I wrote recently about my shameful anime backlog situation. To keep myself accountable, I thought it would be good to document what I finish within a reasonable amount of time. This is the first of those.
I have a real issue with finishing the anime I start, which as I’ve mentioned previously has more to do with how and when I’m watching it than the actual quality of the series. With Frieren in particular, I watched the first half of the first season pretty readily (which, looking back, was a miracle considering that I’d just had a baby a couple months prior to when the broadcast started and just wasn’t really in my right mind due to broken sleep and such). I caught up at the midpoint and, unlike previously when it was easy for me to watch a bunch of anime from week-to-week, I lost my momentum and had to prioritize other more pressing matters.
This was always a small point of shame to me; I really enjoyed what I’d already watched, so why couldn’t I just sit down and finish the first season? I think a big part of why it wasn’t that simple and the main reason why a lot of my hobbies suffered at that time was that I’d gone from having some decent coping mechanisms for my lack of executive function (a life-long issue) to suddenly suffering from having both my guts and my neurons rearranged through the experience of pregnancy. My priorities were different and my ability to focus had really changed as well. A lot of my mental energy was being spent caring for my little one and making sure his needs were met, and so most everything else fell to the wayside.
Now, my “new normal” has just become “normal” and while my old coping mechanisms are sitting on the cutting room floor somewhere, I’ve managed to develop new ones and carve out enough “me” time to get back to anime. I actually returned to Frieren some weeks prior to my post about my backlog because I wanted to finish the second season prior to attending Anime Detour (an anime convention where I’m a staffer), so admittedly the framing here is a bit disingenuous since I’d already finished it before writing the post. Hopefully no one reading will be too disillusioned about that.
I’m sure for most of you out there I don’t need to go into great detail about the plot framing of Frieren, but for the benefit of the few souls out there who have yet to encounter it, it’s the story of an elf named Frieren who was the mage in the party of heroes who defeated the Demon King. Being very long-lived as most elves are, following their victory she peaced-out for half a century to do her own thing. Once meeting up with her party again, she finds that they’ve become elderly (in particular the two humans). Himmel, the charismatic hero, has now become an aged old man who passes away soon thereafter. It’s only after Himmel’s death that Frieren, who originally didn’t pay much mind to the lives of humans, realizes that she has unresolved feelings toward him and suddenly feels a sense of deep loss. In order to sit with these feelings and atone for the error of her ways (and eventually to address some of the reemerging demon threats) Frieren takes on an apprentice mage, Fern, who was orphaned and raised by Heiter (the priest from her party who soon also passes from old age) and gains a front-line fighter in Stark, the protege of Eisen, her fourth party member.
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that much of the series primarily involves Frieren, Fern, and Stark journeying around with the vague goal of heading Northward and performing odd jobs in order to maintain their simple lifestyle of seeing different places, meeting different people, and learning more about Himmel in retrospect through the ripple effect he seemed to have on the people he encountered. The characters do encounter danger from time-to-time; There are beasts roaming the world that pose real threats as well as an occasional demon interloper that manages to push the party members to their physical and magical limits. However, while the action moments are fun to watch, I find that the real meat of the series revolves around the smaller, quieter moments.
It feels a little strange for me to be adding praise on to a series as highly-rated as Frieren, because this is old news to most anime fans I know and it’s difficult for me to see the value in repeating the same things that have been said a million times prior. However, while a review is a review, I think there’s some worth in hearing about and sharing the personal connections we have with media, and Frieren in particular has led me to think about how regret has intersected with my life.
I’ve spent a lot of my life dealing with mental health problems that, for many years, I couldn’t really define. In elementary school, they mainly made me hyperactive in class and kept me from finishing my work on time. By the time I got to high school I was avoiding school, avoiding school work (which by that point came with more drastic consequences) and seeking out attention in unconstructive ways. I squeaked by into college and managed to finish, but I was constantly battling against my own brain to do it, and ended up just burnt out. As a child for most of this time it was never entirely (or even mostly) on me to address these issues, but because they never did get addressed I missed out on a lot of opportunities over the years that I could have taken advantage of if I’d gotten some help. When I’m feeling especially down in the dumps sometimes I’ll end up ruminating on what “could have been” in my life if I’d been diagnosed with whatever when it would have made more of a difference. Maybe I would have studied overseas rather than staying home and working my part-time job, or joined my friend for her D&D session rather than flaking out and pretending to have a migraine (it ended up being the last time we spoke), or gone to my friend’s wedding rather than staying home and dwelling on my own social awkwardness (which I suspect permanently damaged the friendship, because why wouldn’t it have?).
Frieren’s inability to grasp the shortness of human life, coupled with the unexpected impact that those brief lives can have before they fade away, left her regretting the loss of a relationship that can never really be replaced. But for people like me who are continually working through the consequences of having been unable to focus, engage, or step up and just reciprocate a friendship to the most basic degree, seeing someone feel regret and subsequently be able to work through it by trying to make amends through conscious change and reflection provides some amount of hope. In my case, I’m not likely to go study in Japan for a semester and many of those friendships will never be what they once were, but I can be a good friend to the friends I have now, and I can work to be better at focusing and getting my work done now. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing the things I didn’t have, but I see being regretful about them as a hard lesson learned and a motivation to try to operate differently.
Beyond all that, after having finally finished both seasons of the show and becoming one of many anime fans left waiting many months for the third, I think I have a small sense of why the series is so popular. It definitely has some of the trappings of other good fantasy anime, including fun action scenes replete with exciting melee and magical combat. In particular the animation is well-rendered and nice to watch. It also goes without saying that the show does very well by its characters. I read a comment somewhere (probably Reddit) and the gist of the statement was that Frieren makes you care more about its one-off characters (I think the particular example given was the Hero of the South, which, absolutely) than many anime series can manage with their main characters, and I think that sentiment rings true. The bridge-building dwarf, the old man in armor still keeping guard over the village his wife loved, the other mages participating in the mage exam… there are several examples of these types of characters whose lives seem to be fully-lived even though they only intersect with the main characters briefly.
The only realm where I feel the series falters a bit is its portrayal of its demon characters. I think a good villain is one whose motivations are understandable even if they’re not “right.” So far the demons that Frieren and crew have clashed with are many things – violent, dangerous, legitimately threatening – but they don’t feel as if they’re motivated by much other than to be oppositional to humans and other races. That would make sense if we were still early on in the story, but after nearly 40 episodes I haven’t felt as though the demon characters have been presented as much more than a bunch of particularly dangerous obstacles in the road. Considering the POV of the story I’m not sure if that’s going to change much going forward, but I’m just a little bit surprised that a series which is so sensitive to the stories of its main characters can’t spare a little bit of storytelling energy to cultivate its baddies into more than monsters-of-the-week.
As I dutifully wait for October 2027 to roll around (what shall I do in the meantime? Oh, watch the hundred other anime in my backlog) I’m left to reflect on what makes some anime popular while others remain niche. Obviously overall quality has something to do with that, as does how widely it’s released, how well hype is built up by fans of the source material, and other things which aren’t really quantifiable. But I think one big factor is that some stories, whether they take place in the real world or in a fantasy world that has never existed beyond the screen or page, are able to tap into the universal nature of human emotion. Every one of us is unique in our experiences, but we’re also all people who feel things and want to be understood. We all have times where we celebrate our accomplishments, and we all have moments where we regret our own choices. I think that Frieren happens to be one piece of media that’s particularly good at tapping into that and allowing its characters’ journey to echo our own.