“Did she ever tell you what her favorite spell was? One that created a field of flowers.”
-Serie, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
Probable Spoilers
Grief is a fickle thing. It is a feeling at once comforting for its familiarity and insidious for the way it consumes everything else around it. This past Christmas, my mother and I shared a very good cry about the challenges we faced together over the past year: the loss of her mother (my grandmother), the loss of my job, the loss of various prospects both professional and personal. But there was some joy in it, too. This past Christmas was the first time in a long time that both sides of my family gathered together in their almost entirety—from New York and New Mexico, Vermont and New Hampshire. It was a gigantic meal (I cooked), and the celebrations stretched for almost three days.
We cried for the things we had lost, and bonded over that which we still had.
A few weeks later, at the goading of cute and funny art being shared over X (Twitter), and Facebook, I sat down and watched the first couple episodes of a new anime: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.
There are times in one’s life when you encounter a piece of art which seems tailor-made for that period. I have been fortunate to have had these epiphanies several times: The Sun Also Rises, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dorothy Parker, and Bojack Horseman all come to mind. These are works which impact one so deeply as to change the course of one’s life or alter one’s perspective of the world entirely. They inspire, they drive, and they comfort.
Frieren is undeniably one of these masterpieces, and it does all of this with unparalleled charm and beauty. It is a story of grief, of magic, of perseverance, and of time. It is a story which encourages you to slow down and appreciate not the great works of heroes and villains, but the small moments shared on the journey towards those great works. Frieren teaches you the importance of memories made in the moment, and how fast those moments are when you look back on them. Within the tale of an elf exploring the depths of mankind and retracing her old adventuring steps is an examination of what it means to be fundamentally human, and what it means to be present and respectful of yourself, your life, and the lives of others, and what it means to live in a world of magic.
Most importantly for me in that moment, Frieren gave me faith in magic again.
That may be a hard thing to consider for an espoused lover of writing and reading fantasy, but it bears noting again the time in which I discovered and watched Frieren. I was coming to the tail end of my third query attempt—with fifty letters out and my hopes pinned to a story years in the works with which I was deeply in love and which I believed in fully. Thirty-seven rejections now rest in my little excel spreadsheet, with more no doubt on the way. In the time since beginning Madelen Penn’s story of revenge and romance, thorny plant magic and enchanting balls, atmospheric plotting and witty retorts, I had written three books in her universe, had more planned, had drawn maps and written poems and was almost commissioning character art just to see her and her world live.
Querying is not for the faint of heart. Continuing in spite of rejection after rejection is the test of any writer in this era.
Enter Frieren, and Frieren.
“It’s all visualization. I know cloth can be cut. I imagined cutting it, then used my magic to snip away.”
“This woman is insane.”
-Übel and Sense
Frieren welcomes us to a magical land with its trope-tinted band of adventurers fresh off facing down the infamous Demon King. To be sure, a great part of the show’s appeal is its aesthetic. The lands and the backgrounds are so beautifully done. Frieren herself is cute bordering on adorable. There is wit and humor aplenty, whether it be from Frieren’s own immaculately dry observations, Fern’s deadpan exasperation, or the flashbacks to Frieren’s party’s misadventures. That’s before we get to mimics. The plot is delicately layered, with callbacks and call-forwards aplenty, and rewarding for anyone seriously engaged in following the smallest clues and subtlest changes in music or expression. (The music is good enough to warrant being its own character—massive praise belongs to Evan Call and all his work). There are also plenty of beats and easter-eggs for anyone even passingly familiar with the elements of a sword and sorcery fantasy story and for lovers of magical solutions to a range of everyday and supernatural problems.
But the show entreats one to look past the fabled words of every writer (The End) to what comes next. As Frieren, an elven mage whose life stretches far beyond even the comprehension of humans, wraps up what for her has been a brief ten years and goes off wandering the world in search of new spells (her hobby), time moves on. While she may not age, her companions do, and so does the world around her. By the time she returns to check in on her old adventuring team, she finds them aged, nearing death, and no longer up for the same quests as she still is.
And when their former leader, Himmel the Hero, passes— Frieren is compelled to reevaluate her relationship with her past and his, to examine the ways in which humans live, to explore even more the magic around her, and to remember as much of their time together as she can.
