Future Diary 2
Posted: November 30, 2009 Filed under: Future Diary 3 Comments »Sakae Esuno – Tokyopop – 2009 – 9+ volumes
Anyway, yes. I read volume one back in June and liked it, but basically forgot it existed until I was cruising through volumes during recent Right Stuf Tokyopop sale. The series has an interesting premise (a tournament where people with different types of diaries that tell the future in different and very specific ways are fighting to become God, basically), but I wasn’t all that thrilled with the tournament structure. We got a taste of what the competition would be like when two of the twelve contestants go completely crazy in volume one, and I was worried the rest of the series would just be a repetition of those events.
As of volume two, I couldn’t be more wrong. Things break down here. The main character, Yukiteru, has teamed up with Yuno, another diary user that can basically save him in every situation with her diary that focuses on everything that happens to Yukiteru. She is completely obsessed with him, in a creepy-but-useful kind of way, in volume one, and Yukiteru and the narrative take her stalking tendencies in stride. Things begin to look up for the couple, and there’s a chapter or so where the two go on a date and are otherwise getting along, but then the Yuno support is yanked unceremoniously out from under the story, and the rest of the volume gets a lot darker and more disturbing as the pair infiltrate a cult headed by another diary user and run into yet another who is completely and utterly insane, a blind superhero that is out to destroy whatever he can in the name of “justice.”
The tournament is still spoken of, and the diary users refer to each other by number in the tournament, but the dynamics turn into which diaries trump the others in practical ways. For instance, the leader of the cult has a Future Diary that shows her what is going on through the eyes of her 1,000 followers, but that information isn’t useful if the followers can’t be trusted to know what they are seeing. An escape diary is no good if you have been taken into custody and there really is no escape. A justice diary… well, might not be much good if it turns out you are not on the side of justice, I suppose. The followers example is the most practical and direct, but I’m looking forward to how the other diaries are used to trump one another.
The story also becomes a game of “who to trust.” Yukiteru is meeting a lot of different people for the first time, and by the end of the volume, most of them have proven to be completely unhinged and untrustworthy, including at least one person he does need to trust and keep with him. And the ones who seem the most unhinged at first may be the ones who are speaking the most truth.
It’s by far the most interesting series I’ve picked up from Tokyopop in a long time, and it is also genuinely scary. I have a hard time reading it before bed, simply because the story keeps subverting and doubling back on itself in the most unsettling ways possible, and with some disturbing imagery to boot. It also seems to have a knack for doing this without revealing too much of its hand. I’m still waiting for an explanation on two of the character’s particular brands of crazy, and luckily I have volume three handy to help me out.
Basically, it’s quite well-written, despite the fact it’s set up to be a tournament series with a “someone becomes God” outcome, and it’s also pretty scary. I love it. I’m going to read the third volume right now.
[...] in Blue) Sesho on vol. 5 of Fullmetal Alchemist (Sesho’s Anime and Manga Reviews) Connie on vol. 2 of Future Diary (Slightly Biased Manga) Kris on vol. 1 of Il Gatto Sul G (Manic About Manga) Connie on vols. 6 and [...]
Just reposting the above because of some obvious grammar errors that will just bother me. Also I do find this an interesting title but one where the length of it may lessen my enjoyment of it. I like crazy Yuno but I wonder if she will just get kind of boring rather than upping the ante some more. I also hate when stuff like finding dead bodies in someone’s house is just glossed over because the author wants to withhold information from the reader. I can’t imagine a situation where I found a bunch of dead bodies in a house, have the occupant catch me noticing this and then just not delve into the situation a little more. I can suspend my disbelief for magic phones, tape recorders, etc. but this storytelling always annoys me.
I was wondering if a printing mistake in my copy of this book is just a small anomaly or found in all printings. The mistake is on page 36, the splash page of Yuno and Yuki in the ferris wheel. There is a decent sized square white block right in the middle of the page, right on the area where one of Yuno’s ponytails should be.
Not as bad as the first volume of Gerard and Jacques I have that has the entire second half of the first volume printed in some weird shuffling manner where you get about 5 pages of one chapter, 3 of the next, 5 of another and so on until the book ends. At first, I thought it was the author jumping time and space kind of suddenly, as she sort of does in Antique Bakery, but the combination of title pages of two chapters appearing pages apart from one another and generally having no idea what the hell was going on finally let me know that my copy was completely worthless.
That does bother me about this series, that Yukiteru is willing to just go along with Yuno and her insanity. It occasionally does a good job of making it seem like Yukiteru only goes along with her out of fear, but the most recent volume made it seem like he saw her as more of a genuine ally. And she has taken a backseat in recent volumes, maintaining her craziness but not doing anything too interesting, so you’re right about that. I like her a lot as a wild card, though, and I’m hoping the story focuses on her again soon.
I’ve had a handful of volumes with printing errors in them, it’s really a downer when that happens. The worst was the last 50 pages missing from my new From Eroica With Love volume, replaced with the last 50 pages from a volume of a completely different series. I’ve only had a handful of bad books in the few thousand books I’ve bought, and admittedly, they usually come from Viz, with a few pages swapped or something like that. Usually nothing major.
I checked my copy of Future Diary 2, and it’s got the same weird square. I don’t know what that is, it’s not a botched sound effect or anything, and there was no touchup on that page at all. That’s really strange.