For the first time ever the hype didn’t disappoint. Honestly a breath of fresh air for anime, my only complaint is I wish it was longer.
My complaint is I wish they spent less time fighting monsters and more chilling in random villages to learn a spell that bakes bread.
Yeah the demons are the least fun part of the story, aren’t they? Typical dark anime psychopath creatures.
I don’t think the combat can be saved by better antagonists. The real issue is the author is atrocious at writing characters with a plan of action. The use of flashbacks and over explanatory dialogue here is painful. This might not be so bad if they weren’t so insistent on trying to show their protagonist effortlessly outsmarting her opponents.
It’s not just a show thing unfortunately, it’s faithfully replicating the manga here.
To be clear, I still really like Frieren. It has cozy vibes and a really unique perspective.
It’s not just a show thing unfortunately, it’s faithfully replicating the manga here.
Yeah, I had read the manga about two and a half years ago and while I initially really enjoyed it for the cozy travel and the bittersweet start, I gradually lost interest when it became clear that the story was starting to focus more on its mediocre conflicts rather than the travel.
(spoiler)
I specifically dropped it a bit after the maze arc, when they were introducing the new demon villain who had been mind-enslaved to serve a kingdom but still found a way to kill that kingdom.
I was following it as it came out at the time so that probably didn’t help either, since waiting a week for a chapter that was about a conflict I didn’t care for and clearly wouldn’t be resolved for another few weeks made me lose interest. Especially when I was also reading my current favourite manga for the first time around then. And that manga, Witch Hat Atelier, manages to balance amazing vibes while also having compelling “conflict” writing that I enjoyed a lot more.
I’m very glad that the anime has been doing so well though, while I dropped it I still vastly prefer it to the isekai fantasy that was so common for the past decade.
spoiler
I liked the first demon fight, because it gave a big chunk of backstory and world building. This thing being a reminant of a prior era that was horrible back then but trivially defeated now was a clever way of iterating on the idea of “progress” within a fantasy setting.
I was less thrilled with the second demon, simply because “my pot of mana is bigger than yours” is a lame way to resolve conflict.
But the fight with the diplomats gave us another big chunk of plot, in so far as it established why the idea of a demon was so horrible. A monster in a man’s form that preys on compassion is a good set piece for future drama.
At some point, the focus of the story is around the mystery of what occurred in the prior age. And demons are necessarily a big part of that. So introducing them as minor antagonists in order to unspool the story works well.
The pace of the conflicts does drag though. The only thing worse than a Naruto-esque low stakes fight scene is one that feels like filler.
I think for me the interesting part isn’t just “progress”. The interesting thing that this show has going for it is specifically training.
What I mean by that is that battling monsters is not how the characters in this show get stronger. Yes some battle experience plays a part in confidence building and making less practical mistakes… But the main message being driven home here is that it is generational education that makes each generation progressively stronger than the last.
Fern is unbelievably powerful, having trained under Frieren. She has not been in that many battles but she has been trained relentlessly from childhood by Frieren and she has the skill to demonstrate this. She also has the battle-personality of the person that trained her, she has a poker-face unlike any other and she is exceptional at hiding just how strong she really is.
The same goes for other characters in the show. The whole thing is about how people are trained. Who their educators were. What knowledge was passed to them by those educators.
When something new appears that nobody knows how to beat there is a collective effort to paradigm-shift all methods and find a solution. This paradigm-shift then becomes just totally normal and is educated into the next generation.
I highlight this because the traditional fantasy anime is all about defeating enemies to become stronger. But this is not. These people are all strong because they have been trained well. Their strengths are not from collecting EXP points over time by defeating mobs but by their educational backgrounds.
spoiler
I actually found the second demon fight to be extremely amusing purely because of the lore tidbit that retaining your magic makes you more powerful
Frieren is the ace representation I needed
my problem with demons is their lore. It’s the only thing that makes me uncomfortable in Frieren. They are intelligent beings but unlike other races like humans, dwarfes and elves, they are born evil. And in this anime, if you doubt that all demons are monsters that should be purged, you will be punished by rules of this world. I don’t like it. This is imaginary world, you can set it up how you want but for some reason the creators of manga/anime decided to create a world where some beings are just simply evil by nature and must be eliminated. I would like if in Frieren world, demons would be something that people become, like by solding their soul to dark forces or something. In that case i wouldn’t be having a problem with them. Also, to be fair, this problem isn’t unique to Frieren, a lot of fantasy stories has the same problem. But i was hoping that there wouldn’t be such thing in Frieren :(
Yeah, I have the same problem with the demons. I’d rather they just make them straight up ontologically evil by being evil spirit’s literally summoned from hell or something, rather than a race that “evolved” to prey on humans. At least the Demon King being Literally Satan would neatly sidestep all this skin-crawling Evo-Psych stuff
I’m not entirely against the concept of a race born evil (it’s certainly not a new concept, and born evil races are what most people are accustomed to), but for myself I’m concerned with their depiction as being beyond the ability to reason with and that they use their speech just to trick and kill you, which sounds familiar to racist views of minorities.
