WorldEnd (I am not typing out that whole title every time) is a post-apocalyptic tale that’s pitched to be a little more… complete than most, starring as it does Willem Kmetsch, said in this setting to be the last surviving human. The grim oppression of such a scenario, as would be familiar to the likes of Girls’ Last Tour or a few downer endings, is defused significantly by the setting and supporting cast.
For one, while humans are basically extinct, civilization endures with other humanoid races on a series of islands floating in the sky – mostly animal people as we see when Willem intercepts a mysterious blue-haired girl and shows her around for a day, hats required to hide that they don’t have horns or anything.
After seeing her off, Willem checks in with a goblin friend of his, who has an easy money military commission lined up, placing Willem as the new caretaker of a warehouse full of “special weapons”. Once there he runs into an old troll (visually: busty redhead) acquaintance of his, Nygglatho, who seems to either be into him or more likely into the idea of eventually eating him. The blue-haired girl, Chtholly, is also there, as are a few rambunctious kids. Weapons? Initially a question, until Chtholly reveals that she and the others are the weapons.
The general fact seems to be that they are “Leprechauns”, faeries that are good enough at human mimicry that they can use the nearly unstoppable superweapons that humans created in ages past, making them the most critical soldiers against the “seventeen Beasts” that have overrun the surface below. Critically as well, they’re shown to not place much value on their own lives, which allows them to use the self-sacrificing super attack the swords enable.
This does seem to weigh somewhat on Chtholly, as she’s counting down the days until a predicted attack from the Beasts will force her, as the eldest and strongest, to sacrifice herself. She may not, strictly speaking, resist the idea of dying, but all the same she’s not quite as glib about it as the younger kids.
Willem learns of this and endeavors to find a better way. Being a human, he understands the magic swords the fairies wield better than they do, and so he has some ideas. What remains is sparking some hope inside Chtholly, which takes doing as she’s got a lot of hangups (and also budding feelings, but let’s leave that aside for now).
We do also learn how Willem was here as he was petrified in a battle towards the end of humanity and discovered (by Nygglatho, the goblin friend, and others) and reanimated fairly recently, hence why he’s still around and youthful (if not in good condition) five hundred years after the extinction of his species.
Thus, unable to really join the fight himself, Willem has to send Chtholly (and the other teens of the group, Ithea and Nephren) off to battle all the same, hoping that he’s done enough that they can all return home safe. There’s actually quite a bit of hang time, and a fake out suggesting the battle was a Total Party Kill, after which, to say the least, Willem is very happy to see his charges safe and sound
It turns out the defeat was a loss, but more of a tactical retreat in the face of a new, unknown enemy. Chtholly seems “weird visions” worse for the wear, but ever closer to Willem as they hang around the town they met up in for a bit, dealing with a side plot about racial violence against the mayor. After resolving that issue, a military police rabbit shows up to call Willem away from the girls again, with an important name drop.
That name turns out to belong to another sort-of human, in this case one of Willem’s old companions who cursed himself with immortality in such a way that he no longer really counts, and who is (along with the undead remnant of one of their defeated enemies) the creator of the floating islands. Having learned of Willem’s existence, the lich wants Willem to tune up all the old magic swords in preparation for a final battle to retake the surface, since the system of floating islands probably can’t last forever.
He, however, alienates Willem in the process by revealing the truth about faeries, that they’re lost souls incarnated by a sort of necromancy to serve as weapons, destined for short “lives” (as much as they’re even alive) that can be shortened even further if their past lives intrude and erode their minds, which seems to be happening to Chtholly.
Chtholly, locked in a dream with her past life Elq Hrqstn (winner of the award for most incomprehensibly disemvoweled name in a setting full of weird tangled names), manages to negotiate her return and seeming miraculous recovery from memory erosion. This seems to lead to a further consequence when it’s revealed that the makeup of her body and soul has changed in such a way that she’s no longer a fairy. What is she? My money would be on human given how heavy the no-alternates romance in this show is but they don’t answer that.
Instead we launch into an arc about rescuing a downed salvager ship on the surface, which in addition to two fairies who were on deployment before Willem showed up has a magic sword that can restore its wielder’s body, which Willem wants for Chtholly. Pointed, given that she’s still degenerating despite her one-time recovery.
While on the surface, Willem manages to intuit the truth of the Beasts, that most of their number must be converted Humans, which causes him to have a little mental breakdown. At his low point, he lets go of the defenses we’d known for several episodes that he was putting up intentionally and goes with his heart to propose to Chtholly.
