Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

I feel so catered to. It feels like an eternity since I've been given such a phenomenal anime with a well thought out plot, great art and animation to accompany it, emotional thought provoking moments... more than that, it feels so mature in that it doesn't baby me with your typical anime tropes. No obnoxiously screaming kid protags, no overly ecchi scenes meant purely for fanservice, no moments where I have to groan and just deal with whatever stupidity is put before me-- Just a fun and emotional journey that is pure story and human feelings. I'm not going to go into too incredible detail, but ifyou're a fan of fantasy and pure story elements, this is the anime for you. It focuses on the after story of Frieren, who has already well and finished her main quest to defeat the demon lord that plagued their lands. We join her at the end, celebrating the accomplishments of her and the party she traveled with. Time passing ever so swiftly as her party aged while she does not as an elf. She's always known that she will easily outage everyone surrounding her and did not think twice of how she spent her time in those many years till next they met. And then she had to come to face with reality-- The hero she'd traveled with would die. Her compatriots would surely soon follow. Uncaring as she was before, she now realizes just how much she should have bothered to care. Thus does she go on a journey to find herself and to meet up with the others in their older ages. Thus does she take on an apprentice and decide to try and reunite with the hero waiting where they last felled the demon king. What anyone may appreciate most will go into just how well these characters are written. Especially the women! Rarely have I seen a well written woman character that I could fall in love with... and I had just about given up hope in such a male protagonist dominated field. You'll come to appreciate that they're their own characters, with their own thoughts and emotions, with varying personalities and things that get to them in a very human way. Sometimes our emotions don't make sense and occasionally you'll see these characters on their bad days, acting out of sorts and it's interesting to see. Everything from the art, to animation, to music, to details... all of it is wonderful on the eyes and ears. When the going gets tough and the fights begin, the battle choreography is just so gorgeous to watch. So much detail and weight goes into everyone's movement. I think my only possible gripe could be that sometimes the characters can come off as a little stiff, their faces of emotion not as exaggerated when it comes to anime standards. Maybe that's a good thing and we're too accustomed to over the top facial expressions after all this time-- but occasionally, one wonders if it's not just a little too lifeless at times. Other than that nitpick though, I can't help but recommend this anime to all of my friends and share in all its glory! My group of friends were particularly entranced and just so pleased to have a more adult show that felt appropriate for our older age. Just don't go into this expecting it to be fast and getting into this for that quick hit of awesome epic moments. This is a slow ride and an enjoyable one as it builds its world and relationships at a relaxing pace.

If you don't understand the complex characters that elves are, then don't write a story about an elf protagonist. People, There's a reason why elves are portrayed as cold creatures devoid of emotions and empathy, it's because they've been around for hundreds to thousands of years. So while humans are slaves to their emotions which often compromises their decision making, elves on the other hand have lived for so long and have so much experience that they are able to see the bigger picture and remain objective no matter how seemingly cruel the situation requires them to be. Think of Avallac'h in the Witcher 3 for instance. Frierenis a THOUSAND YEAR OLD ELF (estimates have her at around 1400-1500 years). Just to put things into perspective that's the equivalent of 14 full human lives at the very least. Think about how much you managed to do in the past 10 years of your life, now multiply that by 100 and maybe you start comprehending the scale we're talking about here. She's not a teenage girl who has just left her parents' house and is starting to discover the world around her for the first time. And yet that's precisely what the author wants you to believe. It's as though Frieren's time with Flamme, her decade-long adventure with the hero's party as well as the thousand years in between were all absolutely insignificant. During that time she gained no wisdom, learned nothing about humans, felt no emotions and didn't care about anyone or anything except for learning about magic. But when the anime starts, she does in the space of A FEW MONTHS what she failed to do throughout all her life! Can people really not see how utterly absurd this is? Himmel on the other hand is a teenager but somehow he's wiser than the wisest elf. He knows exactly what to say especially to Frieren, he can do no wrong and does exactly what he's supposed to do every...single...time. Of course Frieren never noticed any of that during the decade they spent together, nor the fifty years afterwards, that would've made too much sense. Instead she noticed only after he died because that's when the anime begins of course, and set out on a journey to revisit all the places the party visited during their quest to defeat the Demon king. Hence the title. The premise looked very promising at first, and the first few episodes were enjoyable. Sadly, what followed was a repetition of the same formula over and over again AD NAUSEAM: we visit a location, flashback to when the hero's party visited that same location, Himmel displays his all-knowing wisdom, Heiter is drunk, Fern pouts, Stark tries to cheer her up, and Frieren discovers something so basic about life that we wonder what she was doing the first 1500 years of her life. Visuals are pretty good, animations are fine, and the sound track is forgettable. But if you think that such an anime is anywhere near worthy of being hailed as the best anime of all time then I have lost faith in this community. I can overlook the plot holes and the inconsistencies which I haven't even bothered addressing because, well, there's a much more serious issue at hand. The author doesn't understand basic concepts on which their whole story was based, and instead of being reprimanded they have been rewarded. Do better guys, much better.

