Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, episodes 1-7

This review was comissioned by @toxinvictory.


This is a recent shonen series, the manga running from 2020 up through the present. It's had two cours worth of anime adaptation that started in late 2023, that - as coincidence would have it - is about to release its final episode of the set in just a few days from my time of writing this.

I'm going to be looking at the first seven episodes of Frieren that came out last year. Storywise, all I know about it is that it's a traditional fantasy story, with elves and wizards and suchlike. I haven't read or watched anything from Weekly Shonen Sunday before (though I know their "Inuyasha" series was very popular a while ago), but I have seen some other anime series from Madhouse Studios, and as far as production goes I liked what I saw. So, let's give this a look.


The pilot, "Beyond Journey's End," is simple enough to summarize, but that's because it offloads a looooot of what it's really about onto the audience. Or, rather, onto the audience's expected familiarity with the heroic fantasy genre, particularly in its post-Tolkein and post-Gygax state. There's a reason I'm mentioning Tolkein instead of just the Dungeons and Dragons creators, even though Frieren superficially takes much more after the latter.

The story begins with a party of adventurers - Himmel the human knight, Eisen the dwarf warrior, Heiter the human priest, and our titular protagonist Frieren the elf wizard - returning to the kingdom's capital for a heroes' welcome. They've just saved the land from demons - a task that took them ten full years of adventuring - and have a well-deserved retirement amid wealth and acclaim in front of them. Their reminiscences imply that they were not very strong or competent or respected at all when they first set out to confront the demons, and the memories they share (and good naturedly rib each other about) as they enjoy their victory have a very "bored player shenanigans" vibe to them.

Basically, they played through a level 1-13 campaign, and now their story is pretty much over.

The victorious heroes then turn the topic of conversation to what they plan to do with the rest of their lives, and this is the point at which Faerun gives way to Middle Earth. When her companions exchange ideas for how to enjoy their retirements or build non-martial legacies in their later years, Frieren just nonchalantly says "go back to researching new spells" and then is surprised when everyone else is surprised by her answer. When pressed on it, she shrugs and says that while the anti-demon quest has forced her to take a break from her career, they were able to complete it in just a decade, so she doesn't see it as a major alteration of her life's plans.

When the king holds a feast in their honor that night, Himmel the knight points out the once-every-fifty-years meteor shower filling the sky, and comments on this auspicious omen for a new era without demons troubling it. Frieren says that it's annoying how much the city lights obscure the shooting stars, and that next time she'll take them to her favorite stargazing location a little way out across the kingdom. The others don't have the heart to say anything about this besides agreeing that that would be nice. When the party splits ways at the end of the celebration and the unveiling of the big statues of them and all that, the other three make heartfelt goodbyes, while Frieren gives them a casual goodbye and says she'd like to keep in touch with them, they seem like cool people.

Jump ahead fifty years, with Frieren returning to the capital for the first time since that celebration. She owes the others a stargazing trip for the imminent meteor shower.

Himmel the knight - once a mighty warrior, and a very vain man proud of his manly figure and boyish countenance - has shrunk and withered with age so much that I thought he was supposed to be Eisen the dwarf at first. Heiter the priest, who apparently was younger than he looked at the beginning, is much more recognizable, but he is still gray-haired, wrinkled, and uses his priestly sceptre to walk with as well as a spellcasting focus. Eisen is the most unchanged, as dwarves do live longer than humans, but even he has a little bit of grey in his beard.

Frieren looks, and acts, exactly the same. She has to remind herself that the others are slower than they used to be, and thus they'll have to set out earlier than she intended to reach the spot in time for the meteor shower. This time, when she mentions seeing the next shower after this one, there is only silence.

Just a short time later, Frieren and the others attend Himmel's funeral. Some of the other attendees are taken aback by how unemotional Frieren seems to be. She adventured with Himmel for ten years and saved the kingdom alongside him, but she looks like she's just respectfully showing her face at the funeral of a minor acquaintance. From her perspective though, Frieren only spent ten years with the guy. It's not like they were actually *friends* friends. How could they be? She barely knew him. It's only after the burial that she breaks down in tears, on account of realizing how much of his life he spent in her company, and how little she was able to get to know him despite that.

