For the first time ever the hype didn’t disappoint. Honestly a breath of fresh air for anime, my only complaint is I wish it was longer.
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My complaint is I wish they spent less time fighting monsters and more chilling in random villages to learn a spell that bakes bread.
Yeah the demons are the least fun part of the story, aren’t they? Typical dark anime psychopath creatures.
I don’t think the combat can be saved by better antagonists. The real issue is the author is atrocious at writing characters with a plan of action. The use of flashbacks and over explanatory dialogue here is painful. This might not be so bad if they weren’t so insistent on trying to show their protagonist effortlessly outsmarting her opponents.
It’s not just a show thing unfortunately, it’s faithfully replicating the manga here.
To be clear, I still really like Frieren. It has cozy vibes and a really unique perspective.
I don’t think the combat can be saved by better antagonists.
Does it need “saving” ? The combat isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact the incredible power displayed sort of raises the stakes because it can clearly all be over in just one mistake.
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I liked the first demon fight, because it gave a big chunk of backstory and world building. This thing being a reminant of a prior era that was horrible back then but trivially defeated now was a clever way of iterating on the idea of “progress” within a fantasy setting.
I was less thrilled with the second demon, simply because “my pot of mana is bigger than yours” is a lame way to resolve conflict.
But the fight with the diplomats gave us another big chunk of plot, in so far as it established why the idea of a demon was so horrible. A monster in a man’s form that preys on compassion is a good set piece for future drama.
At some point, the focus of the story is around the mystery of what occurred in the prior age. And demons are necessarily a big part of that. So introducing them as minor antagonists in order to unspool the story works well.
The pace of the conflicts does drag though. The only thing worse than a Naruto-esque low stakes fight scene is one that feels like filler.
I think for me the interesting part isn’t just “progress”. The interesting thing that this show has going for it is specifically training.
What I mean by that is that battling monsters is not how the characters in this show get stronger. Yes some battle experience plays a part in confidence building and making less practical mistakes… But the main message being driven home here is that it is generational education that makes each generation progressively stronger than the last.
Fern is unbelievably powerful, having trained under Frieren. She has not been in that many battles but she has been trained relentlessly from childhood by Frieren and she has the skill to demonstrate this. She also has the battle-personality of the person that trained her, she has a poker-face unlike any other and she is exceptional at hiding just how strong she really is.
The same goes for other characters in the show. The whole thing is about how people are trained. Who their educators were. What knowledge was passed to them by those educators.
When something new appears that nobody knows how to beat there is a collective effort to paradigm-shift all methods and find a solution. This paradigm-shift then becomes just totally normal and is educated into the next generation.
I highlight this because the traditional fantasy anime is all about defeating enemies to become stronger. But this is not. These people are all strong because they have been trained well. Their strengths are not from collecting EXP points over time by defeating mobs but by their educational backgrounds.
I can definitely see that. Although, there is a certain implication that some things have been lost over time.
Frieren’s hobby of collecting niche spells and leveraging “village magic” to great effect, plus the commentary on declining numbers of wizards, and the brief call back to the Elven genocide of prior eras all allude to it.
The flowers episode describes something that is (almost) lost, while the episode at the port town looks at the quality of life being predicted on this steady maintenance without which the past is lost.
The “lost knowledge” thing is another commentary on education. Passing things from one generation to the next, or the failure to do so.
This is pretty explicitly stated in Fern’s backstory where she was convinced not to commit suicide by the priest because it would be erasing the memories (and knowledge) of her family.
I like it a lot. It has made me wonder recently what an mmo might look like if you removed the “gain exp from killing monsters in order to gain more power” mechanic. What would game design for this genre look like if you explicitly prevented this?
It has made me wonder recently what an mmo might look like if you removed the “gain exp from killing monsters in order to gain more power” mechanic.
A bit like a very population dense version of Journey, I imagine.
I think Ultima Online tried to do a system in which you gained ability through practice and it decayed over time. But because of the mechanics of gameplay, all this really amounted to was lots of bot-activity to boost abilities into the stratosphere.
