Dusk Beyond the End of the World ‒ Episode 5

© Project FT／永久のユウグレ製作委員会・MBS

I know hot spring episodes are pretty de rigueur for anime, but you'll have to forgive me for not necessarily expecting a post-apocalyptic anime to have one—and even if it was, I'd certainly expect it to have a catch. But no, not only did it have such an episode that came without any major strings or “but”s, but it was also probably the best episode of the series yet. Which, coming from me, obviously means: Oh my god, it took 50 (well, 200) years, but at long last, we've been given a crumb of information. Delicious, delicious context.

I say “crumb” but while it's still not a ton, it's not insignificant either. We still don't know for sure what's going on with Towasa, but now we at least have a broad idea of what happened over the past 200 years: An AI war, which was obviously devastating, which Towasa played a key role in ending with her technology. She also founded OWEL, who is suppressing information about the past ostensibly with hopes that it won't happen again. As the word “ostensibly” might've implied, I'm skeptical of this. They're obviously trying to suppress the study of history, but I don't think it's for a goal as lofty as not having the mistakes of the past repeated—there's definitely some particular thing or things we're not privy to yet, that they want to keep as obfuscated as possible, even if it means keeping everyone in the dark.

Incidentally, I found myself wondering in this episode how far back that stretches. Is it just information from the past ~200 years they want to keep people out of, or is it all history, full-stop? For example, what if someone wanted to learn about, say, the Industrial Revolution? Edo Japan? The medieval world? Or even way further back than that—what if someone wanted to learn about any number of ancient civilizations, or infinitely further back to study dinosaurs? Are artifacts from these eras still housed in museums—have they been preserved, and can people still go see them? And for that matter, what happens to old media—books, TV shows, movies, games, and so on? Are they considered historical? If so, to what extent? Are they accessible? I'd be curious to see if the series addresses this.

To be clear: You should instantly be suspicious (to say the least) of any person, organization, or government body that's suppressing the study of history. But if I were OWEL and I just wanted to suppress stuff from the past 200 or so years, here's how I'd go about it: Museums that house goods that predate the AI War, especially if it's by over a century, still exist and can still be visited by anyone who wants to go there. But to emphasize, none of them carry anything related to the AI War. Similarly, research into anything relating to the AI War just doesn't get funding. Also, allow people to study more distant history (and maybe some unrelated recent history—say, stuff that students' parents might've been alive to remember) and just make sure that, across the board, the AI War stuff is more than glossed over in schools, it just doesn't get mentioned. And there's any number of ways you could ensure that could happen: Have the lesson plan crawl (EX: spend way too much time on a particular era or two), have the lesson plan go way too fast (EX: if a lot of things get skipped over, it won't stand out if the AI War does, too), talk about something else, etc. This way, people won't really register the idea that the study of history is being forbidden or suppressed in any way (“But you can go read about the Wars of the Roses whenever you want!”), and you're also making sure people never hear about the AI Wars in the first place. If they never hear about it, they can't become interested in it and study it independently. Bonus points if the AI War is complicated and has natural hurdles into understanding what went on.

Basically, you have to turn the AI War into an obscure footnote that nobody's heard of, and by extension of that, nobody really cares about. At best, it's an abstract idea that only some hyper-dedicated history buffs know a little bit about, but nobody cares enough about it to study further—and even if they do despite everything, they won't have resources to research it to a large extent, nor to publish or otherwise spread any findings they make. You have to make it a dead end that nobody cares about—because you'll accomplish so much more in this context by making people apathetic toward it, than by Streisand Effect-ing it. People in the world of Dusk who aren't part of OWEL don't seem to know much of anything about the AI War, so I definitely think there's a non-zero chance that OWEL has done something along these lines.

Similarly, while media that predates it would be fine and accessible to any who want it, media that would've been contemporary-enough to the AI War, that is in any way related to it, would get Spirited Away—destroyed, and turned into undocumented pieces of lost media. Maybe a few of them survive in secret thanks to the efforts of a few lingering fans and media historians, but what good does that do if 1. Nobody knows they're there, 2. Nobody cares to find them in the first place? Point 2 is pretty self-explainatory, but you'd be surprised how long things can sit in archives—important things, even—if they just don't go well-documented, and nobody bothers to check. See example: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century chivalric romance which is considered today to be one of the most important pieces of medieval writing, of which we only have one sole extant manuscript (the legendary Cotton Nero A.x., aka the Pearl Manuscript, which is housed in the British Library), which hadn't been rediscovered until the 19th century because for centuries, nobody bothered checking if there was anything else in the book behind the Pearl poem—turns out, there was!

But while I'm curious about the full implications of the idea that OWEL forbids the study of history—or at the very least, history as it's relevant to the AI War that Towasa was a part of—it's good to finally be drip fed some information about what kind of world Akira's woken up into. Hopefully, we get more episodes like this that have us learning even a little bit of information about the world moving forward. I only wish this series was as good at making characters as it is worldbuilding. The lesson I'm quickly learning about this series is that the less episodes focus on the characters, and the more it's about the world itself, the better an episode it is.

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Dusk Beyond the End of the World is currently streaming on HIDIVE.