Accessibility

Frieren unfortunately falls victim to the hewing axe of accessibility and oh does it take mighty blows at the tree. By starting the story at the end of the heroes journey, one relates to the feeling of emptiness at the end of the long road of achievement. The sisyphean boulder falls, and then immediately must be taken up again. The party, reminiscing, establishes that they were extremely dysfunctional, and often at odds with each other. But then Himmel says "I'm glad I got to adventure with all of you", reminiscent in my mind of the ending of The Catcher in the Rye, where Holden realises that the need for human connection supersedes the emotional valence of the experience. That the only people who can truly reminisce with him are those who were there, and that losing connection with them in a sense makes you lose a part of yourself. And Frieren starts at this moment other stories have ended on, the loss of self that occurs at the end of an era.

Unfortunately, the majority of the rest of the story ends up falling on back on highly accessible tropes typical of battle anime - simplified moral reasoning, argument-as-love will-they-won't-they youthful romance, exposition-filled show-and-tell battles that drag on for episodes, whole arcs designed almost entirely to establish where in the magical power hierarchy the protagonists sit with a literal tournament arc, dozens of throw-away characters there almost entirely to give an intern someone to animate who offer nearly nothing to the story except to establish the history of the protagonist and talk about how strong they are (they love to talk about how strong someone is). We're essentially watching Goku 2.0 if he was a moody asexual.

All these things are part and parcel of the juggernaut that is battle shounen. These shows have been through the ringer so much they basically have KPI's around all those requirements to maintain merchandisability and serialisation that can keep it going forever. Its like if everyone was subtly looking to be One-Piece. The problem is that

A. I do think that anime as a medium is seen by basically everyone as battle shounen. And

B. Battle shounen is legitimately extremely popular because its extremely accessible.

The popularity of it is so high that it starts to effect shows that are trying to deliberately subvert them. The most famous subversion, Neon Genesis Evangelion, is ultimately popular because it hits the primary points to a T and THEN subverts them. It makes you think its going to be a classic mecha anime with a shady organisation and world-ending stakes, and then it keeps teasing you, leading you to take on the role of the adults who want so badly for Shinji to turn into a hero. And that accessibility is deep down why it is so popular.

This need for accessibility, for these KPI's of 'must be serialisable merchandising opportunities', negatively effect stories. It was not enough for Arcane to have 1 perfect season, you must make something that can have endless content, endless high-stakes story beats. It degrades the quality of the art that you can produce. It turns art into from something fundamental to humanity and into simply another commodity. Frieren, in my view, is a corporate compromise. Its initial, enjoyable premise forced to hide beneath accessible narrative structures that overpower what it could have been.

Frieren

Frieren as a character is immortal. Her expectations about her lifespan remind me of the Time Police in Rick and Morty, "You're immortal right? Which means your life is infinite, which means that there's a 100% chance that you'll eventually do everything" + apathy. This is the schema with which she interacts with the world. The story has to spend time contrasting her to the humans around her who truly appreciate the passing of time, and its sad. Episode one basically made me cry right away as the humans appreciate the passing of time. Her unappreciation of the moment is one of the core concepts of the show and is one of the core narrative hooks that I found unique and particularly interesting. As well, the show demonstrated how slow EQ growth is for Frieren. 50 years pass and she's basically exactly the same person, merely grown in magic. And that is interesting, this character with a timeline so long. To truly deliver on this, I think it would have had to show lots of long time skips, followed by a slowdown as she recognises something about her past, randomly. It could have had those revelations happening faster and faster as time goes on, and the narrative could have flowed faster and faster. It could have shown her randomly joining with other travellers, them asking her about her previous adventures, and when she relates them they bring up insights that she didn't see. This would have allowed them to keep the battle shounen aspect of the show constrained to monster of the week narrative conventions whilst leaning hard on the slow-growth aspect.

Instead, the show opts for a more conventional narrative, where her companions die and she experiences regret for not having appreciated their relationships properly when they were alive. She is asked as a favour to take on the raising of a human child. This is an opportunity in a conventional way for the slow autistic immortal to fully observe humanity through the fiery lens of its youth, giving them leeway to detach from the overly polite and understanding cultural Japanese-ness of the normal adults she interacts with and engage in direct, impolite conversation (she spent 10 years with Himmel and co. and that whole time they didn't get through to her one iota so clearly a change of strategy is needed for her character growth).

