Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, episodes 1-7 (part three)

The village where Stark Ten Eisen resides is a very short distance from the dragon's nest. Close enough that it seems awfully strange how mellow, prosperous, and unburnt the place looks. Dragons don't generally let villages in their vicinities be that way. I started to wonder if maybe they were dealing with some kind of advanced illusion magic again, or if the dragon was accepting loyalty and tribute from the villagers in return for superficial prosperity (assuming dragons in this setting are intelligent), but nope. According to the locals, the dragon made their lives miserable until Stark arrived a few years ago; after its initial initial confrontation with Stark, the dragon has been afraid to show itself again.

This guy's got glowing reviews so far. Seems promising. I'd been guessing the challenge was going to be in convincing him to join them after the battle, but nope, wrong again! After being taken to meet the local hero, it only takes a few minutes of listening to his ever-more-contradictory excuses to not let them help him deal with the dragon for good for Frieren and Fern to make him admit the truth.

Stark has never fought a single monster in his life. He came to this village immediately after giving up on Eisen's training before he could complete it. The dragon attacked right after his arrival, and Stark tried to face it, but found himself too terrified to move any further after standing before it and hefting his weapon.

Seeing this strange, clearly non-local, man standing before it alone with weapon in hand and a carefully neutral expression on his face, the dragon decided he must be a mighty warrior who has good reason not to fear dragonkind. It retreated without a fight, and hasn't returned to the village since he's been living there.

His standoff with the dragon was actually just two cowards playing chicken, and the dragon lost.

Fern figures that this one is a dud, so they should either find a different tank or just give up on the dragon and try to avoid similar opponents going forward. Frieren disagrees, though, on account of the briefing Eisen gave her about Stark before they departed.

He fled rather than help defend his home village when it was attacked, leaving him alone, ashamed, and regretful. Just like Eisen was when he fled from battle as a young dwarf. That shame and regret drove Eisen to become strong, and the desperation to make up for that failure was actually the root of the stoic bravery that Frieren remembers from his performance against the demons. When Stark ran away from his training in an impulsive moment of imposter syndrome, Eisen didn't chase after him, because he knew the only really important thing Stark had left to learn was how to deal with that very problem. And that this was something he'd need to learn on his own.

That evening, when pressed by Fern about why she's so sure Stark is worth putting any more effort into recruiting, Frieren just instructs her to go back to the little cliffside they met him by. During their meeting with Stark, Frieren paid a lot of attention to a strangely-shaped crevasse in the cliff beside him. As Frieren suspected, based on what she'd seen Eisen do in the past and what the dwarf told her about Stark, the mysterious noises they've been hearing from that direction is related to that crevasse. When Fern sneaks back there and sees Stark swing his battleaxe toward the cliff, it does this:

High level fighter bullshit: not actually that different from high level wizard bullshit.

Episode 6, "The Hero of the Village," continues the plotline. Although it only takes up half of the episode, so...very weird way to arrange things on the adaptation's part. Wouldn't it have been better to just have a "kill dragon, recruit fighter" episode, instead of having it take up half of two different episodes? Eh, whatever, anime studios, what can you do.

Anyway, this one starts with Fern making her presence known to Stark. She gets some more information out of him, some encouraging, some not. One the one hand, the reason he's still staying in this village and practicing with his axe-lasers is because he knows his presence is the only thing keeping the people who have been so kind to him safe for now, but he fears that one day the dragon might attack again anyway and is doing his best to prepare for that eventuality. On the other hand, for all the work he's putting into this, he fears that if push ever does come to shove there's a good chance he'll lose his nerve again and run away, leaving them all to their fates even if he doesn't want to.

Stark always puts on this jocular smile when putting himself down, especially about his own cowardice. A very transparent defence mechanism, but also a telling one. He really wants other people's approval, even if he thinks self-deprecation might be the only way he can get it short of dishonesty. Disapproval was actually what aborted his training under Eisen slightly early; apparently, Eisen got mad at him and struck him - something he'd never done before - and that was enough to make Stark flee in shame. Not outrage, or unwillingness to take abuse, but shame at having displeased his master so.

Fern gives him a pep talk about how you can put your feelings aside and just let your training and muscle memory take over until the stressful situation is resolved, alluding to some events from her own recent adventures that seem like they really should have been onscreen but weren't. Stark is clearly still thinking about it by the time Fern heads back to the village.

He ends up joining them in the morning after all. And, as they set out to hunt the dragon, we learn more about the incident that ended Stark's training. Apparently, Eisen made a confession as well as giving a reccomendation.