Get this garbage out of #1. It is embarrassing for us as a community. This medium contains the highest of possible art, the deepest and most meaningful of story; yet this show is not amongst that. This is a sloppy collection of annoying characters and intentionally mundane meaningless plot lines. The vibes are not cozy, the moments are not wholesome, and the show is not good. I will not be holding back at all with this review and I will be holding this show to the highest possible standard. If it Is truly the best show it should hold up against the highest level ofcriticism. I will start with the positives. Freeren is number one amongst all anime in one aspect. The first outro of Freeren is the greatest anime outro I have ever seen. It is absolutely gorgeous and compliments the show perfectly. For a show that is supposed to focus on the stuff in between the action, the action is pretty much the only enjoyable part, and a lot of it is quite good. There are two arcs of the story that I found generally quite enjoyable. These are between episode 7 and 10, and between episode 18 and 21. This series contains one episode that I would consider to be really good, that being episode 9. This episode features two very high quality fights that have multiple points where I found myself rewinding to rewatch sections of the animation because they were so well done, which is something I do not do very often. I do not mind the characters Fern and Shtark. I enjoyed many of the moments that these characters shared, And will admit that some of these moments could even be considered mildly wholesome, although I do not take back my previous statement. I also didn't mind a couple of the Mages they added during the Mage exam. Many of the monsters and demons have great designs, and many of the landscapes and settings looked quite nice. There are a few high quality moments of small intricate dingdongmenship relating to ideas such as memories and flowers. Now onto the negatives. If something is to be considered the greatest show, I would say a reasonable minimum requirement is that it doesn't contain any mistakes. This is not a standard that Freeren meets, There are many objective writing errors in the show. This is not my opinion, this is A fact about the show. None of them that I was easily able to catch were that significant or seriously affected the show, yet they are still there. For example I will break one down in detail so you can understand what I am saying. In episode 15 there is a quick flashback where Freeren Is caught by a mimic right in front of Fern. Although it is not directly shown, This scene logically requires that one of the two following options has happened. Option one is that Fern gets Freeren out of the mimic, requiring that Fern learns how you get someone out of a mimic. Option two is that Freeren gets out of the mimic herself, Requiring that Fern learns What happens to Freeren’s hair when she gets herself out of a mimic. By episode 15, Fern is required to have learned a minimum of one of those two pieces of information. In episode 23 there is another scene, in the present, of Freeren getting caught in a mimic, In this scene Fern reveals that she does not know how to get someone out of a mimic, as she has to be told by Freeren how to do it. Fern then immediately reveals that she also does not know what happens to Freeren’s hair when she gets herself out of a mimic, as Fern has the aha moment of “So that's why sometimes you show up with a completely different hairstyle.” It is impossible for Fern to be learning both of those pieces of information at that point in the story, yet this is what the scene is. If one was to intake extreme quantities of copium, A scenario could technically be invented where During the events of the original flashback Fern was separated from Freeren while she was still in the mimic, and then Freeren Gets out of the mimic by herself, and they remain separated for long enough for Freeren’s hair to go back to normal. Yet this scenario of course requires a pretty extreme assumption, along with the assumption that on their previous Journeys Freeren was only caught by a mimic that one time in front of Fern, as well as this Behavior requiring a pretty significant bad-girlesk break of Character for Fern. Thus this is an objective writing error. Again this small little detail does not really affect the story in any meaningful way, but in my opinion something that is considered the best should not contain errors like this. Two more examples of Inconsistencies. Once they enter the northern lands it is the beginning of winter, and it begins to snow, and thus they find a cabin to stay in, they then stay in this cabin for 6 months to wait out the winter. At the end of this sixth month period, at the beginning of Summer, it is still snowy all around them. The next scene, presumably happening in the middle of summer, is