Another approach I’ve seen is mini-games with variable difficulty based on the task you’re attempting. So, opening a lock is a kind-of increasingly complex rubix cube exercise while casting a spell might require solving a Captcha or chemistry problem of varying difficulty. I like this better in theory, but I can see why it never got the traction of more traditional stat-based games in practice.
I think you do run into the fundamental problem of answering “What kind of game do you really want to play?” I’ve heard the Halo FPS combat system described as six-seconds-of-fun on a loop, for instance. Very engaging, lots of permutations on a theme as you change maps and available equipment. But not conducive to a particularly deep or story driven game.
On the flip side, you’ve got a very story-driven game like BG3 which still ultimately involves a lot of rat-smashing, but lets you advance at pace entirely by advancing the story. Bleed off even more of the combat and add more opportunities for social interaction, you might approach what’s being described here. But there’s also a certain “main character syndrome” in all of these animes that make them antithetical to an MMO. You can’t have every player be Frieren, after all. They can’t all be thousand-year-old mages on a 10 year pilgrimage with a big mystery origin story.
Frieren as an NPC set piece and guide stone could be very cool. But I think you can kinda get that already from Genshin Impact, if you just avoid the dungeons and stick to the plot.
I’ve been thinking about it and I sort of think you could have “training” as part of gameplay if you can make it fun and enjoyable. Perhaps a sort of arcade minigames thing? Like Maple Story 2 was doing. They’re essentially Fall Guys style minigames, races, contests, memory games etc. If you came up with some fun ones you could have these as representations of the “training” your character does. Might need to be fairly varied with mmr to create added challenge and competition in this element of the game. The downside though is balancing this against what players probably want to be doing which is running dungeons… But even then I sort of think running dungeon dailies is a hyper repetitive task that people only “enjoy” because they’re gaining progress points towards greater character strength. Perhaps you would offset this with harder and more challenging dungeons or other tasks set to players out adventuring outside of the cities. The issue here is that I think a lot of mmo players are playing mmos because they don’t want a challenge they just want to over-level almost everything and be unstoppable gods.
Pokemon is interesting in a sense because you’re not the one levelling up, the pokemon are. The levelling up in pokemon for trainers is collecting gym badges.
This isn’t really relevant but I’ve also often wondered about more features from The Sims making their way over to mmos. Like characters engaging in conversation with nearby players of their own independence. For example let’s say you go to the marketplace and you’re there looking at the market boards, your character will indepently engage in conversation/actions while idle. Or just in passing out and about characters might greet one another, as you do in real life when you say good morning to a stranger in passing. These could affect social stats between characters, and could be influenced by the players in a roleplay kind of way. At the very least it could highly increase social interaction.
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I actually found the second demon fight to be extremely amusing purely because of the lore tidbit that retaining your magic makes you more powerful
Frieren is the ace representation I needed
It was just a very long build up to reveal “ancient Elven mage trained by legendary wizard kinda powerful actually”
It was fairly important to establish just how much mana she’s got now as a result of consistent training her entire lifetime to raise it. Also I think it was very important to establish that her primary tactic (which she learned from her teacher) is to prey on opponents completely underestimating her strength.
She even mentions that Aura could have beaten her if it had been a head on fight with all of her knights. But ultimately the thing that wins this fight was a very simple deception that she’s carried with her from her teacher her whole life.
And she’s passing that same deception to Fern too.
This whole arc establishes one of the more important skills passed between teacher and pupil.
my problem with demons is their lore. It’s the only thing that makes me uncomfortable in Frieren. They are intelligent beings but unlike other races like humans, dwarfes and elves, they are born evil. And in this anime, if you doubt that all demons are monsters that should be purged, you will be punished by rules of this world. I don’t like it. This is imaginary world, you can set it up how you want but for some reason the creators of manga/anime decided to create a world where some beings are just simply evil by nature and must be eliminated. I would like if in Frieren world, demons would be something that people become, like by solding their soul to dark forces or something. In that case i wouldn’t be having a problem with them. Also, to be fair, this problem isn’t unique to Frieren, a lot of fantasy stories has the same problem. But i was hoping that there wouldn’t be such thing in Frieren :(
Yeah, I have the same problem with the demons. I’d rather they just make them straight up ontologically evil by being evil spirit’s literally summoned from hell or something, rather than a race that “evolved” to prey on humans. At least the Demon King being Literally Satan would neatly sidestep all this skin-crawling Evo-Psych stuff
I’m not entirely against the concept of a race born evil (it’s certainly not a new concept, and born evil races are what most people are accustomed to), but for myself I’m concerned with their depiction as being beyond the ability to reason with and that they use their speech just to trick and kill you, which sounds familiar to racist views of minorities.
