Since its beginning, Girls’ Last Tour has been a story about coming to terms with the end of things. Its very title points to the finality of this journey, preemptively putting to rest any thoughts of surviving beyond the apocalypse. Most stories find their characters rallying against fate with all their might, hoping to change their very destiny. There is no such hope of upending fate here; Girls’ Last Tour knows its characters’ destiny, and is instead focused on the more intractable conflict of how you comport yourself when you know things are ending. When the hubris of assumed immortality is stripped away, what defines us as fundamentally human? When we cannot be comforted by the endurance of our legacy, what else do we have left?

Girls’ Last Tour’s answer to that question is found in the carefully balanced philosophies of Chi and Yuu. The first chapter offers a fragmentary memory to illustrate the differences between them, as Chi’s dreams return her to the time they spent with their lost grandfather. Like animals building nests in the ruins of broken-down cars, Chi and Yuu dance thoughtlessly among the industrial waste of humanity’s end, sagely identifying a field of pipes as the perfect venue for a snowball fight. Panels reveal treasured moments like Chi dozing off in her grandfather’s lap, but also the terror and confusion of separation. Confronted with the pain of losing her grandfather yet again, Chi is startled awake by the undulled blade of grief.

As dreamer and chronicler, these memories are Chi’s cross to bear. She remembers both pain and comfort, while Yuu has no trouble forgetting things, and thus evades the burden of carrying her loss alongside her. Her limited memory is another manifestation of her method for “getting along with the hopelessness,” a philosophy of accepting whatever may come that allows her to smile and laugh even through humanity’s ruin. Is it better to be like Yuu, seeing even the past as abstractions like the ruins around them? Or is there something vital in the remembering, in the grief? For Chi, carrying these memories is much like carrying her treasured books; in our grief, we maintain a chronicle of human experience, a history crystalized in tears.

Of course, Chi’s attempts to define and catalog this world are ultimately as hopeless as her quest to find salvation at the city’s peak. On her own, she might well despair at the impossibility of her ambitions, making Yuu’s contributions to their overall philosophy absolutely essential. While Chi wonders at why people of the past made such vast structures, Yuu busies herself with physical labor, delighting in the construction of a snow hut. When Chi feels humbled and lost by the scale of what society has lost, Yuu snuggles closer, warming up her friend with her body heat. Though these imposing towers have lost purpose or meaning, everything which is fundamental to humanity is still preserved in the bond of these two.

Yuu’s simple phrasing has a way of accidentally undermining the hubris of Chi’s philosophy, and our quest to master our environment more generally. When Yuu asks if Chi plans to visit as many places as possible to regain the most possible knowledge, Chi acknowledges that such a quest would be impossible, a Sisyphean waste of a limited lifetime. When we are cocooned in the focus and validation of our modern lives, it is easy to embrace the fantasy that we are always building towards something greater, always assembling some monument that will last. But out here in the apocalypse, Chi cannot help but be faced with the reality: all of our attempts to improve ourselves will eventually run against the limit of our life span, and even our attempts to achieve immortality through passing on our knowledge will eventually fade. To survive, we must accept both that our struggles to advance ourselves are both vital and ultimately futile.

This twin philosophy of curiosity and investment in the current moment is not a creed adopted by choice; it is a simple assessment of what we naturally are and what we must be, in order to maintain both momentum and hope. Humanity didn’t choose curiosity; curiosity is what makes us, for good or inevitable ill. Hopeless though it may be, humanity’s desire to explore, expand its knowledge, and truly understand is an irrepressible drive. When confronted with the refuse of a rocket ship, even Yuu finds is inspired to curiosity about traveling through space, in spite of her general preoccupation with the immediate and unserious. Our desire to expand our understanding often leads to our destruction, but we would not be human beings without it.

While previous chapters used the vast scale of humanity’s once-proud buildings to convey the weight of history, its final volume presents this legacy through a vessel Chi can actually understand: a massive library, housing shelf after shelf of irreplaceable volumes. Rising to the top of an sprawling warehouse of knowledge, Chi states that “there are more words in books than stars in the sky,” a vivid testament to humanity’s desire to both understand our world and express our feelings about it.