them getting caught in another blizzard and having to find shelter again. (Freeren during this time also reveals that she does not know any spell that produces any type of heat, fire spells do exist yet she does not know a single one.) They could have justified this scene by simply saying something along the lines of, they're traveling through the mountains now, so the weather is like this even in the middle of summer, and if it was winter then it would be 20 ft of snow or something. But they don't do this, it doesn't explain, it just gives us the characters stuck in a blizzard in the middle of summer and expects us to figure out why. It feels like they were so obsessed with having time pass that they forgot to have time actually pass. Early on in the show there is a section where Freeren and Fern decide to clean a massive beach for a fake book. We are then treated to a couple of scenes where Freeren, the most powerful Mage in the world, is picking up 10 little pieces of wood at a time. It then clarifies that Freeren and Fern stay here and are cleaning this beach for 3 months, meaning that both of these Mages have spent a minimum of 3 months exclusively training their floating magic ability. Later on in the show it attempts to justify why Freeren was only capable of picking up small quantities of wood at a time, by saying that no one other than demons and monsters had the ability to fly or float until very recently. (And although spells being made recently is an advantage for things such as zoltrock derived spells it's not for floating Magic.) And even though we know they spent months exclusively training this ability they are barely able to actually use it when they need to. And at the end we see an elf using floating Magic 1,000 years before the events of the story, which from my understanding is not a monster or a demon. It's just sloppy, weird little inconsistencies like this shouldn't exist in the best show ever. Now onto the character of Freeren. I do not like this character. First of all this character is an elf, and elves live a long time. She is very proud of this aspect of her existence, and she will bring up how old she is and brag about it every chance that she gets. Yet at the same time if anyone else brings up how old she is she gets insecure about it. She is extremely selfish and narcissistic most of the time, but then sometimes decides to be absurdly generous. At the funeral for her friend, She begins to cry, and she clarifies that the reason she is crying is not for them, but because she feels bad for herself because she didn't get to know him as well as she would have liked. This is the same friend that she had spent the last 50 years ignoring for no reason other than she was too distracted in pursuit of her own personal Joy. If time is truly that abundant for her it would have been no issue for her to send a couple of letters back and forth, at the absolute minimum at least once every couple years but she couldn't even manage that. It only takes 10 years to make it across the planet, so she was likely in his vicinity a couple of times assuming that she was just wandering around the southern lands. This strange feeling of guilt is the thing that inspires this whole story, Yet she is fully responsible for how she feels. If she had just acted like a normal person She wouldn't have this issue in the first place. She has had hundreds of years to learn how to act mature and she still doesn't. It also doesn't make sense why she is having these feelings in the first place, As there is only one person that she has ever known better than Himll, this being her master. Meaning that in comparison to pretty much everyone she has ever known she knew him very well. And she is making the judgement that she didn't know him very well based off of a singular slightly deeper relationship that she had 1,000 years earlier. It is impossible to have any sympathy for Freeren, in her 1,000 years on that planet she should have learned how to have/be a friend, And it never gives any reason as to why she is so closed off to everyone. Just the fact that she is old and from some perspectives it doesn't matter as much, Doesn't work to explain it very well. I think that the character is pretty annoying as well, I usually like characters that are annoying, but not like this. The way that she acts around grimoires is so contradictory to the way she acts around everything else that it feels like she is breaking character and doesn't feel like some natural quirk. It feels like an excuse that is employed to get this character to do anything, as without it the character wouldn't be willing to do anything. Any good character is flawed, as this is how a character develops, they have a flaw at the beginning and have character development by changing. Yet, at the end of this series there's a scene where an old lady drops her basket of goods onto