Stark's raw destructive power became greater than his own master's, and he didn't seem to know his strength. During a sparring session, Eisen panicked when Stark did some big animu move, and punched him in the face on pure reflex out of fear. Afterward, he was too ashamed of himself to apologize and explain, resulting in Stark fleeing.

Just like the standoff with the dragon. Two cowards playing chicken, and this time Stark was the one who blinked first.

They find the dragon near its magic item nest, and Stark - hands trembling just like Eisen's often did before a big battle - takes point to keep the beast distracted while the wizards blast it full of holes from hiding. Things don't go according to plan, though. Specifically, Stark kills the dragon by himself before Frieren and Fern can get their shots lined up.

It turns out that the dragon wasn't actually a coward who blinked first after all. It just had a very, very astute sense of its opponent's power, and was only willing to risk fighting him when its hoard was being threatened.

With the village no longer needing him, and with a newfound confidence that should be able to substitute for bravery for now, Stark is willing to join the ladies on their quest. You never know when there might be another dragon in their way, after all, and having someone to protect seems to be Stark's best motivator anyway on account of his early shame (just as it was for Eisen).

They depart, with everyone having taken some goodies from the hoard and left the rest for the townsfolk. Apparently, the spellbook Frieren really wanted contained a spell for seeing through people's clothes that she hadn't been able to learn yet. She reminds everyone that she doesn't intend to *use* most of these spells, she just wants to know them for its own sake, and besides it actually is useful for checking for concealed weapons and stuff. Anyway, totally worth fighting a dragon for.

Frieren...you are a very, very unique individual.

The second half of the episode is another breather, albeit one that gives some...well...I'm actually not sure. It seems like we're getting some interesting insight into Stark, and indications that Eisen may have made much, much worse mistakes than just punching him the one time. The thing is, the episode doesn't seem to have any awareness that it was doing this. Maybe it's just setting things up for the characters to confront head-on later, but the tone of the presentation...I don't know.

The party reaches a fortress-city at the kingdom's northern border. A border that is currently closed - and heavily warded against magical attempts to get across - on account of major troubles beyond. It appears that remnants of the demon army have reorganized over the last ninety-or-so years, and they're starting to be a real problem again. I'm calling it even odds on whether the demon king has returned to life, or if there's a new demon king. Anyway. They'll either have to postpone their quest until the crisis is resolved, or find another way through. Frieren is fine with the former, but the humans - understandably - are not.

Fern's reaction, in particular, seems like it might be setting up a theme for Stark to build on. When Fern gets angry or upset, her face takes on a neutral, statue-like expression, and her voice gets very calm and quiet. In other words, she starts looking and sounding much more like Frieren usually does.

Picking up some habits from her longtime mentor isn't surprising, but only showing them when she's angry or frustrated is a bit more telling. It's possible that she does this deliberately, trying to emulate her powerful sorceress teacher when she feels powerless, but...well, think about this in the context of what Stark says a minute later.

He remembers visiting this city before, while training under Eisen. And he remembers everything, including the dwarf, being much bigger back then.

When Stark fled from battle while everyone else in his village fought to their last, he was ten years old. Maybe younger. What a coward, amirite?

Maybe Eisen was also a child when he had a similar experience. And maybe child soldiers are just a normal thing among dwarvenkind. That's the most charitable possible reading. Otherwise, Eisen was just projecting and taking out his lifelong neurosis out on some poor orphan, convincing said orphan to feel guilty for Eisen's own real or imagined failings.

This also means that it was Stark's foster father who randomly punched him without explanation one day.

Stark thinks he's a coward because that's how he was trained to think of himself. And Eisen still describes him as such to others behind his back.

So, in light of that, Fern only channelling Frieren when she's feeling her worst takes on pretty dark connotations. Unless it's supposed to be a contrast thing, with Fern using her mentor as a source of strength while Stark's give him weakness. That could also be. I'll need to see more. Either way though, Eisen is a terrible person, and the episode never calls him on this, instead - to the end - having the characters and the cinematography alike from him as a difficult but ultimately good mentor.

Maybe this is just blowing up a bubble for later episodes to pop. I hope so. Otherwise, this is the first real "wtf, show" of the series.

The episode ends in a silly anticlimax. After Fern and Stark spend the whole day trying without success to find a way across the border, they meet up with Frieren again. Frieren is on edge because she thinks the soldiers are looking for her for some reason. And, when they find and corner her and her companions a minute later, it's to apologize to the great heroine and her companions for impeding their progress.

