Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, episodes 1-7 (part two)
The next episode, "Killing Magic," is pretty clearly two different manga issues. The first of these is a bit of a breather arc, while the second features Frieren's first battle of the kind shonen series are usually packed with.
Breather issue takes place in a delightfully Mediterranean-looking coastal city where Frieren and Fern are buying supplies for a long journey ahead. Fern gets suspicious when Frieren sends her to get all the essential food and other travel necessities, while claiming that she'll be buying some nondescript "magic herbs." Fern doesn't infer the same thing that a person from our own world about what "magic herbs" might be a euphemism for, but she does think that there's something fishy, and ends up spending most of the afternoon sneaking after Frieren to spy on her. Apparently, Frieren has a bit of a history of blowing money on bizarre things when they're already tight on cash, and Fern is sick of it.
What follows is a series of fakeouts, as Fern watches Frieren go to a jewelry store...and then spend a very long time agonizing over which item to purchase. She then asks the jeweler if there's a good place to get fancy desserts in this city, and an outraged Frieren follows her after the jeweler's directions to an incredibly shady-looking pub.
The scene does everything it can to make it seem like "dessert" is rogues' cant for something along the lines of hired goons or forbidden black magic, but then the tavern thugs jusst direct Frieren to a cafe that serves really good pastries. And Frieren does not appear to be disappointed at what she finds.
Resigned to just being confused for now, Fern hurries off to buy all the things she's supposed to buy before everything closes. And, it turns out that today is Fern's birthday, and Frieren wanted to surprise her with a new hair ornament and some good muffins.
There's a moment here, where it turns out that Frieren looked for a place with good desserts in general rather than anything more specific because she wasn't sure what Fern would prefer. Same reason she spent so long and got so stressed trying to pick out the best piece of jewelry for her. Fern, meanwhile, accurately predicts what Frieren is going to order before she even orders it. Prompting another flashback to Frieren's demon-wrangling days.
Specifically, the party eating at a restaurant, and Frieren uniquely not having picked up the others' dietary preferences after the several years they've been adventuring together. Frieren apparently hasn't gotten much better about this since then, but she's at least become aware of it.
Okay. I'm starting to wonder if this is actually an elf thing, or if it's really just a Frieren thing.
One possible reading of this is that elves just don't bother paying much attention to each other's personal habits, compared to dwarves or humans, because in the back of their minds they're expecting to have many decades ahead of them to slowly let that information percolate. On the other hand, with Frieren being the only elf we've met so far, it kind of seems like this is actually just her. Like, why hasn't she returned to her own homeland in all this time? Could it be that her self-absorption and coldness make her just as much of an outsider among her own species as she is among humans, and staying in human lands makes it easier for her to pretend she's "normal" for an elf?
The second option would be interesting. It would take something away from the premise of the story, which would be unfortunate, but it would also be interesting in a different way.
The next little arc, from which the episode takes its name, starts with Frieren and Fern having a sparring session on their way to a village Frieren once passed through with her adventuring party eighty years ago. Frieren is drilling Fern in the precise usage of defensive spells, how to time them to deflect incoming attacks with a minimum of mana expenditure.
This isn't a coincidence. As Frieren explains, the village they're about to visit was the site of her party's battle against the Dark Sage Qual, one of the demon king's most fearsome lieutenants. Qual was, in addition to whatever powers a demon normally has, a brilliant magician who rose to his status largely on account of the powerful destructive spells he invented. At the time, the party was unable to slay Qual, but only temporarily seal him away in the form of a stone statue. The wards keeping him petrified are weakening now, and Frieren intends to do a controlled release and then deal with him immediately and permanently, rather than letting him escape on his own time and slip away to cause trouble again. Apparently, Frieren thinks she can actually kill him this time.
Looks like I was right about Frieren's style of aventuring. Long periods of low-key milk runs, punctuated by occasional, insanely dangerous battles against very powerful monsters. Her reluctance to bring Fern along before was indeed justified, and even now she's nervous about bringing her into this kind of battle without making her grind her defensive skills first.
The villagers - one of whom was just barely old enough to remember Frieren from her last time through and is just barely young enough to not be dead yet - were hoping she would come soon. Apparently, Himmel came back to check on them and their petrified neighbor every couple of years or so until his death, and he told them that it would have to be Frieren who eventually resolved the situation.