It makes no sense to consider anyone as born with any morality (let alone set with one), since morality isn’t really part of the world as such. But the demons inexplicably have basically an ideology to kill humans stuck in their brain that can’t be changed and that’s reactionary as fuck to write, nothing good comes of it. They had a softball among softballs with the infant demon to demonstrate that it’s like a cultural divide that devolved into racism, but nope, demon orphan killed the humans who raised her. The only way that it could possibly be redeemed is if later on this was shown to be some kind of elaborate trick by a party invested in keeping the conflict going.
They had a softball among softballs with the infant demon to demonstrate that it’s like a cultural divide that devolved into racism, but nope, demon orphan killed the humans who raised her.
I can guarantee you weren’t paying attention during this. The demon didn’t do this out of some malice stemming from her demonhood, she literally did this in an attempt to make amends to the other villager. She killed the child of one of the villagers before she was adopted so she got another child as an offering.
Demons aren’t malicious or evil in this setting, their thinking patterns are just fundamentally alien and that leads to conflict. Demons and humans cannot understand each other, that is the conflict in this setting. Demons aren’t born with some sort of natural hatred of mankind.
This is like saying the fucking Cthuhlhu is problematic it’s a sentient lifeform too.
The demon had some weird justification, but ultimately there is at least as much evidence to say it was just fucking with people (or simply hadn’t figured out humans enough yet to devise a better excuse), and even if it was genuine ignorance, that still would not answer why the demon kid had to be killed rather than merely driven out.
Remember that the demons themselves say that they only learned to speak in order to lie, they delight in human suffering, exhibit stereotypical arrogance, feel fear of dying and joy at their tricks working. Most importantly: Humans and demons very obviously can understand each other because demons are excellent at manipulating humans! At the very least, they can understand humans, which undermines your thesis about the kid (though it is plausible that the kid is too young for this to apply) and further cements the demons being just that evil. Everything about all of the interactions we see with the more adult demons suggests that they know exactly what they are doing, morally speaking, from the perspective of humans.
btw, I do not recommend citing HP Lovecraft for “obviously unproblematic” counterexamples, his whole thing was comparing inhuman abominations to minorities. The Deep Ones are literally an allegory for his discovering having Welsh heritage.
even if it was genuine ignorance, that still would not answer why the demon kid had to be killed rather than merely driven out.
A creature who murders entire families because it doesn’t understand human society is still dangerous even if driven out. Letting it go live in the woods to hunt humans isn’t the solution you think it is. If a bear was known to seek out and hunt humans, it should be put down.
Remember that the demons themselves say that they only learned to speak in order to lie,
You take what they say at face value when it benefits your point but when it comes to the child explaining their reasoning you dismiss it. You’re cherry picking here.
Humans and demons very obviously can understand each other because demons are excellent at manipulating humans!
There is literally an entire arc that revolves around demons and humans not being able to understand each other. The anime hasn’t reached it yet but the entire impetus is a demon not understanding human emotions and trying to do so. Their understanding of human behavior is “If I claim to have a son who I love, they are more likely to spare me.” It is a cold-calculated decision, they do not understand why humans are this way. You are objectively wrong on this.
I do not recommend citing HP Lovecraft for “obviously unproblematic” counterexamples,
Ah shit I forgot that since Lovecraft influenced cosmic horror I’m not allowed to use any example from Cosmic horror to prove a point. If Cthulhu is problematic because Lovecraft was, then the Sousou No Frieren is not problematic because the author hasn’t been. But using the author as the only metric for determining a media’s message is reductive to high hell.