the ground right in front of Freeren, It would take Freeren essentially no effort at all to help out this old lady, The show clarifies that in this moment the thought to help this old lady crosses her mind, and it shows her actively making the decision to not help. In the final episode of this series it clarifies that Freeren Has not had any meaningful character development, and is just as selfish as ever. Yes, she now has a regret, but she is still acting the same way that caused her to gain that regret in the first place. I would assume that eventually in this story she probably learns to have a heart in some way, to act with a little bit of humanity, but that didn't happen in this series, so this is my interpretation of the character. I believe there is a place and time for Slice of Life anime. But that place is not number one, and that time is not all time. I am clearly not whoever this show is meant for. Slice of Life is not really the type of story that appeals to me, I view it as a valid part of what anime has to offer, yet I do not believe it is where anime truly shines. I went into this story knowing that it was very unlikely I would view it as a masterpiece, I only expected a high quality fantasy story. And I still feel disappointed, it did not even deliver on that. There are so many more criticisms I could give But I feel that I have already said enough. I know somehow I am in the minority here, there is some sort of fundamental difference between what I enjoy and most people on this website enjoy, as was clearly indicated by how much respect people give to things such as Steins Gate. And even acknowledging all of this, I still believe that this show is not very good, The story is not well written, it is full of objective errors, The characters are annoying and not relatable, The ideas are not fun or interesting, And I genuinely do not recommend watching this show.

Frieren is an anime that I’ve been meaning to review for months, but I wanted to wait just a little bit for the emotions and hype to settle down. There’s a LOT to discuss when it comes to Frieren, but not all of it directly has to do with the anime itself. Firstly, I’m reviewing this on MAL and that means by necessity that I must address the elephant in the room. Frieren accomplished the unthinkable in unseating Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood from its highly controversial 15-year reign. Why was it controversial? Vote brigading my friends. It was artificially kept at number 1 by ahighly obsessive faction of MAL users and…it’s a long story. The first thing you need to know about MAL is that this site and its user base have always been incredibly image conscious to an obsessive and often downright comical degree. While MAL is Japanese owned, the early MAL userbase was overwhelmingly Americans and a lot of MAL’s culture was shaped by the perception of anime and anime fans in the United States in the 2000s. MAL users existed largely in isolation from the “offline anime community”. The people you meet at your local comic book shop buying battle shonen manga and monster girl ecchi or cosplaying at your local anime convention. In contrast, MAL has always aligned itself with the “Elitist” faction of the anime fandom who define themselves as the antithesis of the “weaboos” who formed the image of the Western anime fandom back in the 2000s. The weaboos were constantly getting dunked on back then and were widely perceived as pervy, horny, stupid, immature, manchildren. MAL users followed the lead of the European anime community on 4chan /a/ and desperately wished to be seen as well-cultured, sophisticated intellectuals who only appreciate a select few anime that have artistic value. With this kind of attitude and site culture being enforced, it was no surprise that Galactic Heroes rose to the top of early MAL. However, there was a problem. For there was another anime that began with a G. While the Americans and Europeans on early MAL would have been happy with Galactic Heroes staying on top, Japan and for some reason a huge chunk of the developing world happen to really, REALLY like a certain series called Gintama, which is famous for its irreverent, highly referential humor. The image obsessed elitists would be God Damned if they allowed “Japanese Family Guy” to become the highest rated anime on the site, so the first massive rating bombing and Great Fandom War began. This war threatened to tear MAL apart, but a new faction was forged in the fires of war: The Order of Brotherhood. A loosely organized group of MAL users decided in the forums that a 3rd anime should be deliberately upvoted to number 1 to keep both Galactic Heroes and Gintama from that spot. This anime should be a largely neutral, inoffensive work that presents a respectable face for the anime community but is still accessible and isn’t snobby enough to chase people