re-join Yuki.

Future Diary set up a vast number of tropes and again set the bar for a number of standards. While I don’t pretend to profess this as the greatest anime of all time or anything of the sort, it’s a damn good show. They hit a great narrative couple of twists (which I endeavored to ensure I didn’t spoil too many of) and they made you fall in love with psychopaths and terrorists by fleshing out their backstories. With the exception of the serial killer, all the characters had a deep rooted trauma that was explained as to WHY they were pants-on-head levels of evil. None of them were simply evil for evil’s sake, but driven there by the loss of loved ones, or horrors inflicted upon them. Between this and the super catchy OPs and EDs I still love and listen to this day, I have to highly recommend taking a look at this show, as it’s still something I can go back and enjoy, both in Dub and Sub format. Hell, even the Abridged series is rather funny, and takes a good outlook on the show if you finish and want a good satirical review.