All she ever had to do was identify herself as Frieren, and they'd have done whatever she asked. She just got bored of hero's welcomes a long time ago, and has been avoiding letting herself be identified except when its directly relevant to the mission at hand. To the point where she didn't even think of trying to use it as an ace she could play to her advantage in situations like this.

Frieren is actually disappointed. Not only at having to deal with the attention, but also because she'd been warming up to the notion of taking a little break along their journey. That doesn't really make sense to me even working on elf logic, since they've only been on this journey for a month or less in the first place, so I suspect she might have some kind of inner conflict about going on this quest. As they pass through the gate - the same gate Frieren's old party passed through on their way to the demons' stronghold - Frieren has a weird fugue moment where she thinks of that past moment and almost freezes up. Yeah. She seemed enthusiastic about going on this quest, but now there seem to be avoidance issues popping up. Hmm.

In the previous couple of episodes, Frieren made frequent little digs at Flamme, about how annoying her old mentor was and so forth. I wonder if that's another aspect of the same issue? Some kind of defensive wall she set up against missing her short-lived companions so badly? Kind of seems like it.

I really want to know what other elves are like in this setting, now.

The seventh and final episode of this commission, "Like a Fairie Tale," begins with an interesting teaser. While on the road, Frieren's original party happened to end up discussing Flamme, and the lack of material evidence she left behind her (a lack that scammers have been capitalizing on ever since). After more than nine hundred years, there are many humans who doubt that she ever truly existed at all.

Also, on top of her rumor-shrouded discovery of the afterlife, she was apparently the first human wizard. Or at least, the first human wizard to invent magics original to her species.

Flamme really was a big deal, unless her historical significance has been exaggerated and the achievements of earlier people falsely attributed to her. But still. She was a very, very big deal, and yet a mere millennium later - the elvish equivalent of around a decade, going by Frieren's appearance then and now - hardly anyone is even sure she was real.

This, Himmel claims in a follow-up flashback a little later in the episode, is why it's so important to ensure that the four of them are commemorated. In addition to being hilariously vain and self-aware about it, Himmel wants to leave true-to-life statues of themselves wherever possible to ensure that they don't become rumours and fairy tales.

Anyway, the teaser ends back in the present, Frieren wakes up from a dream of part of this past conversation - a conversation in which she mostly held her tongue and kept her secrets - to be doted over by Fern (much to Stark's confusion). Apparently, Frieren woke up surprisingly early this morning, and Fern wants to make sure this behavior is encouraged. Heh.

Silly ending, but very interesting dream/memory sequence leading up to it. The way Frieren feels about these humans who were so important to her in their own ways, even though they really shouldn't have been with how little time he knew them for, with their own perspectives on the future that they (well, with one probable exception) knew Frieren would see and they would not.

Then there's another reveal, near the beginning of the episode proper. The reason Frieren hasn't mentioned anything about elf society, or other elves in general, is because there are very few of them remaining. Not because of a disaster of some kind, but because elves take an extremely long time to develop romantic feelings and have very low sex drives. The last time Frieren saw another elf was over two hundred years before Himmel, Eisen, or Hieter were born. They are growing closer to extinction with every passing millennium.

Put a pin in these background details for now. I think I'd best talk about their probable significance at the end, while analysing the work as a whole.

The rest of this episode, it turns out, is spent exploring the demons. And, um...they're weird. Weird in a way that I have very mixed feelings about. After making a little many repairing a road that was damaged in a recent battle with the resurgent demon forces, Frieren, Fern, and Stark make their way to an embattled city state. They're barely in the city for an hour before Frieren detects demons nearby, and her detection spell leads them to a procession that includes the city's ruler and some diplomats who just arrived.

I guess either some demons are a lot more humanlike than Qual, or they have some kind of shapeshifting power. Anyway, this trio are here on behalf of Aura the Guillotine, another of the demon king's former lieutenants who fled from battle in the previous war and is now trying to build an empire of her own. The city-state has been holding out against Aura's forces for some years now, and they're getting desperate enough to try a negotiated surrender.

I guess Aura is the creepy little girl on the book-throne, in the OP. Probably.

The demon diplomats clearly being invited to the city and in the company of the local authorities doesn't give Frieren even the slightest pause. She goes into battle mode, takes aim at the lead demon, and tells him that the jig is up, whatever he and his comrades are plotting it ain't going to happen. This results in Frieren being quickly surrounded, disarmed, and seized by human knights. The demon leader - Lugner, by name. I guess literally every species in this world speaks German for some reason - tries to reason with the mystery attacker, but Frieren curtly tells him not to waste his breath. She knows that demons aren't actually people, and that they only ever communicate with humans in order to decieve or manipulate them. Lugner seems offended, but tries to be magnanimous. The city's ruler, Lord Granat, orders that Frieren be thrown in the dungeon at once.

