#esuno

[sunniedesi]

All Future Diary Merch (Part 1)

~~A comprehensive list

Despite being a cult classic anime and manga, finding official Future Diary merchandise feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. That is, incredibly difficult to come by in a sea of redbubble and bootlegs. This is partly due to its age, but also because most merchandising is both Japanese-exclusive and released in limited quantities. For this reason, it’s quite difficult to gauge just how much merch has been created and how much of it is still available to us few fans still active to this day. So, for the sake of curation, here’s a comprehensive list of all officially licensed Future Diary merch (that we know of at least).

A little disclaimer before we begin: this list is subject to change, as I’m always making new discoveries whenever I look deeper into this rabbit hole. If anyone knows of more merchandise that isn’t included in this list, please let me know so I can update it. On the other hand, this post is going to be very dense and likely feature multiple parts due to Tumblr's photo limit, so I'll keep my descriptions very brief. If there's any relevant information related to a product, I'll link it and call it a day. (so be prepared to see a lot of links to some of my previous posts here). 

With all that fluff out of the way, let’s dive in:

~ Magazine Goodies

Magazines often feature little goodies and gifts (or at least they did back in the early 2000’s), and Shonen Ace wasn’t an exception to this. According to Future Diary’s official guidebook, there were three special FD gifts included in different editions of Shonen Ace:

A supplementary manga cover (from the February 2011 issue of Shonen Ace)

A Yuno phone pouch (from the Spring 2008 issue of Ace Assault)

A comic box (from the June 2011 issue of Shonen Ace)

~ Raffle Goodies

Besides these magazine goodies, Shonen Ace also did many fairs where they would sell volumes of their popular series and raffle limited edition products. These raffles were advertised in the obis of the first four Future Diary volumes, which is where most of my product images actually come from. Once again, according to the guidebook, these products were:

An mp3 player + earphones (from Kadokawa’s Spring Comic fair 2006, featured in volume 1) I believe only 10 units exist of this piece, though I could be wrong. The ad for the raffle said that of the 300 participants, 140 would also receive a metal strap (a.k.a phone charm), though we have no pictures of what that looks like (source). 

A jacket/windbreaker (from a raffle featured in volume 2). Sadly, no more information is available for this product.

A wall clock (from Kadokawa’s Spring Comic fair 2007, featured in volume 3). I also believe only 10 units exist of this piece.

The complete crossover of Hanako and the Terror of Allegory x Future Diary (also from the 2007 Spring Comic fair). Of the people who weren’t lucky enough to receive the wall clock, 190 received the crossover instead. 

The meditating Yuno t-shirt (from Kadokawa’s 13th anniversary fair, featured in volume 4). Only 50 units exist of this piece. Of the people who weren’t lucky enough to receive the shirt, 200 received a signed, colored copy of the artwork from the shirt.

~ Kadokawa Extras

Besides raffles and magazine goodies, Kadokawa has made other miscellaneous products featuring Future Diary for special events:

A fan from the Kadokawa Manga Festival - Summer 2009, which happened to feature Yuno.

A Christmas Yuno x Yukki bookmark from the Kadokawa Manga Festival - Winter 2009. 

A Yuno Keychain sold for Shonen Ace’s 25th anniversary.

Sakae Esuno’s crossover illustration for Kadokawa’s 30th anniversary.

~ Books

Besides the manga releases, there are other Future Diary related books, such as:

Fragments, the guidebook.

Future Diary's ecchi parody: Mosaic Keshi.

The original Future Diary sample booklet, which included just the first chapter of the manga.

The two light novels.

Bonus: despite never receiving a standalone release, I’ll mention it here: the Tantei Akechi x Future Diary crossover story.

Extra bonus: there are two clear files that were given as bonus gifts for purchasing some of the manga volumes (I don’t know where else to place this so here they are).

~ DVD/Blu-ray Bundles

The limited edition sets of each localization of Future Diary include plenty of interesting bonuses worth diving into. I’d like to note that I might be missing some information here as the contents of these bundles are a little tricky to research, though.

