Let’s reach into 2011 and pull a lonely girl out of her suffering… together… ?
Future Diary is an easy target. It’s loud and ugly with its emotions - barely able to contain itself. I needn’t explain - its reputation precedes it in the western tradition of teenage gore anime. It is beyond known that these types of anime in the emo canon are popular with girls - teens and below. (I straight up genuinely saw a 5 year old girl with an oversized Yuno shirt back when I worked at a children’s ice cream theme park.) So here we have the heyday of a demographic-genre match: emo shows for emo girls, fighting against an overpowering oppressive force known as 2010s internet rhetoric. The 2011-2012 anime came stumbling onto the battlefield, walking over the corpses of Twilight and Evanescence. She didn’t stand a chance. The internet processed her and spat her out - as it is wont to do. Yuno was stripped bare and filed into the database of ‘Yandere’, becoming the face of it. However, 13 years separated from this massacre, let’s see what we can salvage from 2011’s next hot mess.
The entire world revolved around our charming leads - Yuki and Yuno. They’re both isolated kids just arriving at the door of adolescence. Unsocialised, unloved and unknown: they would find each other in any universe (AND THEY DO). Naturally they fell into a codependent mess the second things got complicated - it’s a tale as old as time. If you haven’t been the main character of one, you’re lucky. Of course, you don’t need a bad relationship to know how a good one feels, but the nature of being young and unaware tends to lead more into the former.
Yuki is desperate for friends, for anyone he can connect with. He can’t reach his peers, and his parents are respectively aloof and overprotective. They divorced a year prior to the series, and are very hands-off with him. However, his mother is prone to ignoring his boundaries and privacy as we see when Reisuke and Yuno stay over.
Nevertheless, his parental connection is a strong driving force for him - his dream is to simply see the stars with them, an unfulfilled promise. His attachment style is neurotic and anxious; desperate for connection but scared to want it. His hobbies are quiet, indoor, and solitary. At age 14 he sits alone in his bedroom after school, talking to God in his head (who doesn’t?). The Indiscriminate Diary - his unique future diary - records everything around him, but doesn’t begin to touch on how he feels about anything. Have you ever seen a child so lacking in self-esteem to not even record their emotions in a private diary? I have.
And so of course Yuno loves him. Her little schoolgirl crush is the only thing keeping her alive despite her own parental abuse. Their respective broken families tie them together - Yuki takes after their fathers, and Yuno their mothers. I think this scene where Yuno stops Yuki from erasing his wish "To go stargazing with my family" shows how they could implictly understand each other just from their shared backgrounds. She knows how powerful a parental connection can be, and takes him seriously: perhaps they could have built up a more healthy connection if circumstances were different.
But in this reality, Yuno’s affection - not a return on her love - but the driving power of the desire, keeps her conscious and coming to school every day. She needed a reason to be there, and he provided it. For her, it’s not real, and she knows this. Her desire for a crush fulfilled itself. And Yuki is isolated and unavailable enough for their potential relationship to be seemingly plausible while also being far away enough to sustain her for a long time. It’s a good tactic - it got me through highschool (and thereafter…). Anyone treating her as just a lovesick yandere is failing to actually look at her. Without love, it cannot be seen; Yuno wasn’t hiding in the first place. Throughout the story, she tells Yuki time and time again how he can manipulate her by showing her a modicum of affection - real or not. She drops her facade when she needs to paradigm shift to a new mental gymnastic pose to keep it all together.
Yuki doesn’t have the social awareness to recognise his own problems, let alone Yuno’s. To a vulnerable kid like him, Yuno’s passion and obsession wouldn’t come across as instantly dangerous. He doesn’t have anyone else to compare with, and no one else aside from her to open up to - it’s a miracle he rejects her as strongly as he does. And so he’s extremely vulnerable to all of her very obvious abusive tactics.
She isolates him from family and friends, dismisses his concerns, erases history/gaslights him - towards the end her paranoia causes her to abduct him - and she’s ready to kill anyone that makes her jealous. Yuki begins oblivious, but progressively learns her tactics (especially once he makes friends). He even develops his own manipulative tactics to control her. He withholds affection when needed, uses ultimatums like “if you really love me”, and forces her into working for him by weaponising his own incompetence and inaction.
Ultimately his plan is to use her as long as he can and then let her kill herself. The guilt of this affects him throughout the series and causes him to jump through mental gymnastic hoops - just like Yuno. They’re both willingly manipulating and being manipulated by each other, using their love as a facade to keep it all together. It’s compelling! It’s real! Even without the killing game and timeloop, I believe in their relationship. God bless!
And I really do believe in their love. I said before there was nothing behind Yuno’s affection, and that Yuki passively let himself fall into her. This is true at first, but as any trauma-bond goes; they slowly grew into each other through their time together. To survive to the end, they had to become intimately familiar with how the other worked, to be able to predict how they’d move and lean into that. In their final fight, they almost parallel the Naruto/Sasuke clash in their understanding of each other. By the end of the series, despite shaking my head at every red flag these two knuckleheads raise, I always find myself wishing they could find a way out of this maze of causality they’re trapped in.
I need to discuss the real meat of their relationship, which is the imbalance caused by Yuno’s prior life in the original timeline. Not much is known about that worldline, aside from their plan to commit a dual suicide to win the game, and their last-name basis when referring to each other. They weren’t as close (and co-dependant?) as they were in the 2nd timeline, yet they still won. To me this indicates that their combination does have a strong basis - though it’s worth noting Yuno had already killed her parents and was attending school as if nothing had happened before the games began. My guess is Yuno still took the lead and Yuki weaponised her - as their respective dispositions would naturally lead to. However, their love would have developed much more naturally. Yuno forces herself onto Yuki in World #2, and her foresight naturally forces him into a much more passive role than the first time around. I’d imagine they worked together more, and decided to team up under a more natural joint desire for survival.
