Anime Review: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Gorgeous, slow-burn, adventure storytelling that takes a unique approach to building unforgettable characters

Among the likely contenders for Anime of the Year is relative newcomer, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, a story of a bored, eternally youthful elf mage, who begins her next adventure after completing a ten-year heroic quest with three friends. Despite the seemingly simple premise, the storytelling style is so clever that the basic journey narrative subtly becomes a unique psychological and emotional introspection as the characters progress through various adventures. The initial slow pacing and absence of feelings from the protagonist gradually evolve into intense adventures and a poignant, time-reversed exploration of the psychological connection between an indifferent, bored, immortal mage and a joyous, charismatic, but very mortal hero.

Frieren is a youthful, white-haired elf mage. She is not only incredibly powerful using magic; she is also essentially immortal, having been alive for centuries. But what sets her apart in the narrative is her personality. She is confident and curious but not really passionate about most things (except for finding new spells and grimoires (magic books)—then she becomes child-like). Prior to the start of the story, Frieren joins a party of heroes on a ten-year quest to defeat the demon king. The group consists of Frieren, the mage; optimistic young Himmel, the heroic fighter; quirky, wine-loving Heiter, the priest; and strong, reliable dwarf, Eisen the warrior.

The anime begins at the end of their quest, when the four heroes return home after vanquishing the demon king. Initially, we aren’t given much backstory context about the demon king or why he needed to be vanquished. That detail is mostly beside the point, apparently. The heroes return home to much fanfare, celebration, and even monuments in their honor. However, the four remain contemplative of their time together. Frieren moves on without sentiment and without much of a future goal.

Years later, she encounters an aged but still joyous Himmel just before he dies of old age. She also encounters a much older Priest Heiter who asks Frieren to mentor a magically gifted orphan girl he has sheltered. The child, Fern, progresses under years of tutelage and Frieren reluctantly becomes attached to her. Later, the also long-lived Eisen, the dwarf warrior, gives Frieren his apprentice, a teenaged boy named Stark. Her new crew begins to resemble the original heroes’ party as they eventually pick up a priest (with his own complications) and deal with a range of obstacles throughout their journey, including monster attacks, vengeful elven mages, dangerous dungeons, political intrigue, personal grief and loss, and the inevitable tournament/competition arc, which adds a slew of new and intriguing side characters, including some semi-likeable antagonists.

Frieren has elements of many iconic journey stories, including Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, and the tear-jerker anime (which I loved), To Your Eternity. The show takes a clever approach to showing us what life is like for a near-immortal like Frieren to interact with short-lived but ultimately beloved humans. Many of the key human characters age dramatically between meetings with Frieren, and even though the time seems short to her, we see that it is catastrophically impactful to humans. On the other hand, in her new journey, Frieren must become a mentor to the talented (and quietly opinionated) orphan Fern and later to the insecure boy Stark as he finds his own inner, as well as external, strength.

In her interactions with her two young apprentices, we see the way time slows down for Frieren. After gradually recalling lessons from her journey with the original heroes’ party, she begins to see the world in a new way. She ironically bonds with her old teammates long after they are gone and, in the case of Himmel, she seems to be slowly falling in love with him decades after he has died. It’s not romance in the traditional sense, but it is emotionally gorgeous and incredibly, poignantly sweet. Instead of being or feeling tragic, her moments of post-death connections feel like a celebration.

That is the true strength and uniqueness of the show: the way it celebrates kindness and thoughtfulness without becoming morose or overly sentimental. Frieren herself remains aloof, irritating, funny, and quirky. There is only one time where she truly breaks down and sobs, and it is a showstopper moment for the series. This is when we realize the show isn’t really about this thousand-year-old elf mage; it is about all of us, humanity, in this current moment. Can we choose bravery, kindness, strength, thoughtfulness, and compassion in the face of terrible circumstances or in the face of the relentless pull of ordinary, everyday life? Frieren reminds us that everything we do matters, and everything we do will be remembered long after our journey ends.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• A quietly powerful study of the human condition
• Unusual pacing mixed with lots of action
• So many appealing characters in a unique storytelling format

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

'Dragon Age: Absolution' packs dragon-sized themes in an elf-sized package

Against the common cliché that expects very little quality from videogame adaptations, this miniseries explores the danger of hunger for power with the depth of prestige TV

Across the iterations of the Dragon Age line of videogames, the common message has been about the tragedy of too much ambition. Time after time, someone seeks a quick path to greater power, and soon the repercussions become everyone's problem. Variations on this theme of human hubris range from the cosmic to the quotidian, turning the history of Thedas into a long series of misguided attempts to correct the excesses of the previous misguided attempt.

