Info
- Title:: Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou
- TitleEN:: Girls’ Last Tour
- Studio:: White Fox
- Year:: 2017
- Format:: series
- Episodes:: 12
Log
2020-02-01 – 2020-02-06
watermoon 01/15/2020
like personally i’m the type of person that would love 24 episodes of wandering the desert and sinking into ennui, but i might be the minority here
❄emicore❄ 01/15/2020
that’s girls last, uh, forgot the last word
girls last tour
ep1 – 2020-02-01
looks like we’re in for a lot of 3d and moeblobs.
at least they’re kinda cute (if difficult to tolerate at times) and have discovered the primitive origins of war firsthand.
ep2
it’s an interesting backstory element that, even though chito can read, she can’t read kanji, and i guess everyone switched over to kana somewhere down the line in this universe.
which makes her monologue about writing interesting, because one of the key effects of language reform in japan was how it hindered everybody who grew up in the post-jouyou era from being able to fully partake in a pretty substantial literary history. (but i wouldn’t be surprised if the writers were explicitly trying to draw out that parallel)
(also did this one make a sukiyaki reference?)
ep3 – 2020-02-02
(except i watch anime after midnight so yesterday would’ve been the mythical palindrome number)
i’m getting definite advance wars vibes in the design of the girls.
also wow this one got to me in a whole bunch of ways. i think i’m actually going to like this one.
ep4
wherein the girls discuss the possibility of religion as a beautiful delusion – a placebo to rid one’s mind of the thought of a bleak afterlife…
and then follow it up with a pretty good goof.
still, the tonal shifts work well for this series. they don’t take themselves too seriously, but prod you with thoughts as they putter around the unending city.
ep5 – 2020-02-03
dammit that iie/ie pun.
i think the fact that everything is outright vacant is low-key one of the more interesting aspects of their current condition. like if everybody just mysteriously disappeared – or more realistically had to be evacuated – there would be a lot more of the detritus of everyday life around. whatever lead to their current state had to have been a process, with resources being continually scrounged up and replacements no longer being created (hence the general absence of even books).
also i’m not sure how much the last half really adds here, but you can say that about most of this series and i think that’s the point.
ep6
…
i guess that ending was to be expected, in much the same way as map dude ultimately lost his reason to live as well.
is this what absurdism is? to find meaning once all other options are exhausted?
to see the universe spit in the face of your passion and dedication, yet in a way where you can only blame yourself?
(of course, when standing on the tail end of history, one’s passions become little more than personal diversions anyway…)
ep7 – 2020-02-04
this is a surprisingly stressful episode.
somehow they made walking on pipes super stressful, and then made following arrows stressful, and then made standing on a death treadmill stressful, and then made cooking stressful by dumping whole sacks of salt and sugar in as equal parts with the potato.
ep8
the fact that they escaped the pipe labyrinth and got back to the truck is the real mystery.
and then, after a stressful day, the girls get drunk and make the yuri happen
but also make it stressful by dancing so close to the ledge.
ep9 – 2020-02-05
i like this theme of yuu just nonchalantly dropping questions that make chito completely rethink her prior assumptions about things.
also deciding to blow up the construction robot instead of just grabbing a bucket for the fish is i guess one way to solve the problem.
ep10 – 2020-02-06
oh hey the op is back. (i don’t know if it’s anything special, but i like it quite a lot. even if they do dab.)
tempted to post some trash like “girls last tour is just icarly on a tank” and see how long it takes before twitter reams me.
much like icarly, one of the big themes of the show is the idea of automated systems persisting even when the people who they’re meant to serve become absent. the interconnected systems become their own sort of higher-order organism, or ecosystem.
uh oh they’re getting on the streets of rage 2 elevator.
uh oh it’s just as dangerous.
ep11
having the girls randomly press a button that causes the wanton destruction of an entire precinct is somehow a stretch for even this anime.
although it did lead to a pretty meaningful character moment. even if the world is derelict, chito’s horror felt like a real reaction to something that would, in any other context, be unspeakable.
ep12
The World Ends With Yuri
it was a moving ending, if maybe a bit obviously so.
and the big fungus creatures working to decompose the remnants of human civilization were a bit overt too.
i feel like we’re meant to pick out something in the end.
like i don’t think that humans really deserved what they got, but rather succumbed to systems greater and with more force than themselves.
really this whole show is about two girls trying to survive amidst systems that are greater and wield more force than they do, so the parallel tracks pretty well.
and so much of what the montage is trying to convey is that the human experience is about the little things. the birthdays, the games, family and friends – even the girl who discovered a massive scientific breakthrough has equal attention focused on her love for potatoes.
i would say that something went wrong, but maybe it’s more that people with too much power got too human at the wrong times. it could’ve happened with anyone, and from anyone, and the systems just amplified what was already there.
2022-05-30 – 2022-06-08
- stylized kanji does appear in some places, like the 粉 when they find the potato powder. so even reforming the kanji out of their language was a process
- one interesting thing about the camera is that it shows that there’s still a very obvious gap in what we know about their history. we see the before times, and the apocalyptic war, but earlier in the series we walk through and utilize a lot of different pieces of compensatory infrastructure, built sometime after the knowledge of how to work and maintain them as intended had been lost.
- it’s not hard to infer what happened on the most general level: without the ability to adequately maintain the plants that generated their resources, those resources became increasingly scarce, and competition over them intensified. but that all doesn’t explain why the language was simplified in the interim, nor does it explain why books were printed in this simplified language.
- (unless the idea was that people then only needed to know the bare minimum of literacy, and any of the books chito found were more like technical manuals)