WARNING: The following article contains mentions of abuse, suicide, mental illness and assault. It also contains spoilers for The Future Diary.
Chances are, even if someone is unfamiliar with The Future Diary, they know the face of Yuno Gasai, the girl with pink hair happily slaughtering her way through dozens with ax, knife and rifle. Yuno is a character who manages to stand out even in a cast of serial killers, masked vigilantes and domestic terrorists. Since the show first premiered in October 2011, Yuno has become one of the most famous -- or even THE face -- of the yandere character archetype, sometimes even referred to as the Yandere Queen. The term yandere refers to a character type literally sick because of their love. Yandere characters tend to operate on a switch, coming across as sweet and innocent until the bloodlust strikes in order to protect the one they love.
Unfortunately for Yuno, The Future Diary places her in a position where her violent side is a constant necessity. The story follows 12 diary holders who are competing in a battle royale to succeed Deus as the god of this world. Yukiteru is a high school boy thrust into the Survival Game armed only with a phone diary that contains entries ten minutes into the future. Unbeknownst to him, his classmate Yuno is also a diary holder, except that her diary is all about him. Yuno's goal is not to become god but to get Yukiteru through the game alive. Yukiteru doesn't truly her motivations but is happy to use Yuno's combat skills to survive.
Throughout the show, Yuno switches between devoted girlfriend and cold-blooded killer. Her berserker state is often visualized through a sudden deadening in her eyes -- a common yandere trope -- before she takes up a weapon and goes to work. She displays a level of dissociation during these sequences that helps explain how she can switch between modes so quickly. Her behavior only escalates as the Survival Game progresses. However, Yukiteru slowly warms to Yuno's love and comes to trust and even love her in return. When they are the only two diary holders left, Yuno reveals to Yukiteru that Deus' power will not allow him to bring a soul back to life, but instructs him to kill her anyway. When Yukiteru refuses, deciding to die with Yuno instead when the world ends, her greatest secret is revealed: this isn't her first time playing the game.
While The Future Diary's decision to include time travel and multiple timelines is a controversial one, it is here that Yuno truly shines as more than just a stalker with gun skills. Deus' assistant Muru-Muru reveals to Yukiteru that the Survival Game has already happened once, and ended with him and Yuno deciding to die together. However, Yuno didn't go through with the suicide pact, believing she could resurrect Yukiteru as god. When she discovered this was impossible, she went back in time to the current timeline, killed her spare self in order to take her place, and began the game again with Yukiteru at her side. With her secret out, Yuno decides that she will have to kill Yukiteru in order to stop the world from ending and go back to replay the game. However, Yukiteru flees with the help of Minene, a competitor presumed dead, and Yuno is forced to follow them two years back rather than just a few months to kill both him and her other self from this third timeline.
With Yuno's history revealed, her simple yandere label starts to wear away. Many yandere characters suffer from tragic pasts and Yuno is no exception, abused relentlessly by her mother and locked away in a cage. About a year before the game began, she managed to trap her parents in the cage so they would learn to be kinder to her, but accidentally neglected to give them the necessities to survive. Her obsession with Yukiteru began after their deaths. When the two of them were the only ones left in the classroom attempting to fill out surveys about their futures, Yukiteru confessed his distress over his parents' divorce. Yuno responded by suggesting they could get married someday, and Yukiteru casually replied that it could happen when they were grown up. This was the origin of Yuno's love -- it was based on no more than two minutes of conversation, yet it offered her an anchor to a positive future.
Yuno is not sick with love, but rather with the need for stability. She herself says it best when Yukiteru tries to appeal to their love to end their fight in the third timeline: "I would have fallen in love with anyone who let me cling to them! And you would have fallen in love with anyone who was willing to protect you." Their love is not based on anything but a desperate need by desperate people, and it is the 'love sick' Yuno who is willing to recognize this. She does not believe in her own obsessive love; she only recognizes her need for the illusion of it.
The fact that Yuno is on her second run of the Survival Game also helps explain her behavior as something beyond a simple label. Not only was Yuno abused by her mother and neglected by her father, but she also survived the entirety of the first game -- only to lose Yukiteru anyway. This tragedy marked a huge shift in Yuno's goals. Where in the first game she chose to ignore the suicide pact to bring Yukiteru back to life, in the second game, she wants to die at his hands. She goes from wanting to live to wanting to die due to these circumstances, and throughout the second game, she seems to suffer from severe PTSD that wipes out her memories of the first timeline to allow her to continue functioning. Aru Akise, Deus' observer in the world, notes that Yuno's memory seems to fluctuate, and actually guesses before his death that Yuno had experienced the Survival Game before. The look in her eyes when she begins to kill could well be a symbol not of berserker mode, but that her memory has briefly returned so she can fight before locking those memories away once more. She is a product of intense suffering, and while trauma is often in a yandere's past, Yuno takes this to the extreme, forcing the viewer to question whether it's even right to take such a topic and trivialize it with a character archetype.
