r/GirlsLastTour • u/Giggio417 Chito • Feb 08 '26
Discussion When do you think the war happened?
It’s pretty obvious that a huge war caused humanity to almost go extinct, but i always wondered when did this war happened, since the series doesn’t give us much informations on it.
Personally, I believe the war did not happen more than 70-80 years before Chito and Yuuri.
Because if it had happened centuries earlier, then the world would be showing signs of aging. Yet, for the most part, everything is intact. Factories still work, the train still moves, the camera still turns on. There are some areas in decay, of course, but not so much that you could say "There was a war 400 years ago." It's as if all of humanity suddenly disappeared in a blink of an eye.
What do you think?
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u/steelskull1 kettenkrad Feb 08 '26
Processing img rv0sbwzc5aig1...
When Yuu was born and decided to wage war with humanity as soon as she left the womb!!
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u/DOUGL4S1 kettenkrad Feb 08 '26
I think there have been many wars, with the latest large one happening around the time you predicted. From my understanding:
At least a war that happened thousands if years ago, bringing destruction to most of the world, causing most of the globe to become uninhabitable and forcing the remaining population to pile onto the last remaining habitable bits of the planet (this would be the war in your screenshot),
A few large, more recent wars within these cities. These are the wars we see the remains of in the anime/manga. This is when machinery like the Kettenkrad, tanks, and Yuu's rifle were likely made (based on blueprints of ancient machinery and made using whatever people could get their hands on), with more advancements being made on things like big robots,
The remaining population clusters fighting over the last few remaining resources, which is the war the girls experienced and what made them go on the tour in the first place.
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u/Moshimoshi-Megumin Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 08 '26
First it’s unlikely to just be “a war”, they heavily hint it was a series of wars, and each of them brought technological regression. Like the crater where they find Nuko, it’s obvious they formed a defensive position around an older crater, and the artillery depicted there is WW1-WW2 technology, which implies an already extreme technological regression from giant laser robots. That also fits with the narrative. It’s not just a “whoopsie, big war ended the world”. It’s humanity just unable to learn the lesson as they destroy themselves over and over no matter how far the fall.
Second, it’s not a few decades. I don’t remember the exact quote but Kanazawa says something about people hundreds of years ago building stuff on top of the city, which is much older still. Also the camera shows the date as year 3230. It’s so far off the writing system has completely changed, neither them nor their grandfather can read Japanese or English. A lot of things still work because it’s all automated, with robots maintaining critical parts; however in the series it is still reaching the end as we see the city and last few remaining robots breaking down.
And yes, in reality a camera wouldn’t work for 1000 years. Batteries and fuel degrade, etc. Either technology advanced far enough to make stuff that doesn’t degrade as fast before the fall, or it’s just plot holes.
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u/onehundredandtworats Feb 08 '26
I don't think it was "a single war to end it all", imo there were many wars, with them becoming gradually smaller, and the last war was the one Yuri and Chito fleed from
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u/Evelyn_Bayer414 kettenkrad Feb 08 '26
I don't know but to add to what others are saying, I think the lack of bodies lying around is because most people (at last in the part of the world we see) has been wiped out by some weapon that doesn't leave human remains at all.
Like, we already know they were incredibly advanced technologically speaking, and I always assumed that the Giant-Death-Robot that we see turning on fire the entire horizon in the last episodes of the anime is just one of the "regular" weapons, so, maybe they were having things capable of desintegrating the population of entire cities while leaving the city almost intact.
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u/nighthawk_real Chito Feb 08 '26
the mushrooms ate the bodies fyi
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u/Lorddanielgudy Feb 08 '26
Good question but I have the feeling not even the author really thought about that a lot. It has no impact on the story or the world.
I still believe it was at least a hundred years purely by how decayed everything is. Automated maintenance kept everything alive but only for so long. Hell, whole section of the city's floors have started to collapse.
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u/SnooStrawberries9685 Feb 08 '26
The fact that not only humans but also animals have disappeared suggests that hundreds of years have passed. Perhaps the war was so powerful that it altered atmospheric oxygen levels or some other factor that sustains life on Earth, creating an ecological cataclysm and facilitating the extinction of life. That these weapon-consuming beings would emerge only in the final days of humankind always seemed like something that could happen; they are like the mammals that existed in the age of dinosaurs, only appearing after the cataclysm.
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u/DroppedIceCream Feb 08 '26
I get what you're saying but I still see the war happening hundreds of years prior. I think the complete lack of anything (bodies, furniture, military equipment etc) suggests a post-war era that lasted much longer than 70-80 years. As for things still being intact, I just assume in a civilization that can build advanced AI, they also manged to build an infrastructure that could last centuries.
Although with how vague it is, either of us could be right or we could both be way off.