I first heard about Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, the award-winning fantasy story when a YouTuber named Gigguk made a video about it titled ‘How it feels to lose everyone’. I remember watching the video and how it stayed with me.
The feeling of bone deep melancholy I felt looking at the different manga panels displayed on my screen convinced me that this wasn’t a story that I could just watch and shake off. So when the anime released in the fall of 2023, I waited. Not because I thought it wouldn’t be good but because I knew it would be. I knew it would leave me emotionally devastated and well… I didn’t want to experience it right then. I waited patiently for the season to end, thinking I’ll binge-watch it, emotionally wreck myself for a week and move on with my life. Well, I did binge-watch it, I did emotionally wreck myself, but the third item on my checklist – the moving on part – I just have not been able to accomplish.
The Hook of Frieren
You might be wondering what is it about this story that makes it different from the other millions of fantasy anime that release every season? What makes it better? Let me tell you – Everything. Frieren begins where all the other fantasy stories end. The Demon King has been defeated and the legendary heroes have already saved the world. Songs have been sung, statues have been erected, and history, it seems, has already moved on. The legendary hero who saved the world has already died, while the other companions have begun to age and die as well. All except one. Frieren. She is an essentially immortal elf, who has already lived for a thousand years by the time the story starts. The ten years she spent journeying with her companions may have defined their lives, but for her it was only a drop in the vast ocean that is her life.
The emotional crux of the series is built around this imbalance. What happens when the journey has already been over for decades before you fully understood it? What remains when the people who you shared that journey with have already begun to disappear?
Time as Distance
Frieren is a story defined by Time. It shapes every emotional interaction in the story. For humans, time creates urgency. It implores us to make meaningful connections with those around us because life is short and unpredictable. For Frieren, who is functionally immortal, such urgency just does not exist. Time just stretches on endlessly, making meaningful connections with others almost impossible.
The death of Himmel the Hero becomes the turning point in the story of Frieren’s life. His loss forces Frieren to come face-to-face with something unfamiliar – Regret. Not for something she did but for something she never did. She never tried to understand what the years spent travelling together meant to Himmel. How much she meant to Himmel. The series portrayal of grief stuns me with just how heartbreaking it is. There are no emotional outbursts, no long monologues, no dramatic declarations. Just an immortal girl learning to sit with her regrets in life and trying to do better so that she may never make the same mistakes again.
Fern
Fern, a quiet young girl, is the catalyst for the growth we see in Frieren. