I am a sucker for bad endings, and in many ways I loooove this ending. I feel there’s a intrinsic brilliance to its ruthless realism.
There’s a lot left unexplained, but I feel this goes very well with the overall theme of the manga; a lot of my enjoyment came from being just as clueless and surprised as the girls about the mysteries of the dying world.
With some help from the anime, I added all the scribbles to a post in the volume 4, in case you are curious.
As @Belthazar mentioned, the anime has a few more scenes that explain a few more details, though nothing too drastic.
Considering ヌコ and his kin tell them at some point there’s no one left alive in the lower layers, it is hard to know what would have happened to them had they stayed at home. Of course, from a practical point of view, they’d have just died sooner, but I believe there was value to their trip beyond just strengthening their friendship. I believe that through their journey both of them found some meaning to having been alive, and in the last chapter they openly say they enjoyed being alive.
XD That’s a fun theory. It was indeed intriguing to watch the panel with the cube and its abstract circles and squares in it, and I still wonder if the author wanted to say something more with that.
I was half-hoping that ヌコ would appear to consume their corpses in the last scene… though of course that doesn’t make any sense since ヌコ and his kin didn’t go to the upper layer nor did they consume any organic matter.
Yeah, that’s my hunch too… that somehow the robot brought the manufacturing chain to a halt causing a huge famine that led to war.
