Girls' Last Tour

a review

It’s like Cormac McArthy’s The Road but with Moe Blobs!

My media habits have one central through-line: I love when people take established tropes or genres and flip them on their heads. Girls' Last Tour is a great example of this. It combines two genres I am not accustomed to seeing together: post-apocalyptic fiction and cozy slice of life. That sounds like it shouldn't work, but by $deity, it sure does!

It helps that the core duo have great chemistry. Chito, the brunette, is the typically serious and straight-laced leader. Yuuri, the blonde, is the fearless, dauntless, and reckless dork. The two of them play off each other really well, and have a believable sisterly relationship. I would enjoy spending time in any setting or story with these two.

This setting, however, is remarkably bleak. They spend most of their time traveling through the ruins of a bombed-out megacity, scavenging for food and supplies. Their hope is that, as they climb to higher and higher sections of this layer-cake of a ruin, that they will find more supplies and survivors. It’s a hard journey; the world has been devastated in a nuclear winter, basically all life has died off, and only small pockets of humanity remain.

Thankfully, despite the harrowing circumstances, these girls find little moments of joy on their travels. Whether from a warm drink, making their own food, taking a warm soak, or simply enjoying each other's company, they find moments of comfortable domesticity and solace in each other. Chito collects books, and would have been a voracious reader if she had been born into a situation where books weren't so rare. She is also keeping a journal of their travels. Yuuri, though illiterate, likes to wax philosophic about their world, the things they find, and the meaning of all they endure. She is intensely curious, and behind her silly and foolhardy facade, often reveals a deep thoughtfulness just under the surface.

She's also a massive pain in the ass. I love her.

As Chii and Yuu putt along on their half-track motorbike, they come across a couple characters, help them in their own journeys, and learn a bit about the world before things fell apart. One leaves them with a camera, a relic of past society, which captured both daily life and the devastation that led to the impossible circumstances the girls faced in the present. The montage of birthdays, baseball games, and other little bits of life, interspersed with images of war and destruction, were absolutely gripping. The girls came away from it feeling bittersweet, wishing for the world before it fell apart, but feeling less lonely seeing those who came before.

While plenty of other viewers described the show as a “cozy post-apocalypse,” I felt on edge the whole time I watched. The setting is so unbelievably bleak, and with the city already picked nearly clean, I felt like it was only a matter of time before things got untenable. Worse, knowing how these settings often get used to show the worst sides of humanity, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for these girls to go through something horrific. I like them way too much to want to see harm come to them.

The anime ended a few chapters earlier than the manga it was adapted from. Basically, it ended with the sense that the girls’ journey would continue and that they would continue to climb to the top. The manga confirmed my suspicions though; there is no happy ending for them, not in this life anyways. I read quite a few comments from folks who read the manga end-to-end, who were completely gutted to see how things turn out. You desperately hope for something, anything, good to happen for them. But alas, their tour eventually comes to a cold and bitter end. I wish these two could get isekai'd into a better situation, where we could watch them thrive.

Tsukumizu, the mangaka who created the series, wrote the following in the epilogue (translated by a deleted account on reddit):

Since this world is too large and complex, various things will pass by still unknown. However, no matter the time, Chito and Yuuri believed that the joy of being alive never disappears. I drew this believing the same thing, I think... Although it wasn't a great product, thank you for reading all the way here.”

This had me tearing up in the restroom at work when I stumbled across it. I’ll have to disagree with that final statement; it is a fantastic work and the mangaka is selling themselves short. Yes, it is bleak, but the peculiar blend of hopelessness and comfort present in the series resonates with me, and I think it’ll speak to the experiences many of us have experienced this last half-decade.

If you have the emotional bandwidth to go along for the ride with Chito and Yuuri, I highly recommend Girls’ Last Tour. It has left me reflecting on the people in my life, who have walked alongside me through hardship, and those whom I try to be there for as well. Be prepared to have big, weird, complicated feelings throughout the series. If you are in the head-space to engage with it, it’ll stick with you for a long while, I think.