Mirai Nikki 08 — Issues of Trust | Draggle's Anime Blog

I remember feeling that this arc with the dogs was one of the weakest parts of the manga. It is fairly silly. There are less ridiculous ways to kill people than with a pack of dogs. How can the police be so utterly incompetent as to not detect a pack of killer dogs that are still loitering near the scene of the crime? Not to mention, how can they let a group of kids sneak in? And the whole scene with Yukiteru commanding his classmates to hold the windows is silly and contrived. Why don’t they just go upstairs to a more defensible position and / or call the cops?

But with all that said, I still enjoyed this episode. I think it was able to capture much of the basic appeal of the manga: the question of trust.

Trust

The fundamental problem for Yukiteru in Mirai Nikki is the question of trust. Should he trust Yuno? She loves him; certainly. But can he trust her with his life?

In this episode, Yukiteru is forced to ask the same question of his classmates and his newfound friends. Yuno wants to abandon them and let them all die.

For her, it isn’t even a question of trust. They’re simply obstacles to her relationship with Yuki, and ought to be eliminated. He doesn’t need any friends but her. Yukiteru, however, with his desire to make friends, decides he can trust the two girls who were nice to him and defended him. But he has doubts about the suspicious guy who claims to be a detective and his friend, and doesn’t trust his bully either.

Perhaps unsurprisingly,Yukiteru’s trust turns out to be deeply misplaced. Seriously, why would you trust anyone who has a face like Yuno and a hat like Rena? But I digress. Yuno ended up being right: trusting those two girls was the wrong decision. As for the boys, it’s not entirely clear yet, but they probably can’t be worse than the two girls.

The lesson is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

But this is much of the fun of Mirai Nikki. People are not who they seem. The ones you trust the most will be the ones to stab you in the back. And the ones who seem the most suspicious will be the ones you can trust with your life. We’ve already witnessed this with how Yuno and Ninth have been the ones who rescued Yukiteru.