Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (S1E8-10)

This review was commissioned by Erin Ackerman.


Last time, elven sorceress Frieren departed north with her human apprentice Fern and her old war buddy's human apprentice Stark, seeking to discover a way of communicating with the dead. Doing so is bringing them into the land of the demons, whose king was slain and army routed by Frieren and her companions eighty years ago, but who have since begun to reorganize and start to become a problem again.

We left off right as the "tidings of resurgent demons" gun was firing, with Frieren confronting a party of demon "diplomats" in the city of Granat who had been faking a desire for peace in order to disable the human city's magical defences from the inside. Unfortunately, the city's noble ruler didn't take kindly to Frieren unilaterally declaring the demon dignitaries were up to no good and trying to attack them, leading to her being thrown in the dungeon. Her party members, Fern and Stark, aren't really sure what to think about what just happened.

And, with the recap all done, I can now talk about these three episodes. "Frieren the Slayer," "Aura the Guillotine," and "A Powerful Mage."


Put simply: unless there's a major rugpull coming up, I'm pretty sure that my enjoyment of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" is going to be inversely correlated with how relevant the demons are.

Put a little bit less simply: I didn't dislike these episodes, but I liked them a lot less than I did most of the previous ones. The reason I didn't love them is because the demons are shallow, uninteresting antagonists, and for the most part they only force the heroes to react and change when dealing with them in fairly superficial ways. With a lot of dramatic tension hinging on the minutiae of a magic system that either doesn't explain itself very well, or just isn't very well thought out in the first place. This arc also reveals demons to be much more important to the broader setting and backstory than it previously appeared, which makes me somewhat less excited to learn more.

There are some interesting things going on in these episodes, to be fair. There just aren't as many of them as I've come to expect from this series. If I didn't have high expectations going in, I'd call this perfectly serviceable fantasy-action work.

Well.

To start with the "turns out demons are (unfortunately) more central to the backstory than I realized" aspect, a series of flashbacks in these three episodes inform us of why there are so few elves in the world. A thousand years ago, when Frieren was young and her teacher Flamme was just coming into her own power, the demons made a concerted attempt to wipe out the elvish species. Demons are very arrogant about magic, being as they're literally made out of it, and considered elves with their aptitude for wizardry to be a greater threat than the other humanoids with their less mystical methods of warmaking. The extent of the genocide is unclear, but it's implied to have been mostly successful. Elves have been dangerously few in number ever since then, which makes it a lot more understandable why hardly any would be risking their lives in combat the way Frieren is. And also makes it more understandable why Frieren hates demons so much.

It turns out that Frieren first met Flamme when the latter arrived too late to protect an elven village from demonic attack. Frieren was the one survivor, who had managed to kill the demon commander before running out of mana and going down.

I get that the show is Doing A Thing with the "last surviving defender of their village" repetition, but with Eisen, Stark, and now Frieren all playing it so close to the same way it's just starting to get silly. Yes, I know, the whole theme of cowardice and bravery with the first two makes their version(s) a bit different from Frieren's, since the latter did stand her ground and fight to the last, but still, it's starting to feel like once too often.

Anyway, Flamme finished off the last few demons that the exhausted Frieren couldn't, saving the latter's life. Frieren didn't realize a powerful wizardess was approaching at first, due to Flamme's extraordinary skill at suppressing her mana signature and making herself read as just an average human to detect magic attempts. Demons as a rule don't hide their power levels, especially when around others of their kind; might makes right for them, and not letting other demons know how powerful you are at all times is a good way to lose your place in their hierarchy. Thus, masking your mana signature is a good way of throwing the demons' own sensors off and causing them to miscalculate.

This serves to set up a major...theme? plot point? both? I think both...of these three episodes, and probably of the series as a whole. That being, the importance of hiding one's own power.

Flamme, as we already learned, did very little to commemorate herself. Despite having virtually invented the human magical tradition, and having come to be revered as something like a minor goddess by the time of the series' present, she was careful to leave no artifacts or locations that could be turned into sacred relics of hers. To the point where her existence itself is in question for everyone who isn't literally a thousand years old. Frieren herself has put Flamme's philosophy into practice over the course of her life since then. We've already seen that during her last adventuring journey, she actively resisted Himmel and the others' suggestions to have themselves commemorated in song and statue in the places they saved from demons.

The act of commemorating other people with flowers (as she did for Himmel's statue in that one early episode) is also revealed to have greater significance for Frieren. Flamme made two requests to Frieren when the human was approaching her death of old age. The first was to one day find a way to slay the demon king (was this the same demon king that she and her companions fought 820 years later, or have there been multiple demon kings since then? Maybe different kings, but same "dynasty" for all political and military purposes, with Flamme referring to "the king" as "the phenomenon of the demons being organized under a single powerful leader?" I'm not sure). The second was to master a flower-growing spell, which she was to then cast on Flamme's hidden grave.

Apparently, Frieren spent most of the nine centuries after Flamme's death living an ascetic existence in the forest around her humble, unknown burial site, practicing her magic and increasing her mana reservoir endlessly, and casting the flower growth spell on Flamme's grave morning after morning after morning.

I think we're meant to assume that Frieren did leave her hidden grove and travel around a bit to keep up on magical discoveries elsewhere. Other than that though, she was basically doing a solitary shonen training montage for eight hundred plus years. Whether or not she met any other elves in this time, we aren't yet told. Likewise, we don't know how the geopolitics changed, what the posture and scale of the demon kingdom was, or who else fell victim to it throughout that time.

...

This is part of why I'm not sure if it's supposed to have been the same demon king for that entire time or not. If the demons were unified and organized for that long, and the time period in question started with them neutralizing the entire elvish race as a threat, I feel like they'd have conquered the entire damned world by now.

I guess it's possible that the demon king spent a few centuries here and there imprisoned, or lost ground due to rebellions by his lieutenants that he had to spend time and resources suppressing. But for all intents and purposes, from the perspective of Frieren and other nondemons, that's effectively the same thing as multiple kings having sat the demonic throne. So, idk.

...

Anyway, Himmel, Heiter, and Eisen heard that there was a powerful elf sorceress living humbly in this one patch of forest, and recruited her into the party, and that's how the four of them ended up adventuring together and eventually killing the demon king.

Getting back to the importance of demons to the story, what we now know is that killing demons was one of the two missions given to young Frieren by her surrogate mother figure, and that she's spent nearly her entire life practicing her magic for the purpose of killing demons. Full on Doomslayer shit. Elves are an endangered species because of demons. Frieren met Flamme and became her apprentice because of demons. Much of the reason for Frieren's alienation from her shorter-lived companions isn't because she's an elf like it initially appeared; it's because she's a traumatized endling who's spent most of her life separate from the rest of society as she practiced killing demons.

It's...honestly a rugpull, as far as Frieren's character is concerned. At least for me. I'd been increasingly musing about how many of Frieren's emotional problems were inherent to being an elf surrounded by nonelves, and how many of them were just personal foibles, sure, but this reveal pushes everything so extremely far toward the latter that I almost feel like the pilot misled me. Like the show isn't actually about what it told me it was going to be about.

Is it just me? Maybe it's just me.

Well, anyway. On to the present-day plot of these three episodes.

While Frieren is in the dungeon, one of the three demon ambassadors" ignores his companions' warnings and recklessly goes down there to murder her before she can convince the humans to listen to her. She makes short work of him; her mana-signature-masking worked well to make this lone demon think he was a match for her when he actually wasn't.

The fallout of this murder attempt has the other two demon infiltrators - Lugner and Linie - launching their plan early, and also leads to Frieren existing the prison and regrouping with Fern and Stark. From here, these episodes split into two subplots as Frieren leaves her companions in the city to deal with Lugner and Linie while she seeks out the demon warlord camped outside the walls who sent them. Of these two plotlines, the former is far more interesting.