The complete Japanese Blu-Ray box included the following bonuses: a 16-page booklet, pilot episode, the MurMur Corner specials, the promotional TV commercials and videos, audio cast commentary for every episode, box sleeve and disk sleeves with original designs, and the CD soundtrack.

The Japanese Blu-Ray/ DVD had individual volumes (9 to be exact) which were also accompanied by limited edition bundles. These bundles included similar bonuses: an 8-page booklet, video specials and commercials, cast commentaries for their respective episodes, a box/ disk sleeve, and one of two character trading cards.

Volume 1 of the Blu-Ray/ DVD also included a mouse pad with an original design for its limited edition, while volume 6, 7 and 8 included one of the three Radio CDs for their limited edition sets. (source).

Bonus: if you bought the Volume 1 Limited Edition set from HMV, you would receive a poster of Yuno in an HMV uniform. There's also a Tsubaki version, though I'm not sure what volume that's for. If you bought it on Amazon, you would receive a special sticker set.

The German Collector’s Limited Edition: comes with the box, booklet (same one as the Japanese), memory cards of all the diary owners, pins of Yuno and Yukki and an embroidered patch with the name of the show. (Note: the French Limited Edition also contained the same booklet).

The Collector’s Limited Edition Set (UK): included a 28-page artwork booklet.

SelectaVision Blu-Ray Collector’s Edition of Future Diary: comes with the CD box, complete series and extras (total of four disks), soundtrack CD, a small container with Tsubaki’s face, 9 large postcards of the manga covers, a doble-sided poster, sticker set, trading card set, a replica of Yukki’s beanie, and a 40-page booklet. What else can I say, ole 💃

Side note: I’m disappointed that the LATAM version never had a physical release. Not only did we miss out on similar bundles, but the dub is now incredibly difficult to find since it wasn't moved over when Funimation passed to Crunchyroll. The castilian dub is also surprisingly good in comparison, which is something I don’t normally say (castilian dubs don’t have a track record of being very good, sorry).

Lastly, the US Limited Edition Box included three extras: a filler box and two Valentine's-Day-themed postcards.

That's it for part 1. Tune in next time for more merch insanity!

PS: for some reason every time I try editing my drafts for this they get posted. I had to delete the first version of this because Tumblr's playing tricks on me. So now you're getting this post earlier than expected xd.

[yunoteru4ever]

Hanako x Future Diary, Part 2??

According to Japanese Wikipedia, there is actually a second part of the Hanako and the Terror of Allegory x Future Diary crossover story that you can read over here.

In Part 2, they say that Murmur and Hanako somehow do a Freaky Friday mind-body swap. Hijinks are then presumed to (briefly) ensue.

Japanese Wikipedia claims this this second part was eventually included in later Japanese reprints of the collected Volume 2 of Hanako, so... I guess that's now the next thing I need to get my mitts on so we can scanlate it.

Mind you, the Wiki page doesn't provide any source links for these statements. So I could just be throwing money away.

But dammit, we MUST know.

[hornymirainikkifan]

Rereading the manga of redial and wtf it's totally different from the anime??? And better if I might add.

The main story's manga also was much better with no unnecessary fanservice (the kids at the resort, Ai's rape and her talking to Marco on the balcony afterward and Yuki with Wakaba Moe in the illusion world).

Redial's manga has so much more cool stuff like the future of Marco and Ai in the 3rd world (they deserved so much better fr) and Yomotsu's involvement in the Omekata cult. And they erased all these all some guy could draw 14 year old girls in swimsuits smh

[dexpwuppy]

OOOO I HATE YUNO GASAI WITH A BURNING PASSION

I hate Future Diary as a whole, there's nothing i found to be redeeming about that anime or its characters

But Yuno? Fuck her. Fuck bitch ass Yuki. I hate them both.

The end of that anime is them biting the curb up close and it's extremely graphic and extremely satisfying, that's canon because the creator told me so

[would-they-be-good-at-asmr]

Propaganda:

There exists a canon Yuno Gasai asmr track officially released only in Japan:

[mirainikkicentricblog]

Happy 50th birthday, Sakae Esuno!

Let's raise a toast to the creator of Mirai Nikki and Big Order, Sakae Esuno, on his 50th birthday!