There is a kind of intimacy, a deep understanding and familiarity with one another, that you typically only see between siblings, lifelong best friends, and decades-married couples. It's a rare level of intimacy. Most people only get to develop a small handful of such relationships over the course of their lifetimes.

For elves, though? That's just friendship. That kind of closeness and familiarity is what an elf living among other elves experiences with their entire social group.

Nothing short of that even qualifies as "friendship." Just friendly acquaintance, at most.

Conversely, the kind of bond that elves develop with their own families and loved ones, developed over the course of centuries or millennia and informing and coloring the vast library of experience the elf accumulates over the course of multiple human lifetimes, is literally beyond our comprehension. What elves call "love" is entirely outside of the human experience. We just never get the time to develop it.

It definitely recontextualizes the "smug elf" archetype. From their perspectives, humans (and other beings with human-ish lifespans) never live long enough to actually grow up. What we see as a mature personality is just another stage of adolescence for them, and we never get to develop what they see as the full spectrum of adult emotions.

Tolkein engaged (at least to an extent) with what it would really mean for a race of natural immortals to interact with people like ourselves. That was a part of what the elves *were* in his work, albeit probably still not as large a part as it should have been all things considered. Among his imitators, the significance of these lifespan disparities is almost always glossed over.

...

Speaking as a dungeon master, this is why I've always either a) reduced elf lifespans to just a few centuries a la the fourth edition World Axis setting, or b) stipulated that elf player characters and the majority of elf NPC's are very young members of their species whose elders are rarely seen outside of their distant homeland. Ditto any other races of the "immortal but otherwise mostly humanlike" description.

Very few players are willing to put in the necessary effort for roleplaying such a being, and I don't have the brain cells to run NPC's like this except for brief interactions with one or two of them at a time.

...

The final sequence comes twenty years later. Frieren has opted not to go back to the elf domain after the funeral, instead continuing her arcane explorations among humans, as she wishes to come to understand them as a people even if she's unlikely to do so with individuals. Her wanderings bring her back to the home of Hieter the (now a century old and fully retired) priest. He has a favor to ask of Frieren. The formerly wine-sotted and miserly priest has apparently had a change of heart in his final years, and started actually behaving like priests are expected to. He's adopted a war orphan named Fern (though she does as much taking care of him as the reverse, at this point), and she's proven to have a natural talent for magic. He wants Frieren to take the girl on as an apprentice.

Frieren refuses; as a mid-to-high level wizard, the kind of adventures she gets up to would be unduly dangerous to bring a newbie to. Since she refuses, Hieter asks another favor of her instead. One of the eldritch tomes they looted from the demon king's fortress turned out to be the intricately ciphered research journal of an ancient alchemist who is said to have made real progress into immortality and/or resurrection of the dead. For some reason, Hieter has been sitting on this for seventy+ years without telling anyone or made a serious attempt to decode it, but now he's afraid of dying so he'd really like her to try it. When Frieren says that decoding the tome shouldn't take her more than five to six years, he thanks her, and also mentions that if she's going to be taking a few years off from adventuring anyway would she mind teaching Fern in her spare time? Sure, Frieren says she can handle that.

Damn she's gullible. :v

That ends "Beyond Journey's End." The episode and series title, obviously, is itself a Tolkein referene. What happens AFTER the unexpected journey (and before the next adventure with Frodo), when the party members of races with vastly different life expectancies come home with Smaug's head? And, in a possible double-entendre, what comes after death for those who cannot escape it?

Episode 2, "It Didn't Have To Be Magic," opens on a montage covering the four subsequent years. Frieren pores over the alchemist's journal, and trains Fern in sorcery as the girl enters her teens, while Hieter's exceptional spryness for his age slowly drips away without any visible impact on his good humor. Almost as if he's actually accepted his own mortality and isn't really panicking over whether or not Frieren will finish decoding the book in time, funny that. Four years into their cohabitation, Heiter's unusual health for his age comes to an end, and he loses his mobility. This - along with Frieren's completion of the decoding and discovery of no immortality spells at all at around the same time - prompts him to confess the extremely obvious truth to Frieren. And, well, he got what he wanted. Frieren is forced to admit that with her studious nature and fiery determination to impress her adoptive father, Fern has advanced to the point where she wouldn't slow Frieren down or get herself killed if she took her adventuring.

