Plothole time: a person cannot just “act well” from out of nowhere. I don’t care if Yuno wrote a perfectly fine script. Yukiteru still had to act it out with confidence. Something that goes completely against his character.
Still, this episode was full of fun twists. Eleventh as the major of the city makes for a nice final villain, and his speech in order to close down the orphanage was a very nice introduction. I just have one message to the creators of the anime: if you show him in the midst of all sorts of telephones, instead of having Eighth, you’re pretty much spelling out that he’s going to acquire her server diary at some point. Way to create tension here!
Now, I had been spoiled about there being two Yuno’s… multiple times (thank you, manga readers…), but still the identity of the third corpse came as a surprise to me. The creators can do some nice things with this. The whole plot twist of deceiving Eighth also was very nice to pull: they know how Eighth’s diary works, and because of that it would be easier to get rid of them, while also making use of the occasion to find out what Eleventh’s diary does. Why Yuno didn’t immediately pull the trigger when she had her gun right next to Eleventh’s nose is beyond me, though.
What also surprised me is how the soundtrack has gotten better recently. The new tracks here feel much more colourful and energetic whan what this show had before, working in this series’ favor.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Maybe Yukki manned up because he was tired of being a wimp? He knew what had to be done and that the way to do that would be close teamwork with Yuno. The outfits for both Yukki and Yuno were gorgeous. So sexy!
No, Yukki manned up because right now, he literally has nothing left to lose. Both his parents are dead, and the only way to revive them is to become God. FU to those who spoiled you, that was uncool.
Since I can’t help it myself: 11th is not the final adversary. And I don’t think you can guess who it is.
This whole situation reminds me strongly of the parallel situation with Guilty Crown’s lead.
DMonHiro, why are you spoiling me?! Right now at least, 9th and Kurise seem to be the main adversaries and I don’t think it’s unlikely for 9th to be an adversary again. Who else? The most logical explanation for the third corpse would be that Yuno had an identical twin who she wanted dead. Or else that was someone else’s umbilical cord. The Yuno from ep 1 must still be alive because the phone is still there.
Methinks you haven’t watched enough anime from 2011 to come up with anything better than that.
OTOH I much prefer the anime’s foreshadowing of this surprise twist (in Episode 1 over the manga), that Yuno is not Yuno, but I suspect that we’re due a few more twists.
Do you mean Steins;Gate? I feel like time travel would be an overused letdown. Why would either Yukki or Yuno have to resort to time travel if one of them is a god? How else would they time travel? I could hardly tell what was happening at the beginning of episode 1. Was that supposed to be Yuno? It looked most like Akise.
Since I haven’t read the manga, my speculations are spoiler-free, but may hit closer to the mark.
The answer, however ambiguous, is in the first 30 seconds.
Why would the next World’s Greatest Detective be chopping up Yuno with an axe? Has the show established Akise Aru doing anything like that in 19 episodes? Use the internal logic of the show, and you’ll arrive at the right or best guess.
I wish Minene-sama would just throw that grenade at the car, the end.
What happened to your powers of speculation? They were pretty solid in the past. Has your account/identity been hijacked or something? ;)
Nah, I have been spoiled :P The truth is so close to be revealed I would refrain from any sort of “speculations” that would ruin other people’s viewing experience.
Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Watching others’ reactions can be more fun sometimes.
As for Minene and the grenade, I’m semi-serious about it. When would you get another chance of having 4 other remaining diary holders within a blast radius?
Minene has had many chances like this in the past only to not pull the trigger. At least three or four different times she’s had Diarists at her mercy and didn’t eliminate them.
That leads me to the belief that she isn’t in the game to win outright — at least not immediately. Moreover, she has vested interest in that cop Nishijima, and the grenade was a deterrent for others, not an offensive weapon.
Sorry u spoiled yourself, which prevents u from enjoying the anime :(
“Plothole time: a person cannot just “act well” from out of nowhere.”
…So you think both your parents dying, leaving you nothing and no one else in this world, is not enough to make you change yourself? D:
Like I said earlier, his parents deaths aren’t just there for the twists. It serves as Yuki’s turning point in his personality.
I’m with Trass on this one. If ever Yuki needed a reason to win other than surviving its this. So I’m not surprised he acted it well given that he has a purpose.
His fugly facial expression at the end of the ep when Akise showed up with the truth signifies that he has… returned to his former self. Guess the death of his parents weren’t shocking enough?
Having marathoned episodes 1-19 of this series, I have to say that while I like the premise and some of the characters, the anime as a whole feels a bit contrived. Of course we have the quintessential wimpy male lead, but working within a yandere pairing makes for some freshness and added intrigue. All the same, some of the developments just don’t sit well with me.
First and foremost is the believability of some of the “bad things” that happen. The entire plot is focused around some form of omnipotent god fabricated by the main character’s imagination who decides to thrust the main character’s city into chaos for the sake of conveniently staging a “kill-em-all” game between 12 seemingly random participants. What’s more, the (obviously human) winner of this game is somehow promised the imaginary god’s throne and to rule over time and space. Believability aside, nobody even bothers to question this.