Fern and Stark's battle against the remaining demonic duo contains some interesting exploration of students and teachers, and the difference between genuine learning and rote imitation. Lugner and Linie are both veterans of the war that Frieren and her previous companions ended eighty years ago, and they remember the way the heroes fought back then and have countermeasures in mind. Fern and Stark, meanwhile, are the students of those same heroes, and need to adapt what they've learned against opponents who are expecting it.

Fern the apprentice wizard squares off against Lugner, the spellcaster of the duo. Unlike mortal mages, most demons use their innate magic to master a single trick and spend their potentially very, very long lives improving it; essentially, most demons have one powerful "at will" spell that their moveset revolves around. For Lugner, that trick is manipulating his own blood to create tools, weapons, and tracking beacons. He's very, very good at using his blood magic for a number of applications, but he still lacks the flexibility of someone like Fern, who is able to keep him guessing by using her more diverse powerset. Additionally, despite having less raw power than an elf or a demon, Fern is really good at casting spells quickly, forcing Lugner to burn through his mana supply faster as he fends off her relentless, individually weak, attacks. Her version of Frieren's fighting style is thus not quite what Lugner was expecting, enabling her to eventually get the upper hand.

Stark's battle with Linie, the brute of the duo, is more interesting. Rather than a "spell" per se, Linie's magic trick is a supernatural imitative ability. She sees Stark using the battleaxe-based fighting style he learned from Eisen, and decides to counter it with a mirror-matchup by directly imitating Eisen (who she met in combat at least once during that old campaign). However, since she never actually learned these techniques in a meaningful way but is only mirroring them, she has no understanding of the hows and whys. Her execution of each movement is perfect, but her planning isn't.

Basically, it's Eisen's student vs. an AI whose algorithm was programmed using videos of him.

What really ends up tipping the scales in Stark's favor, though, is almost the opposite of what's happening between Fern and Lugner.

Basically, for all her perfectly copied movements, Rinie just doesn't have as much force behind her blows as the legendary dwarf warrior. As we already know, Eisen didn't pull his punches all that much when he and Stark were sparring. Thus, he's already used to blocking and absorbing harder blows than the ones she can dish out using this style. She's not strong enough to use these techniques to their full and proper effect, and chose poorly when she defaulted to mirror-matching him.

Is anything that happens in these two fights especially brilliant? Not really. Does it give us a new understanding of Fern or Starks characters? Eh, maybe a little I guess. It's totally fine anime fighty fun, but it takes up a lot of space for just that. I won't go so far as to say I was "waiting for it to be over" by the time it ended, but I think I was starting to get close.

...

There's one bit connecting Fern's battle to Frieren's own that had me squinting a bit, though. There's a point in both of their duels where it's established that demons can and do mask their mana signatures for the purposes of sneaking up on prey...but that the concept of dialing it down for the longterm to make enemies underestimate them is completely unknown and in fact incomprehensible to them. And, this is an assertion that I have trouble accepting.

Deception is supposedly the basis of all demonic social instincts. The idea of pretending to be something you're not in order to defeat an enemy should be the most intuitive thing in the world to a demon. Even if their hierarchy is based on brute strength. Hell, especially if their hierarchy is based on brute strength. How better to eliminate rivals and bait potential future challengers then to pretend to be weaker? How better to stop yourself from being bullied by stronger demons then to make them unsure how much stronger than you they actually are?

I can see the demons having accepted a policy of "hiding your power level is a capital crime" in order to keep themselves functioning as a group within their behavioural parameters. But in that case, they still shouldn't be surprised when humans and elves use these tactics against them. Lugner and his own boss Aura are both stunned to near "n-nani?" levels when they realize that that's what Fern and Frieren have each been doing for their own tactical reasons. Am I really meant to believe that every wizard who fights demons isn't already doing this? Why would every demon-fighting wizard not already be doing this? How could the demons have not gotten used to this from their enemies by now?

This is another example of why I have trouble with attempts to make "always chaotic evil" races that are capable of humanlike organization. They always turn out to be a pile of irreconcilable contradictions if you really think about them. It's just like my earlier question of "who is making the clothes they all seem to be wearing?" only with more immediate plot impact.