This concept is reasonable. The idea of children, with their energy and impetuousness, would be a good foil to Frieren works. The first problem is that the story will have to have it both ways. Frieren IS inertia personified. Atleast emotionally. You are actually going have to have lots of time stretches where nothing changes because

A. growth is non-linear

B. she's particularly slow

So what advantage is there, story wise, to having her travel with a child? The point of that would be that the fiery energy of youth could break down her walls. But is that what the story wants? Or does it want to have her grow slowly? BUT THEN, THEY DON'T EVEN DO THIS, BECAUSE FERN IS PRETTY CHILL, ACTUALLY.

It seems then that the show didn't know what it wanted. It can't fully commit to the core concept of the main character: Glacial emotional pacing. Because for accessibility, it has to work at human timescales. But this isn't the worst, because a generational epic with Frieren at the center would be MUCH less accessible AND (most importantly) it would be much harder to pull off. And maybe experimental and bad is worse than conventional and well done.

Well done - as in Steak

The show is then hewn repeatedly over the next many episodes, chop chop chop.

It falls victim to extended, expositional battle sequences where world building is weaved through dialogue in a show-and-tell style presentation. Frieren battles a demon, and in doing so exploits one of their flaws, that demons would never understand why a person would hide their magic power ability, their mana, and by exploiting this can get them to overcommit to offensives that leave them vulnerable. Frieren, the story, over the course of basically all of episode 9 and 10, exposits this to death, through constant cuts between the A and B plots, demonstrating this principle. All of this in my mind is purely to allow for an "epic" fight sequence as Frieren sandbags for ages as they reveal the fight macguffin in the 'Scale of Obedience', before revealing her true power and engulfing the demon.

This shit was stupid. It was like it was trying to do a Gandalf the White in the court of Theodon reveal like in Lord of the Rings, except that was good because first of all, it was relatively short, and second, the result of it directly impacts the story by introducing a new character, Theodon, who we have been investing in slowly over the course of the movie. This lazy crap invests super heavily into demons who are fundamentally uninteresting characters because they are chaotic evil, and therefore have no moral or emotional nuance, and then kills them off, never to return.

If the story wanted these chaotic evil demons to reify some narrative quality, whilst keeping them emotionally flat and uninteresting as characters, kill them off quicker. If they're simply a narrative foil to demonstrate something about Frieren and about humans, then they're narratively disposable and we don't need multiple episodes interacting with them to get the point. The part where the child demon killed the villagers was enough.

The part where I stopped watching - the Mage trials

Little is more narratively battle shounen than a tournament. It seems to me that the cost of writing and recording dialogue relative to the cost of animating fight sequences must be off-kilter in Japan. Because so many shows do this, introduce a dozen or more characters with various magical abilities and to animate them all doing battle whilst the story more or less grinds to a halt (something I'm not opposed to when its Frieren spending 6 months finding a particular flower in an area because its narratively cogent), I suspect animation is underpaid in Japan.

The problem is not necessarily that Frieren has a tournament. I want to emphasise that I'm happy with basically anything if its done well. There's nothing I'm opposed to on the basis of the thing itself. I'm opposed to indulgence in shounen battle anime story-loops that barely serve the story itself. The mages of the guild are bureaucrats, and Frieren is essentially a hippie in their world. But it just doesn't make any sense that all these mages can look at the strongest mage in the land, a literal living legend who is actively recognisable, and not atleast get a bit starstruck.

Its not even the realisticness or not of it to me. The mage tournament is showing many things in the story such as Frieren's continued laissez-faire approach to the passing of time and how the world outside of Frieren, who is the only real mage we've met, view and interact with the system of magic (why does it matter in the story though is what it struggles to answer). Its the fact that the mage tournament is realistically almost purely a narrative detour. Although we get some thematic continuance through the frustration of Fern at this very much a waste of time when she realises they're going to be hanging around for (I think) 6 months to complete something that doesn't make sense, the execution of the mage tournament itself would deliver as much of the same impact if we were more or less to skip the actual story of the tournament, and just cut to its completion.

There's this obvious tension within the story I think that the writers struggled with which is that they actually need to show lots of time passing with no growth. And they need to find a way to keep things interesting whilst making the reader or watcher feel frustrated at the interminable length of time that the story is taking, because that's what the story is about. The easiest way to do this is with high-engagement, highly accessible subplots that drag on both to the characters and to us. Unfortunately, my patience was worn thin at this point by the constant attacks of the hewing axe and I couldn't progress past it. If the ending redeems it thematically then that's great, it just didn't sustain my interest long enough to care.