Girls’ Last Tour episode 8 rewatched.
We’re split into 3 minisodes this time, and the first one is Memories.
Memories takes us through a vast land of flat concrete, lined with these walls of steel drawers. We don’t manage to see what’s in the majority of them, but we do get our hands on a couple of objects. A tissue. A button. A radio. An empty bullet shell. All very mundane objects, and with the radio being seemingly broken, none of them even really have any obvious value. Really it’s just pointless shit that Yuu’s picking up for the hell of it.
However, when they come across another of the stone statues and start taking photos of it, they find themselves talking about what it is to remember people. Because see, Yuu forgot who Kanazawa was. He’s been mentioned a few times past his initial episode, as has Ishii, there’s continuity after all, but this is the first time we explicitly see a character be forgotten about for a length of time. And through having this discussion about forgetting people, and the fact that the camera is what’s helping the pair remember Kanazawa, Chito comes to realise that this land they’re in is probably a graveyard. And that’s just one of those conclusions that’s like, it’s fair enough to make, obvious even when you’ve got all the clues. But the actual design of the whole place as well as Chi and Yuu acknowledging that sentimentality, they do return the items after all, it gives the whole thing extra weight. The pair have spent a good portion of the show contemplating what being dead even is, yet here they are respecting the dead without any attachment to any of them or any societal pressure to respect the dead piling on them. They’re just like that because yeah. Idk, it’s interesting. This is a good minisode.
The second minisode is Spiral. Which sees the pair have to ascend the inside of a tower on their kettenkrad, and the path to the top is pretty much entirely a spiral. Sans a part where the path’s broken and they need to go around the outside, which has its own flimsy metal path. Of course, the rule of Chekhov’s precarious walkway suspended hundreds of feet above the ground on the outside of a tower kicks in, and they do find themselves having to rush to get out of danger again. But after that it’s just a tiny bit more chill climbing and we’re home free. The main thing this spiral tower serves as is a metaphor for the cyclical nature of life. Eat, sleep, Fortnite, repeat. Stuff like that. Chi and Yuu come to terms with the mundanity of their existence, as well as ponder over what’s at the end of the spiral of life. We don’t get an answer but they wouldn’t have the answer anyway so.
And then the last minisode this time around is Moonlight. Now I’m always saying that despite the near 3 years since my first and otherwise only watch of the show, that I can remember most of the minisodes. And this one’s no exception! But what got me is that it’s one where the title card appears shortly after the actual minisode begins, and yet I was able to remember that this was the beer episode from this shot:
Which I felt proud of myself for. And yeah, the beer episode. That’s actually pretty much this episode as well. They find themselves in a building which has old beer bottles, Yuu talks about the power of the moonlight a lot, the pair get fuckin' mad crunked, and then they just dance around, and be cute, and talk about going to the moon, and Chi has a hangover the next day. It’s really nice and fun to watch and I’m a fan of the fact that the pair down their entire bottles before getting drunk, rather than the fuckin, cute girl licks an alcoholic chocolate and gets drunk from that that you see sometimes. Like Chi and Yuu actually go all in and it’s great.
Look how fuckin cute they are!
And then that’s episode 8. It’s a good blend of the usual philosophy stuff with the first minisode, the acknowledgement of the danger they’re in in the second, and then cute girl slice of life for the third. Nice time all around.
