Mirai Nikki – Episode 26

This is the last episode of Mirai Nikki. I’ve sort of put off watching it because Mirai Nikki’s a really good show and I’ll be sad when it’s over.  Sorry about that.  Last episode ended with Yuno in a pretty dominant position: she had beaten down Minene, had sealed Yukiteru in a pocket dimension, and was standing over her timeclone with a knife and a determined expression.  What can possibly stop her now?  Murumuru might.  Last episode in order to defeat Minene, Yuno had removed Murumuru’s power seals.  One imagines that perhaps her power was sealed for a reason?  Maybe she’ll go into an indiscriminate rage, Yuno will die, and Yukiteru will become the God of the previous world?  Let’s see how they end things in episode 26 of Mirai Nikki.

…thirty minutes pass…

Mirai Nikki Dot PNG

Wow, that was a downer.  I expected to be sad because I had finished a show I really enjoyed watching, I didn’t expect the ending itself to be quite so depressing.  I guess I believed in the power of true love, and this just wasn’t that sort of story.  I can appreciate a good tragedy, and this was a good tragedy, and I appreciated it.  But I wish they had just been able to live together happily in the third timeline, like Minene and Nishijima did.  Now I know how people who shipped Romeo/Juliet felt, I guess.

Yuno took the easy way out.  She got to pretend that she’d atoned for her sins, and then die.  Her change of heart was handled well, it felt very natural.  If anyone is going to be able to argue you out of casting yourself as the villain, it’s going to be yourself.  The timeclone did help show her how cynical she’d become, but more than that I thought the messages in her diary were a crushing blow.  The messages in her diary were from a Yuno that had been through fights together with Yukiteru, and loved him, and just wanted to save him.  So when she was reading the future on her phone, she got a lot of commentary about “Oh no!  Yukki has been trapped in a pocket dimension! Oh no! Yukki is still trapped in the pocket dimension!  Hang in there Yukki!  I’ll get you out!”  She had to read herself being horrified at her actions at ten minute intervals, and had to think to herself, “this is what someone who actually loves Yukki sounds like”.  It kept her from being able to ignore her cognitive dissonance, and that, in the end, is what broke her.

Yukiteru got an incredibly raw deal.  At least everybody else got to die!  Yukiteru had to live for ten thousand years as the god of an empty ruined world, knowing that he had ruined it, knowing that the girl he loved had killed herself to allow him to suffer through millennia of despair.  When he shouted Yuno’s name and broke out of that pocket dimension, I was cheering for the power of true love, but it sure didn’t work out for him, did it?  He should have just stayed there and seen the stars with the illusion of his parents and made out with the illusion of that chick from his class.  I guess the moral of the story is “if you choose reality over pleasant lies, everything you had sought will turn to ashes in your hands and you will be left in despair and abandonment for all your days”.  Or possibly the moral is “even if you have a really clever explanation for why it’s a good idea, don’t murder all your friends”.

At least everybody in the third timeline is happy!  Even Yukiteru and Yuno!  They’re so happy that they never meet and fall in love.  That’s depressing.  It sort of seems to validate what Yuno was saying last episode.  Well, maybe this way the love between Yukiteru and Akise can finally blossom.  And surely Yuno can find somebody, she has pink hair and is hardly even crazy this time.  John Bacchus did what Yukiteru failed to do – he created a happy ending for the people of his city, and he allowed Yukiteru and Yuno to survive simultaneously.  I guess he was the real hero of this story.  The real hero is the one who says, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t make twelve crazy people fight one another to the death to determine who gets to be God.  Maybe we should do something else”.  That takes courage!  It’s hard to tell your boss his idea is dumb, and even harder if your boss is the God of Time and Space.

All in all, I liked this show a lot.  I feel like it had more potential than it actually lived up to – the pacing felt rushed in a lot of places, and the survival game format led to killing off a lot of characters that still could have been profitably developed.  It felt like the show only explored a tenth of the space it had available to it. But that’s sort of the sign of a good piece of science fiction!  Science fiction is all about introducing interesting ideas, and the more ideas you introduce, the less time you have to develop each.  The value of a piece of science fiction can be measured by how much fanfic it makes you want to write, and on that metric, Mirai Nikki was a damn good show.

Bonus Image Corner:

Yuno... saneface? D:

I guess Marco and Ai's love won out over Yukiteru and Yuno's in the end.