The way that the series indeed remains detached and innocent for so many episodes makes the emotions hit so much harder when things get serious in the two final episodes.
I felt genuine discomfort when the robot (controlled by Yuuri) caused all that destruction in episode 11. There was no longer space for detachment and innocence. The tone of the anime changed and it was well-deserved.
Yesterday marked 75 years since the atomic bomb ”Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima. As years go by I feel that the terror of atomic warfare is understood more and more intimately in my mind. You hear about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki so many times in school but my first instance of truly grasping the horror was when I was 18 years old and watched a documentary on the topic. It showed footage of a baby scarred from atomic fire and it was in this moment that it viscerally dawned on me how all these photos and videos from victims of war are REAL. You may know intellectually that all these events happened but it may take years before the fact settles in on an emotional level, no matter how much horror that history books and documentaries may have already shown.
In the same vein, places and technology can feel like fiction on an emotional level even though you know intellectually that they are very much real. I have seen atomic warheads in photographs (and in fiction) depicted many times before. Because of the sudden shift in the tone of Girls’ Last Tour it meant so much more when they came across the (oddly placed) nuclear submarine and the atomic warheads stored within. For the first time I asked myself ”What would it feel like to actually stand right next to a nuclear missile?”
My immediate reaction was…aversion. Distaste. An urge to cry and to dismantle these monstrosities as quickly as possible. Although the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer has resonated with my soul on many occasions before, the sudden visualization of standing next to nuclear warheads made his words echo in my brain on yet another level of profoundness. I got another glimpse into how awful it would be to be involved in the creation of WMD.
Context of course matters a lot. It is possible that one day we will use nuclear bombs as propellants in space, as a means of achieving high velocities and travelling between star systems. The context of the technology thus changes from the terrors of war to that of inspiring space exploration.
There is also the never-ending question of whether the potential of nuclear war is a deterrent. Is it because of atomic bombs that we haven’t had another world war? If total nuclear disarmament was achieved, would it remove a deterrent that has prevented WW3 from breaking out? There are many strong opinions on the topic and all I can say is that I can’t disprove the notion of atomic bombs as deterrent. That alone makes me uncomfortable. True, nuclear weapons almost triggered WW3 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and there were other times when technological errors almost caused either side to unleash the nukes. But two things can be true and who knows what our world would have been like without these weapons.
If I had to choose I would (probably) still disarm every atomic bomb. One is a world that risks total annihilation of human civilization by a few human commands and the other is not such a world.
I'm sure Girls' Last Tour did not intend to evoke all these thoughts and emotions within me. Even so, that is precisely what it achieved as I watched those two final episodes in this era in time, in this time of my life.
