YU-NO again

I'm currently doing my third watch of the 2019 Anime adaptation of YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound of This World.  My first time was following the Simuldub one episode a week for half of the year, my second was in early or mid 2020 doing a standard binge watch of all the episodes in a day or too.  This time I'm doing it at a more fluid pace.

I'm also re-watching it in the context of how much more Anime I've seen since, dedicating a good chunk of 2021 to watching more Anime adapted from Visual Novels, both highly revered and poorly regarded.  With an emphasis on some of the earliest stuff, and seeking to learn more about VNs and their history in general.

YU-NO didn't get the attention it deserved because the Western Fandom never got the memo on how old and influential the source material was.  It's like the frustrations many western media Nerds had at seeing people who didn't hear of Dune till this year calling it an attempted next Star Wars.  But YU-NO's simultamious influence and obscurity runs deeper then that even, perhaps more comparable to John Carter of Mars, or for a comparison to how it's tied to the English speaking world being deprived of it till we'd gotten used to it's imitators, Paul Feval's The Blackcoats or Ponson Du Terril's Rocambole.

YU-NO is probably the most important Visual Novel left out of Bowl of Lentils The Origins of Visual Novels video.  The culmination of that history lesson is chiefly Leaf's Visual Novel Trilogy which originally coined the term.  YU-NO was first released in January of 1996 between the second and third instalments of that trilogy.  The Leaf VN trilogy however becomes less focused on it's fantastical and genre elements as it goes on with To Heart being the first primarily High School Harem VN, the foundation on which's Key's Seasons Trilogy built.  YU-NO's importance however partly lies in how the sheer ambition of it's story dwarfs anything else that can be called a Visual Novel or Sound Novel that came before it or it seems for awhile after.

YU-NO is pretty much the genesis of at least two sub-genres of Otaku media, the time looping to thwart a bad end scenario exemplified by Higurashi and Steins;Gate.  And Isekai in the form it's most commonly associated with today.  But like Sailor Moon's relationship to the fully developed form of the Genre it started, it lacks a certain core conviction I would be less forgiving of if it weren't the innovator.  The fact that Takuya is forced to accept that Mitsuki can't be saved, the later Otaku media spawned from it are about defeating Fate, and later in the story that applies to more then just her.  [Turns out an epilogue OVA I didn't know about resolves this issue somewhat.]

One of the few pieces of discussion about this Anime as an adaption that was floating around when it started airing was a statement from the people making it about Mio being "even more Tsundere" and some parallel statements about other characters, which was taken as a bad sign for the adaptation and I understand why as someone who's reacted similarly to quotes related to Batman projects.  But trust me Mio in the 2019 Anime has not been flanderized into a standard modern Tsundere caricature.  In fact when I compare her to the characters usually propped up by even the most cynical AniTubers as the good "well written" Tsunderes, I consider her more balanced and stable then any of them.

I had observed on this blog before I knew about YU-NO how in the early and mid 90s the Anime characters who were doing the Tsundere bit were mainly the protagonists of Shoujo Anime.  The term Tsundere was coined probably on 2channel in the early or mid 2000s mainly in reference to Visual Novel characters who at the time mostly hadn't been animated yet.  Mio is the model on whom that VN archetype was based, and as such is perhaps the missing link to verify my observation, I really think she was written to be like a 90s Shoujo protagonist.