Yuki's anxious attachment causes him to run towards anyone that shows kindness to him. He doesn't have any social skills to speak of - but the game inherently requires a degree of social mastery in order to conceal yourself, manipulate others, and survive. Conversely, Yuno is said to be relatively popular in her class, despite not having any close friends. It seems her good grades and effort towards her appearance help solidify her as a formidable social force - much like any woman attempting to survive in this society. Personally this combination conjures up images of the "They forgot my drink" / "I'll handle it" relationship dynamic. The game exacerbates all minute problems in their relationship to a reality-destroying level (literally).
And I’m so glad we only see the second game. I’m personally really fascinated by supernatural levels of trauma, and relationships shaped despite that. (I can’t give any examples due to the spoiler nature of these works but. Imagine a famous DS game or doujin VN series.) Yuno put in the work to develop a relationship with Yuki, learned how to kill (proficiently at that), overcame any hangups about the hollow truth behind the universe (unfortunately not a very developed topic in the story), and had the grit to bait her lover into killing himself so she could become God and bring him back. Murmur’s depiction of Yuno at this time is the most fragile and vulnerable we ever see her - grieving and begging for another chance to not be alone. Murmur calls her pitiful, but I see a poor kid once again learning that love and stability are conditional, volatile. Not only must she kill herself in the 2nd timeline, but she must usurp her place and carry out the role of the un-traumatised Yuno, so as not to blow her cover. The strength Yuno has to kill herself depicts a level of self-hate that Yuki can’t begin to comprehend. How does she continue from there? There isn’t a script for this kind of trauma - her entire world truly fell apart in her hands.
This depiction of supernatural trauma to me feels more grounded and realistic than something that goes for a more tame approach - it feels as intense as the real thing. It also raises some philosophical questions. Truly, how does one assimilate into society after something like that? Who can understand you anymore? Are you better off just giving up? And that’s where the real beating heart of this motif comes through - the path onwards is the same as any other knee scrape or terminal grief. Time, community, care - the simple needs any shattering animal cries for. And so despite the worlds against Yuno, I really do believe there’s a way for her to be alive and present again. Infact, towards the end of the series, despite the ongoing killing game and collapse of all reality, Yuno manages to confront herself and be honest with Yuki.
I think it was this dialogue that stuck with me the most, ever since my original watch. Her clarity and awareness here recontextualised the show into my current reading. I think admitting this is the first step to developing independence and stability. The next change in her occurs when she is faced with the 3rd World’s Yuno.
She has to confront the person she used to be before she was traumatised, and see how far she has come. Her past self rejects her deterministic mindset, and current Yuno isn’t able to kill her like she did the 2nd timeline’s Yuno. Yuno 3’s parents arrive and cover her with their bodies - proving to Yuno that there may have been a way for her family to be loving and complete again. It’s also at this point where Yuki’s watershed moment happens. He breaks free from the Fantasy Dream reality where his parents are still alive, and instead works with Minene to stop Yuno. In other words, he accepts reality, and stands against Yuno with his own drive and beliefs. Of note, he doesn’t do it alone - and I think it’s a smart choice to not portray self-actualisation as a solitary activity. We’re all in this together. It may come across as saccharine, but Yuki’s decision here changes the futures of every other Diary User. They all have their own hangups and traumas shown in their individual arcs, and Yuki arriving at the school to fight Yuno causes a butterfly effect that pushes everyone else a little closer to a more integrated self. Whether you believe things would be that simple is irrelevant - the message comes across clearly: that helping yourself inherently helps others.
Yuki arrives after this, to stop her from making the mistake a 3rd time. Here we see what happens when these two, after beginning to confront who they are, meet again. They both immediately revert to their dependency, and take a self-sacrificing approach to resolving the conflict. I don’t want to criticise them too much (they are in a killing game), but I think this scene really illustrates how even having awareness of your personal hang-ups and relationship patterns won’t prevent you from falling into the same routines when the conditions are the same. The familiar is comfortable, and trauma affects how your brain processes information. Yuki is unable to recover from this, he enters a crisis and spends his godhood (10,000 years) in a black void, ruminating on Yuno. 1st world Yuno is dead, and 3rd world is living a happy life in the world that Yuki improved - but she feels something is missing. Murmur provides her with the memories of Yuno 1, effectively making her the same girl. She (somehow) smashes her way into Yuki’s void, using a hammer. The anime adapts this differently, but personally I love the representation of a hammer. Does Thor know Freya won?
In addition to the above emotional core of the series, it is also just… a very engaging show. There’s a reason why it was so popular at the time, and to this day has a form of prestige. The story is able to quickly pivot between the toxic romance, the killing game, the mystery, and character introspection. It’s blazingly quick, and doesn’t lose its ability to shock you senseless (some moments had me (mouth agape) asking my partner: “Is this real? Is this actually real?” even on a rewatch). Every character provides a new twist and perspective on both the future diary killing game, and Yuno+Yuki’s relationship. The dub is superb, keeping the emotional delivery and exposition comprehensible while elevating the series’ more comedic and edgy moments into a desperate housewives-esque camp masterpiece (genuinely!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! as if I needed to clarify girl!!!!!!!!!!!)
I love Future Diary!
