”You will never be an early 2000’s romance anime love interest who's actually a computer learning about human emotions.”

This soft physics plot cope is the focus of little known 2015 feature film from A-1 Pictures; Glass no Hana to Kowasu Sekai or Vitreous Flower Destroy the World.

VFDTW is similar to the iconic anime series Chobits, in the sense that, the Mc’s are anthropomorphic software described as two narrow domain anti-virus agi programs and a single sentient easter egg OS.

When awakened, the dormant OS, a dizzy violet-eyed ****-asi who calls herself Remo, overwrites the standard OS, embedding a secretive and conditional failsafe into humankinds’ quantum multiworld simulation engine.

Viewers learn through exposition that the human race has gone extinct, but not before becoming ancestoral simulators of Earth, mapping consciousness, networking each general purpose construct of matter to a remote ark, a digitally immutable dataome, called *Chie no Hako* or The Box of Wisdom.

MC’s Dorothy and Dual are rule-based anti-virus ****-agis tasked with the upkeep of this akashic simulator. Meanwhile inside the Box, spontaneous and unseen sensory media nodules generate a simulants’ existence. Simulants find themselves navigating for resources in any number of openworld mnemonic tableaus depicting early human history. 

As corrupt files become a frequent occurrence, the Box requires a cold and unquestionable deletion of infected emotional data payloads.

These action sequences take place at or near Planck length in an unimpressive but functional jewel-toned gravityless geodesic battlefield. Here, in the Box arena, viruses are vanquished to phantom quanta in vivid madoka style datafights to the death. 

Eventually, the forced deletion of a close friend prompts our protagonists to reflect on their operating instructions. Remo further confuses the software with her ability to do things they can’t, like taste sweets or feel joy.

As Dorothy and Dual ponder these new concepts they become increasingly self-aware, wrestling with an overwhelming grief that accompanies sentience. 

In its own way, VFDTW belongs to the mahou shoujo genre of speculative science fiction. It is afterall, a story about emotionless agents spontaneously evolving into sensitive and digitally enervated asi. 

Directed by Masashi, his previous works, the early 2000’s genetic noir thriller series R.O.D. or the distopian coming-of-age technofable Shinsekai yori, both support plots with uniquely complicated scientific or technological dilemmas of morality.

Decidedly, VFDTW would serve better as a six episode OVA adaptation. Moreso, what was nature of the Great Reset, the extinction event that ended humanity? Is this world sim run to harvest the data of a dead civilization? Was this dataome, the “Rosetta” of human history, ever found by a future spacefaring society? With a watch time of sixty-seven minutes, we aren’t told. 

In the end Masashi’s try at this cyberpunk tale feels unfinished. Ideas are abandoned in favor of frequent slice-of-life sequences and progressively distasteful displays of yuri and l0l1con fanservice. Plot devices stall, leaving viewers to mull over what VFDTW might have been.