Dusk Beyond the End of the World

Episodes 0-3

I'd be curious to learn how many of you voted for this series because you're enjoying it so far, versus how many of you voted for this series because you wanted to watch a clown be forced to dance to the weird tune of having to review a pseudo-incest anime. Because I have no doubt that both types of voters did their part in seeing to it that Dusk Beyond the End of the World (henceforth Dusk) got weekly reviews. But which one is more dominant? How irony-tinged is the comment section (not) going to be as the season progresses? Should I start taking tap dancing lessons? At least for the time being, I'm less sure about questions like those. But whatever the journey, the destination is still the same: The nature-overtaken, sci-fi world of Dusk.

This series made me realize that although it took a while, I'm definitely starting to feel some post-apocalyptic fatigue. While it's still nowhere even close to the level of isekai or reincarnation anime, there's no denying that in the past few years especially, we've had a noticeable uptick in anime exploring (sometimes literally) a world left behind in the aftermath of apocalyptic disaster. To list just a few recent examples, Zom 100, Train to the End of the World and Apocalypse Hotel all spring to mind. But then, this season alone, we also have Touring After the Apocalypse, and I think there's a valid argument to be made that DIGIMON BEATBREAK—which takes place in a world that's been very obviously affected by climate change and disaster—at least partially counts as well. And I think the world of Dusk has just enough unique qualities to give it at least some level of intrigue, so I don't think it's an issue of it being boring, per se—at least in this regard.

The main thing that I think Dusk has working in its favor is the political intrigue it's wasted no time in planting the seeds for. We've seen hints that OWEL—who we still haven't heard a full explanation on who they are, what they do, and how they came to power—is making active efforts to suppress information about history for reasons we're still not sure about. Hence why Akira is considered to be such a major target for them—one presumes he risks “infecting” everyone with his knowledge of the past. Only problem is that Akira still has no idea what's happened to the world since he got shot—and it sounds like that was about 200 years ago—so he has no context for what information of his would be considered dangerous by OWEL, let alone why. Still, any time a powerful governing body makes active efforts to suppress knowledge of history, whether it's by chasing down someone who's been in a cryo-sleep for 200 years or, oh I don't know, say, trying to exert power over museums, you couldn't ask for a bigger, more obvious red flag.

Also in Dusk's corner is some great production quality. The animation looks great, especially during the (admittedly few) action scenes. While the environments don't have the same lushness as those of Touring After the Apocalypse, they're still oddly scenic in their own right, and have that same sharp contrast between the beauty of a world that's returning to nature, and an everpresent dread and loneliness. The voice cast has some heavy-hitters like Yui Ishikawa, Ami Koshimizu, and Takehito Koyasu among others. And the intro theme feels to me like the kind of thing where I can tell most people will probably like it, but it's just not my cup of tea.

Where Dusk is stumbling, meanwhile—and quite hard at that—is pretty much everything else. We've established that there's some cool worldbuilding going on in the background, but in the foreground? It's just Akira looking for his foster sister, Towasa, even if that means just her grave. He's accompanied primarily by an android who looks stunningly like her, and wants to marry him—also like Towasa. And if you don't think the romance between them is a compelling one, then it's hard to find the will to care about this. Even if you look past the vague incestuousness of it all, I just don't see any chemistry between the two of them. All I see is yet another white bread protagonist, and his genius foster sister who doesn't seem like she's talked to literally any other person even roughly her age. These just aren't good romantic leads. I just don't know how much simpler I can make this.

But as promised, let's shift gears to talk about the sister-loving elephant in the room: The incestuousness of it all. Here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for. There's more than a few anime out there with themes or elements of sibling romance (fun fact, courtesy of a recent video on ANN's socials: Way before he was Doma in Demon Slayer or Jamie in Street Fighter, one of voice actor Stephen Fu's first roles was in such an anime). And they all inevitably end up being messy in their own ways. But even so, I have a feeling based on what we've seen so far that Dusk is going to be right up there with titles like Vampire Knight as one of the messiest. And I say that mostly because at only three (four if you count episode 0) episodes in, we've already been introduced to two would-be couples of siblings, Akira and Towasa, and Fides and Kalcrom. Notably, while Akira and Towasa are adopted siblings (a pretty common trope in sibling romance anime), the latter are biological siblings, and are both in the running to lead what's functionally the mafia of their age. Although also of note, however, is that we don't yet know if the sister's feelings are one-sided or not.

In the world Akira has woken up in, what we would call “marriage” is now called “ehlsea-ing.” And from what we've seen, homo, hetero, and poly ehlseas are all pretty culturally normalized. Marriage or ehlsea-ing has already set itself up to be a pretty central theme of Dusk. Shortly before he gets shot, Akira and Towasa talk about getting married, Yugure—an android who's obviously at least physically modeled after Towasa—has been saying from the get-go that she wants to marry Akira, and then ehlsea-ing is the main cultural anything we've seen in the world of Dusk so far.

What I'm getting at is that romance, and marriage or ehlsea-ing in particular, is obviously going to be very central to this series. But honestly, I'm way less interested in the incest, as much as I am the queerness that's going on in the background of it all. I hope very much that's something that gets talked about more as the series progresses. Worded differently, I hope it's something that Dusk is actually going to do something—anything—with, as opposed to just having it be there as window dressing or a cool nugget of world-building.

This series has potential and plenty of it. But in the absence of a hook that keeps me wanting to watch more—and worse, shortcomings that are pretty hard to ignore—as it stands currently, I just can't find it in myself to rate it any higher than a solid, “meh.” Hopefully though, as the series goes on, I'll be revising that to a meh-gnificent, rather than meh-siberable or meh-diocore.

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Dusk Beyond the End of the World is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.