I want to flick Frieren’s ears and watch them go boi-oi-oi-oing!
I liked it but have some concerns about the depiction of demons, that being that despite being able to talk, they can’t be reasoned with and are just trying to trick you so they can kill you.
Also, is it my imagination or is there something about the animation that feels reminiscent of 80’s/90’s anime? Something about the shading, perhaps the environments, brings back the vibes of artwork from old anime. Also the dwarf’s appearance, I could almost swear I’ve seen old anime with dwarf characters who looked like that.
concerns about the depiction of demons
I choose to think of it as commentary on Yakub’s creatures
spoiler
In all honesty I didn’t finish watching the season but even the first episode that the demon envoys show up in irked me, and I can’t really put my finger on it. I noticed that it also marked a departure from the usual tone of the show.
Frieren abruptly revealing that she has an exterminationist ideology towards a race of intelligent life is pretty jarring, certainly.
The viewers line of sight when seeing friren: the demons are jews!
Arc flying over the viewers head: The demons are a 1:1 standin for ai.
It’s got an extremely fascist attitude towards the demons. Like, arguably worse than Goblin Slayer. In the way that GS has “fantasy savages”, Frieren basically has “fantasy Jews” who must be killed even when they are infants because they “only learn language so they can lie”, etc.
Not every fantasy enemy has to be morally nuanced, and intractably evil groups aren’t necessarily fascist or racist allegories.
Their world has an abundance of creatures that prey exclusively on humans, and a lot of them do so through mimicry. The demons are predator animals that feed exclusively on people, with the ability to work together to some degree, and very rudimentary abilities to pretend to be human in pursuit of that main goal. Creatures like them are prominent parts of nearly every cultures mythology, and just like the Fae, or vampires or anything similar, they don’t need moral agency to work as antagonists.
Not every fantasy enemy has to be morally nuanced
It’s always the go-to refuge to take a conversation of “should” and change it to “can”. The creator can do whatever they want, what I am saying is that they shouldn’t.
and intractably evil groups aren’t necessarily fascist or racist allegories.
Intractably evil races most definitely are racial and will always be perceived as such to racist societies like America and Japan.
Their world has an abundance of creatures that prey exclusively on humans, and a lot of them do so through mimicry.
I’m already rolling my eyes. Are you the sad apologist for reactionary treats? I thought it was someone else.
We’ve already played the game a thousand fucking times of “oh, but this species needs human blood” and Promised Neverland is a perfectly fine example of solving it even when it is posed in a very dire manner, though this fictional problem has also been solved in fiction for much longer without the answer being killing literal orphans begging for mercy. Fucking jackass.
The demons are predator animals that feed exclusively on people, with the ability to work together to some degree, and very rudimentary abilities to pretend to be human in pursuit of that main goal. Creatures like them are prominent parts of nearly every cultures mythology, and just like the Fae, or vampires or anything similar, they don’t need moral agency to work as antagonists.
blah blah blaah it’s just verbal diarhea because this conversation is old and you’re just grasping at whatever you can.
Guess what? Vampires were based on bigoted views of Jews too! You actually aren’t helping your case!
And “Fae” simply aren’t comparable, they are intelligent life who can be interacted with and generally aren’t ontologically malicious. You’re 0 for 2 on examples of something in “nearly ever culture’s mythology”. Please, keep trying, and see if you can pick something that isn’t The Poisonous Mushroom this time.
Guess what? Vampires were based on bigoted views of Jews too! You actually aren’t helping your case!
Bram Stoker didn’t invent vampires, and the creatures and mythology associated vastly pre-date the antisemitic culture surround his novels.
And “Fae” simply aren’t comparable, they are intelligent life who can be interacted with and generally aren’t ontologically malicious.
They’re perfectly comparable. They are not ontologically malicious, but in the majority of their incarnations, they are completely divorced from human mortality or ways of thinking. Creatures that look like people, but do not think like us or share a remotely similar moral framework. (Plenty of mythological fairies are ontologically evil on top of that).
blah blah blaah it’s just verbal diarhea because this conversation is old and you’re just grasping at whatever you can.
I hadn’t realised your name was supposed to be representative of the quality of your discourse.
