Girls last tourmore like, girls PEAK tour am I right
I just want to say, i'm HEAVILY biased towards this anime/manga, it's been in my favourite for a long time, i've interacted with the fandom, and i've kinda formed my tastes and in part personality around it, so yeah, don't expect me to be neutral or objective
Girls last tour it's a post apocalyptic philosophical slice of life anime created by our lord and saviour tsukumizu yuu. First of all, even if it's post apocalyptic there isn't any action, or danger in the traditional sense, this is not mad max, the post-apocalyptic setting just provides a setting where tkmiz can discuss the shit he wants to discuss
Our two main protagonists, yuuri and chito have grown up after the apocalypse, so they have no real idea how the human society operated, a lot of the anime plays with the both of them rediscovering human artifacts and trying to interpret them
The first episode of this anime really defines the tone of the rest of the show and sets you in the right mindset. TLDR, they find rations, and yuuri pulls up her gun to chito in order to keep all the rations, however, this isn't really a tense scene, but more playful banter
while chito and yuuri are in a very dangerous situation all the time, they don't really feel like it, for them, the concept of them being the last humans on earth is an accepted fact, they know that at some point, probably earlier than later, they will die. Of course that doesn't mean that they're totally careless, they still have fears and things like every other human does, but for them, the apocalypse is their daily life, and they have normalized like we do our daily lives
Tkmiz as a writer has a very absurdist philosophy, they aren't really negative or pessimistic in any way. I don't have studies in philosophy, but my interpretation of tkmiz works is along the lines that no single object in our human society has inherent value, all value is produced by human beings, and our thoughts of what has value are created by our environment. Nothing has value by itself, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to give our own meaning to life, to fill that void with love, with art, with competition, with anything that makes you really feel alive
An example of this would be the episode about "paradise". At the start of the episode, chito and yuuri find some hot springs, and they decide to bathe in it, this is great. Chito knows how to read and has read some books in the past, so she has picked up some vocabulary, she describes the bath as "paradise", yuuri agrees with it, later on the episode, they find a sanctuary dedicated to a god, which is supposed to be a religious, mortal sanctuary, however, while chito understands the origin and explains it to yuuri, neither of them really get the idea, then, they start talking about the actual meaning of the word paradise, which they define as a holy land. However, they admit that they prefer their own paradise (the hot spring).
On our current society, it doesn't make much sense to put the hot springs over the important religious monument, but by itself, there isn't anything that makes our interpretation more valid than their interpretation, it's just that we live in a culture where we define paradise as the religious temple, not the hot spring. our ancestral origins and belief system have made our society consider the religious temple more important, but they are in a different circumstance, their environment is different, they live in a situation that no human being so far has ever found themselves in, and it just so happens that in that world, the hot spring IS paradise.
Although, my personal favourite episode from the anime is the episode where chito and yuuri dream of owning a house. They find some old ruins o a house, and they just daydream what would it be to live in there and what would they want to have in their house, this episode is GOOD
first of all, kinda similar to the previous episode I talked about, they often make some pretty weird choices for furniture they would want, or even romantice certain pieces of furniture like bookshelves, this really shows how culture and our environment affects how we perceive the world and how we decide to run our lives, their necessities are different to ours, and their life experiences are different, so what they want is going to be different to what we want
This episode also touches the concept of value, again, chito wishes for a bookshelf, however, she doesn't really know how to fabricate one or where do they come from, we know that you can easily make a bookshelves with a bit of wood, but she doesn't, and still, she perceives wood as way more valuable than we do. She sees bookshelves as another artifact of human history, she really can't tell what is more valuable, a bookshelf, or an empty book, so due to her lack of knowledge and experience, she perceives the bookshelf as WAY more legendary than it is, to like royalty level shit
The episode also does really good at showing the relationship and dynamic between the two protagonist, they imagine them living together, which in our current society has certain implications that in their world they really don't. That type of activity, the designing your dream house with someone, is often an activity reserved for you and the person you love, it implies a romantic relationship, but again, lack of cultural context makes chito and yuuri not perceive it that way, and we as an audience perceive and understand it
It's not clear if thre is any sort of romantic feelings between chito and yuuri, however, if we look at it from more a meta perspective, something very interesting comes up. Let's reverse that scenario, and say chito was a man. Would we as an audience still have seen that scene and understood that there weren't any romantic feelings necessarily involved?, honestly, a lot of people may have understood it, but it would have been a smaller %
At the end of the day, for as much as tkmiz tries to frame certain things from this more culturally removed perspective, the actual anime still exists in a society where cultural context and previous knowledge exist, when we watch something, we subconsciously kinda considerate what the intention of the author was, and it just so happens that, for the same scene if chito and yuuri are a man and a woman, romantic feelings are more implied, and if they're both women or men, they aren't as implied.
Girls Last Tour NEEDS for both of their characters to be the same gender because in our handbook of media interpretation we perceive male/female couples different to homosexual ones, and it just so happens that the female/female pairing is the one that communicates the message better
In fact, there are a bunch of tweets by tkmiz that kinda confirms this:
Tsukumizu Yuu wrote:
>It often seems to me that sexual desire is the very essence of what it means to 'live', but that's too depressing so I become compelled to deny sexual desire completely. However, if I do that only values like 'nothingness' and 'death' remain, so I'm troubled.
>It is depressing to be afflicted by an emotion like 'lust' when I don't have any intention to do something like having kids.
>For people who revere homosexual love in media, I personally think it could be seen as a form of compromise or reconciliation of that dilemma.
>A work like 'Last Tour' featuring a male-female pair seems like it'd become incredibly irritating. 'What, are they Adam and Eve?', you'd think.
>In Ekuni Kaori's short story 'Sultry Night', a lesbian couple comments "There's nowhere left for us to go after this, huh? We're at a dead end." while holding hands, singing, drinking beer and walking through a town at night. I liked it very much.
Now, moving onto the art, this is something that doesn't really translate to the anime adaptation sadly, so I will mostly be talking about the manga
First of all, what does it mean for something to have good art?The most simple answer is well, the actual panels are well drawn, but honestly, I've read a lot, and for me what differentiates manga with good art from those that don't is the actual framing. It's not enough to know how to draw well, you must create circumstances in the story where the art is impactful, where you can dedicate an entire page just to a single drawing, good art is the one that sticks in your head, and for that, it needs to feel striking. Tkmiz does this very well, GLT is very focused around the world, so they just have big panels just showing stuff



Another thing I really like about tkmiz art is their paneling, it's not just about making panels that look good, the way you arrange tha patterns, and the actual background of the page where the panels are printed on are important. If we see in old manga, for example osama tezuka phoenix, you can see that the actual panel structure repeats over, and over, and over. Old mangakas just kinda followed a blueprint and then created a story with that, the panels felt rigid and paneling wasn't the most important
however, with time, mangas have started to care about the paneling a lot more, a work like GLT makes sure it's paneling helps the narrative of the story as well as being visually pleasing, this is something that would be pushed way further with their next work, shimeji simulation, but GLT already had really nice showings of this.

There are some drawings that straight up break out of their original panel, like this one

This was a trend tkmiz kinda helped to create and popularize, and in fact, a lot of modern mangas take this lessons and push them even further, a modern example of this (without counting shimeji simulation) would be witch hat atelier


Honestly, I haven't even talked about the ending or the sound design or how the adaptation didn't cover the entire manga and what that has to say about girls last tour and the anime industry but it's been like an hour and 15 minutes and I should go to sleep soon and this is also nearing the 2000 word mark but just so you know I could write another 2000 words on this
So yeah, girls last tour is GOOD, S rank.