"Made to love magic": thoughts on Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
In the prologue to his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil makes this observation about how humans perceive death and the passage of time:
“A great deal of effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and indeed often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we would find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.”
Although many of Kurzweil’s technological predictions in that book haven’t aged well, this philosophical aside has stuck with me, and it was swirling around my head while watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.
A lot of people have talked about this one, but I only recently decided to check it out. Aside from the obvious issue of “so many TV shows, so little time,” what took me so long? For one thing, the setting didn’t really appeal to me; fan hype isn’t always a reliable metric either (I’m looking at you, Lycoris Recoil). The anime TV schedules seem to be saturated with TTRPG-inspired “high fantasy” shows these days, so it’s difficult to see what’s worth my time.
My initial impressions of Frieren weren’t necessarily negative, but I did find its premise slightly disorientating: I had to pause the first episode to make sure that I hadn’t pressed “play” on the wrong one, because it starts at the point where I expected the story to end. Fortunately, this piqued my interest enough to stick with it, and I’m glad that I did.
It’s partly a D&D-esque adventure that leans hard into the fantasy setting – with all the tropes and genre conventions that go with it – but it’s not entirely a cheeky pastiche of those stories either. Half of the recurring cast are only seen in flashbacks, with their actions echoing down the years in a more indirect way. The most surprising part for me though was learning that the original comic was serialised in Weekly Shōnen Sunday, because the wisful nostalgic vibe feels to me like something that would resonate more with an older demographic.
The only thing I’ve seen so far that does a similar thing to Frieren is Mari Okada’s Maquia feature film, which also shows a fantasy world from the perspective of a character whose life expectancy sets her apart from most of society. Like Frieren, Maquia’s titular heroine lives a somewhat lonely existence in part because the arc of her life inevitably follows a different path from those of “ordinary” humans. It’s a great example of worldbuilding, but it also examines how relationships are affected when the protagonist is able to live far longer than most of the people she cares about.
Frieren is full of moments that highlight the way that the passage of time affects the way we experience the world, in both major ways and minor ones. Anyone who’s returned to their childhood home will recall how damn *small* it all looks when you’re an adult, much like the way that Stark laments that his favourite dessert doesn’t look as big as it did when he was young. Even if the place hasn’t changed, the people – including you! – undoubtedly have.
Another example is Serie, the type of character who is likely to be familiar to anyone who’s spent a lot of time in higher education or academia: her detached, theoretical view on life is set up as a contrast to Frieren’s constantly-evolving and more hands-on approach, and after spending a couple of dozen TV episodes following Frieren, it’s easy to see the flaws in Serie’s worldview.
This particular dynamic also highlights how some people – especially older ones – find that the wisdom that comes with age is useful in so many ways, but cannot prepare them for everything. Society itself is constantly changing, and even the most knowledgeable sage can be left behind if they’re not careful. Like the demon whose all-powerful spell became weak and irrelevant over time, the older generations of mages like Serie, Flamme and even Freiren can find themselves out of date: their strengths are unsuited to a new era.
This is I think why the choice that Fern – who, I have to admit, is my favourite character in this show – made in the final episodes, and the reactions to it, were so telling. Serie couldn’t understand it, but Frieren was proud of her. My reading on this is, the “old” way of magecraft – devoting years to hunkering down with collections of grimoires and honing combat spells – isn’t appealing to a human who’s living in a world after the Demon King has been defeated and the tales of wandering heroes who travel around helping others are what inspire people. Sure, Fern is absolutely terrifying in a fight, but that’s innate talent being channelled into brute force attacks using centuries-old spells that a centuries-old mentor taught her. Given a choice, she would prefer to use something practical that can be applied in everyday situations: partly a sign that she took Frieren’s “helpful adventurer” philosophy to heart, and partly a sign of her own maturity. She recognises that being powerful can be useful, but it’s also pretty great to be able to make your life, and the lives of the people around you, easier and more pleasant.
In a similar way that jet lag messes with your sense of time because you can’t keep track of where one day ends and the next one begins, the blessing of a long lifespan like Frieren’s takes away the sense of urgency that pushes you forward and dissuades you from procrastinating; it unmoors you from one of the major factors that makes human life so vibrant and fulfilling. All those years, and the knowledge that can be acquired during that time, don’t count for much unless you’re willing and able to share them.
As Nick Drake once sang:
I was born to love no one
No one to love me
Only the wind in the long green grass
The frost in a broken tree.
I was made to love magic
All its wonder to know
But you all lost that magic
Many many years ago.