And, really, at this point it would just be kinda fucked up to abandon 14 year old Fern at this point. Frieren has spent enough time studying humans at this point to realize how important those four years are for someone that young.

We also get, via flashback, some insight into Heiter's change of ways in his final decades. Seeing the late Himmel's heroics, how he never stopped trying to help people and save people all the way up to the end of his life, made Heiter ashamed of his own failure to be a properly holy man in (non-adventuring) deed. When Himmel died, Heiter resolved to try to be more like him in the years he had remaining, both as atonement for all the good he didn't bother doing previously and as a tribute to his lifelong friend.

Frieren figures, after having the story summarized for her with surprising emotional openness and vulnerability by Heiter, that she supposes she might as well do the same thing. Even if neither Himmer nor Heiter were lifelong friends, and indeed only barely friends at all in her elvish mind even though she's been trying hard to unlearn that way of thinking when dealing with humans.

When Heiter dies, Frieren and Fern pour the ritual liquor on his grave together. Fern mourning the man who saved her life and took her in. Frieren good-naturedly ribbing his memory, like their adventuring party all used to do to each other.

After the funeral, Frieren takes Fern adventuring. Either she was lying about how dangerous her work is, or she's decided to take safer "adventures" until Fern has toughened up further still, because they mostly just help peasants with farm troubleshooting stuff in exchange for access to minor-league folk magic. Spells like boil tea, transmute sour grapes into sweet grapes, and its more aggressive counterpart transmute sweet grapes into sour grapes. It turns out that Frieren isn't just softballing her mission selections to protect Fern, though; her actually dangerous adventures aren't the majority of her adventures, with most of them being milk runs like this.

When Fern asks why she bothers, Frieren explains her true goal: to master every spell in the world. Not the most powerful spells. Not the spells that she thinks she's most likely to actually want to use. All of them. Just for the sake of mastering them. Getting a scroll of boil tea from a village witch doctor is just as meaningful of a step toward that ambition than learning conjure sky castle or submerge continent from an ancient god-authored tome in a monster-filled dungeon.

Interestingly, Frieren says that she doesn't actually like magic all that much, despite all appearances to the contrary. This is just something she's decided to spend a while doing (and...also risk her life doing? Yeah, I'm not sure I buy what Frieren is selling here lol). Fern (whose name I just now noticed is incredibly similar to her instructor's) says that she also only sort of liked magic, but that her own reason for leaning into it so hard was to make her (now late) adoptive father proud.

It turns out she's not the only one whose motives come down to something kinda-sorta adjacent to that after all, as it turns out. Their next adventure takes them to an herbalist who can teach Frieren about the magical uses of some local herbs. In exchange, she wants a neglected statue cleaned up and repaired.

Most of the locals weren't alive yet when Himmel and his companions saved their village from the demons. The herbalist was just barely old enough to remember it, herself.

Frieren tempers the hero worship with her own memories of Himmel's less-than-heroic attributes. None of the other three party members accepted the offer of a commemorative statue from these townsfolk (the king ended up making much better ones for the lot of them later anyway, heh). Himmel, on the other hand, kept the sketch artists busy for days trying to get the exact right pose to make him look as impressive and sexy as possible. He was a great man, but also a total dweeb. With the growing distance, the humans forget about everything except the former. For Frieren, the distance is minimal, and she remembers everything about him. Despite, from her own perspective, barely having gotten to know him at all.

This leads to Frieren revealing to Fern that it isn't juuuuust perfectionism that motivates her to research every spell that there ever was. During her time with the party, the way they appreciated her vast repertoire of spells for all occasions, the way they complimented her on them, really puffed Frieren up. She might have said her decade with them didn't really mean much to her at the time, but given that she's been doing a spellbook completionist run starting as soon as their adventure was finished, I'm not sure that I can buy this. Maybe elves' relationship with time and familiarity isn't actually as alien as Frieren claims. Or maybe a decade among humans was just barely enough to change the way she thinks.

Which in turn would still mean that the elf view of time and people is at least as much cultural as it is an innate property of immortal experience. Hmm.

