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This Week in Anime
Frieren's Demon Problem

by Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree,

Steve and Nick tune back in to Frieren: Beyond Journey's End to discuss the series' primary antagonists: demons and how fantasy often handles "evil races."

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is streaming on Crunchyroll.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Steve
Sorry, Nick, I don't feel like writing a column tonight. It's been a rough week, and I'd much rather settle in with my two favorite weekend activities: poring over tomes and imbibing concoctions.
Nick
That's certainly a bold way to describe "getting drunk and scrolling social media," but I'm afraid we've got a lot of work ahead of us, Steve. It may only be the start of December, but we've already got a full season of sad elf adventures to cover.
Alas, time marches on whether you're a millennial anime writer or an anime character older than a millennium.
We talked about Frieren: Beyond Journey's End earlier in the season since it dropped an XXL first episode on us, like a house giving out king-size candy bars on Halloween, but a whole lot has happened in the series since then, and we'd be remiss not to circle back to it. In the time between, we've met new characters, uncovered new mysteries, and Frieren posted feet.
I also haven't been able to log onto Twitter without seeing at least five Frieren fan art (a few featuring feet), and that's my metric for whether or not a series has made it. Frieren's certainly done a lot to earn it! Aesthetically and philosophically, it's one of the most ambitious shows airing right now, as it wrestles with concepts from mortality and nostalgia to the progression of society and culture. Meanwhile, Frieren herself wrestles with a burger the size of her head. It's the anime with everything!
To be fair, that could be a regular-sized burger held by a very small mage.
True. One of the more monumental recent developments was Frieren running into someone even more vertically challenged than herself.
She also met a horny, drunk, gambling priest. Which, frankly, is just bad party building. It would be best to have a healer, but you've already got two squishy DPS. Stark can't keep tanking and pulling aggro for the whole quest, guys.

Just look at him; that boy barely has any brain left to damage.
Stark has two remaining synapses, each spent on these clouds.


It's funny, though, as much as the title touts this story to be "Beyond Journey's End," Frieren sure has just been whipping up another journey with three brand new companions to help dig her out of a mimic chest's chompers.
That subtitle was a hail mary thrown by the official translation. The series' Japanese title is a pretty difficult-to-localize bit of wordplay that ties Frieren, the character, to the idea of funerals and mourning, which makes for a particularly awkward title drop at one point.

"Beyond Journey's End" is instead just there to signify that this is a story happening after the typical epic fantasy journey—hero, demon king, dungeon crawling, all that jazz—while the original title declares this to be a story about processing death in all its many forms.
I think both titles end up fitting thematically. Frieren's journey to defeat the demon king has certainly been over for about 80 years at this point in the story, but her capital-J Journey continues beyond that, as do all of ours. But it also does, intentionally or not, slot Frieren into the subset of RPG-influenced anime fare that skips over the main quest and turns the epilogue into its own story. Because after the hundredth light novel about a loner getting Truck-kun'd into saving a parallel world that resembles medieval Europe, you have to start writing outside the box.
That's certainly a gimmick that's come up a few times in recent years as the anime industry continues to delve too deeply and greedily into the depths of the web novel landscape. However, despite some RPG terminology, Frieren has yet to show me a single stat screen, which makes comparing it to those other shows feel like blasphemy.
Ugh, tell me about it. Practically, no idea is bad unto itself. It's the execution where things matter. Take note, isekai authors. Fewer words about your protagonist's gauntlets of +2 intelligence and more words about magic as a metaphorical extension of your characters and their personalities/motivations.
It feels obvious to say it, but Frieren benefits significantly from being a fantasy story that isn't riffing on the calcified tropes and fixations of Narou. While not wholly original within the fantasy genre, it has the good sense to tie its world-building and characters together rather than just stapling ideas to stock archetypes.
It does feel like a "Coughing Baby vs. Hydrogen Bomb" type of literary matchup, and I'm not just saying that because Frieren can atomize her opponents.
However, it's not like those ideas aren't without controversy. One particular decision by the creators has left many people with many feelings. So, I guess we get to dip our toes back into some good old-fashioned Fantasy Racism discourse.
The demon stuff is the most I've scratched my head at Frieren to date. I'm still unsure what the story expects me to take away from it. You have the rest of the series, which possesses this quiet and understated nuance about the essence of impermanence. Then we get a few episodes in the middle about how much Frieren hates demons and is, by all accounts, entirely correct to do so.
It's...complicated, mostly because it's the show's most drastic departure from established High Fantasy tropes. While lots of fantasy has "evil" races, they usually go about it by just having the demons or orcs or whatever be faceless hordes of enemies in black armor, usually led by some disembodied force of pure malice that doesn't invite sympathy. Yet with Frieren's demons, their whole modus operandi is to invite and manipulate sympathy.
Frieren speaks like they're not even sentient. She compares their mastery of human language to the kind of mimicry predators sometimes evolve with to lure in their prey.
I don't think that part is meant to be literal, but it certainly makes its point clear. Demons do not function on a social or individual level like humans/elves/dwarves/whathaveyou do. They learn the language of other creatures to manipulate them more effectively but view non-demons as something akin to very clever animals and have seemingly no qualms about using deception to get what they want.
The few demons we've met so far seem to fit that bill. After a brief introduction to them in diplomat mode, all of their scenes behind the curtain are almost laughably diabolical. The townspeople and their government are framed as hapless chumps for trusting the demons, and Frieren is wholly exonerated for trying to blast them into smithereens at first blush.
It's undoubtedly a fraught way to go about things, but that got me thinking more about what, exactly, the series is trying to do with them. The entire conceit is that Demons exploit humans' tendency to anthropomorphize. We see somebody who looks and talks like us and assume they must think, live, and see the world as we do. Which, in the majority of fiction with fantasy races, is true! Whether it's Tolkien or Dragon Quest, elves, dwarves, and orcs are just humans with extra bits. And those stories are often very inclined to turn those races into allegories about real-life society in a way that can be...let's say, ungraceful.
It generally leads to messages that are, at best, hamfisted or, at worst, profoundly offensive. I almost want to say that Frieren is preemptively sidestepping that issue by so thoroughly and immediately dehumanizing its demons. As an audience trained on decades of fiction using the approaches you mentioned, we expect demons to be a stand-in for people, so we're thrown off balance when they're not. Maybe that's where my sense of friction is coming from. But if that's the case, I want to know what Frieren is trying to do with its demons instead. If they're just super evil bad guys for Frieren and her friends to fight, that's not interesting.
It's incongruous right now, but outside of giving us some easily unsympathetic bad dudes to blast, I think it's trying to compare to Frieren's journey toward empathizing with humans. Her borderline apathy towards other people for most of her life is, in part, a consequence of existing on a different biological timeline than her party members. While not malicious, she is still, for lack of a better word, inhumane in similar ways to those demons. The difference is that she is actively working to break out of those habits now.
True, I could see that developing down the line. Like Frieren, the demons are only interesting insofar as their intersection with "regular" humanity. The juiciest tidbit for me was the flashback to the child demon because he vocalized his ability to perceive how others felt about him and his childish kind of rationality. That felt like the closest the show got to addressing prejudice, but again, maybe it's for the best that it wasn't pursued further. It's not like there's a shortage of material to cover with Frieren alone.

