English Dub Review: WorldEnd: What are you doing at the end of the world? Are you busy? Will you save us? “Moonlit Sorcery”

Chtholly is fading away, but she isn’t ready to give up on being herself yet!

Spoilers Below

Chtholly is melancholy, sitting by the cliff-side and contemplating her situation. Her memories are fading, getting replaced with hallucinations from her previous self. Ithea joins her, and tells her a story. A story of a girl in the same situation, who was absorbed by her previous self and vanished entirely. The original girl took over, now awake in a strange place in a body she didn’t know. Thankfully, the person she took over from had kept meticulous diaries. By reading through them, she could mimic the person she had taken over, and continue where both their lives left off. That girl is Ithea. That being said, she gives Chtholly the best advice she can: stop focusing on the red-haired girl’s visions, stop generating venenom, and live her life to the fullest.

This advice does Chtholly a world of good. She takes to her chores with incredible gusto, and begins making scarves for the other girls for the winter that has already set in. She and Willem are still waiting for the rescue ship to be retro-fitted for the job, so they are around for a little while longer. Willem is holding out hope they can get Lapidemsibilus from the ruins to restore her mind, while she is focused on learning all sorts of things. She requests to learn how to tune the Dug Weapons’ many talismans, or to use accupressure to relieve venenom buildup in the body. She’ll even settle for him telling her about his hometown! Anything to spend a bit more time with him, and to be of actual use during the mission. Time runs on until Snowfall Festival, an Ogre holiday that they’ve celebrated at the warehouse ever since Nygglatho has taken up residence there. Chtholly hands out the scarves she made, and all the older girls receive gowns sent by Phyracorlybia (daughter of the mayor of Corna di Luce). This is a brief moment of happiness for the group before Willem, Chtholly, and Nephren head to the surface.

I loved the twist with Ithea, and it was really great that they put it at the beginning. They could have easily turned it into an end-of-episode revelation, which would give Chtholly the resolve to push forward. Instead, it was done at the beginning, and drives her actions throughout the episode. The revelation also came with a complicated emotional aspect at the end. Ithea asks Chtholly if she wants to know about Ithea’s true self. Instead, the blue-haired girl simply says that she’s her bright and bubbly friend, who cares more about others than herself. Though Ithea claims this is a relief, her expression says there’s more to it than that. It is possible she wanted to do more than just have a confidant. She may have wanted to have a chance to be her true self for a while. To drop the charade of Ithea and just be her. If this is the case, Chtholly just shut her down, and those were tears of pain, not relief. All the same, this scene had some deep acting from Amber Lee Connors and Brittney Karbowski. There’s a lot of emotions at play when you feel like you’re slipping away. Even more when you are pretending to be someone you aren’t. They both did a good job of being vulnerable and complex.

This was a big episode for talking. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just what it is. Soon, however, we should be seeing some real action down on the surface, and we can see what these animation studios can do when they lay it on the throttle. Until then, you’re going to have to settle for good background art. I haven’t taken much time in the past to talk about the backgrounds. I love how they’ve brought out the warmth of the home out in all the scenes inside the warehouse. It just feels like they live, learn, and love in that space. By contrast, the backgrounds of the action sequences somehow convey a frenetic energy.  This art has really made the series, lending a level of deep-running, subtle emotion to the story’s melancholic ways. As a side note, I find Snowfall Festival’s decorative concepts to be more than a little frightening. I give this episode eight horrifically mutilated snowmen out of ten.