His unforgettable characters, intricate plots, and mind-bending narratives continue to resonate with fans worldwide.

Thank you for everything, Esuno-sensei!

[haveyoureadthismanga-poll]

[ultraericthered]

So I felt like making a hot take post about this audacious bitch:

Minene Uryuu, Ninth Future Diary Holder from The Future Diary. (Yes, she and Black Lagoon's Revy Two-Hands are almost the same character, I know.)

Losing her parents as collateral damage in religious extremist militia warfare when she was 8 years old, Minene was forced to live a brutal life as an orphaned, homeless street rat in a Middle Eastern nation overrun with the religious extremists' ceaseless conflict, possessing little of her own and having to resort to theft in order to survive. The result of this was Minene developing a burning hatred towards the idea of God and of all religion as a whole, organized or otherwise.

Carrying this disdain for everything related to religion and letting the wrath and hatred fester inside her heart as he got older, Minene was eventually able to make her living as a terrorist bomber, specifically targeting religious structures, religious organizations, and prominent, influential religious individuals, in order to destroy them in the name of atheism and shit. Before it was turned into her Future Diary by Deus, Minene's Escape Diary was a regular journal that she used to chart out all the possible escape routes in whichever area she was planning to attack. She is very tactical and intelligent, able to easily gather information and make deductions based on it. Having spent her adolescent years alone with no love or guidance, she believes she is fated to be all alone in the world, does not need anyone else in her life to help her, and must survive and endure at all costs so she may one day see the stated end goal for all her evildoing realized: the erasure of the very idea of gods and all religious faith built from the world. Throughout her life, Minene appears to be haunted by her eight-year old self and the memory of crying over her dead parents, symbolizing her desire to escape her own past and be saved.

So where I am going with this? Well, here's my hot take:

Minene Was Right.

...Except for all the ways in which she was not.

While wanting to erase the concept of deities and higher powers from the collective of humanity is childish extremism in her thinking (people have believed in such things for ages and I really don't think there is anything that could stop them), Minene's want to see the total abolishment of all religious institutions, depowering of religious leader figures, and cessation of both all damaging religious practices and of the relevance thereof, is honestly completely understandable. Sure, she cannot and should not force atheism onto all peoples of the world, and I'm sure once she was gifted god-like powers by an actual deity she'd find herself beginning to understand that, but when she looks at religion and its place in the world, Minene sees flawed, fallible, needy, selfish, hideously ignorant and deluded human beings taking the fact that conceptualized notions of divinity, spirituality, and higher power over all physical reality that is sacred and holy exist in life, and using it as an excuse to interpret spiritual faith in very human ways and apply them to human work for the fulfillment of human desires. Thus can religion become the driving force behind wars, behind crimes, behind abuse, behind oppression, behind classist, racist, sexist and homophobic practices, etc. If defined very broadly and stretched to meet the requirements that humans want it to meet, religion can be a vehicle for sin, all while the sinners hypocritcally preach that they're doing the righteous and holy work of their god(s) and stand against evil, vice, and sin that corrupt this world.

I feel I don't need to ellaborate on how much suffering is wrought upon too many innocent human lives due to violent conflict driven by extremists who use their religion to justify their acts of inhumane atrocity, who cling to the sacred dogma of their faith and the way in which they've chosen to interpret the words and will of their priests, prophets, messiahs and deities as being permission, or a mandate to satisfy their hatred, bloodlust, and hunger for power and dominance. Or on which currently going conflicts in particular I've in mind when I say all this. I've seen or heard the rhetoric of "our religion tells us..." or "our faith dictates that...", or even "our God commands us to..." applied to blatantly worldly matters and very human-centric, material-based disputes. And it strikes me as fucking ludicrous. So I just have to think that Minene had it right the whole time: if human religion and all the harmful ways religious faith gets utilized ceased to be, the world would be a far better place to live in. To me, this ideal is just.

So how did Minene then end up going oh so very wrong in her life?