Either she can't fight properly without her staff, or she just decides to go along with this and bide her time for now. The next time we see her, Frieren is being afforded a visit by her companions.

Frieren assures them that she doesn't think the way she does about demons due to hatred, or fear, or anything like that. It's just scientific fact, and she's personally corroborated it in the field well after learning it academically. She tells Fern and Stark about an occasion when, after helping some villagers wipe out a demon raiding party, the DM threw the classic "what if baby orcs?" dilemma at them. A lone demon child (or at least, a demon who looked like a child) was found in the woods nearby calling for her mother. Both the townsfolk and the adventurers were split on what to do. One local family, who claimed to have seen this specific demon eat one of their own children, demanded that they kill it unless it can somehow give them their daughter back. The village chief, on the other hand, was inclined toward mercy. Within the party, Frieren wanted to kill it, and tried to do her best to convince the others that they should do so, but the other three - Himmel in particular - were hesitant at the very least.

So, the chief took the little demon girl in. The adventurers were operating out of this village for at least the next few days, so Himmel figured they'd be close on hand if something went wrong. Frieren still thought this was a terrible, terrible idea that everyone would regret, but she wasn't willing to fight her companions over it. For a day or so, the little demon girl seemed to be doing her best to integrate into human village life. Then, that night, she killed her entire foster family save one child, burned down their house, and started carrying their unconscious kid away.

When caught and asked what the fuck, the demon explained that she sensed murderous intent from the family whose daughter she'd killed. She also saw that humans have a custom of adopting orphaned young. Remembering what that grieving family had said earlier about wanting their daughter back, she concluded that the prudent course of action would be to orphan another human child of around the same age and present her to them as a peace offering.

No one objects when Frieren magic missiles her, this time, even when the demon starts calling for her mother again. As it dies, Frieren asks the demon why it keeps doing that. Demons don't reproduce the same way humans, elves, etc do. They don't have a concept of parenthood. The dying demon, with its final few breaths, explains that "mother" is a word that makes mortals less likely to attack you, so if you find yourself outmatched by them you can sometimes get away by saying it.

...

Okay, but what WAS she planning to do with that unconscious child, then? It's not like she was being subtle, burning the house and then slowly walking away with her captive without any attempts at stealth.

I feel like she was telling the truth? Like, she actually was trying to appease that other family, but somehow failed to realize that killing some humans will antagonize the rest of their communities. Impossible though that seems.

Obviously, she was too dangerous to live. But I do think this was an honest attempt at making peace, though it's illogical in some way or another no matter how you slice it. So, demons making genuine peace offers isn't impossible, just very, very unlikely to lead to anything good.

But then, the way that Frieren phrased it, she said that demons are "incapable of being at peace with mortals." Which may indeed be true. Maybe there's just no level of understanding that would be sufficient to make them safe to be around, even if they truly meant well.

Demons do seem able to cooperate with each other, though, even if their society is implied to be a very harsh and competitive one. So, they're not actually asocial creatures.

Yeah, I really don't know what the story is getting at with them.

...

According to Flamme, Frieren says, demons evolved from a semi-intelligent monster species whose ecological niche was standing in dark alleys and repeating "Can I have a cigarette?" until prey came within reach. They got smarter in response to their prey figuring out the usual tricks and them needing to come up with more sophisticated ones. Eventually, these magical ambush predators reached their own kind of sapience, and demons as we now know them came to be. Their intelligence is built around a core of predatory manipulation and deception. The question "what do I need to say in order to make the thing I want happen?" is the only kind of social instinct they truly have.

...

I find this hard to reconcile with their onscreen behavior, though. Like, why would Qual pretend to want to avenge the demon king? Claiming to want that didn't give him any tactical advantage against Frieren and Fern. And, if demons are capable of being fond enough of one another to want to avenge their fallen, then doesn't that mean they DO have other social behaviors?

The rest of the episode acts as if Frieren is correct. But I really just don't see how she could be.

...

Frieren tells her companions to come back and bring her books once in a while if they can manage it. She'll try to convince her captors that they're making a big mistake. If she fails, then it shouldn't be more than a year at most before this city is destroyed and Frieren escapes in the chaos. Oh well.

Upstairs in the castle, the demons wonder if that too-knowledgable elf lady might be a problem they need to solve themselves, even after she's been arrested.