He wasn't happy that Frieren herself never came back in any of that time, but he assured the locals that she would do so when they needed her, so don't worry. Frieren's reaction to being told about this is about as mixed as you would expect.
So, the two of them approach their second statue-in-the-woods in as many episodes. This one is a lot bigger and more intimidating, though. And also comes back to life when Frieren removes the dying wards.
Qual isn't happy to learn about the events of the last eight decades, and makes his best effort at avenging his fallen liege. During the demon war, Qual was most dreaded because of one particular spell of his invention; a blast of energy that could bypass any defensive charm, vaporize any magical armor or shields, and slay the mortal behind them in the blink of an eye.
Fern deflects it easily with the basic shield spell that Frieren was drilling her on. And then Frieren shoots Qual's own superattack right back at him. Said superattack being the exact same energy blast spell that we saw Fern practicing with during her training montage in the pilot.
Qual's spellbooks were among the many that the heroes looted from the demon king's palace. Over the decades since then, his superattack was reverse engineered and proliferated to the point that it is now considered the go-to offensive spell for any wizard worthy of the name. Likewise, studying the spell enabled the invention of a defensive shield that can actually block it, which resulted in that counterspell now being considere the basic go-to wizard defence. Qual is no longer an outside context problem, but rather just a normal warmage like the ones every kingdom can field a unit of.
Given time, he could possibly use the same genius that already revolutionized the field of war magic once to do so once again. Which is why he is not going to be given that time.
It might not have the "magitech" aesthetic, but just with this one side adventure Frieren: Beyond Journey's End has done a better job of analogizing magic to technology than the vast majority of fantasy settings that attempt it.
It shows how the passage of time - even small units of time by an immortal's standards - can be very important, and demonstrates that Frieren is aware of this. Elves might not be as acutely aware of it as shorter lived entities, but still, they pay enough attention to this type of thing to keep up.
Less obviously, there are also implications here about why the demon invasion was a failure. Qual's attack spell is apparently simple enough in theory that even an apprentice wizard is expected to learn it. And yet, he was the only demon who could cast it. Why would that be? Presumably, for the same reason the demons also didn't have the (apparently equally simple) defence against that spell; their society was harshly competitive, and incentivized each individual to hoard knowledge and power instead of sharing it. Making the demon army as a whole weaker than the sum of its parts.
Episode 4, "The Land Where Souls Rest," follows the same two-in-one format as its predecessor, only in this case the more-intense second arc ends up being much more important to the story as a whole. In fact, it marks the point where the prologue ends and what seems to be the main plot of the show begins.
The first story has Frieren and Fern visiting a beach town whose bay has filled up with shipwrecks and other debris brought in by the current. This was always an issue for the locals, but recent socioeconomics have seen the town's population shrink significantly, and the lack of manpower to keep the bay clear has caused the mess to build up. Fern knows that there's something up again when Frieren accepts the job even though the payment - ostensibly a grimoire penned by a legendary mage - is an obvious forgery. Apparently, there are a million fake spellbooks purported to be by that wizard floating around, courtesy of many centuries' worth of scam artists, and this one is a typical specimen. When Fern calls her on this, Frieren simply says that she's doing this for herself, not for payment.
The work takes them a couple of months. During which time Frieren's mental health seems to take a nosedive. She always had trouble waking up early and keeping whatever place they're currently staying at tidy, but Frieren starts sleeping absolutely horribly and barely taking care of herself at all. To the point where her teenaged apprentice starts to feel like her mother.
It comes out when Frieren expresses relief that they'll have their work finished before the New Year's festival. Apparently, there's a local ritual that involves watching the first sunrise of the new year over the seashore, and the bay full of ship hulks had been ruining this. And, as I'm sure you've all predicted by now, Frieren has been here before. During a new year, in fact. The other three party members all went to watch the sunrise with the locals. Frieren, who had never been a morning person, refused, insisting that it's just a sunrise, and she'll always be able to do it later sometime if she feels the urge.
She's been practicing trying to control her sleep this whole time. The night before the new year's dawn, Frieren stays up the entire night, and needs Fern to help her stumble the way to the seashore just before dawn.
She thanks Fern for helping her, and for being so understanding in general. In the end, it was just a boring normal sunrise after all, but seeing how happy it made Fern to watch it makes Frieren happy too. She just wishes she could have experienced that vicarious joy through her previous set of companions.