I want to flick Frieren’s ears and watch them go boi-oi-oi-oing!
I liked it but have some concerns about the depiction of demons, that being that despite being able to talk, they can’t be reasoned with and are just trying to trick you so they can kill you.
Also, is it my imagination or is there something about the animation that feels reminiscent of 80’s/90’s anime? Something about the shading, perhaps the environments, brings back the vibes of artwork from old anime. Also the dwarf’s appearance, I could almost swear I’ve seen old anime with dwarf characters who looked like that.
concerns about the depiction of demons
I choose to think of it as commentary on Yakub’s creatures
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In all honesty I didn’t finish watching the season but even the first episode that the demon envoys show up in irked me, and I can’t really put my finger on it. I noticed that it also marked a departure from the usual tone of the show.
Frieren abruptly revealing that she has an exterminationist ideology towards a race of intelligent life is pretty jarring, certainly.
a little bit
The viewers line of sight when seeing friren: the demons are jews!
Arc flying over the viewers head: The demons are a 1:1 standin for ai.
Just picture the demons as white peopel
Skill issue tbh
It’s got an extremely fascist attitude towards the demons. Like, arguably worse than Goblin Slayer. In the way that GS has “fantasy savages”, Frieren basically has “fantasy Jews” who must be killed even when they are infants because they “only learn language so they can lie”, etc.
Not every fantasy enemy has to be morally nuanced, and intractably evil groups aren’t necessarily fascist or racist allegories.
Their world has an abundance of creatures that prey exclusively on humans, and a lot of them do so through mimicry. The demons are predator animals that feed exclusively on people, with the ability to work together to some degree, and very rudimentary abilities to pretend to be human in pursuit of that main goal. Creatures like them are prominent parts of nearly every cultures mythology, and just like the Fae, or vampires or anything similar, they don’t need moral agency to work as antagonists.
Not every fantasy enemy has to be morally nuanced
It’s always the go-to refuge to take a conversation of “should” and change it to “can”. The creator can do whatever they want, what I am saying is that they shouldn’t.
and intractably evil groups aren’t necessarily fascist or racist allegories.
Intractably evil races most definitely are racial and will always be perceived as such to racist societies like America and Japan.
Their world has an abundance of creatures that prey exclusively on humans, and a lot of them do so through mimicry.
I’m already rolling my eyes. Are you the sad apologist for reactionary treats? I thought it was someone else.
We’ve already played the game a thousand fucking times of “oh, but this species needs human blood” and Promised Neverland is a perfectly fine example of solving it even when it is posed in a very dire manner, though this fictional problem has also been solved in fiction for much longer without the answer being killing literal orphans begging for mercy. Fucking jackass.
The demons are predator animals that feed exclusively on people, with the ability to work together to some degree, and very rudimentary abilities to pretend to be human in pursuit of that main goal. Creatures like them are prominent parts of nearly every cultures mythology, and just like the Fae, or vampires or anything similar, they don’t need moral agency to work as antagonists.
blah blah blaah it’s just verbal diarhea because this conversation is old and you’re just grasping at whatever you can.
Guess what? Vampires were based on bigoted views of Jews too! You actually aren’t helping your case!
And “Fae” simply aren’t comparable, they are intelligent life who can be interacted with and generally aren’t ontologically malicious. You’re 0 for 2 on examples of something in “nearly ever culture’s mythology”. Please, keep trying, and see if you can pick something that isn’t The Poisonous Mushroom this time.
Guess what? Vampires were based on bigoted views of Jews too! You actually aren’t helping your case!
Bram Stoker didn’t invent vampires, and the creatures and mythology associated vastly pre-date the antisemitic culture surround his novels.
And “Fae” simply aren’t comparable, they are intelligent life who can be interacted with and generally aren’t ontologically malicious.
They’re perfectly comparable. They are not ontologically malicious, but in the majority of their incarnations, they are completely divorced from human mortality or ways of thinking. Creatures that look like people, but do not think like us or share a remotely similar moral framework. (Plenty of mythological fairies are ontologically evil on top of that).
blah blah blaah it’s just verbal diarhea because this conversation is old and you’re just grasping at whatever you can.
