"I Love You" by Mahiru Shiina (MILGRAM)

"I Love You" Cover

Mahiru's second trial titled: "I Love You" is a harsh aesthetic change from her first trial. This most likely stems from the fact she was voted Guilty in trial 1, and then beat to an inch of her life by prisoner 10. Spoilers ahead! (Parataxis in italics.)

The video starts with a pair of dangling feet, dripping wet with shoes lying underneath them. There is no background for a few moments before a carousel replaces the darkness. The horses are rusted and it's dark. The camera pans further up the hanging body, and shifts over to Mahiru, holding onto a rusty horse. She sighs and continues walking around, finding a similar couch to that in her first trial, and a table with broken glass. She lays on the couch and closes her eyes, before she opens them again, to find the table filled with cake and tea, and a man wearing the same clothes as the hanging body is waking her up, and she hugs him.

This first scene, Mahiru raps her lines, speaking very quickly, but the words themselves are loaded, as she comments on the audience finding her guilty based on her first song. "The meaning of life while guilty, I can’t even breathe anymore / My lethal weapon: 'This is how to be in love with you'" I personally find it almost comedic how she almost mocks the viewer by that last line. I'm not really sure if it's mocking as in the interactions between Mahiru and the Guard, she's an extremely sweet girl, and even the way she talks about the other prisoners is from a place of love and kindness. She even still considered prisoner 10 her friend after that same prisoner beat her near to death.

One line before a shift in the song really sticks out to me in how I believe that Mahiru suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder(BPD). "What am I supposed to do now? If you won’t tell me, I can’t be me." A lot of people with BPD tend to be extremely influenced by those around them, especially their favorite person, who I believe we get to see/meet in this music video/trial. They take on aspects of their person, and without that they have a hard time figuring out their sense of self.

As soon as her eyes open to the tray of cake and tea, the vibe of the song changes, going from a darker tone to a very happy and excited tone. The chorus is her and her boyfriend(presumably) cuddled up with each other, with him feeing her cake. One line in this chorus is "My emotions are out of control, that’s inconvenient? I don’t care!" Which is alarming, truthfully. Considering these songs are about her boyfriend, and the fact that she's in MILGRAM because of a murder, it's almost very damming evidence. A very common theory is that she either directly killed her boyfriend, or is responsible for his death.

Now, I don't think Mahiru committed the murder herself with the intention to harm her boyfriend, considering how much of her songs are just proclaiming her love for her boyfriend. I think it's possible that her love for her boyfriend was too suffocating, and in turn he ended up committing suicide because of it. I was speaking with one of my friends who got me into MILGRAM, and she brought up a point that it's possible Mahiru was the depressed one because of her upbringing (tldr: she was sheltered until she was in college, and doesn't have full control of her own finances despite working a part-time job. She's mentioned that her parents still control her finances and that she only gets an allowance).

This theory went even darker as Mahiru, being very depressed, found a man in her same college courses, and got closer to him, and he also ended up being very depressed, so she and him were both good and bad for each other. Mahiru's love was most likely suffocating, considering how almost all of her interrogation question answers were about love, or finding a loved one, or how her interests would align with her partner's regardless of her own feelings about those same interests (playing even more into symptoms of BPD). My friend said that Mahiru just needed someone to go along with her in order to actually go through with her plans to commit suicide herself, but I personally disagreed with this. I understand where the thought comes from, but I believe something different.

Since we know as viewers that Mahiru takes on traits of her favorite person, I think her boyfriend was extremely depressed when they met, and she absorbed those thoughts and became depressed in order to get closer to her boyfriend. She was still extremely obsessive with him, and in turn made him worse. I think she drove him to committing suicide, because her love was just too suffocating.

I highly recommend watching this trial. I can't do it justice. There is very dark imagery. She ends up feeding her boyfriend dead rats. The text gets more scribbly and shaky. The video ends with her boyfriend hanging in front of the camera. The last line is "DIE".

I really don't think Mahiru wanted her boyfriend to die, or to even be responsible for it. I think it was a mix of reasons; her being very unstable and extremely clingy, and her boyfriend already being depressed.

Mahiru was voted Innocent this trial, with just under 70% voting her innocent. I don't think this is because of the contents of the trial. If anything, this trial would have been more damming for her. I think the reason she was voted innocent was because of the fact she was beat almost to death by prisoner 10. The viewers felt bad for being responsible for her being so brutally attacked. However, they also voted Amane to be innocent this trial, which indirectly led to Mahiru's death.

Mahiru succumbed to her injuries because Amane murdered prisoner 5, who was the doctor keeping Mahiru alive. I'm almost in shock at how stupid some of the voters were because of their decisions with the voting, but all I can do is observe.