The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Familia Chronicle Episode Freya

What's It About? 

Long before Bell Cranell came to Orario, the goddess of unparalleled beauty, Freya, rose to prominence as the head of her powerful familia. Yet these days, she finds herself fenced in, discouraged from leaving home by her overprotective familia members. Not one to be kept in a cage, she sneaks out and begins a grand adventure of her own, all to find her Odr—her fated soulmate!

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Familia Chronicle Episode Freya has story and art by Hinase Momoya, based on the original light novel series by Fujino Ōmori. This volume is translated to English by Dale DeLucia and lettered by Carolina Hernandez. Yen Press released its first volume both digitally and physically on April 18.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Freya is simultaneously one of the most fascinating and most awful characters in the world of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, at least in my estimation. Adapted from the light novel of the same name, Familia Chronicle: Episode Freya gives manga readers a chance to see inside her rarified world – and one of the first things that come to light is how she's either selfish, hedonistic, or both. While Freya's mostly male Familia members (ladies seem to be mostly support members rather than fighters) argue among themselves over who gets to do what for their goddess, Freya herself is obsessed with trying to find her “odr,” roughly equivalent to her fated one. To this end, Freya slips out of the mansion and goes off on a ramble. The last time she did this, her Familia almost started a war with Loki Familia. This time she finagles a way to leave Orario altogether, much to the despair of her Familia's top members.

In the main DanMachi story, we mostly know Freya as someone fascinated by Bell, and this opportunity to understand that he's just the latest in a string of obsessions is important. Not only does it foster what can only be described as an unhealthy atmosphere within her Familia, where members are always at each other's throats, scrabbling for her favor, but it also shows us how fickle she is. Her fleeting whims cause problems every time Ottar and the others fail to stop her, and this time she's taken herself off to the pseudo-Middle East, plopping down right in the middle of a regional war. Her potential odr is a major part of it, and that Freya is keen to just tag along and see what happens is her personality in a nutshell: if she's entertained, she's happy, but she's not really going to lift more fingers than strictly necessary in any given situation.

Understanding Freya is important in the DanMachi long run. Chances are that if you're invested in the overall world, you've either already read the light novel or were planning on picking up this manga version. That's definitely a good idea, and along with informing later main storylines, it's interesting to see how different Freya is from the other goddesses we've met in the series. At one point in this volume, Freya notes that Hestia, Astrea, and Artemis would all be horrified at the sight of a slave market. She shrugs this off before proceeding along her hedonistic, almost thoughtless way, inviting us to think about how those others would have handled the situation differently. Hinase Momoyama's art captures this very well, and Freya looks wonderful under their pen. The pages read easily as well, and that even one of the prum quadruplets can be told apart from the other three feels like something of a triumph. Middle Eastern stereotypes abound, but if you can get past that, getting to know Freya is a must for DanMachi fans.