This Week in Anime

Frieren's Demon Problem

Steve
Sorry, Nick, I don't feel like writing a column tonight. It's been a rough week, and I'd much rather settle in with my two favorite weekend activities: poring over tomes and imbibing concoctions.

Alas, time marches on whether you're a millennial anime writer or an anime character older than a millennium.

I also haven't been able to log onto Twitter without seeing at least five Frieren fan art (a few featuring feet), and that's my metric for whether or not a series has made it. Frieren's certainly done a lot to earn it! Aesthetically and philosophically, it's one of the most ambitious shows airing right now, as it wrestles with concepts from mortality and nostalgia to the progression of society and culture. Meanwhile, Frieren herself wrestles with a burger the size of her head. It's the anime with everything!

True. One of the more monumental recent developments was Frieren running into someone even more vertically challenged than herself.

Stark has two remaining synapses, each spent on these clouds.


It's funny, though, as much as the title touts this story to be "Beyond Journey's End," Frieren sure has just been whipping up another journey with three brand new companions to help dig her out of a mimic chest's chompers.

I think both titles end up fitting thematically. Frieren's journey to defeat the demon king has certainly been over for about 80 years at this point in the story, but her capital-J Journey continues beyond that, as do all of ours. But it also does, intentionally or not, slot Frieren into the subset of RPG-influenced anime fare that skips over the main quest and turns the epilogue into its own story. Because after the hundredth light novel about a loner getting Truck-kun'd into saving a parallel world that resembles medieval Europe, you have to start writing outside the box.

Ugh, tell me about it. Practically, no idea is bad unto itself. It's the execution where things matter. Take note, isekai authors. Fewer words about your protagonist's gauntlets of +2 intelligence and more words about magic as a metaphorical extension of your characters and their personalities/motivations.

It does feel like a "Coughing Baby vs. Hydrogen Bomb" type of literary matchup, and I'm not just saying that because Frieren can atomize her opponents.

The demon stuff is the most I've scratched my head at Frieren to date. I'm still unsure what the story expects me to take away from it. You have the rest of the series, which possesses this quiet and understated nuance about the essence of impermanence. Then we get a few episodes in the middle about how much Frieren hates demons and is, by all accounts, entirely correct to do so.

Frieren speaks like they're not even sentient. She compares their mastery of human language to the kind of mimicry predators sometimes evolve with to lure in their prey.

The few demons we've met so far seem to fit that bill. After a brief introduction to them in diplomat mode, all of their scenes behind the curtain are almost laughably diabolical. The townspeople and their government are framed as hapless chumps for trusting the demons, and Frieren is wholly exonerated for trying to blast them into smithereens at first blush.

It generally leads to messages that are, at best, hamfisted or, at worst, profoundly offensive. I almost want to say that Frieren is preemptively sidestepping that issue by so thoroughly and immediately dehumanizing its demons. As an audience trained on decades of fiction using the approaches you mentioned, we expect demons to be a stand-in for people, so we're thrown off balance when they're not. Maybe that's where my sense of friction is coming from. But if that's the case, I want to know what Frieren is trying to do with its demons instead. If they're just super evil bad guys for Frieren and her friends to fight, that's not interesting.

True, I could see that developing down the line. Like Frieren, the demons are only interesting insofar as their intersection with "regular" humanity. The juiciest tidbit for me was the flashback to the child demon because he vocalized his ability to perceive how others felt about him and his childish kind of rationality. That felt like the closest the show got to addressing prejudice, but again, maybe it's for the best that it wasn't pursued further. It's not like there's a shortage of material to cover with Frieren alone.

All that plus elf pecs and blankie mode Frieren.

I love stories that interrogate how unfathomable periods might affect (or not affect) a person's psyche. That's one of the topics I think Sonny Boy touched upon quite well, for example. I wonder if there's any connection between Keiichirō Saitō doing the best episode of that and directing Frieren.

It's also eye-opening to see an elf even older than Frieren seriously contemplating the end of his own life. Frieren thinks on timescales far longer than those of her comrades, and we've seen her grapple with their deaths, but she hasn't done much thinking about her legacy. Meanwhile, so much of human culture, from religion to statue-building, is all about establishing footholds of permanence into the raging torrent of time. It might ultimately be futile, but the struggle itself is core to our existence.

I guess he could have started a pot farm. Some people do that. Ain't much, but it's honest work.

You're acting like Frieren didn't already have the most powerful ace up her sleeve.

I really can't stress enough how paramount it is to the series' charm that Frieren is both an alien and a goofball.

The slow, understated humor is so good. I was rolling at Sein's futile attempts to get Frieren to exert the bare minimum effort to save his life.

I'm glad we're seeing more of what Frieren saw in Himmel, too. He struck me as bland in the show's opening act, but his determination to be a real fake hero (or fake real hero) put him in a new light for me. Plus, I appreciate the writing tying that thematically into how memories take on a life and luster all their own after a person's passing. Memories are themselves just as ephemeral and malleable as their original subjects.

As an anime-only viewer, I think they've been integrated pretty naturally! I like that there are a lot of subtle connections, too. In one episode, Frieren mentions she has a spell for making sweet grapes sour, which seems like a non sequitur until you get the flashback where one of her old party members mentions preferring sour grapes in passing. The greater point—that Frieren's current life and habits have been molded in a big way by her old friends—is loud and clear, but those smaller details enrich the writing.

Fern just has a short fuse because it falls on her to fulfill the most important and thankless RPG class of them all: team mom.

Maybe she's just a few centuries away from a growth spurt.