“Do you like magic?”
“I like it somewhat, I guess.”
“In that, we’re alike.”
- Frieren and Fern
Helping her along the way is the aforementioned Fern, a young girl who Frieren adopts as an apprentice mage at the wish of another of her ageing and dying friends, the drunken “miscreant of the cloth” Heiter, and Stark, the powerful, if slow-to-mature, apprentice of her party’s warrior. When the notes of Frieren’s own former master, the legendary mage Flamme, reveals a way for Frieren to speak once more to Himmel in the heavenly lands of Aureole, she departs north with her new party.
Along the way, the party engages in all of the things one expects of a band of adventurers: there are monsters to fight and peasants to help, demons to slay and the elements to endure. There are towns and castles, forests and coasts, days without food or money and dreamy sunsets complemented with meals of ethereal desserts. They retrace Frieren’s old path north, and she gets the opportunity to revisit the sites of old battles, to repair and clean statues of her and her friends, and to talk with the few people still alive who remember their adventures. When the time comes for them to journey even further north, however, they find that Frieren and Fern must pass a mage exam, and so get swept up in the politics and bickering of a host of competing mages and their bureaucratic academy.
This is where I must fully admit my deep love of Übel and everything she represents. That is all.
But there is more to the adventures than the adventures, and more to Frieren’s past than the quest to slay the Demon King and bring peace to all.
“By the way, what brings you all the way out here? Where is your party headed?”
“We’re going to Aureole. The land where souls rest.”
“And where is that?”
“Ende—where the Demon King’s castle is.”
“I see. So you’re finally setting off to defeat the demon king. That era of peace she talked about, I hope it’s everything she dreamed of.”
“Old Man Voll… the Demon King is already…”
“What is it?”
“I’m just forming a memory. Something of you to carry with me into the future.”
“Hm… That sounds nice. I think I’d like that. I’m very glad I got to see you at the end of my life.”
“You said that exact same thing when we spoke eighty years ago.”
- Frieren and Old Man Voll
The catalyst for Frieren’s journey through Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is her desire to learn more about humans and take more time to appreciate the way their life, perception of time, and feelings work. This is contrasted with her own glaring emotional deficiencies—whether it be acknowledging to herself how she feels or correctly interpreting another’s feelings (if she notices them at all). The show draws a lot on the relationship between Frieren and Fern, the prior playing the role of distant, but trying, mentor and the latter the perpetually exasperated, if determined, apprentice. Fern’s natural ability with magic is both fueled by and undercut by her own tragic past, something which Frieren misses time and again in her drive to form Fern into a “proper mage.”
But Fern’s more heartfelt nature draws Frieren out of herself as the show progresses. From admitting that her time is not solely her own now that she has an apprentice to trying to learn about Fern and later Stark’s favorite foods and shopping for their birthdays, Frieren makes a concerted effort to study and internalize the ways in which people care for one another and appreciate one another. Through their relationship, Frieren also begins to fully process her grief over Himmel’s death.
The relationship between Himmel and Frieren is told to us through various flashbacks, usually serving to explain a certain motivation or reaction from Frieren in the current timeline. What these flashbacks reveal is deeply romantic (Romantic?) and tragic—touching at the same time it’s torturous. One smiles and allows a tear to escape as we get snippets of meaningful moments from their past revolving around the smallest things, be it a flower crown, a pose, a ring, or a restaurant. Though it was in Frieren’s words, ‘a mere ten years,’—it is an inarguable fact that the prior adventure has had an outsized effect on Frieren’s life, and that Himmel did as well. She sees signs of him everywhere (he is the hero who defeated the Demon King, after all), and she is also reminded of his many acts of kindness from the words of peasants and mages alike. One of the show’s best moments is of another mage telling Frieren he was inspired to become a hero in part not because of any of Himmel’s great actions, but in the way everyone in his own hometown spoke about the small ways in which Himmel helped them.
In this way, Frieren comes to understand the importance of appreciating what one has while they have it, while coming to terms with the ever-changing nature of the world of humans and the unending march of time. This is one of the show’s better lessons, and the reason I became so enthralled with it in the first place. Frieren highlights so many small things as reasons for doing great things they become uncountable. There are side characters driven to moments of heroism and major characters haunted by flashes of past joys and pain. But they all continue to live and to grow, to learn and to adapt, and ultimately to remember and to remember to remember.
