Happy Friday the Thirteenth! What better way to celebrate this second-most-terrifying of days (after Halloween, right above Valentine’s Day) than with the thirteenth episode of Mirai Nikki! Actually it sort of seemed at the end of last episode like they were gearing up for another slice-of-life episode, Yuno and Yukiteru were going to go visit the planetarium and have hot makeouts on top of a dufflebag full of corpses. But in some sense, the slice-of-life episodes are the most horrifying of all! At least in the action episodes, if there’s a serial killer chasing you down, you know what to expect. He swings a hatchet, you throw a dart, and may the best man win. But in the slice-of-life episodes, you’ll be hanging out with Yuno and everything’s going great, she’ll smile cutely and say sweet things, and then in an instant she’ll take something someone said the wrong way, and out come the knives, and suddenly “slice of life” has gotten a little too literal. Let’s see if she can keep things together in episode 13 of Mirai Nikki.
…thirty minutes pass…
Hasn't Gasai Yuno been living in a house with no electricity for some time now?
Ok, I didn’t expect Yuno to go quite that far. I mentioned in my blog post for Mirai Nikki Episode 4 that Yukiteru wasn’t in any mortal danger from Yuno because if she were going to put him in mortal danger, he would get a DEAD END warning on his cell phone. At the time I mentioned that he might be in danger of being sexually assaulted by Yuno, but I wasn’t imaginative enough to see the danger that she might drug him, kidnap him, and lock him in a rape dungeon. Heck, now she can kill him at her leisure, and even if his cellphone beeps an advance warning, it’s Yuno who’s holding it! I guess maybe I had too much faith in her – I knew she might engage in a crime of passion, but I would have figured that at some point, when she was rigging up swinging axe and poison gas traps and nailing together a rape throne she would stop to think to herself, “maybe if I really love him I should not kidnap him”. There is an impressive amount of premeditation in this crime. I guess it’s possible she just happened to have a rape dungeon lying around, and when the opportunity presented itself she pressed it into service. Akise Aru implied earlier she had kind of a sketchy history, but he didn’t elaborate, so maybe she’s done this sort of thing before, and she just sort of accumulates traps over time.
So, I was a little disappointed in Yuno, but I was happy to get an episode focusing on Akise. He’s no L from Death Note, but it’s still fun to watch the normals dabbling in the games of those with superpowers. I think he’s a little too focused on the “boy detective” thing, though. A gang of scrappy middleschool students running around solving mysteries is great and all, and I can see what Akise means about needing to sneak up on Yuno in the guise of friendship, but the first time he triggered an axe trap, he should have realized that the jig was up and called in the real cops. If Akise Aru has something to prove, that’s fine, he can face the peril and show the world what a boy detective can do. But putting someone like Hinata up against Yuno is just unfair.
I was glad to see that Deus felt the same way I did about Kurusu’s early exit from the game. Damn that Murumuru and her meddling! If Kurusu were still alive and the Future Diary Alliance were still intact, you can bet he wouldn’t have let Yuno get away with kidnapping Yukiteru. Now he has to rely on his “friends” to spring him. Man, it’s a good thing he managed to convince Yuno to let him have friends back then, or he’d really be screwed now. On the other hand if he hadn’t led her on back then, maybe she wouldn’t have kidnapped him now? The way she has pictures of their mock wedding plastered all over the walls of the dungeon seems to suggest that his friendly behavior has only been feeding her obsession. I guess the test is, back in episode 4, was that apple drugged? She was going to feed him an apple, but was the apple just an apple, or was it the fruit of the tree of knowledge, full of the original sin of knockout drugs, causing him to be cast out of the garden of eden and into a rape dungeon? Deus and Murumuru were talking about how he had changed his fate by seeing the room full of bodies, but I thought that was the long term fate of growing closer to the dangerously-insane Yuno without taking proper precautions, not the immediate fate of being kidnapped. That would explain how she was able to spot that kid’s poison tomato, though – her brain was already primed with thoughts of tainted fruit.
All told, this was a good episode to watch on Friday the Thirteenth. The onsen fanservice bits didn’t really fit with the mood, but hey, the fans gotta be serviced, right?
Bonus image corner:
The aforementioned rape throne.
Murumuru makes the troll face.
suntzuanime 