Hey, remember back in Summer ’24 when the seasonal was Atri, a romance between a boy and a robot girl in a post-apocalyptic future that one of the two had reached by stasis pod? Well, Dusk Beyond the End of the World has a very similar pitch: Boy meets robot girl in the post-apocalypse. Where it differs is that this time the boy got to the ruined future by way of stasis pod… and this show is way less pastoral and harmless, if the body count of the opening is anything to go by. What’s more, this one is an anime original, which is always a good way to get me to sit up and take notice.
Episode 0 is pure prequel, but if I have any insight into how this story is likely to flow, it’s probably going to be needed on a macro level to really appreciate how the human elements develop going forward.
The episode takes place in the near future, where AI has become a common part of life, with all those sci-fi things like machine-mind personal assistants, self-driving everything, and machines that make beautifully plated breakfasts for you that we’ve been told are part of the near future reality never quite seems to reach. Driving the tech boom is teenage super-genius Towa Oumagi. In Towa’s life is her year-younger adopted “little brother”, main character Akira Himegami. The two have feelings for each other that are very dear but also not familial in nature, and we spend most of the episode seeing the two of them get over their hangups and get together as a couple, dating and intending to marry, while Towa deals with setbacks on her goal of creating humanoid androids in order to produce a better future. Sure, whatever, basically a childhood friend romance except they lived under the same roof a while.
As part of her scheme to get people over being luddite jerks, Towa ultimately unveils her “LC Plan”. Standing for “Life Compensation”, it’s basically an idea to use general implanting to make people into cyborgs with connected AI supportware. Before we can hear too much about what she intends for this, a crazy zealot bursts onto the stage and tries to shoot her. Towa gets one bullet in the flank and then, trying to protect her, Akira gets three more in the back.
Cut to an unknown period of time later as Akira awakens in a smashed-up pod, in a crumbling ruin that overlooks a city in a state of decay that indicates it’s largely been reclaimed by nature.
Thus we move into Episode 1 when a couple natives of this ruined future come and find the “wise one” Akira. Once he’s able to understand their language, which takes a couple lines (more on that in a bit), Akira learns that his pod-bound self had been an object of worship for generations, and that a recent earthquake prompted the locals to go check whether he was still okay or not. The jury is out on what being awake in this timeline is.
They take Akira back to their village, where he learns that they live in a village with pre-industrial cultural standards, where people are mostly happy but for the stranglehold on information, including both history and technology, exercised by the totalitarian world government OWEL – a homophone with “Orwell” in a fairly obvious reference. The people seem to live in fear of OWEL and see them as brutes and bullies despite the fact their regime has supposedly freed humanity from war and suffering, including being worried that offering Akira hospitality may count as “hiding a relic”.
Akira also learns that rather than marriage, the locals practice a tradition known as Elsie (which recalls to him the “LC” of Towa’s proposed system, in a way I don’t think the creators would bother with if there wasn’t some connection) that bonds any small group of willing participants rather than a single pair. But while that’s brought up heavily in the pitch, it’s not exactly important for the moment.
Instead, we shortly see that the rumors of OWEL’s nastiness were not exaggerated as a snitch results in one of their operatives showing up with a force of armed goons. He shoots a man in the leg, takes that man and his little girl daughter, and locks up Akira telling him to expect no civil rights as a living relic. One train ride later he decides he’ll instead kill the hostages, send goons to kill everyone in the village who could possibly know about Akira, and keep Akira locked up as a personal genie in a bottle, providing advanced knowledge so the creep can rise through the ranks.
Before he can do any of these horrible things, a mysterious hooded figure we’d briefly seen in passing bursts onto the scene, cutting the train to ribbons with her lightsaber and making short work of a load of OWEL goons before finally pulling out the big gun and blowing the creeper, along with most of the mountain that happened to be behind him, to kingdom come. The arm cannon thing is the kind of display we wanted out of Black Rock Shooter, but it’s no less cool to see it here.
Before making with the saving, this figure asked Akira to listen to a request she would have. After the battle, as Akira intuits that she’s not human, she declares that she’s an android named Yuugure. She then takes her hood down, revealing that she’s exactly Towa’s model except blonde, and asks Akira to marry her.
Thus ends episode one.
Now, I promised a post-script. I want to put this down, so I have the record if I’m right. While pitched sort of as a “boy meets robot girl” show – like Atri, or Beatless, or any of a number of other scifi romances, I have a sneaking suspicion that Akira himself isn’t exactly human any more. He doesn’t wake up when his pod is destroyed, but significantly after. The locals say an earthquake hit the region and we see a flashback to him in a complete and powered pod, but humans in medical devices are kind of delicate so it’s hard to imagine that if he wasn’t at least augmented he’d be merely out of sorts with a life-support-system-smashing wake-up, especially when it’s delayed and he was just sort of hanging out on cables for a while.
Further, when the natives are first introduced, they’re speaking simlish for a couple lines before Akira starts to understand them and their lines are rendered in Japanese. Which would make sense if he had some sort of integrated supportware that translated what he was hearing and, later, saying. Between these two details, I personally think that Akira is an advanced cyborg, likely a project that Towa worked on for most of the rest of her life (depending on when the apocalypse hit and how). He might even be an android copy himself, an “artificial personality” with memories up to where the original died, but for the time being he doesn’t seem to have the awe-inspiring physical abilities of Yuugure and is recognized by her as the original, so I’ll credit that there’s probably a fair amount of OG meat in the character we see now. This is neither here nor there for the show as it currently is, really, but if I’m right the formal reveal could be pretty cool depending on when and how the character and (formally) the audience learn such a thing.
For right now, this one is looking pretty promising, so I hope you’ll follow along with me for the season.