Thought for the Evening: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Last year and into this year, there had been a lot of buzz about the first season of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, as an unusually good anime series. I recently had the chance to watch it and I can confirm that it is extremely good. It adapts the popular manga, Sōsō no Furīren ('Funerary Frieren'), up into about volume six of the current run, which is at present a little over thirteen volumes. Part of the reason for the quality is that it has an extremely good first episode, which introduces us very quickly and very well to a set of characters. But it's also a series that puts a great deal of thought into characterization and theme and mood, and gives plenty of occasion for thought.
The story is about Frieren, an elf mage. Frieren at one point had joined a party of adventurers, consisting of Himmel the Hero, Heiter the Priest, and Eisen the Dwarf. (All of the names of characters and places, and some of the cultural elements, are German in inspiration.) They successfully defeated the Demon King after ten years. But the series is not that story; it begins after their success. Their little party disbands, and Frieren goes off journeying while each of the others does their own thing. But this is where the key point lies: Frieren, being an elf, is immortal. When she goes off wandering, she does for fifty years. For her, being over a thousand years old, that is nothing. But Himmel and Heiter are mortal men, and even a dwarf like Eisen, although much longer lived than a human being, is not immortal. Himmel dies not long after she returns, and Frieren finds herself profoundly affected without knowing why. Adventuring with someone for ten years was for her like knowing someone for a few weeks, but she finds herself wishing that she had put more effort into knowing Himmel, and eventually, after Heiter's own death, Heiter as well. She sets out to revisit a few of the sites of their old trials and successes, eventually joined by two young human orphans, Fern, a mage who had been adopted and trained by Heiter, and Stark, a warrior whom Eisen (himself still alive but getting too old for heavy adventuring) had trained. Part of the adventure is looking for the semi-mythical land of Aureole, the land where souls rest, just in case it exists and Frieren can talk to Himmel one last time. (Thus the 'Beyond Journey's End' in the English version of the title is cleverly ambiguous: the whole story takes place after the original journey to defeat the Demon King, but the journey they are on at present is itself colored by the possibility of what might happen after its end.) The whole series, then, is about death, but also about how people we know only briefly can still matter even when they are gone.
It is also about the importance of small, brief things; it could hardly be otherwise, since human lives are also small, brief things. One of the things Frieren has always done as she wanders around is collect spells. Many of these spells are simple or silly, like a spell to make grapes sour, although we often discover that some of the weirder and sillier ones have some deeper personal significance for Frieren. The most important of these, which keeps coming up, is the spell to make a field of flowers, a seemingly useless and ephemeral spell, particularly for a battle-mage who spends centuries fighting demons, that nonetheless turns out to have a surprisingly immense power to bring people together and unite them in personal connection. The spell parallels in some ways Himmel's tendency to do small acts of helping others. The story shows us that the memory even of heroes fades, and eventually vanishes, among human beings, but some of the strongest memories of Himmel and the rest of the party have very little to do with the Demon King and a lot to do with these small deeds in out of the way villages. Such small almsdeeds are themselves like the spell to make a field of flowers. All of civilization is woven out of spells to make a field of flowers.
The series also has a good depiction of evil, which is something that anime in particularly often struggles with. The demons are not, as they are in many fantasy stories today, just another race of monster; they are what we might call sociopathic psychopaths. They are cunning predators and we are their prey. Because of this, the anime manages to depict one of the greatest moral dangers to human beings, the person who treats words as nothing but tools of manipulation. I would actually put the depiction here in the highest tier of treatments (a tier in which I would put Milton's Satan, Austen's Lady Susan, and Tolkien's Saruman); Frieren is particularly good at showing how dangerous this perversion of language can be even when you know that it's happening.
And the characterization is extraordinarily well done. Frieren herself could have seemed a rather blank character, but the series is very good at showing us how she is not, like the demons, devoid of real personal emotion; her emotions are just on a very different clock than ours, and many things that affect us very deeply are very light and glancing things in her millenium of life, the matter of a moment. Nor is she the only one; over and over we are introduced to characters in ways that immediately connect us to them.
In short, if you have a chance to see this quiet, melancholy, and very enjoyable series, I recommend it quite highly, and it joins Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Puella Magi Madoka Magica as one of the most thought-provoking anime series I have seen.
Various Links of Interest
* A. J. Barker, The Division of Sacred Scripture
* Gregory Salmieri, Aristotle on Selfishness: Understanding the Iconoclasm of Nicomachean Ethics ix.8 (PDF)
* William F. Vallicella, Four Kinds of Ontological Argument, at "Philosophy in Progress"
* Takuay Niikiwa, Consciousness is Sublime (PDF)
* A previously unknown poem by C. S. Lewis was recently discovered.
* Sergio Cremaschi, Descartes's Philosophical Novel and the Scottish Enlightenment (PDF)
* Freddie deBoer, The Modern Curse of Overoptimization
Currently Reading
Blind Harry, The Wallace
Eusebius, The Church History
Stanley L. Jaki, Neo-Arianism as Foreseen by Newman
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century
In Audiobook
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet