Over my birthday weekend (a week and a half ago as I’m writing this), my friends introduced me to Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, an anime that I’d heard about a while back but never really gotten around to watching. I’m terrible at watching things by myself, I’ll freely admit, but I almost watched Frieren back when I first heard about it because the premise of it was incredibly compelling to me. Frieren is an Elven mage who saves the world with her adventuring party and then goes on a personal journey afterwards only to discover upon her return that her treasured companions are not as immune to the passage of time as she is. A mere fifty years of idle spell collection was a lifetime for her friends and now she has to cope with not only the regrets she feels but how to live amongst humans who live, grow, and pass in so very little time. The anime has it all: the unintended consequences of power vacuums, repeating the mistakes of the past because humans don’t live on the same time scale as the demons they’ve been fighting, an ancient being struggling to answer the impossible questions of (effective) immortality, and a constant dose of heart and connection to tie it all together. Exactly my shit in ways I couldn’t anticipate before watching it, to the degree that it has probably become my favorite anime, supplanting Delicious In Dungeon from just last year.
What hooked me on the concept initially was my fascination with the idea of someone outliving everyone they know and care about. It’s been a mild fascination of mine for quite a few years now, but there really isn’t a lot of media that covers it without going in the vampire-direction (of focusing solely on the tragedy that is the immortal being losing touch with reality/morality as the long stretches of time render mortal life irrelevant or beneath their notice) and that’s not one I’m particularly interested in. I don’t want to see an emotionally dessicated husk of a being as it struggles to live amongst vibrant mortals. I want to see a vibrant, living person grapple with the fact that the people passing in and out of their life mattered just as much as any and every other person who did (or will do) that same. I want the stories about the value of connection and the difficult questions of how to love and connect despite knowing that, someday, that connection will be broken. I’ve even tried to explore it myself, in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but my players never really bit on that particular hook and the story moved elsewhere.
In most media I’ve encountered, this framing of the grief of immortality tends to be a smaller part of a larger story. A one-off question, a throwaway conversation, or even just a largely irrelevant side-story. Some stories explore it a bit more deeply, but it rarely gets more than a single moment of exploration. Jaheira of Baldur’s Gate 3 will admit she’s considered it and decided against the long life afforded to powerful druids but ultimately abandoned it without ever really engaging in a deeper conversation about why she chose to do so despite there being quite a bit of space dedicated to it in her sanctum (likely a sign of something trimmed due to how big BG3 already was). The first season of Not Another D&D Podcast shows one of the protagonists grappling with it toward the end of the season and does a good job of actually having the conversation between characters who have a personal stake in it. Neither ever returned to it, though, and they barely touched on what something like that might mean to the mortals around the person contemplating immortality.
Frieren, though, is all about this idea. Not only does it IMMEDIATELY pose the question of how an immortal deals with the people who leave their life, but it resolves this initial framing fairly quickly and then keeps asking more questions! This nigh-timeless nature of Frieren is not just a topic to be explored via narrative themes, either. It is a huge portion of how the titular character relates to the world. Everything you see happen in the show addresses the fact that she operates on such a different scale of time that her experiences and decisions appear almost alien to the mortal (mostly Human) characters in her life. Even the other long-lived people we encounter in the show, Dwarves, who can live a few centuries, still relate to the world in a manner much more similar to Humans than Elves like Frieren and the ones we see take the side of the Humans every time the topic of time comes up because Elves live so unfathomably long. We only properly meet two more elves in the first season of the show (though I suppose you could argue that we don’t really “meet” one so much as “encounter” them) and both of them take the large scale we see through Frieren and distend it even further, making it even them seem even more alien. It truly grasps the idea and takes it as far as it can, all without ever actually creating too much distance between the audience and Frieren.
Thematically, much of the exploration of relation and connection is explored through expressions of care. Not just the way that people take care of those they treasure or love, but also care as in the way you treat people you don’t know and the world around you, or the things a person spends their time and effort on. We see deep expressions of care through the intense focus of demons as they hone a specific type of magic to nearly unimaginable levels. We see care as people support and protect other people despite having no obligation to do so and at what might be a great cost to themselves. We see care as Frieren learns to explore and experience the world of Humanity in a manner that better suits those around her than herself. All of these people, even the demons, who care deeply are shown in a (at least mildly) sympathetic light regardless of whether we’re supposed to like them or not as the show takes great pains to make us understand why they care and how that care is ultimately what makes them someone (or something) we can understand at least in part, if not entirely. On the flip side, those who do not care are the ones who are made to feel alien, unfathomable, or incomprehensible to the audience, regardless of whether they are Human, Elven, or Demon. A lack of care in a character’s introduction is not always a sign of villification, though, since the show also explores how the act of caring is what is important, not just caring about something others care about, and that some people are more guarded with their care than others (and why that might be the case), but that’s a bit beside the point.
It is difficult to discuss even this much without going into details that I’d describe as “spoilers” since the show isn’t really an action anime or even a drama in the typical sense. The show explores ideas and connections and while there are a lot of interesting details that get slowly built over the series, the story is about how the characters live and relate to each other, so even writing about the introduction of a character or some minor interaction two characters had is, in my opinion, entering into spoiler territory. I’ll admit that I’m definitely erring on the side of caution here, but I really think the parts that make the show most worth watching are those small moments between the protagonists and other important but less central characters (though, as the show goes on, you might be surprised to learn what constitutes a protagonist in this story about time and connection). Yes, a lot of the action feels very good to see when it finally happens and the entire thing is stunningly animated, all of which also makes it worth watching, but I think it would not be contentious to say that the heart of the show lives in the often quiet moments between people that happen around the action and in some of the least-animated portions of the show. It really is worth a watch and is as bingeable as anything else I’ve seen lately since it is so well-paced that it never hits you with too much at once. Just an absolute masterclass in animated storytelling.