Unfortunately for the happiness of the new fiancees, the military relief force, hungry for more artifacts than the force they were sent to rescue, may have dug too greedily and too deep…
As thing go to hell, we get a picture where Chtholly’s past life is some kind of god who was struck down by the last human wielder of the sword Chtholly is now bound to, who was also in love with Willem in the past.
The deific past life has a mindscape talk with Chtholly as the escape ship is slowly being overrun, explaining that her order tried to wipe out humanity to prevent the whole beast apocalypse and calling Chtholly her dream of, like her killer, fighting for love.
At the end of this, Chtholly becomes cognizant of what’s going on in the waking world, and dedicates the last dregs of her existence to fighting back.
Of course, before she actually emerges we get a hell of a desperate fight, killing off pretty much all of the mooks we’d met over the last few episodes and pushing the three active faeries to their limits – and beyond in the case of Nephren, who enters a degrading state that she says will lead up to the “go boom” event Leprechauns can invoke.
Willem, having lost all hope, dives to save Nephren when she throws herself off the ship. Chtholly, as her last act, dives in to save them both. She cures Nephren’s condition (or at least seals off the kaboom) and then engages in battle with the impossible swarm of enemies on the surface.
This final battle is overscored with a really beautiful rendition of Scarborough Fair (reprised from episode one, where it covered the montage of Chtholly and Willem sightseeing on their first meeting), interspersed with flashbacks and paired narration from the lovers about how much the trail here meant to them, ending as the outmatched and dying Chtholly insists that right then, she’s the happiest girl in the world. It’s honestly a really well-done sequence, until finally Chtholly goes mystically nuclear.
Despite exploding, Chtholly is able to appear before Willem one last time.
Her hair turns red as her Chtholly-self degrades. As you can see, there’s not a lot of her left.
We don’t actually see her keel over, but it’s confirmed that she didn’t make it (we even see some sort of infant reincarnation of her in a mysterious wood) and strongly implied that neither Nephren nor Willem escaped either. With the original light novel series being eleven volumes, I sincerely doubt that Willem at least is done for and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to show a scene of Nephren being brought down from the brink if she was just going to bite the dust anyway, but in terms of the ending of the anime both our main characters and one of the more prominent secondaries are all dead.
Despite this, the framing of the ending does come off as more bittersweet. It’s certainly a sequence that could start the waterworks if you’re the kind of person who gets worked up that way, especially with how it’s sold by the swelling music and judicious use of slow-mo, but I don’t feel like it’s just a misery source.
Looking back over WorldEnd, and thinking back on topics I’ve touched before in this blog, I have to think: “This is what Sky Wizards Academy wanted to be.” I’m actually shocked that Sky Wizards Academy is the older of the two, by a few months in print and two years in anime.
But that just means WorldEnd is the world class upgrade. If you only watch one anime about a somewhat grumpy retired badass of a protagonist who has reasons he can’t fight directly any more training a group of girls who are expected to take up the battle, in a world that exists upon floating islands in the sky because innumerable monsters have completely overrun the surface (and it’s weird that we have two), the quality is night and day and it’s clear that WorldEnd is the one that you want to watch.
On the negative side, there are ways – small ways – in which WorldEnd can feel a little rushed. We don’t get all too many scenes of Willem and Chtholly before it’s clear that Chtholly is seriously crushing on him. That’s not too bad, the framing makes it easy to see what she sees in him, but it’s less clear at first why Willem is seeming to reciprocate deep down. We learn much later, when his inner demons are tearing him apart with Chtholly unconscious having that last mind talk with her past self, that he worries he’d been projecting his past feelings on for her, both his apparent unfulfilled love with the former wielder of her sword and his affection for this sort of little sister figure who maintained the home front. There are hints earlier, but it would have been nice to actually see Willem grappling with these worries back when he’s still resisting falling for Chtholly, since that’s quite evidently core to why it takes as long as it does.
But all in all that’s not a major quibble. We get lots of downtime with the characters to learn who they are as people, and understand how trauma leaves its mark on Willem even if it takes a little while to learn what trauma is doing the marking. There are a lot of unsolved mysteries in this world, but not everything needs to be answered and addressed in a satisfying manner (like, even if the beasts were created by some humans from humans, why?). When you get down to it, the anime at least of WorldEnd is the tragic love story of Willem and Chtholly, and everything else is in service to that. Lensed as a romance, the bigger picture of world-shaking events is rightfully kept distant.
In the end, I think WorldEnd is worth a B+. I debated a higher grade, but stepping back from the fact that the ending hits really hard, most of its running time is pretty comfortably on the good side of average. Aesthetically pleasing and potentially moving, though, it’s one I would absolutely recommend checking out.