And then we have some of the annoying characters who complement the show’s misplaced humorous segments. We’re introduced to a seemingly badass counter-villain who gouges out eyeballs and injects drugs, but who is later unconvincingly revealed to be a misguided childlike buffoon who supposedly acted in accordance with a juvenile sense of justice (replete with Power Ranger pelvic thrusts near the end of his arc). Once this aired, it dialed back the supposed ‘maturity level’ of the show considerably right before it dialed back up — and then way back down.
There’s also a bunch of unbelievable antics from the main character, especially in recent developments. Unlike how Death Note handled its main plot gimmick, the diaries don’t feel as real — we’re supposed to believe the kid would write all the answers into a phone, so he can then use a ‘future diary’ to cheat on all his tests without anyone noticing, even when the teacher calls out Yuno just for playing with clay. And then the increases in his grades are immediately used as irrefutable evidence that he’s a “diary holder,” despite nobody even knowing the fundamental capabilities of his dairy? The whole situation is beyond absurd.
What’s worse is that this character seems to be used as a poor conduit for the plot. He does things that don’t seem believable given his characterization — the only thing consistent about him was his wimpy awkwardness, which was recently overwritten to make room for a subplot in which he ruthlessly betrays and murders innocent people in order to become god instead of accepting his lot and moving on. He hasn’t even seen a lick of evidence that the so-called imaginary god can resurrect people (in fact, the only evidence is to the contrary). Yes, he lost his mom and dad, so I could certainly understand motives for revenge, but even after the cheap ploy of associating his rotten father with stargazing at the very end, that’s absolutely no reason to kill everyone in the name of a (literally) false god…all in hopes of later somehow BECOMING the god and resurrecting everyone from the dead or something. You’d think if he was this “determined” he wouldn’t have been so keen to accept all the other crap thrown his way (the game, the betrayal by his friends, the crazy stalker, the deaths of countless people directly attributable to him, and so forth. Besides, his methods are certainly more than questionable at this point.
Having seen corpses in the girl’s house, he decides to “forget about it” after unconvincingly fretting for a while and then pretty much falls in love with her later. Suddenly one of the corpses is identified as the same girl and he gets all riled up about some sort of ridiculous “betrayal”. So she had a twin or something. How is that more traumatizing to our “changed lead” than her killing her own parents? And as long as there were corpses and skulls being dragged around by this girl — the same girl who recently tied him to a chair, force-fed him and collected his piss in a glass bottle — why should the familial identify of one of these corpses even weigh into things? The guy hardly knows the insane chick beneath the surface (and he acknowledges this repeatedly), so why is an arbitrary fake name something to suddenly go nuts over?
Suspension of disbelief is fine — I’ve suspended disbelief a lot more forcefully in some other shows and ended up loving them to bits. What a story needs is a CONSISTENT level of believability. This show tries to convince us that everything is incredibly realistic in one scene, when in the next it seems to wink and show something that would make any viewer shake his head. Compared to this, the stuff that Deadman Wonderland and Guilty Crown try to pull suddenly doesn’t feel too off-base, for better or for worse.
I wrote an essay long enough to answer every little bit of your questions, but before I could finish the last sentences and post it, there was suddenly a blackout. I got discouraged and decided to forget it anyway.
But on second thought, I’ll at least answer one question.
Deus isn’t an “Imaginary” God created by Yukiteru’s “Imagination”.
He IS a god. If you actually read his lines, he said that he’s not a mere imagination. He is a god, so why can’t a “GOD” chooses to exist inside the imagination of a human. Yuki didn’t make him up. Deus decided to exist in his imagination by his own will, as means to contact candidates for the next God. This, is also the way he used to contact the remaining diary users. If you watch the show carefully, there are some times when a diary user suddenly appears in front of Deus in split second, and then they’re suddenly in the real world again. Yes, it’s just their imagination. Deus is talking to them that way.
I honestly appreciate the effort, and I certainly like your explanation of Deus’s entity. The awesome ridiculousness of his character now has a bit more redeeming consistency in my eyes.
It’s truly a shame about that blackout, though.
I like how people like hoiut are really wanting this to be an intensely serious and realistic show and let every plothole get to them when that’s clearly not the purpose of this show.
If you read everything I wrote (and I certainly won’t blame you if you didn’t; it was unnecessarily and stupidly long), I said I often enjoy even more absurd series than this one. A little more consistency in believability (or unbelievability) would help, though.
This one just tries to blend realism and inconsistent suspension of disbelief. It’s clear the anime depends on things being realistic in one moment and then violates that dependency itself the next.
And also, I never said I didn’t like the show. Psgels mentions some inconsistencies in enjoyableness throughout the series, too. ;) It looks like the second half is a bit more focused, though. Looking forward to the finale!
Mother disappointed I thought she was some sort of mastermind given that she was working with the 7s from afar. Being deceive by Yukiteru has to be very humilliating.
so yuno isn’t really yuno, but like, what does that really matter anyways? I mean Yukiteru already knows she’s a parent murdering maniac, and I think this is the Yuno he’s been with all the time, and it’s not like he really knew her before, so what does it matter that she’s not Gasai Yuno in the scheme of things?
Anyways, pretty unbelievable about face by Yuki, but agree music has got better, and again it was so out there that I could still enjoy it. Ish.
I hope it does blow my mind with it’s what the fuckery, because it’s been pretty hyped up by the manga readers.