It turns out she might not have actually been the only one, though. When Lord Granat comes to meet with them - accompanied by a suspiciously large retinue of knights - he reveals that he only lured Lugner and Co here with the promise of diplomacy so that he could avenge his son. Or...maybe I spoke too soon. Lugner tells Granat that he, himself, lost his father to humans. They can keep the cycle of violence and revenge going, or they can make history. He manages to talk Granat down, albeit just barely.

As the demons return to the guest room, one of Lugner's underlings asks him what a "father" even is. Lugner responds that he has no idea, it's just one of those human social words that's important to them or whatever.

Anyway, soon they'll be able to get this fool to lower the city's defences, and then they'll have enough humans to feed Aura the Guillotine's entire army for weeks. Unfortunately for the demons, Lugners other underling has slipped away without their permission to try and kill Frieren in her cell; if she knows too much, then she knows too much, and he's sure he can make it look like she died in an escape attempt and took the guards down with her.

Frieren was half-expecting this, of course. And she gives the demon pause when she reveals that she, personally, was the one who beat his queen up so badly that she abandoned her then-master and hid for decades.

That's the end.


I....really do not know what to make of the demons. On one hand, they seem like an unironic instance of the most nonsensical flavor of "always chaotic evil." You know, the kind of monster that can have a complex society consisting of thousands of individuals working together for the common good, including advanced industry, material culture, etc, but still somehow inexplicably is totally antisocial. I'm not against "always evil" races in fantasy, but only if they consistently act like it. When they don't, it gets uncomfortable to say the least. I *feel* like there is going to be more to the demons than they themselves seem to think, but I might be giving the story too much credit.

Now, that said, I think I can maybe kinda sorta see what the story is going for in terms of how the demons serve as a foil to Frieren. First though, let's get back to Flamme, Himmel, and the elf extinction vortex.

The fact that Flamme made zero effort to make her career a matter of historical record might be directly related to her discovery of the afterlife. Unlike other humans, she did know that everyone would be able to meet and talk to her again eventually. Frieren's life is expected to be very long (unless she gets herself killed adventuring, which is actually likely enough that she probably should take it into account), and thus she was always ambivalent about the statuary. Ambivalent, but still, she let them do it. Flamme apparently didn't let anyone immortalize her in this way. Because she understood that everyone was, equally, much more genuinely immortal than the elves even think themselves.

Speaking of the elves and how immortal they are or aren't, that reveal about their demographics kind of changes everything. The most obvious question it implies is "where did the elvish population even come from in the first place?" Were they more fecund, up to a few thousand years ago when something caused their behavior to change? Or did the elvish creator god or whatever just make a large number of them, and their population has been slowly shrinking ever since their genesis?

That said, I think the more important question, at least about what this means for our protagonist herself, is "Are there even such things as elvish society or elvish social norms at this point, if there are a scant few elves living mostly among nonelves?" Was this already the situation during Frieren's childhood, assuming she even had one? How much of Frieren's "elf" perspective is actually something she was taught, as opposed to just being her own unique reactions to living in a world where almost everyone else dies within the equivalent of a year or two after she meets them?

Is Frieren's entire *thing* really just a defence against the grief that's constantly bombarding her?

Maybe elves actually *don't* experience time any differently than humans. Maybe they don't actually have deeper emotions based on centuries of persistent intimacy. Maybe Frieren develops friendships, falls in love, etc just as fast as a human does, only she ultimately outlives them every single time. If that happens enough times, denial and distancing might be the way to go.

Maybe she really did feel like Flamme was a mother to her. Maybe she knew she was in love with Himmel from their first few months together onward. She does everything she can to put the two of them down without seeming petty, when they come up in conversation, but her actions never match her words here. Ditto her aversion to anything that reminds her of the passage of time, like the commemorative statues etc.

If she verifies that the afterlife is indeed real, I think Frieren might just be planning to kill herself and be eternally reunited with them. It seems like the only solution to her problem.

In light of that, the demons sort of are the mask that Frieren puts on. Comfortable with their immortality due to genuine lack of caring. Unable to see mortals as anything but disposable mayflies not worth bothering to try to understand, just to get stuff from. Assuming that they aren't actually wearing a mask of their own.

Anyway. "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End." When it's about Frieren having an existential crisis, it's a very unique, very interesting story that does things I've never seen before with its fantasy subgenre. When it's about Frieren and Co fighting monsters, then it's just yet another DnD-inspired shonen anime; a much better than average example of the latter, to be sure, but still lacking much to really distinguish it.

Hopefully it leans more on the former and less on the latter after this point.

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Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man (17-20)

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Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, episodes 1-7 (part two)