I hadn’t realised your name was supposed to be representative of the quality of your discourse.
Bram Stoker didn’t invent vampires, and the creatures and mythology associated vastly pre-date the antisemitic culture surround his novels.
Don’t bullshit me that you’re talking about the Vrykolakas or whatever when you said “vampire”. Beyond that, “vampires” represent a solved problem, even shitty books like Twilight deign to have the nuance to have vampires who refuse to harm people!
They’re perfectly comparable. They are not ontologically malicious, but in the majority of their incarnations, they are completely divorced from human mortality or ways of thinking. Creatures that look like people, but do not think like us or share a remotely similar moral framework.
Then it’s not comparable. The demons generally understand people pretty well and abuse that fact. There are mischievious “Fae” that tend to play tricks, but they are usually not evil, and certainly not justifying literal fucking genocide by saying that even an orphan begging for mercy is just another pest to be exterminated.
(Plenty of mythological fairies are ontologically evil on top of that).
Some are evil, but by the very nature of most of the folklore and the alien nature of the fairies, that they have been encountered as evil is not enough to establish that they are ontologically evil. We have no reason to believe that a Redcap, for instance, could not be reformed in just the same way as a sapient vampire could. Sometimes groups have a long history of being in violent conflict, that does not mean it could not be any other way and you usually do not find in folklore an insistance on such a conclusion (usually they stay more in the domain of pragmatic advice or the morality of a more immediate situation).
Even worse than a simple narrowness of thought, this need to make superficial tropes immovable pillars of the core of a creature’s being is a manifestation of reaction, a measure literally only conceived of to oppose critical thought such as “What if we talked to the Redcap? What do they really think and feel?” because that’d be too pro-social to the fuckers in fantasy who just want everything to be a Crusader fantasy about cutting down hordes of subhumans.
Which incidentally might be connected to interesting fact that the more insidious a creature is portrayed as being, the more likely it is going to end up being a direct and deliberate racial allegory (see were-hyenas, for instance) rather than, well, a more deniable racial allegory.
The closest you can get in fairy folklore to the message in Frieren is with Changelings, which is incidentally reactionary as fuck and in some cases appears to be an articulation of the superstitious slaughtering of infants with birth defects and other abnormalities, such as an en caul birth.
Because the question is not “Is this person on the internet forbidding [something already written] from being written?” or “Have people written this before? Long enough ago that we can just call it culture with no further interrogation?” Socialism is the rutheless criticism of all that exists and the question is “Is this trope reactionary in nature?” To which the answer is “Yes!” and you have not done a thing to push the needle away from that conclusion.
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Newest episode spoiler
They interrupted my comfy fantasy travel anime for a goddam tournament arc
I wasn’t impressed by it and dropped it after 6 episodes tbh
Now Apothecary Diaries, that’s the good shit. 16 bit Sensation was cooking really hard, as they say, but was unable to stick the landing unfortunately.
Dungeon Meshi looks like the anime adaptation is going to have pacing issues - much like Helck, read the manga instead.
Only saw the first episode, it looks great visually. I didnt get hooked by it though, which makes me worried
The first 3 episodes were combined together for the actual airing of this one. If you only watched 24 mins then you didn’t actually watch all of “episode 1” that was aired on tv.
Hm Im gonna start it soon as well. Maybe give it another 2-3 Episodes ? If it doesnt do ANYTHING for you by then I would just drop it.
First 3 episodes were combined and aired together for tv. The intro and worldbuilding is relatively slow so they did it takes a little more to hook.
Meanwhile, I finally caved and started Lodoss with the OG anime elf lol
Watch Dungeon Meshi too and OD on elves
I’ll probably watch it in a year like I did with Bocchi the Rock lol
Wish it was longer.
Isn’t it still simulcasting? I might be missing something.
I meant more that it feels like there’s quick pacing to the anime and wouldn’t mind more chilling. But I think its the point that it doesn’t due to Frierens concept of time compared to humans, what is an entire life for one is a blink of an eye for her.
Dang, you got me hooked and now I gotta wait another week.