Any resemblance to actual events, etc.

The new Netflix miniseries Dragon Age: Absolution offers a chilling portrait of the insidious way ambition can seduce and eventually destroy. In a fantasy empire where humans reign and elves are a subjugated underclass, those in positions of power have seemingly never needed to learn that using others is wrong. The practice has taken root so strongly that it's reflected even in the smallest misdeeds: every time a character in the series is revealed to have done something bad, the badness is defined by a choice to use people—sometimes literally. This is consistent with the way the Dragon Age franchise has usually represented evil: humans using demons, demons using humans, humans using elves, Qunari using mages, mages using blood, mage hunters using lobotomized mages, armies using children, the noble families using each other as pawns... it's a very Kantian stance where the hallmark of evil is failing to see other people's autonomy and instead seeing only their usefulness. The main religion of the continent even has as its main precept that magic (i.e. power) should serve us, not be served by us. The fatal mistake of every overconfident mage in this setting is to lose their sense of purpose and become a plaything in the service of power.

What this worldview does for the Absolution miniseries is provide a moral anchoring point for characters' actions. One villain is so controlled by resentment that they plan to make a whole civilization pay for the atrocities committed by their rulers. Another is so disconnected from the lives of ordinary people that they plan to break the laws of nature to keep their former playmates. Even our heroic protagonist is at one point guilty of sacrificing the safety of a child to fulfill a job. And in each case, a plausible-sounding argument might be made for those terrible choices. This is a world that puts people in impossible situations and continues to punish them for desperately trying to break the cycle of mistakes. However, this is not a bleak world. The reason this particular type of moral failing has been represented so many times across Dragon Age continuity is not because the writers want to impart a nihilistic view; it's because multiple examples of the same mistake serve to illustrate how many opportunities people get (and miss) to make the world better. Nothing forces the factions in the setting to mistrust and scheme against each other; it's the unnecessary pattern of paying back revenge with more revenge that keeps the world burning. Underneath every well-written tragedy is this humanistic hope: it's not that the universe is fundamentally tainted; it's that people could choose better but don't.

The starkest metaphor for the way evils works in Dragon Age is blood magic, a route to power literally fueled by the suffering of others. In a neat practical symbolic package, blood magic can stand in for numerous forms of sociopathy, indifference, or exploitation. Quite intentionally, Dragon Age lore is vague enough about the earliest era of its universe that it's debatable whether it was the first demons who used the first humans or vice versa, but what is certain is that the theme of weaponizing others for one's ends is firmly established in the very foundation of the setting.

This is what makes the character of Rezaren, the main antagonist in the Absolution miniseries, so instantly compelling to watch. He is so deeply convinced of his own good intentions that he doesn't notice the incongruity of resorting to blackmail, backstabbing, torture and enslavement in order to regain a distorted idea of childhood harmony. In our times, we're sick of hearing of the ties between totalitarianism and toxic nostalgia, but the boring trope exists for good reasons. Rezaren exemplifies the villain with a motivation disproportionately smaller than his methods. A lifetime of infinite privilege has rendered him incapable of empathy, because, for the pampered nobility he comes from, the pain of growth is not a normal part of life but an embarrassment that must be punished.

Dragon Age: Absolution relies on too many flashbacks, which do the pacing no favors, but one key event in the past of both the heroine Miriam and the villain Rezaren is revisited from their opposite perspectives in a narratively fascinating manner. It's unfortunate that the plot takes so long to get to its actual theme (there's an air of the perfunctory in the boilerplate D&D party adventure of the first two episodes), but once the viewer learns what this series is actually about, once the extent of Rezaren's evil is exposed, the rest of the story goes by in a thrilling breeze. The mage Rezaren is a fantastic achievement of characterization precisely because of how casually appalling he can be. And again, we see an effective use of ambiguity in the portrayal of his backstory: is he a bad person because of the elitism of his upbringing, or was he honestly a good child who only turned bad because he was briefly in contact with a demon?

Be that as it may, Rezaren outshines our heroes in terms of viewer's interest. We've seen D&D campaigns so many times it's difficult to present an interesting group dynamic that doesn't resemble every game we've played. Rezaren is something else. He's so deluded by his privilege, so oblivious to the inherent dignity of others, that he considers the death of a slave as an affront to his property rights. He has lived such a suffocatingly sheltered life that he cannot comprehend why his former enslaved playmate would want nothing to do with him, and he even offers to enslave her again as if he were doing her the greatest favor.

