Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-185.2.190.227-20161204101028/@comment-27702860-20170718144129

Mirai Nikki is deliciously complex with its moral ambiguities. It is a "happy ending" for Yuno and Yuki. For all who die, not so happy. Worse, some suffer rather extraordinarily in the process--see blind priestess girl who got repeatedly raped only to get her hand removed by Yuno's hatchet.

However, all twelve of the players were tossed into a game most did not choose--certainly not Yuki. If you do not play, you die. So what was he to do? For awhile, he survives hanging on to Yuno, but he begins to realize the only way to "win"--and in his mistaken belief--and bring everyone back is to become more like her: killing people, until he becomes as selfish as any including Minene. Yes, we all love Minene, but she is a sadistic killer without a moral compass for much of the series until, really, her death.

The bottom line is sometimes you are put in craptacular circumstances.

In order to "win" to "survive" means everyone else has to die. Harsh, but that is the reality they get. If no one plays, everything dies.

Thus Yuno's idea of a "Happy Ending" is reliving one sexual encounter with the hopes her lover will kill her and live. If not. . . there is always another world! She has a career as a motivational speaker.

Okay, can I pull something positive out of this morass of death, doom, destruction, and mochi?

Like Higurashi the characters had to have the correct world and make the correct choices. Deus-II senses that the "game" is rigged. So--to avoid a Wall of Text Plot Summary--he has some agents to try to figure out what is going on. Meanwhile, F-W Yuno has groan a bit and cannot quite kill Yuki even though she still suspects he does not actually love her. So she abandons dying Second World and moves to Third.

However--again trying to avoid Wall of Text Plot Summary--Deus-III realizes the "game" is a very dumb idea originally conceived by a character who just expected to win. So they both decide to dispense with it. Minene keeps her promise, so Cop's kid will not die. Bottom line is that the various characters do not suffer the lives they had in the Second World and, presumably, the First World. So that is a "Happy Ending" for them. Just like Higurashi, the various iterations of "Da Kids" do not have "Happy Endings" by and large either. Cannot do anything for them.

Right, do not know if that answered your question. I am not saying it is "all bad," just that happiness is relative. Another way to look at it is part of the "message" is how irresponsible parents ruin everything. Pretty much every character who suffers suffers from having a bad, irresponsible, indifferent, to absent parents. They all seem to have their own agenda. Even the Cop becomes so single-minded in becoming Deus to save his son he really never sees him or his wife. Blah. . . blah.

Yuki had the opportunity to be like that if he accepted Yuno's "Happiness Sphere" for want of a better term. He realizes life is not about just his happiness. He does not "know" Third World Yuno, but he finds it "wrong" for her to be killed. The Third World parents are better for many reasons.

As for the worlds, the First World, without Yuno-Deus is gone. She enters the Second World retaining some of her powers which all makes sense in retrospect. When she and S-W Yuki go to the Third World, the Second World goes to nothingness. When S-W Yuno--who is effectively the Deus of the First and potential Deus of the Second!--kills herself, S-W Yuki becomes S-W Deus and. . . we see what the universe is like: nothing unless he does something.