adventure party

Welcome to Brittle Almanac! This week, we're talking about Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, fantasy as a bag of (often frustrating) tricks, adventure, and what I think I want from story. Before we dig in, though, I wanted to shoutout some cool personal news: you can read "Faultline," a flash fiction of mine, over in Split Lip Magazine in their October issue. I'm in some wonderful company, too—be sure to check out the other folks in the issue. (And catch me and my fellow contributors talking about some stuff we're reading/watching/playing, too! I took the opportunity to talk about The Sopranos, a great show I'm surprised I liked, and The Ground Itself, one of my favorite tabletop roleplaying games.)

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Decades slip by in the early going of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. The show's first episode opens with a party of heroes—including the elf mage Frieren—celebrating their victory over the Demon King and ends fifty years later with a funeral for one of Frieren's companions. (Some spoilers coming, as a heads up.)

"Slip" is not quite right. Time passes in a casual, brutal fashion. It's lonely and sweet and cruel, all at once: Frieren wanders the countryside, rests nearly naked in a stream, explores dungeons on her own, fails to visit the people with whom she saved the world. She doesn't even seem to notice how much time has gone by, and until she seeks out her old companions for the first time, neither do I. I am caught up in the beauty of the world, curious about this old, surly elf, pleasantly surprised that a fantasy anime has skipped past the same-old violence and straight to the world's recovery. Eventually, Frieren kicks off a new journey accompanied by Fern and Stark, students of her old companions Heiter and Eisen respectively. On this new journey, Frieren finds that all of what has accrued in her wake haunts her. Did she neglect her companions? Has she held the world at arm's length for too long? Is it too late, after all, to be part of the world and its turning?

Beyond Journey's End captivated me from the start, but I had concerns as the vibe of the early episodes eased into a different routine. When Fern and Stark join Frieren, the show becomes a much more familiar fantasy story. There are bright spots, though: it's an adventure haunted by the past. It is rare for an episode not to weave Frieren's journeys together—and, eventually, for Frieren's long life to reveal deeper resonances. These snapshots of the old adventure intruding on the new one are deployed in sometimes obvious but lovely ways and are often beautiful in their own right. By the end of the first season, though, I was a little disappointed by how uncomplicated Beyond Journey's End decides to be. I was inspired by it, too.

Early on, I had the sense that Beyond Journey's End might be invested in disrupting fantasy's tendency to tightly pack every ounce of significance around the circumstances of a main character. To be fair, there is wonderful character work on display throughout—the ensemble is interesting, the heroes often easy to root for, the villains fun to rally against. I dared to hope the makers of this thing shared my instincts! Instead Frieren herself is a convenient knot in the world—not just a member of the party who slayed the Demon King, but the greatest student of humanity's greatest mage, a weapon aimed directly at demons and certain to live long enough to cause real damage. On the one hand, that is simply how fantasy often functions. There is great pleasure in watching this show; its reliance on genre (both the specific trappings of the Japanese shonen style and European fantasy more broadly) is a crucial aspect of that pleasure, I think. But on the other hand, I have a difficult time separating its familiar sights and sounds from the way the conflict between humanity and demons is framed.

We first see a demon in the early episodes of the show: Qual, a close associate of the Demon King and a powerful mage in his own right. He is larger than any human and scary-looking; he looks more like the monsters or spirits the party has already encountered. Qual is sealed near a human settlement, but his seal is nearly broken—Frieren and Fern arrive in the village just in time to crush Qual as he reemerges. The encounter is mostly an opportunity to talk about how, in the wake of the Demon King's defeat, humanity has brought its characteristic ingenuity to bear on magic; Qual is outmatched by the progress made in the nearly-hundred years since he was sealed away. By and large, Frieren treats Qual with an air of mild respect. He's as an old rival. Other demons eventually step in to view, and when they do, Beyond Journey's End plays its hand: the demons are merely the darkness at the edge of civilization, incapable of feeling and hungry for flesh. Frieren and her friends encounter these demons in a town with closer proximity to demons than other places the show has visited; the humans and demons are attempting to negotiate peace, and while the demons are certainly up to no good, we learn over the course of a few episodes that Frieren has been trained specifically to be a long-living, demon-killing magic weapon. That teacher of hers, the greatest human mage? She met a very young Frieren and saw an opportunity to arrange for the death of the Demon King. From there, the notion that Frieren is enormously significant to the history of the world, and its future too, becomes glaring. This sort of maneuver not only sours my mood something fierce, I think that it threatens the entire enterprise.

There is every possibility that the story turns all of this on its head—the manga likely has many years left in its run, after all. I have doubts, though. So much of Beyond Journey's End—even its familiar pleasures—are rooted in fantasy and its historical tendencies. Now, I do not want to suggest that this is all that fantasy is capable of—I'm in the middle of Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera right now, so I know folks are doing the work of weirding, queering, and modernizing fantasy and its possibility space, that this is an old, ongoing project with many hands on it. What I'm contending with is the distinct pleasures of stories like Beyond Journey's End. Bracket Frieren's destiny as a demon-killing weapon of mass destruction. Hard for me to do, right? But it's worth saying: outside of that, the show has very a narrow focus. Its interests lie not in how magic functions, but how it intersects with people and their concerns. Sure, the adventuring party is old hat, but Frieren and her friends spend a lot of screentime performing simple tasks for everyday people. These tasks occasionally involve killing; most of the time, though, they are helping people maintain a piece of infrastructure, pitching in on the farm, or just hanging out. I was so taken with this side of Beyond Journey's End*, but I'm just not interested in its worldview at all.

*And this is where I have to admit I learned something from Reddit about the Japanese title: apparently, "Beyond Journey's End" is only part of the title in the localization; the actual title, "Sousou no Frieren", roughly translates to something like "Frieren the Slayer". Some of my early impressions definitely emerged from the actual content of the show, but the title certainly inflected things further. Wild! I want to say that this is an incomplete picture, too, because it's a Reddit post and I don't know Japanese—at the very least, the part about "Beyond Journey's End" being a localization appears to be very true.

For a while, I allowed myself to only think of the Demon King's killing in the abstract. The pitch of the story seemed to be: now that the great evil is vanquished, the people of this place have a chance to reflect and recover and build. This was, of course, an incomplete understanding of what the show has going on—it was wishful thinking, too. Now, I understand that the Demon King was likely only evil in the sense that he and his kind threaten the sort of life Frieren leads: one where a person can wander the countryside without much issue and rarely come into conflict with other people, collecting forgotten magic and doing simple work. In the fiction, there are various facts presented that suggest that demons are irredeemable monsters—my contention is with the worldbuilding, where that decision emerges from. There is no room, at least at this point in the story, for a more balanced idea of demons.

Okay, the show has some boring, frustrating tendencies, and maybe something darker and more fundamental lurking underneath those tendencies. Its low key elements also have me by the throat, and I'm glad to know I yearn for that sort of thing. You know, I have questions for myself, as I carry this stuff into my own work: are these pleasures only possible because of a worldview that trucks in classifying and vanquishing otherness? What pleasures, new or familiar, have been obfuscated by such a worldview? And what about fantasy as a bag of (frustrating) tricks do I need to attack, disrupt, and dismantle to find out?

In the meantime, let me know if you want to wander the countryside together, looking for a particular flower—let me know if, because we have loved someone, somewhere, sometime, we can do this together.