away. The popular shonen Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood was chosen for this role. It would be like The Shawshank Redemption on old ass IMDB. It’s a peacekeeper title everyone basically at least likes. However, the Order of Brotherhood began to abuse their powers. Every single time a new anime briefly gained the number 1 spot, it was absolutely bombarded by 1 and 2 ratings until it was no longer a threat for the top spot. For 15 long years this happened. It got to be such a well-known meme that a youtuber asked his followers to get Interspecies Reviewers to number 1 just to mess with these guys and MAL had to completely change how it calculates ratings and how many anime you must watch before your opinion even counts. I think it’s at least 50 now. Throughout all this time, The Brotherhood firmly believed that they were keeping the peace and instilling order. Despite all their efforts, the downfall of the Brotherhood was inevitable simply because time doesn’t stop. While anime popularity in the US was in sharp decline in 2009, this is no longer the case in 2024. For most of the world, anime has never been more mainstream. Anime certainly still has a bit of a stigma in more rural parts of the US, but the image of the typical anime fan is no longer homogenous. A person’s first mental image of “anime fan” is just as likely to conjure up a famous athlete, rapper, or social media personality as it is the images in Filthy Frank’s “Weaboo Song”. If the anime fandom doesn’t have a huge image problem, there is no need for self-loathing, hyper self-conscious anime fans to gatekeep everything and bully others to try preventing the entire community from being bullied. Another factor is that the percentage of active MAL users who are American has dropped substantially over the last 15 years. The Brotherhood was and still is overwhelmingly composed of American users obsessed with image and “elitist vs weaboo” bullshit from a million years ago that doesn’t even apply to the anime experience and history of countries like India, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, China, Indonesia, etc. Random anime like Oshi no Ko were sneaking to number 1 more and more often and the effort it took to ratings nuke these newcomers back out of the top 50 kept increasing. Frieren just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. So…is Frieren actually the best anime of all time? Personally, I would say no. Not even close. However, there is some substance behind the hype. There is a reason the Frieren was able to unite the terminally online with offline casuals, liberals with conservatives, male viewers and female viewers, and Japanese otaku with the rest of the world. Frieren has many aspects that it does remarkably well. Before we even talk about the characters and plot and all that stuff, let’s look at some of the technical aspects. Frieren is a GORGEOUS anime that represents a triumphant return for Studio Madhouse as the king of quality anime. A title which had been slipping from them over the last few years. Frieren is also the 2nd mega hit in a row for young director Keiichirou Saitoh following up on his incredibly well received debut: Bocchi the Rock. He is only 31 years old and is now one of the most in-demand directors in the entire anime industry! Every scene in Frieren is not only visually appealing and directed in a way that squeezes every bit of emotion it can get from the source material, but it also has the confidence to pace itself as if it’s going to run for 6 seasons. Even though that’s far from guaranteed in the anime industry. Fortunately for Frieren, its Japanese merchandise and figurine sales are quite strong and further seasons seem like a safe bet. It is always tragic when you get a Promised Neverland situation where the director poured their heart out and they either get cut off completely or given WAY too few episodes to wrap up the story all because Japanese consumers didn’t buy enough dakimakura and didn’t care as much as the gaijin so the studio fucks it over! Frieren’s soundtrack was outsourced to an American composer named Evan Call and it sounds much closer to a Hollywood mega film than a shonen anime. Have you ever actually bought an anime soundtrack? There’s the main theme, the battle theme, and a few main character themes that you can instantly recognize and are REALLY good compositions. Then you get to the comic relief scenes and it’s like listening to a cat walking on a synthesizer and farting up a storm. Kaoru Wada is especially guilty of this. The Inuyasha soundtrack for example has some BEAUTIFUL tracks and then some of the worst auditory vomit you’ve ever heard in your fucking life. The vast majority of anime soundtracks have always been like this. There are one in a million exceptions like Cowboy Bebop, but music was a major theme of that anime. You’re not going to get a