Mirai Nikki – Episode 15

Apparently the group I normally follow for Mirai Nikki is on hiatus for some nonsense reason.  GotWoot, I like your subs, but the pattern is, first you start trolling, then your quality slips, then you become a joke of a group like gg. But the spice must flow, so I’m following a lower-tier subgroup while they are off being prissy drama-queens.  Last time on Mirai Nikki, Yukiteru had just broken up with/escaped the clutches of his girlfriend/kidnapper Yuno.  Now he’s hanging out with Akise, who is great, but you know, no Yuno.  He’s also with Kousaka, the guy who used to bully him and who now is apparently reformed?  Anyway, Kousaka has a future diary, or maybe not, and somebody is able to spy on it, somehow, and there is a lot of stuff going on that needs to be explained.  Hopefully episode 15 of Mirai Nikki will explain it.

…thirty minutes pass…

Crazyface flambé, what a delicacy!

Well they explained things more quickly and completely than I expected.  I feel a little foolish for not figuring it out on my own.  So the eighth diary is in the cloud, it’s survival games as a service.  On the one hand, that’s really powerful, because you’ve got arbitrarily many people feeding you data from the future.  On the other hand, that’s not as powerful as it might seem, because all the stuff you get is stuff that your users care about, like how awesome they are about to be, or the middle-school boys they’re about to flirt with, or the currently-airing anime they’re about to watch.

Yuno was great this episode (pictured above).  She just won’t let Yukiteru cut her out of his life! They can’t have ordinary romantic moments together anymore since the rape dungeon incident, but it’s still sweet when she breaks into his house to cook him a delicious meal, or when she cuts power to his important gadgets in order to make him pay attention to her, or when she offers to  murder his enemies in exchange for a hollow facade of affection.

I guess she’s in breach of contract, though.  I dunno what to say, I really expected her to win, even after those bastards cheated by having two sets of diaries. I expected Yuno’s power of Deep Love to overcome their power of True Love.  Things were looking pretty good there when she was getting all Nagato Yuki on those flying knives, but I guess she’s shown in the past when she lost to Tsubaki and to Akise that she isn’t some sort of unstoppable force.  Yukiteru focuses too much on not wanting to rely on her because she’s crazy and has values that diverge significantly from his own, when really he should be afraid to rely on her because she’s not entirely reliable.  He wants someone to save him, to absolve him of the responsibility of living his life and playing in the survival game.  But even if someone offers to save you, that doesn’t absolve you of anything.  It just changes your responsibility from “win the survival game” to “make sure the person who is playing in the survival game for me wins”.  Marco scorns him for not protecting his girl, but I’ll reproach him for not protecting his underling.

So I wonder where we go from here, now that both Yukiteru and Yuno have their diaries captured.  That means that the enemy has perfect information about Yukiteru’s surroundings, so the first order of business would be to lock him up in a dark room somewhere out of the way.  It’s too bad Yuno’s in a coma, her experience might come in handy.  I guess Minene is going to try to get them to ally with her, but like, why?  What do they have to offer her, without their diaries?  Yukiteru is one giant surveillance device, Yuno is handy with a knife but out of commission.  Maybe Minene could profit from the cunning plans of Akise Aru, Boy Detective, but this most recent cunning plan didn’t turn out so well, did it?  Maybe she’s going to try to spoof the diaries to help her sneak up on the enemy?

Bonus Image Corner:

That's sick, he's like fourteen.