That decade of adventuring seems to have really effected Frieren, despite her obliviousness to it when they parted ways. Maybe this emotional turmoil is something she only developed over the decades since Himmel's death, but I don't think that it can just be that.
The next minisode brings the duo back in contact with the member of Frieren's old power who we've seen the least of, and the only one besides her to still be alive. Eisen the dwarf warrior has come to the ruins of Hieter the priest's village on the first anniversary of his own, much more recent, death. Apparently the town was destroyed in the opening stages of the demon invasion, which may or may not recontextualize Hieter's chronic drinking problem a bit.
Also, despite his fighting days being behind him, Eisen is still in armor and helm. I guess these dwarves are of the Discworld variety.
Frieren and Fern meet the dwarf there, and after paying their respects to Hieter and his family, they get down to business. That ancient wizard whose fake spellbook she was given before - Flamme, probably named after the real life Nicholas Flamel - may have actually hidden a real spellbook somewhere around this region. While Frieren has (once again) been here before, she was here a much longer time ago, long before Hieter was even born. With the notes that Eisen was able to recover (most of which had been gathered by Hieter over the course of his life), they might have a shot at finding this ancient stash. However, the search will take a while.
Fern looks outraged when the length of the project is brought up, but then starts actually crying when Frieren tells Eisen that she didn't think Fern would appreciate having to spend that time. Having your short lifespan treated casually by your immortal teacher is one thing. Realizing your mortality is holding the teacher back from doing what she wants to do, and that you're burdening her with your presence after all, is apparently even worse.
The search ends up taking much, much less time than expected, though. Frieren is able to supply some navigational information of her own that Eisen did not have access to. And, once they find an ancient tree that turns out to have a remarkable strong anti-divination ward on it, we learn why that is.
Nearly a thousand years ago, when Frieren was a very young elf, she learned magic from a not-yet-famous human by the name of Flamme. In fact, Frieren the apprentice was present when her mistress planted this very tree, not knowing that Flamme planned to hide something under it.
Also, Flamme - at least at the time Frieren was apprenticed to her - was smoking.
The tree opens itself up for Frieren, revealing a preserved, root-encrusted version of the little hut that she and Flamme spent some time in, and which the tree had been planted right next to. In that hut, they find the book.
Earlier on, there was a brief flashback to Frieren's demon-hunting adventure, when she and her companions discussed the possibility of life after death. Apparently, in ancient times, most people believed that there was no afterlife. The dwarves, with their hidebound traditional ways, still believe that to this day. However, something happened in the last millennium or so that changed the human (and possibly elven? not sure) consensus on this.
That something was, apparently, a set of rumors that eventually became codified into religious beliefs. Rumors concerning the exploits of a mighty sorceress who was said to have spoken with the dead. The book Flamme left here still doesn't provide any tangible evidence, but it does contain her own insistence, written in her own hand, that she really did discover the afterlife.
More importantly, it also contains instructions for reaching the location she was able to contact Aureole from.
...
Aureole probably comes from auric, or "golden." Looks like we're paying at least a little bit of homage to Nicholas Flamel with his philosopher's stone obsession after all, heh.
...
The land she achieved this feat at was located at the very northernmost tip of the continent. Very close, in fact, to the demonic castle where Frieren, Himmel, Eisen, and Hieter fought the campaign's final boss. That's probably not a coincidence; if you can see into heaven from that bit of frozen shoreline, maybe there's also a portal to hell there.
The journey to the far north isn't nearly as dangerous as it used to be on account of there not being a demon army anymore, but it's still dangerous. It's a long journey across ever-harsher terrain, and there are other monsters - some of them quite powerful in their own right - that inhabit those badlands.
Eisen is too old for such a journey. Frieren isn't, though, and she definitely has people she'd like to be able to talk to again. As for Fern, well. She's not even really finished grieving for Hieter yet, and the battle with Qual proves that she can handle herself against monsters at least decently well at this point.
So, the plot finally kicks off. Frieren's anxieties about mortality, immortality, and what they should mean to her gives her no choice but to return to the distant north. It may take years of Fern's much shorter stay in the world of the living, but I mean...even if she wasn't missing her foster father, this is the kind of commitment that any aspiring wizard who wants to leave a mark on the world would be eager to make.