seasonal fantasy anime where the OST sounds like the LOTR movies and every single track in every single scene is good. However, Frieren is actually able to accomplish just that! So Frieren is gorgeous, has an amazing OST, and is super well directed. So what? How is the world building? This is a shonen that deals with magic, so how is the magic system? This is once again an area where Frieren triumphs. Frieren is very happy to take a pause and explain minor aspects of its world and history but never in a way that bores the viewer. It gives enough details to keep us engaged but there is still a LOT that we want to learn. As for the battle system, some characters in Frieren have a higher base level of mana and can cast bigger and flashier spells, but it avoids the vertical power scaling pitfalls of previous shonen titles. Frieren is very strong, but she’s not invincible. Someone with a lower level of overall mana but the right spell at the right time could easily kill Frieren. This isn’t a series where strategy just goes out the window and it’s all about who has a bigger number. Frieren also manages to avoid one of the huge traps of bad fantasy writing where one spell is SO much better than anything else, that it ruins the magic system and makes everything else essentially irrelevant, so all battles end up looking the exact same. Stuff like fireball in the original D&D, Balefire in Wheel of Time or the Avada Kedavra in Harry Potter. Frieren actually pokes fun at this while adding to its own recurring theme about the passage of time. You have this super arrogant demon who has been frozen in stone for 50 years. He developed this killing curse that’s similar in essence to the Avada and he absolutely decimated the wizard population of 50 years ago so temporarily sealing him was the best they could do. He gets utterly humbled by an apprentice mage because his world beating spell became the new standard by which all offensive magic is judged and all defensive magic was developed against, so after 50 years it’s very average instead of remarkable. This tends to be how real-life weapon advances work and describes the relationship between armor and weapons development. In terms of characters, Frieren once again does a good job. The anime hops back and forth through time between the current day, Frieren’s adventure party from over 50 years ago, and Frieren’s time with her teacher around 1000 years ago. In each time period, we see little ways in which Frieren has developed as a character and been impacted by those around her that she grows to care about. While Frieren gets the most development and character investment, Fern, Stark, and others are also allowed plenty of room to grow. Having said this, Frieren is still a shonen and once you reach the first tournament arc…yes course there’s a fucking tournament arc…you do get some characters that are less impressive. For example, we get this grumpy, middle aged bastard named Richter who not only is willing to kill 2 teenage girls to pass his wizard exam, but he goes out of his way against the orders of his superior to try do so and seems to revel in it. Then this sadistic and murderous aspect of his personality is just kind of dropped and is never mentioned again. Another wizard is a murderous psychopath, but this is largely played off as a joke and her personality never really evolves much beyond “lol, what a psycho bitch!” The demons are also kind of boring and shitty antagonists, but they’ll get their paragraph later. Don’t you worry! Frieren is a shonen in terms of its core demographic and it uses several of the familiar trappings of popular shonen manga, but also a deliberately slower pacing in order to place just as much focus on its themes as it places on kickass fights. Frieren at the end of the day is a series about mortality and the bonds we form with other people. Even if we’re not immortal like Frieren, we all know a grandparent, a friend, or someone else who passed away and we would do anything to have spent more time with that person. We care deeply about the people that we love and recognize on an intellectual level that we only have a very finite, precious time to spend with those people, yet it’s still so easy to take our time on Earth for granted and neglect our personal relationships. Frieren captures a fundamental human struggle that’s both universal and powerful. When it’s at its best, Frieren is an emotionally moving series that inspires us to live our lives better and not shut ourselves in. Sadly, we must now talk about the other controversy surrounding Frieren besides its unusually high MAL score. This controversy surrounds the demon race, who are the primary antagonists of the series. Frieren needed some kind of external conflict to add danger and keep things from getting too boring. So, the writer of the Frieren manga took the easy route and created a generically evil