Episode 5 – Dusk Beyond the End of the World

I know a hot spring plot is pretty necessary for an anime, but you have to forgive me for not necessarily expecting a post-apocalyptic anime to have one – and even if it were, I’d definitely want it to have a highlight. But no, not only does it have such an episode without any major ifs or “buts”, but it also might be the best episode of the series to date. This quote comes from me, and it obviously means: Oh my gosh, it’s taken 50 (okay, 200) years, but we finally got a little bit of information. Delicious, delicious background.

I say “crumbs,” and while it’s not a lot, it’s not insignificant either. We’re still not sure what happened to Towasa, but now we at least have a rough idea of ​​what happened over the past 200 years: an AI war that was obviously devastating, and Towasa played a key role in ending it with her technology. She also founded OWEL, an organization that ostensibly suppresses information about the past in the hope that it will never happen again. As the word “ostensibly” might suggest, I doubt it. They’re clearly trying to suppress historical research, but I don’t think it’s for a goal as noble as not repeating the mistakes of the past – there’s definitely something specific or something we don’t know yet that they want to keep as vague as possible, even if it means keeping everyone in the dark.

By the way, I found myself wondering in this episode how far back this goes. Are they just trying to distance people from information from the past 200 years or so, or is this all history? For example, what if someone wanted to learn about the Industrial Revolution? Edo, Japan? Medieval world? Or even earlier than that—what if someone wanted to learn about any number of ancient civilizations, or study dinosaurs ad infinitum? Are artifacts from these eras still preserved in museums? Have they been preserved? Can people still visit them? For that matter, what happens to old media (books, TV shows, movies, games, etc.)? Are they considered historical? If so, to what extent? Are they accessible? I’d be interested to see if the series addresses this issue.

To be clear: You should be immediately suspicious (to say the least) of any person, organization, or government agency that suppresses historical research. But if I were OWEL and I just wanted to suppress stuff from the past 200+ years, I would do this: museums that house items from before the AI ​​Wars, especially ones that are more than a century old, are still there and can still be visited by anyone who wants to go there. But it is important to stress that none of them carry anything related to artificial intelligence warfare. Likewise, any research related to AI warfare will not be funded. Also, allow one to look into more distant history (and maybe some unrelated more recent history – like, stuff that students’ parents might remember) and make sure that as a whole, the AI ​​war stuff is not just glossed over in schools, but just not mentioned. There are many ways to ensure this happens: let the lesson plan crawl (eg: spend too much time on one or two specific eras), let the lesson plan go too fast (eg: if a lot of things are skipped, then the AI ​​war will not be noticeable), talk about other things, etc. This way, one doesn’t really realize that historical research is being banned or suppressed in any way (“but you can go and read about the war”). Roses whenever you want! ”), and you also ensure that people never hear about AI warfare in the first place. If they’ve never heard of it, they can’t become interested in it and study it independently. Bonus points if AI warfare is complex and has natural barriers to understanding what’s going on.

Basically, you have to turn AI Wars into an obscure footnote that no one has ever heard of, and by extension, that no one really cares about. At best, it’s an abstract idea that only a few super-enthusiastic history buffs know a little bit about, but no one cares enough about it to study it further – and even if they desperately did, they wouldn’t have the resources to study it to any great extent, nor would they publish or otherwise disseminate any of their findings. You have to make it a dead end that no one cares about – because in this case you’ll accomplish more by making people indifferent to it than through the Streisand Effect. People in the Dusk world who aren’t part of OWEL don’t seem to know much about AI warfare, so I definitely think there’s a non-zero chance that OWEL does something along these lines.

Likewise, while media that predates AI Wars is fine and accessible to anyone who wants it, media that is sufficiently contemporary to AI Wars, in any way related to it, will get Spirited Away– destroyed and turned into undocumented fragments of lost media. Maybe some of them survive in secret thanks to the efforts of some lingering fans and media historians, but what’s the use if 1. no one knows they’re there, and 2. no one cares about finding them in the first place? Point 2 is self-explanatory, but you’d be surprised how long things can stay in archives – even important things – even if they’re not well documented and no one bothers to check. See example: Sir Gawain and the Green KnightThis 14th-century chivalric romance is now considered one of the most important works of the Middle Ages. We only have one surviving manuscript (the legendary Cotton Axe of Nero, also known as the Pearl Manuscript, now held in the British Library), and it was only rediscovered in the 19th century because for centuries no one bothered to check if there was anything else behind the Pearl poem in the book – and it turns out, there was!

Still, while I’m curious about the full implications of OWEL’s idea of ​​banning the study of history—or at least history as it relates to the AI ​​wars Towasa was involved in—it would be nice to finally get some information on what kind of world Akira wakes up into. Hopefully we get to see more episodes like this that give us even a little bit of information about the world moving forward. I just wish this series was as good at developing its characters as it was at building its world. The lesson I quickly learned with this series is that the less the show focuses on the characters and more about the world itself, the better the show is.

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Dusk at the end of the world Currently live broadcast
lurking.