I could easily point to the fact that she's a bloody terrorist, that she has gleefully bombed, gunned down, slashed up, and decimated populated areas with much human cost that she didn't seem to give a damn about, and clearly that's wrong....but that's a bit too obvious. Anyone with a functional moral compass can tell that the clear cut bad guy doing clear bad things is in fact bad and their actions cannot be considered right. I could go deeper and point to her hypocrisy, how she became what she'd hated most - someone who persecutes and victimizes other human lives due to her own belief that evil, sinful acts committed in the name of her own brand of faith (atheism) are justified or "necessary evil" - and that she's been every bit the demon that she'd come to see Murmur #1, 1st World Yuno Gasai, and John Balks as being....but nah, her worst error of all isn't even that.

Where Minene went wrong most of all is that her anti-religion ideals aren't and were never the true reason behind her turn to crime and terrorism, but merely the rationale she told herself. Meaning she was out committing impersonal, indiscriminate acts of mass harm and murder for the sake of no vision of a greater good, but over small, deeply personal psychological burdens that are really no good reason to do any of this awful, heinous shit. See, when I mentioned in my summary of her character that "Minene appears to be haunted by her eight-year old self and the memory of crying over her dead parents, symbolizing her desire to escape her own past and be saved"? That's what it's really all about. She chose to become a destructive, mass murdering terrorist and a public menace as a cry for help. Terror was her language for saying "someone help me, love and accept me, save me the way I was yearning to be saved, tell me it's okay for me to be human, to move beyond my painful past, live in the here and now for a better future, and not throw my life away doing horrible things....or if not, then please kill me! Just put me out of my misery now!" Anyone of sound mind and clear consicence truly motivated by a desire to make the world a better place for others to live in would never think terrorism to be an effecive recourse. Ever. That's how you can tell that Minene was never acting for the sake of that cause. It was always about her internal cycle of self destruction and the crying of her buried inner child for the healing and salvation of her soul, for the help she'd never recieved when she was orphaned years ago, never about the erasure of religion and how that might help the world at large. Minene's war was truly with herself.

With such a well thought out, disturbingly mentally and emotionally malnourished character to work with, it sucks that Sakae Esuno didn't always know how to work with her in the most effective ways. When you have a very realistically human set-up for someone who represents realistic human evil but then use it to depict instead a cartoonish, costume-wearing comic book supervillain and then still go for nuance, redemption and heroism with that character, it's gonna feel more than a bit awkward. But while I wish she'd have gotten more interplay with Yuno and Kurusu (and none at all with Nishijima), I do really appreciate that the core of her character arc was kept focused on her association with Yukiteru. What Minene truly needed was someone who'd be steadily open and understanding with her, which prompts her to be open and understanding with them, which itself taps at Minene's concealed humanity and draws out her better qualities, and Yuki was this person to her. What compounded this with the healing of Minene's heart and soul is that Yuki himself was, in his current state, reminiscent to Minene of what she'd been like as a kid: a naive, hopeful, and good-natured yet troubled youth walking towards a dark abyss as their innocence dies and their heart cries out for anyone or anything to pull them back away from the edge. While Minene realized the truth about what she'd yearned for and re-embraced her humanity too late to save Yuki from taking the plunge, it was just in time to save her own soul and make some difference, as ensured by, ironically enough, an Act Of God - literal Deus Ex Machina (but I remain torn on how this was implemented by the writing within canon, it sort of diminished Minene's arc tbh.)

And what she did not need was someone telling her "I love you as you are, warts and all, but only really because I love the idea of the person you could be and who I can see you becoming, because if you did become like that, then I'd want to marry you and get laid with you!" Goddamn, I hate the writing for that fucking character so much.

Hey, I now just realized - Minene and Cyrus from Pokemon could be considered like inversions of each other. Both characters suffered hardships in their young lives that brought them to some very valid points about worldly issues in need of being addressed yet their untreated personal pain and all the defects born from it in both mentality and personality steered them in the wrong direction, towards extremism and terrorism in their pursuit of a solution. But Minene seeks to eliminate the very idea of the divine while utilizing mundane human means, while Cyrus wants to eliminate human spirit while utilizing the exploitation of higher power in hopes of ultimately becoming a deity himself. And this is actually the second time one of the Diary Holders in The Future Diary has been likened to Cyrus!