fantasy race that wants to wipe out or enslave all the other sentient species and must be stopped at all costs. However, this evil species isn’t like the goblins from Goblin Slayer. Those little bastards are a semi-sentient walking virus who can’t even naturally reproduce on their own without raping the females of other species and murdering the male population. They are simply a fantasy disease. Frieren’s demon race are a civilized, intelligent, fully sentient race who are simply evil and must we wiped out. Who cares? They’re literally demons, right? Well…sort of. They’re not demons in a Christian sense. They’re a naturally occurring, sentient species of humanoids with a slightly higher base level of magic who all just happen to be jerks and normal humans refer to them as demons. Unlike Warhammer demons and other Christian inspired demons, they don’t literally come from Hell. If you kill a Frieren demon, they die permanently with no afterlife. If you kill a Warhammer demon or any Christian inspired demon, they just kind of go back to Hell. The demons in Frieren have no interest in corrupting Humanity or deceiving humans into doing horrible things. They trick other species like Elves, humans, and dwarves into feeling sorry for them or giving them a chance before immediately betraying and kill them. Then the demons cry crocodile tears when they finally get what they deserve. The concept of an innately evil species that needs to be wiped out is one that fantasy has largely been trying to leave behind for about 40 years now. Tolkien is sometimes credited as the architect of this trope, but with him it comes from a very different place. Tolkien’s writing is always heavily influenced by his devout Catholicism. The orcs, trolls, and Easterlings aren’t evil because God made them that way. The God of Tolkien’s universe known as Eru Iluvatar didn’t create any being specifically to be evil, let alone an entire species. Tolkien’s equivalent of the Devil was jealous of God’s creations, so he took stuff that Iluvatar created and made his own warped mockeries of those things. However, even the Orcs in Tolkien’s belief are not entirely beyond redemption since they still retain the gift of language, which shows that part of their original souls are intact. Frieren is entirely secular in its morality and advocates a genocidal solution purely based on what seems to be rational. “There are no women and children. Get it through your head. These are mere animals who imitate human forms. They convince the whole world to feel sorry for them and each and every time it’s just a trick so they can attack us again the moment our guard is down. The solution is obvious. We should just kill them all!” While this quote is very close to one spoken by our favorite Elf Waifu, a quote that the series does EVERYTHING to perfectly validate her on, this isn’t actually a Frieren quote. This is a quote from some random old lady that got interviewed by CNN last month. The language that Frieren uses casually and without much thought by the mangaka is used almost word for word to advocate genocide in real life. It’s not just bad timing and bad luck that Frieren was released when it was. There is no time period where this aspect of the series’ writing would have been praiseworthy. Frieren in regards to this sub-plot engages in writing so lazy and so regressive that it stumbles into uncomfortable territory. Imagine for a second if you would that some political party in some country was actively planning a campaign of genocide or ethnic cleansing. However, they know that such actions are no longer seen as acceptable in any circumstances by an overwhelming margin of society. So…they decided to finance an addictive and popular show that (while not being the focus of course) subtly promotes genocide in a rational light and tries to shift the thinking of young audiences. This isn’t what happened of course, I already said that Frieren’s case is one of criminal laziness. However, that show would look EXACTLY like Frieren and that’s not a good thing. Overall, I’m giving this series an 8 for now…but it would be more accurate that I’m giving it an I for Incomplete. I think Frieren promises to be a strong franchise and has all the potential in the world if it can avoid shooting itself in the foot. However, I wouldn’t have written that lengthy previous paragraph if Frieren was safe from monumental errors of judgment. The series could very well turn out to be a disaster that I will be embarrassed that I ever enjoyed. Or it could be absolutely amazing, and we will all just kind of forget some of the less ideal aspects of S1. The future of Frieren has not yet been written. Most of my offline buddies haven’t seen Frieren and don’t want to watch Frieren. To be honest, I’ll probably hold off shoving it down their throats until I get a better grasp on which way this franchise is headed.