Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Boy, do I have opinions on this one...
A recent critical darling, Frieren presents itself as sort of a character driven fantasy series. The show follows elven mage Frieren (all the characters and places in it are named after random German words. You get used to it but it never quite stops being distracting). Frieren was a member of a legendary group of heroes that slew an evil demon king and restored peace to the land. Being an elf, though, she lives much longer and ages much slower than her companions, so after most of those had passed away or grown elderly, she realizes that she has never found closure with them (Mainly with legendary hero Himmel, whom she had some unresolved romantic feelings for) and decides to retrace her old journey, at the end of which promises to be a mythical place where she will get commune with the souls of the dead to meet them one last time, taking along her apprentice Fern and young warrior Stark.
Frieren is a very frustrating watch. At its best, this show is quite beautiful, using the iconography of medieval fantasy to frame a journey about self discovery and coming to terms with loss, regret and the merciless passage of time, realized as a melancholy pilgrimage through autumnal forests and sleepy villages as the main characters learn to understand themselves and each other better. The problem is that this is really only about half of it.
Frieren's first and possibly greatest problem for me is the, frankly, bafflingly moronic decision to set it not in a naturalistic feeling fantasy setting, but this weird, semi-self aware DnD pastiche where people in this ostensibly serious, character driven fantasy series occasionally lapse into tabletop jargon, talking about their adventure parties, mana levels and character classes and whatnot. While some of the character interactions occasionally veer towards the goofy, this is what really takes me out of it more than anything else.
The other problem is that it has a bad tendency to abandon its own premise of introspective character study in favour of lukewarm and tropey action-adventure fare for long stretches at a time. Early on in the series there was a plotline about the heroes helping a town against a clique of evil demons and I started zoning out, hoping that this wouldn't be what if the rest of the season would be like. And to its credit, it wasn't. About two thirds through the season (which has 28 episodes overall, by the way) there started a plotline about Frieren and Fern having to participate in a series of tests to prove their aptitude as mages in competition with a quirky supporting cast of fellow wizards. And I started hoping this wouldn't be what the rest of the season would be like. But much to my chargrin, it was.
It's so heart breaking to see a show that regularly demonstrates how good it can be and then simply refuses to, about half of the time. One moment you're watching a series about coming to terms with the curse of a supernaturally long life and learning to cherish your memories while accepting their fleeting nature and the inevitability of loss and before you know it hits its heas and slips into some recurring dissassociative episode where it thinks it's DnD: Honour Among Thieves for a good part of its runtime. And all you can do is stand on the sidelines, asking "Are you okay there, buddy?"
Straight up, this was a painful watch, not because its bad. Even at its worst its still very well animated and well directed and has very solid characterization. But because for how long and how regularly it fails to be as good as it could be. A bit more than half of this is very good television I wouldn't hesitate a second to recommend. And a bit less than half of it is... whatever. Not bad, but uninteresting. Right now there's a lot of hype around, though if there's one thing I learned about anime criticism ever since I started half paying attention to it, it's that it has a near pathological case of recency bias where it regularly latches onto some recently released production to treat it as a future classic, only to forget about it soon after. And... I imagine this isn't gonna be the one to actually persist, unless later seasons learn to focus on its strengths more.
