World's End Harem

Episode 11

After eleven weeks of flaunting digitally-scorched sexual conquests wearing flimsy sci-fi conspiracy negligee, World’s End Harem ends with a little more banging, but mostly with a lot of pathetic whimpers. Limping and tumbling on its way to the finish line, the episode can barely hold itself together, and it's all in the service of a nonconclusion that does little to tie off any threads and even less to whet the audience's appetite for more. Even the most diehard Doi stans will have to admit this finale is garbage. It's an embarrassing note to end on, and for World’s End Harem, that's the perfect curtain call.

There's no point digging into the plot. It's a confused and purely perfunctory mess that, after twenty minutes, just amounts to reuniting Reito with Erisa—and they don't even kiss! Rather, the unmissable hallmark of this episode is how unfinished it is. World’s End Harem never looked good to begin with, but even those scant corners it possessed are sliced into oblivion here. Long stills and pans plague the episode, and in most of them, the mouths aren't drawn. So you'll be looking at a character unloading a paragraph's worth of exposition, and half of their face just doesn't exist. The whole industry is in a slow and excruciating freefall thanks to production bloat, and even most high-profile shows struggle to put episodes together these days, so bottom feeders like World’s End Harem really have no chance. However, if there wasn't time to animate the mouths, they should have gone avant-garde and used the censors to cover them up. At least that would have been funny and tongue-in-cheek instead of just bad.

And speaking of things that are bad, Doi's material remains the worst, most navel-gazing component of a series that didn't really have much going for it in the first place. This term didn't exist in the online lexicon when the anime began, but as a creative work inexorably tethered to both its text and subtext, World’s End Harem is the dictionary definition of “maidenless behavior.” Doi lives out the pathetic and unimaginative power fantasy of the specific strain of virgin obsessed with their own virginity to the point of embittered entitlement. This comes to a laughable head when Karen uses science magic to both age him up and cure his eyesight, physically completing his transition from “loser” to “chad,” as if his arc weren't blatant enough. Literally all of his problems have been solved by fucking women like they're entirely disposable. He kept a girl chained up in his bedroom, and now he is the only man on the planet legally allowed to plow. And despite everything, he's still too much of a nerd to be affably evil, which has been the sole unintentionally redeeming factor of his story. The writing is simply too incompetent to make him cool. He's just a pathetic husk wrapped around a contradictory collage of toxic masculine ideals. A caricature in the guise of a champion. The Ozymandias of orgasms.

The UW takes a backseat to all this, which is unfortunate, because while it has emerged as the most offensive part of the show (excluding Doi), it's also now the most interesting. I want to know more about this secret man-hating triumvirate who managed to engineer the worst act of bioterrorism in history but also cannot muster the competency to kill five below-average men. I want to know more about Chloe's dedicated lesbian BDSM room. I want to see Karen deliver a nationwide address as prime minister while looking and sounding exactly the way she does now. Like, hopefully I don't have to explain why conflating feminism with hating men, and then further conflating hating men with total androcide is disingenuous at best. World’s End Harem's dog-whistling really wants you to be impressed with it, as if it's the very first narrative in history brave enough to consider that killing off all men would be a little bit fucked up. It can't even be bothered to be creative with its misogyny.

Credit where it's due, there is one character beat in this finale that I genuinely liked: Kyoji deciding to stay behind so he can be with all of the women he knocked up. The way it's presented is very funny, showing us a collage of photo ops featuring smiling Kyojis and a smattering of different pregnant woman, but it's also kinda sweet as well. It might be the one altruistic thing anyone has ever done in this show. And furthermore, Kyoji's determination provides a great contrast to Reito's spinelessness. Once more, our supposed protagonist does nothing but get dragged around by the proactive women who surround him. He has a chance to take Mira with him—not to screw her, as she suggests, but to fight and do something to pull her away from the obviously evil UW—yet he just lets her go. He has made exactly one choice for himself all season, and when fate inexplicably decides to reward his ambition-bereft behavior by reuniting him with the one woman he's been saving himself for, he displays all the passion of a box of Wheat Thins. I can hate Doi, but I can't feel anything about Reito. He is blankness incarnate. He is an absence. He is a void emptier than the ones that attach themselves to any exposed nipple.

Ultimately, I can't recommend World’s End Harem even as an ironic pleasure. There was no chance for it to be sexy, and even less chance for it to be good, so absurdity was pretty much the only thing going for it. And there's just not enough ridiculousness spread over eleven episodes to make World’s End Harem overall worthwhile. There were moments, to be sure. I had a blast with a handful of episodes, and the particularities of reviewing a piece of hot garbage weekly made my experience a bit more fun and rewarding than it otherwise would have been. I cannot, however, justify a universal recommendation. There's better trash out there. You deserve better trash. Let me take this one for the team, and I'm taking it straight to the incinerator.

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World’s End Harem is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve can be found on Twitter if you want to read his World’s End Harem livetweets. Otherwise, catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.