Yuno's story is undoubtedly tragic, which makes it interesting that her final role in The Future Diary is actually one of hope. By traveling back in time, Yukiteru and Yuno end up changing the lives of the people who would become the diary holders. The detective who would fight to become god to save his son from a terminal illness receives a mysterious phone call that saves his son's life by alerting him to the problem. The young cult leader who would be assaulted by her own followers after her parents' death calls off the trip that would have ended their lives. Minene is reunited with the younger version of her dead love interest. The god Deus will make the decision to choose his successor in a different way than the Survival Game. Most importantly, Yuno grants hope to her younger self.
Related: Monogatari: Was Kiss-Shot's Fate With Araragi Too Cruel?
It is true that Yuno does mean to kill her younger self when she first arrives back in time. She sees this as the only way to achieve happiness, and even reasons that this other Yuno has only suffering in her future. Yukiteru abducts the young Yuno from her home before she can be killed and a chase ensues, ending with Yukiteru locked away and Yuno facing her helpless alternate self. However, when Yuno is given the chance to kill her younger self, the other Yuno talks about loving her parents, understanding that her mother is sick, and is sure that they will one day accept her. This Yuno has not yet killed her parents and still holds onto a will to live that the other Yuno lost after the first game.
Yuno is completely stunned by this innocent version of herself, saying shakily, "This was when I still believed I had a bright future... where did I go wrong?" She watches her past parents arrive to comfort and protect their daughter, and is suddenly so jealous of the life she never had that she decides to kill all three. Yukiteru catches her in time, preventing her crime of passion and promising to die so she will win the game. He loves her in that moment because of who she is, not just because she protects him. All the fight gone from her, Yuno stabs herself a killing blow instead of killing Yukiteru. He will become the new god, her other self will have a happy ending, and she can die as she has wanted to ever since the end of the first game.
When Yukiteru becomes the god of the second timeline, he sulks in a world that has been reduced to nothing for ten thousand years, obsessively clinging to Yuno's death. Meanwhile, the Yuno of the third timeline thrives with a loving family and good friends. The other diary holders have completely different fates that are certainly an improvement in this timeline. But Yuno is not done. As Yukiteru sits in the darkness with nothing but his cellphone, he suddenly receives an update that he will have a visitor. Yuno finds him and together, the two of them begin building a new world. The OVA for the series explains that the third timeline Yuno, prompted by Muru-Muru to remember she had someone she cherished, was given the memories of the dead Yuno, which allowed her to break through into Yukiteru's universe and offer him a chance at happiness. It's not necessarily a healthy relationship, but it's one that gives the two protagonists a chance. It's quite a change for the girl who started the series as the cute but dangerous stalker, but Yuno shows that no fate is set in stone.
Related: My Hero Academia: All the Signs Bakugo Is Fated to Be the Next Endeavor
Yuno Gasai is much more than the face of the yandere archetype. Though she is an undeniable icon and demonstrates the switch between adorable schoolgirl to ax-wielding maniac in a way befitting of the Yandere Queen, she is so much more a stereotype. She is a representation of hope and of actively changing the lives of those around her. She rejects her own obsessive love out of the concept that it was based on need, not actual love, in an act of self-awareness that calls the true nature of love into question. What is love but a transaction of something needed from another person, whether that is support, validation or an end to loneliness? What if that's actually enough? Is the love between Yuno and Yukiteru less valid because that transaction was for support and protection, or must we admit that love itself is by nature transactional?
To love someone at all is a choice, and Yuno makes that choice not because she needs Yukiteru as support anymore, but because of who he is in her memories. It is a promising end for the two, and it comes entirely from Yuno's ability to hold hope for the future.
Yuno Gasai is a rich and complex character who deserves to be remembered as so much more than the face of yandere. However, first impressions are lasting, and viewer discontent over The Future Diary's ending meant that much of the character development Yuno underwent in those last few episodes was overlooked. Nonetheless, she is a survivor and a representation of a future that can be changed for the better.
The Future Diary is available to stream on Funimation, Prime Video and Hulu.
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