[cantheywinthehungergames]

I just remembered this anime randomly. How about Eiji Hoshimiya from Big Order? The big order wiki says he’s estimated to be 17 years old.

Tribute Name: Eiji Hoshimiya

Age: ~17

Restrictions: No use of the Order power

If you would like to see a character aged 12-18 enter the Hunger Games, please submit them through my asks. 19+ aged character submissions are currently closed.

Please also look at my pinned post for submission rules as well as a list of previously submitted characters prior to submitting your character.

[mothy-chan]

Sometimes I pick on Esuno's work, sometimes I say I hate Esuno, and then I lie in bed and cuddle with Esuno's dakimakura.

[hatsumishinogu]

Reign of the Seven Spellblades Vol.8

[sunniedesi]

New Official Future Diary x Big Order Art

Recently, there's been a Reddit post circulating around the Future Diary community showcasing some never-before-seen artwork at a recent exhibition. I initially didn't think too much of it, since I'm aware there's plenty of older Esuno artwork that's been lost to time and has never seen the light of day on this side of the globe. That said, it was brought to my attention that it could be one of the lost artworks that appeared on Esuno's defunct blog, which made me want to look further into it.

Now, the artwork is currently being displayed at an exhibition in the Animate Ikebukuro store. According to the description of the Reddit post, the exhibition is part of a sale held in celebration of Shonen Ace's 30th anniversary. So, I went into Animate's official website to read more about it, and there's a ton of artwork being sold as part of this promotion. Here's a clean version of the FD art displayed on the site.

Interestingly enough, it seems all of the artwork featured was made solely for the 30th anniversary sale. Which made me think this crossover artwork might actually be recently drawn by Esuno!

I reverse searched the image to see what else I could find, and sure enough, there is one auction listing that confirmed my suspicions.

If you look carefully, it says 30th in the back! So it is safe to say, this is Esuno's most recent Future Diary artwork! Strangely enough, he hasn't posted anything about it on his twitter, but the trademark from the image in the official site confirms that this is his original artwork.

A few things to note is how much his art style has changed since Future Diary. The style we see in this artwork is much closer to the style in Detective Akechi is Berserk and his adaptation of Reign of the Seven Spellblades. So seeing his older characters in this new style is very interesting and refreshing! Also, did anyone else notice Yukki's eyes are brown instead of blue? I wonder if this was done to differentiate him from Eiji (or maybe Esuno forgot Yukki's original eye color? T-T).

Lastly, I believe this was a limited time sale (a.k.a. it's over now), but knowing that it happened only a month ago, we might start to see some resellers in the future. So, in case you're interested in buying this, look for stuff like 未来日記 BIG ORDER アクリルスタンド少年エース30周年 (Future Diary Big Order Acrylic Stand Shounen Ace 30th Anniversary) (kinda sounds like a wish listing lmao)

Anyway, if you need me I'll be in the corner of my room fangirling about this.

[yunoteru4ever]

On days like today, the dark and cynical view of human nature that premeates Sakae Esuno's works really speaks to me.

Like, yeah, we are inherently fucking awful, aren't we?

[masked-and-doomed]

Why is Takao the only one who gets punishment in the 3rd World. Huh.

[ouclematis]

2006

[cerastes]

Mirai Nikki, I can talk at length about how disjointed this manga was, how utterly badly written it was, how much of everything it had going for it was a fortunate lightning-in-a-bottle combination of offering a few narrative beats and concepts plenty of people wanted and couldn’t find in other works of the time too easily, so you made do, but what I will forever appreciate about it, and why despite being keenly aware of how putrid it is overall, I still consider it a work I thoroughly enjoyed, is that it really dared to say “this evil terrorist woman who has blown up and killed several dozens of children and teens on-screen is one of the central characters of the narrative that we are in fact supposed to like and gets a good end despite never getting a redemption arc or anything of the sort”.

Esuno cannot write to save his life —just look at Big Order, aka “I played Persona one time while listening to Jojo and I think I get it” — but his particularly messy writing and obvious raging boner while ever handling a pen at least results, against all odds, in some quality evil woman representation.