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ultraericthered · 9 months

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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!

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