In this case, in addition to nonsensical, it also makes the demons just plain boring as villains. Lugner and Linie talk a lot throughout these fight scenes, and the show takes pains to give them the time to monologue, but...they don't have anything to say. At best, their dialogue is just an exposition medium. The show has told us that demons aren't people. It's shown us that demons aren't people. But now it's framing them like people, and expecting the audience to care about their constructed pseudo-personalities, and it just...no. They're not even hateable. These fight scenes would have arguably been better if the demons didn't talk at all, and all the focus was all on Fern and Stark's inner monologues as they outthink this silent chess-program of an enemy.

...

Meanwhile, Frieren goes off to duel the boss who's been waiting outside for the defences to go down. Aura the Guillotine was another of the demon king's lieutenants back in the day, and Frieren and her companions forced her to retreat and go into hiding the last time they fought. She gets her namesake from her habit of decapitating defeated enemies and using their bodies as headless zombie-soldiers.

The "aura" part is as relevant to her schtick as the "guillotine" part, though. Her whole thing is that she can weigh the total of her mana supply against that of another creature, one at a time. If she wins this soul-wrestling match, she can permanently mind control the target. Even strong-willed creatures can only get back control for a few minutes a time, and she usually eliminates even that possibility by chopping off the victim's head and keeping the body mindlessly loyal without them. Unlike most demons, she's also diversified her magical repertoire a bit, and has a range of divination spells as well. She uses these divinations both to avoid getting into soul-wrestling matches she wouldn't win, and for general remote-sensing in advance of her demon and headless-zombie armies. It was for this reason that Frieren parted ways with Fern and Stark before going after Aura on her own; Aura can only scry on one location at a time, and dividing their forces is the only way to surprise her.

If confronted by a group of enemies, Aura will generally stay behind her zombie legions and retreat if that doesn't work. If confronted by a single enemy, it depends on what she thinks of their power level relative to hers; if she loses a soul-wrestling match, then she herself will be mind controlled by her would-be victim.

Yeah, you see where this is going.

Frieren masks her mana signature and holds back her combat performance against the zombies just enough for Aura to think she can control her. Frieren isn't sure if she'd have been strong enough to win a soul-wrestling match with her eighty years ago, and she wasn't alone at the time anyway, but after the experience she's gained since then and the knowledge that Aura has spent most of the same time on the backfoot licking her wounds, well.

So that's that for Aura the Guillotine.

In the denouement of this little arc, we do learn about a downside of Flamme's doctrine of humility and anonymity. When the lord of the city, Graf Granat (whose life Fern and Stark managed to save from the other two demons), learns that the mage he'd imprisoned was the famous heroine Frieren, he apologizes profusely. If he'd only known who she was, he says, he'd have deferred to her superior experience with demonkind and taken her advice from the beginning, rather than arresting her. Which in turn would have saved the lives of several of his servants and guards, and spared him and Frieren's group a great deal of injury and exhaustion. This had already bitten the party in minor ways once or twice in the past, but this time there were serious consequences to Frieren's adherence to "hide your power level." Perhaps this will lead her to reconsider it, at least when there aren't demons in immediate need of slaying.

Anyway, after a brief stay in the city they just saved, the party will soon be continuing on northward toward the ruins of the demon king's palace and the portal to the afterlife that's rumored to exist near it.


I feel like episodes 7-10 could have been collapsed into two episodes without losing anything of importance. A lot of the screentime was spent in either flashy magic-fights against the demons that go back and forth more times than they need to before ending, or in similarly repetitive sequences of Stark and Fern hurrying the wounded Graf Granat from hiding place to hiding place before finally biting the bullet and turning around to just fight the two twats already.

I'm hoping that after this, the demons will take a backseat to the story for a while and let us focus on Frieren's relationships with her mentor and companions. Like I said at the beginning, my enjoyment of this series is probably going to fluctuate in exact inverse correlation with its demon focus.