It certainly was whiplash-inducing to go from Frieren telling Aura to [Play Minecraft] and following it up with an episode about the emotional and philosophical intricacies of personal faith.
All that plus elf pecs and blankie mode Frieren.

I love stories that interrogate how unfathomable periods might affect (or not affect) a person's psyche. That's one of the topics I think Sonny Boy touched upon quite well, for example. I wonder if there's any connection between Keiichirō Saitō doing the best episode of that and directing Frieren.
If we can figure out how to tie Bocchi the Rock! into that idea, we might have another column to write. For now, though, I appreciate how Kraft's faith is expressed as a personal choice. While a church exists as a political entity, and Priests have their class of magic, believing in a greater deity is presented as a choice made by those seeking order and comfort in the world. As a non-religious person who has nonetheless spent a lot of time examining the distinction between religion and faith, I appreciate how much nuance is put into it.
It's also eye-opening to see an elf even older than Frieren seriously contemplating the end of his own life. Frieren thinks on timescales far longer than those of her comrades, and we've seen her grapple with their deaths, but she hasn't done much thinking about her legacy. Meanwhile, so much of human culture, from religion to statue-building, is all about establishing footholds of permanence into the raging torrent of time. It might ultimately be futile, but the struggle itself is core to our existence.
I think Kraft's faith ties into his life, not just his death. He has existed for so long that whatever great deeds he did have been lost to history. He hadn't seen another elf in centuries and assumed they were extinct. If he wants companionship or company that won't crumble to dust and be forgotten by the world around him, what option is there besides believing there's an eternal embodiment of benevolence watching over it all?
I guess he could have started a pot farm. Some people do that. Ain't much, but it's honest work.
I imagine even the best strains would get boring after a few millennia. Though having a good herb hookup would have made recruiting Sein way easier.
You're acting like Frieren didn't already have the most powerful ace up her sleeve.

I really can't stress enough how paramount it is to the series' charm that Frieren is both an alien and a goofball.
I'm thrilled the anime nailed that joke. It's the perfect amount of low energy. That whole episode has some of my favorite gags from the entire series.
The slow, understated humor is so good. I was rolling at Sein's futile attempts to get Frieren to exert the bare minimum effort to save his life.

I also appreciate that Frieren sees a lot of herself in Sein. The parallels between Fern and Stark write themselves, but Frieren having enough self-awareness to see her hesitation in him is a big step. She's not just reminiscing and making up for missed opportunities from her first journey but also taking on the role Himmel played for her back in the day.
I'm glad we're seeing more of what Frieren saw in Himmel, too. He struck me as bland in the show's opening act, but his determination to be a real fake hero (or fake real hero) put him in a new light for me. Plus, I appreciate the writing tying that thematically into how memories take on a life and luster all their own after a person's passing. Memories are themselves just as ephemeral and malleable as their original subjects.

I'm also glad that this adaptation is giving me a chance to revisit this material. At first blush, I found how Frieren always has a pertinent flashback to look back on for a given episode a little trite. Yet, on revisiting, it starts to feel less like a writing contrivance and more like the process of slowly realizing just how much of her journey she internalized without knowing. It's a million little moments she didn't think about at the time that suddenly clicked into place.
As an anime-only viewer, I think they've been integrated pretty naturally! I like that there are a lot of subtle connections, too. In one episode, Frieren mentions she has a spell for making sweet grapes sour, which seems like a non sequitur until you get the flashback where one of her old party members mentions preferring sour grapes in passing. The greater point—that Frieren's current life and habits have been molded in a big way by her old friends—is loud and clear, but those smaller details enrich the writing.
I'm glad somebody around here appreciates the smaller details because Fern sure doesn't.

Fern just has a short fuse because it falls on her to fulfill the most important and thankless RPG class of them all: team mom.

Come to think of it, between the sleeping-in, the lack of respect for everyone else's time, and the total emotional obliviousness, a lot of Frieren's character makes sense if she turns out to be the elf equivalent of a teenager.
Maybe she's just a few centuries away from a growth spurt.

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