Dusk Beyond the End of the World: Think Morning, Count Two

Meet Akira Himegami, a high school kid in love with his step-sister Towasa, a genius scientist building the kind of AI that makes half the world excited and the other half terrified. This TV special is Episode 0 of Towa no Yuugure, and it's basically a romantic gut punch dressed up as a sci-fi prologue. Right when these two finally confess their feelings for each other, an anti-AI extremist group attacks, Akira takes a bullet for her, and he ends up frozen in cryo to survive. He wakes up 200 years later. Civilization is gone. A creepy organization called OWEL runs what's left, and something called the Elsie system has replaced marriage entirely with algorithm-matched partnerships. Then a combat android who looks exactly like Towasa shows up, saves his life, and immediately proposes to him. That's where the story really begins. P.A. Works handles the visuals, and they do what they do best — the contrast between the sleek near-future society and the overgrown ruins Akira wakes up in hits hard. The whole thing carries this melancholic romantic weight that reminded me of Plastic Memories and Planetarian, where the beauty is inseparable from the sadness. If you liked Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song and want something that leans harder into the romance side of human-android relationships, this one sets up something genuinely compelling in a single episode.