Rather unexpectedly, after Chtholly’s final stand against the only type of flying beast reduced their numbers, peace has come to Regule Aire and perhaps permanently.
But, “there’s a magical effect to wars, where a country can ignore their own problems and put ’em off till later” and now that the problem of the beasts is resolved, the various factions of Regular Aire are jostling for power and the faerie soldiers, the most powerful “weapons” they have, are in the middle of that conflict. As the girls at the Faerie Warehouse suddenly try to cope with peace, they think about those who they’ve lost but critically two of them, Nephren and Willem, aren’t quite dead yet.
Continuing a trend from the past couple of volumes, I was pleasantly surprised that WorldEnd had a few more sci-fi elements to it than I first expected when I started the series; what I first thought was a story of “humans destroyed their own world with only one survivor left” turns out to be the story of a completely different world with a far more interesting tragedy (though I do wonder if the otherworldly Visitors are actually humans from Earth, especially since words like “emnetwiht” have a distinctly Earthly origin). There is one wrinkle to the story that I was still puzzled about at the end of this volume however — is this world actually a simulation?
On the one hand, the beginning of volume 5 seems to describe this world as a “sandbox” that Visitors created on their space ship’s computer and molded to their will; but on the other hand the fact that almost all of the Visitors have been killed, and that the world itself is about to implode, doesn’t make any sense if the Visitors are literally the masters of this world and could just change things the way they first did. I don’t think it’s the translation that’s tripping me up, I think Akira Kareno simply didn’t explain this rather important detail clearly enough and that I’ll have to look around for other fan interpretations of the series to see what the general consensus is.
Aside from that detail, WorldEnd has come to a satisfying, though a bit surprising, “ending.” Ending in the sense that there is a sequel series coming out now which I don’t believe it was originally planned for; from what I’ve heard, the series wasn’t terribly popular during its initial run (hence the reason why it’s so short) but it picked up popularity towards the end/when the anime later aired. The premise of the sequel series (currently unlicensed) does seem to undermine some of the sentiments here which I think is a bit sad since I like this ending. I think it balances melancholy with hope in the same way the rest of the series has.
I’m sure if the series proper had continued longer that the story would have gone in a different direction than what we have in this final volume, as there’s a line about reclaiming the surface in a previous volume that I think was meant to be foreshadowing. But the idea that peace has come unexpectedly, and that this exposes an underlying but ambiguous tension, is an interesting idea and one that fits thematically into the rest of the story. It’s clear that tensions between the various races has always existed and that war has caused many of them to “put up with” situations and agreements that they aren’t happy with, so it also makes sense that as soon as there is a lull in the fighting that a power struggle will break loose with the world’s strongest “weapons,” the faerie soldiers themselves, in the middle of it. The idea that while the girls will no longer have to risk their lives on their old battlefields yet they’ll have to continue navigating a dangerous world felt like a neat way to wrap up the story without feeling too snappy about it.
Willem’s part of this final volume does drag out a bit too long though; once it was revealed that beasts are simply emnetwihts who have reverted to their original forms it was clear what his fate was going to be. Although, even for a series like WorldEnd that delights in giving its readers tragedy, it would have been a shock to kill off the other main character of the series without giving the audience a properly long amount of time to feel sad about it. I also just didn’t get that attached to the Visitor Elq Hrqstn, who appears on the cover, since we just don’t get much time with her.
Once again I find myself curious about where WorldEnd would have gone if it was more than five volumes from the start, especially with regards to the Visitors like Elq. I doubt that the Visitors will play an important role in the sequel series (since their absence is essentially the reason for the entire mess of the world in several different ways) and I just don’t feel like the full potential of their place in this world was used (or at least, Kareno certainly could have milked more tragedy out of the fact that the best plan to save the world was to kill a small girl and smash her soul into tiny pieces to try and save the emnetwihts, the entire idea is basically glossed over at the prologue to this volume).
While I can’t help but wonder about what could have been for this series, and I certainly don’t feel like every element was handled as well as it possibly could have, I was satisfied with the ending to this wistful series. It largely managed to balance being tragic with being hopeful and it’s a tone I don’t come across often in fiction. I still have a one volume collection of short stories to read but I’ve been less a fan of WorldEnd’s more light-hearted and comedic moments from the start so I’m expecting that I won’t enjoy it as much. I do also wish that the anime had been able to adapt the entire series instead of just the first three volumes, since volumes 4 and 5 are by far the most interesting of the bunch.
But overall I’m just happy WorldEnd got to be made and brought over here, even in shortened form.