The tragedy of Rezaren is that he knows no way of interacting with people apart from using them. This is nominally supposed to be Miriam's story, the epic journey that reconciles her with herself and heals her inner wounds, but as usually happens in epic stories, the heroine's victory is only as interesting as the villain's villainy.

If the viewer only gets to the first episode, it would be easy to be fooled by the appearance that Dragon Age: Absolution is like every other D&D-adjacent show. Miriam's companions are assorted flavors of generic archetypes and comic relief. But finishing the series (which should have been a single feature-length movie, honestly) is very much worth the less than stellar beginning. The combat scenes are decently animated, and the visual style fulfills its function of catching the eye, but where the show excels is in the moral drama. To be clear, there's never a doubt that Rezaren is in the wrong; there's no possible "other side" to the argument. What nonetheless makes him such an interesting character is how easily self-deceived someone can become when no one dares challenge the proclaimed goodness of their intentions.

Rezaren is a complex, fleshed-out villain on a par with the most wicked that Game of Thrones or its imitators can offer. There's no mystery to his motivation; there's just an incorrigibly warped perspective that no amount of emotional contact can fix. That such a feat of writing was possible in just six half-hour episodes is reason enough to recommend Dragon Age: Absolution. But for fans of fantasy warfare, heist missions gone catastrophically wrong, or gruesome forbidden magic, there's abundant material to sate that hunger. There's also a dragon, if you're into that. But the seriousness with which this story addresses horrifying extremes of pride, ambition and callousness is the true jewel hidden inside the sparkling, colorful exterior.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the touch of genius that was using an imprisoned dragon to symbolize the lingering tensions of a highly unequal society, +1 for creating a villain that is at the same time fully reprehensible and fully understandable.

Penalties: −1 for excessive exposition of world history facts that are foreign to this specific plot.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: The Good, The Bad, and the Smug, by Tom Holt

Holt, Tom. The Good, The Bad, and the Smug. Orbit: 2015.

Buy it here as of late July 2015.

A witty successor to Terry Pratchett!

Just making the comparison should make Holt's day: Terry Pratchett was the acknowledged sage-king of fantedy (fantasy-comedy). The master wordsmith dazzled all with his lingual perambulations (a metaphor that doesn't really make sense, but what did you expect? I'm no Terry Pratchett, after all!), and the fantasy/comedy world felt his loss keenly indeed.

For myself, I've been searching for, if not a replacement, than at least a worthy journeyman successor to Pratchett, and judging from the comedic antics of The Good, The Bad, and The Smug, I may have struck gold with Tom Holt.  The book is a wittily written yet fairly fast-paced laugh-out-loud action-packed exploration of both the nature of good and evil and the possibility of multiple worlds (possible due to what Pratchett would have called "quantum", with references to the "space time continuinuinuinuum"). While not quite at the finely polished level of Pratchett's mature works in the Discworld series, for example, Holt's effort is mighty respectable.

The reader soon feels drawn to the tale of unlikely companions, an elf reporter and a goblin king (ostensibly mortal enemies), in their quest to save the world from what we might call the banality of good. They struggle in the name of "evil", but everything about them screams "good guys," unlike a certain goblin character who figures out the only way to escape imprisonment is to convert to good and stick to it come what may. The main antagonist is a strange Rumplestiltskin-like figure who is not all he seems, in that sense much like the recurring trope of doughnut-as-portal in spac
e-time.

You'll chortle aplenty with this book, and though I can't quite recommend it as highly as I would the finest of the Discworld series, Holt has shown he belongs in the same sentence as Pratchett--no small accomplishment!


The Math

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for finding the perfect balance between engrossing story and comedic digressions

Penalties: none (save falling slightly short of Pratchett's brilliance)

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention"


[For those wondering "only an 8?" considering how much I obviously enjoyed this book, NB: Nerds of a Feather is the mortal enemy of grade inflation, and an 8/10 indicates several standard deviations above a run-of-the-mill level. For more information, see here.]

Reviewed by Zhaoyun, who, in addition to contributing to Nerds of a Feather since 2013, has been thoroughly enjoying fantedy since first discovering Terry Pratchett like a gazillion (okay, maybe 15) years ago!