All of this coalesces into my favorite scene in the show, and the moment I return to now and again when I need my own comforting reminder of the magic we all possess.
“One thing before I go? That small field of flowers was conjured by magic.”
“Yes, and your point is?”
“That you used my master’s favorite spell. You told me that you found it foolish and useless.”
- Frieren and Serie
The first spell we see Frieren perform in the entire show happens during a montage of her adventures, and in its immediate context it’s almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it: she creates a field of flowers at a gravesite. The spell in question is referenced again when she and Fern begin cleaning and redecorating a statue of Himmel as a favor to an old woman—and Frieren spends months searching for the specific flower she wishes to summon. It is one of the earliest touching moments we get of her past, and one which shows the extent to which she cares in spite of her normally aloof exterior. We find out over the course of the show that this is not only Frieren’s favorite spell, but also the favorite spell of her master, the legendary mage Flamme. The field of flowers returns again and again as a condensed motif of everything the show represents: the power of small things, the grief inherent in loving memory, and the beauty and charm of magic. Eventually, we learn too that the field of flowers was integral to Frieren and Himmel’s first meeting, and that it was the reason why he sought Frieren to be the party of hero’s mage in the first place.
And we learn that even though Flamme’s own master, the elven mage Serie—who runs the Continental Magic Association—derides the spell as useless and foolish, she herself uses it to create a garden through which she remembers Flamme, her first student. This conversation stands among the most impactful moments of media for me, and it’s almost a little hard to explain why. The way these various plots draw together in that moment (the conversation itself is set to the backdrop of a doppelgänger battle whereby everyone is trying to figure out whether or not Fern would be able to actually kill Frieren in a battle) peaks in the revelation not only of Flamme’s death but in her dream for everyone in the world to be able to experience magic. It is a dream she achieved, she is the mage which founded humanity’s magic and we obviously see its effects in the show’s current timeline, but one gets the sense of the weight and struggle tied up in it. Magic, we are told, is about visualization.
Serie, Flamme’s mentor, said she could not imagine Flamme even living long enough to realize her dream. She destroys Flamme’s will, discredits her favorite field of flowers spell, and sets her life towards working on limiting who can use magic. She turns her back on Frieren and the human town before them and chastises her apprentice, even in death, for having the dreams of a child. What’s more, there is a deep and underlying sense of worry coming from her—to the point where she warns Frieren that if anything should kill her that it would be the demon king, or else it would be a human mage.
But the characters live in a world of magic, after all.
Frieren faces the sunset over the town and smiles in spite of Serie’s warning. The thought of all that change and power excite her. She does not fear the future of humans, or of widespread magic. In doing so, in that distant past, Frieren speaks to the hopes and dreams of hundreds of future mages and, in another sense, speaks to the viewer as so much of the show does. This was perhaps my ultimate takeaway through the entirety of the show’s first season (and here’s hoping it gets more!): that belief and desire for everyone to have magic.
What that means in practical application is harder to describe. I have spoken some of my love of poetry as finding magic in the mundane, and there’s something to it. I went fly fishing this morning and although I only caught a minnow (seriously), I stood in the first really warm sun of this spring and listened to the water and smiled. I went out to dinner with a friend and discussed writing and travel and our hopes for our own projects. Friends of mine are getting married, buying houses, getting published! I am sixty-two thousand words into a new novel and readying another few query letters. My windows are open, and the breeze is tinted with flowers.
But in the depths of my grief and in the trials of querying and in the struggles of writing and living and trying again and again to make something magical, I remember that Frieren gave me the space to process, accept, center, and move forward. In that true sense, it gave me faith in magic again—and it did it in small, beautiful moments. I have nowhere near covered everything about why I love this show, but I don’t think I would be able to in one go. I’ll just have to watch it again.
“Fern, in my life magic was reduced to a tool for resolving political disputes. There is something I’d like you to tell your master—that I have long forgotten how joyful magic can be. But she gave me a firm reminder.”
-Denken
As befitting something of this emotional importance, I have also made a meme. You’re welcome.