Unsurprisingly, the next episode - "Phantoms of the Dead" - unveils the series' second intro sequence. Or rather, it unveils the second half of the existing one, which had been cut short in the first four episodes. The second half is less visually experimental than the first, and more typically shonenesque. It does have some tantalizing imagery though. Like this:
At first I thought this might be the demon king who the heroes defeated, with "king" being one of those weird gendered translations that sometimes happen to Japanese media during localization. I don't think the demon king would have a throne room full of books, though, so this sinister-looking elf child must be someone else.
Also Flamme keeps looking like the person I want to be and the person I want to be with, in equal measures:
Ancient alchemist thirst traps aside though, the "more traditionally shonenesque" element turns out to be a harbinger of the episode to come. I hope the rest of the series won't be all like this. Not that this episode is BAD, per se, but it's just much, much more typical of a fantasy adventure anime than the previous material, and less memorable for that.
Frieren and Fern's journey north takes them through a mountain pass that has recently been said to be haunted. An unusually high number of travellers who head through the pass have failed to emerge from the tree cover again, and some of those who have made it through claimed to see the ghosts of dead loved ones floating through the fog. For Fern, who remembers one of her last conversations with Hieter in which he promised he'd come back to benevolently haunt her if she was a good enough girl, is intrigued. Frieren, who knows that every single ghost sighting in history has turned out to be a fake, suspects that a very different type of spirit might be at work here. She once fought an einsam, a malevolent wraithlike entity that uses telepathy and illusions to lure travellers astray using the images of their desires and then eats them, and to her this sounds a lot like another einsam that's figured out a good hunting strategy.
And, well. Frieren is right. Also as she predicted, it's very hard to strike at a very convincing illusion of your dead loved ones, even if you know that they're a fake. Fern freezes up when a ghostly Hieter appears in front of her and tells her she's been a good enough girl for him to make good on his promise. Frieren sees a ghostly Himmel, and disintegrates it with zero hesitation. Breaking one part of the illusion also breaks the rest of it, so the Hieter ghost and the spooky fog and darkness that made the woods look more convincingly haunted are both dispelled too.
The huge, chain-laden einsan, now revealed, doesn't survive the next volley of attack spells.
There are a couple of interesting details in the way Frieren reacts and relates to the illusions. First, seeing the ghostly Himmel makes her realize that she's really changed as a person over the last century, because this is NOT anything remotely like what the last einsan she fought showed her. She seems to be pleased by this discovery.
I'm starting to think she was in unrequited love with Himmel. He, much moreso than any of the others, seems to have been on her mind for the entire time since. His compliments were what made her want to collect more spells. Appealing to his legacy has proven the most reliable way to get Frieren to do what someone wants. The brevity of time they spent together might have made Frieren unwilling to acknowledge it. Or maybe elves just have "little crushes" that last this long all the time and don't think much of them.
The other detail is that while the Hieter-illusion is congratulating Fern on her good and virtuous life that enabled him to come back and see her, the Himmel-illusion just smiles at Frieren and says "Come on, blast me." Because apparently that's the only plausible thing for him to say in such a situation. It just really, really wasn't the einsan's lucky day, heh.
Also, "einsen" is way too similar to "Eisen." I did a double take the first two or three times the monster's name was spoken. Bad move, story.
The next random encounter is a more challenging one.
The dragon is asleep. However, its nest of plundered magic items is in view, and Frieren really wants to get her hands on some of the spellbooks poking out of the hoard. At her insistence, Fern helps her try and kill the dragon in its sleep, but its armor is apparently much more magic-resistent than even the experienced Frieren bargained for. Escaping the awoken dragon ends up being a very near thing. The closest that Frieren has come to dying in decades, and the closest that Fern has ever come to dying.
Still, while Fern is unwilling to keep trying to poke at the monster, Frieren thinks they should be able to deal with it if they get a bigger party with a more balanced composition. As luck would have it, there's a village not far out of their way where a great warrior named Stark resides. Before they set out, Eisen told them that he trained Stark, and that he might make a good addition to their party if they can convince him to come along. So, it's time to go recruit him and use this dragon-hunt as a practical job interview.
See what I mean about this episode feeling like it could come from any better-written-than-average DnD inspired anime? Yeah. Like I said, I hope the entire show from this point on doesn't just become that. It really seemed like it was doing something unique before.
There's still two and a third episodes left to go. I'll cover them, along with my final comments, in the next post.
