Future Diary – The Anime that Makes you Question if Anything Matters at All

This weekend, man. Holy shit this weekend. To say the absolute least, it’s been a journey, and all from a few psychological thrillers I watched. But I digress. I really can’t say enough good things about the anime Future Diary, but I have resolved that I’m going to keep this post as spoiler free as possible. I will say, however, Future Diary is a mature anime. I don’t mean you have to be over a certain age to watch it or enjoy it, though it is a 18A show; what I mean is that in order to get into it, you have to be okay with a gritty, basically uncensored, version of the world. Things are bloody and messy, people are complicated and don’t explain every motivation, and the world, well the world certainly has a lot of  happiness to be had, even in the darkest of places, but for most of the characters in this show, it all stems from darkness. So if you’re down for anime that likes to fuck with everything you know and love about anime and your mental and emotional well being, keep reading.

The premise of the show is that the God of Space and Time is dying and in order to decide who will succeed him, he decides to conduct a survival game. If you’re unfamiliar with survival games, they’re essentially competitions that pit an eclectic group of characters together who are forced through various means to kill or be killed. Think Hunger Games or Battle Royale. In Future Diary’s survival game there are 12 participants chosen by effectively three criteria: he/she has to be highly observant, he/she must have a passion/desire to document, and he/she have to be a bit of a loner. The 12 contestants chosen are then given a device, typically a cell phone, which tells them the future of the next 90 days. To make the game even more interesting, each contestant’s diary focuses on different details of the future. If a future reads “Dead End” it means that a contestant is going to die by one of their opponents; although, the future is a fluid, especially for people who readily know it. If becoming a God isn’t enough motivation for people to play the game, there’s also the added bonus that the world will end if a new God isn’t chosen before the old one dies.

Just by the premise alone, I was willing to give this anime a shot, and boy, was I not disappointed. It’s seldom that I’ll text a friend to watch something immediately, but after I watched this first episode of Future Diary, I knew two things. I have friends who are going to absolutely love this show, and I don’t think I could watch this whole 26 episode series without the ability to vent to someone who knew the mental fuckitude that was this show. With that in mind, I texted Low Five’s one and only Penner at two in the morning and told him he needed to watch the first episode, and he happily obliged. The next couple of days became a string of texts between us filled with rage, happiness, laughter, sadness, and the consistent use of “Super Devil” to describe one of the characters in the show. As you watch the series, you will come to understand.

To put it into perspective, this show has tones and subplots, backed by an incredible soundtrack, which sometimes mimics a romantic comedy, a shounen action, a detective story, a drama, and a whole bunch more. All of which effectively tosses your emotions into a dryer with steel-toed boots and set to its highest spin cycle.

No jokes though, there are moments in this anime that may make me never sleep the same again. It’s pretty early on in the series and once you get to that part, you’ll know, you’ll understand. But it doesn’t peak there. No, no, it’s far from peaking. Future Diary likes to make you think that it really can’t get more intense, then episode two comes along and it’s all like, “we’re going to crank this shit to 11.” Come episode three, though, it’s laughing at you, saying, “you thought we were done at 11? 11 is for bitches.”

Penner and I have both agreed that we’ve never talked to our T.V.s as much as we talked to them while we watched this series. Typically, it was to yell ‘no’ or ‘stop’…repeatedly. Uhg. I want to say more, but I just can’t. I don’t want to give any spoilers.
I hope that you watch it. Go watch it. If you need someone to talk to, I’m here for you, just comment down below. Just try to keep it as spoiler free as possible.

Keep Strong.

I’ll also leave you with Penner’s words after we took a small break from the show “I hope the edge of my seat is ready ’cause that’s where I’m going to be for the next X amount of hours.”

P.S. you’re probably wondering how the pictures in the post correlate to the anime…they don’t. I just wanted to leave you with something happy and good.