When the herbalist wants to decorate Himmel's newly restored statue with flowers, Frieren recalls that there was a certain species of blue flower that he was especially fond of, and that grew in abundance around his distant birth town. Those flowers used to bloom here too, but the environmental damage inflicted by the demons made them locally extinct. Still, Frieren figures that a few of them must have recolonized *some* part of these forests, so she tells Fern that they'll be staying here a bit and exercising their newfound knowledge of the local botany to try and find them.

They remain in this village, poking at everything in the nearby forest, for six months.

Finally, Fern - after a pep talk from the herbalist encouraging her to stand up to her mistress and count on her much-touted elven maturity to make her receptive - tells Frieren she's had enough. Frieren cannot seem to get it through her head that Fern's time is a much more limited and valuable resource than Frieren's own. And, frankly, would Himmel have wanted her to spend half a year looking for flowers when she could have been using her great power to help so many people in that time? Looking at Frieren's tribute to his memory, and looking at Heiter's tribute to his memory, Fern is pretty sure the priest did a much better job.

...

Heh, I had just been thinking that if it's considered normal for elves who spend centuries mastering things like magic, the elves should have been able to solve the humans' demon problem pretty easily. The fact that they didn't suggests that either a) it's very rare for an elf to spend that kind of time grinding the kind of skills that have direct combat applications, with Frieren being one of the rare exceptions, or b) most elves are just assholes.

...

Frieren, fortunately, is indeed mature enough to see the wisdom in what Fern tells her. She agrees to just accept some seeds for a similar-ish looking blue flowers from the herbalist and plant those around the statue instead. While they're talking though, a squirrel steals the seedbag, forcing them to go chasing after it. And, while they're pursuing the rodent, Frieren remembers something; squirrels hide stashes of seeds all over the place, but they sometimes then forget where all of them are, or die before the winter comes and leave the stashes hidden indefinitely. That, in turn, makes her wonder about something else.

They start looking at some ancient ruins that have bits of dirt encrusted over their roofs. Sure enough, there are flower gardens up there on account of forgotten squirrel-stashes. Including plant species that were otherwise wiped out in the demon war that have slowly begun to germinate in that thin soil layer as the climate returned to normal.

The flowers have been preserved, on account of the actions of short-lived creatures who forget things all the time. Whereas a long-lived elf with a near-photographic memory was totally lost.

Perhaps there's a reason, down to more than just differing personalities, for why Frieren was able to entirely miss the point of Himmel's legacy, while the comparatively incurious and wine-sotted Heiter did not.

The episode closes with Frieren, Fern, and the herbalist looking at the new flower patch they've plant growth'd into accelerated maturity around the statue. A line spoken by Fern lingering in Frieren's mind; Frieren doesn't really love magic, exactly, but she wants to learn more spells out of ambition and to honor a dead acquaintance. Fern also doesn't love magic for her own sake, but she wants to learn more spells not just to impress her late benefactor, but also because she needs a livelihood, and magic is a marketable skill she had a natural talent for. One of the few.

They're alike, but they're also really, really not.


That's the first two out of seven comissioned episodes. This is simultaneously extremely typical fantasy anime, and an extremely atypical one. The setting is the same cliched DnD-inspired generic adventureland we've all seen a zillion times, but such settings are virtually never used to tell this type of story.

It's particularly significant to me that, while there was a heroic crusade against the demon king right before the story starts, we're two episodes in and still haven't seen a single violent act onscreen yet. The closest we've come to fighting, or even to weapon use of any kind, was a couple scenes of Fern blasting a hole in a rock as part of her training sequence. How often do you see a story set in this type of fantasy world do that?

The intro and outro fit that unusual niche as well. Look at the range of art styles the visuals include, set to a very soft, sensitive musical background, that they chose for this DnD inspired shonen manga adaptation:

It's almost like a mirror version of Yona of the Dawn. Yona is a fantasy shoujo series chock-full of danger, war, and political intrigue. Frieren is a fantasy shonen series about a woman rethinking the way she relates to other people and processes things like love and grief. They're almost direct counterparts.

As for the theming around immortality and the lack thereof, and the vague implications of this going in an afterlife-focused direction, I'm not really sure what to say just yet. I'll wait until I've seen more episodes to comment. For now, this show definitely has gotten my interest.