Here, at last, the grand ambitions of prior humans feel both sympathetic and intimate; as Chi will later admit, she actually feels a kinship towards this grand project, seeing herself as the latest inheritor of humankind’s inquisitive spark. For all that Girls’ Last Tour hammers on the recklessness of our intellectual ambition, moments like this attest that there is something wondrous in our quest for knowledge as well. The idea that we are so eager to explore and express that our collective visions outnumber the stars is a beautiful thought; through these libraries, we have created our own cosmos of experience, built solely out of our shared insights and feelings.

But for every moment of exulting in humanity’s ambition, there are ten more built to temper Chi’s hopes, and remind us it was our dissatisfaction which facilitated our ruin. Tempers flare when the girls’ trusted vehicle breaks down; while Chi attempts to repair the truck, Yuu sings a nonsense song, prompting Chi to snap at her. The interaction is a tidy illustration of the relative scope of their concerns: Yuu is just trying to be supportive of her distressed friend, while Chi cannot help but imagine how much harder their journey would be without this mini-truck, and how important it is that she manages to fix it. 

When it seems clear the truck cannot be repaired, Chi briefly finds a new purpose in turning it into a warm bath. But when even this task is complete, she has nothing to distract her from either the terror or the sorrow of losing their most trusted companion. With her mechanical know-how having failed her, Chi has nowhere to turn but to Yuu, to be comforted by Yuu’s acceptance of whatever may come. While Chi was annoyed by Yuu’s song when she still bore hopes of fixing the truck, now she asks Yuu to sing it again, as a last tribute to their fallen companion. For humanity to survive, we need both the figure tending the forge and the figure singing by the fire – or as Chi phrased it at the library, books of both facts and fables.

Girls’ Last Tour’s final chapters proceed as a series of goodbyes, as the girls lighten both pack loads and hearts on their final ascent of the tower. First, they must discard their excess books, and Chi’s hopes of eventually building her own library alongside them. For once, it is Yuu who is forced to speak practically, telling Chi that she cannot possibly carry all the books they retrieved from the library. It’s a rare moment of indulgence for Chi, but a perfectly understandable one: her books weren’t just beloved, they embodied her will to survive, and to carry this knowledge into an unknown future.

As long as Chi had these books and her destination, she had a past and a future – by abandoning these books, she is admitting that the two of them are merely surviving for as long as they can, with no hopeful end in sight. The final moments of Chi burning her own diary are heartbreaking; the diary was her prayer in physical form, a book of her own creation to contribute to the grand library of human thought. In order to accept this tragedy, Chi must embrace at least a sliver of Yuu’s philosophy, and acknowledge that her own continued existence is her dream’s truest fulfillment.

Lights flicker out as the pair continue upwards, now traversing a rising stairwell with no end in sight. In this intimate darkness, Yuu’s hand finds her friend, and she confesses that in spite of her carefree attitude, she too is afraid of dying. The scene could well serve as a metaphor for all their journeys, or even mankind’s collective voyage. Rising through darkness, we gain and abandon countless insights and memories. Our monuments and revelations are temporary; at the end of everything, there is only the feeling of your partner’s nervous hand, and the impulse to offer a comforting squeeze back. Robbed of any external stimulus, Chi feels a sense of connection not just with Yuu, but with the entire world around them. All of the refuse of this world, all of the things they’ve found and lost – Chi briefly feels a part of all of it, and perhaps even at peace with such an existence. Perhaps humanity is ultimately expressed as a junction – that union of curiosity and wonder, expressed completely through the clasped hands of Chi and Yuu.

At the top of the city, they find nothing but a starry sky. This was always how their journey was going to end; humanity has been dying out precipitously all throughout their adventures, and there was never really any hope of some splinter community surviving in the midst of this desolation. But nonetheless, they undertook this journey, worked together throughout its duration, and accomplished what they set out to do. Their time was spent urgently and carelessly, passionately and idly, but it was all spent together, and it was ultimately a joyous trip. Its import is not in the ending, but the telling; it is lovely that Chi found a moment of revelation in the darkness of the tower, but every step of their journey has illustrated the miracle of their bond, so perfectly balanced that they might make an enchanting playground of humanity’s decline. You take the good with the bad, use the hope of a destination if you must, and remember not to lose the joy of discovery. Hand in hand, hope and wonder entwined, we make what we can of this fading earth.

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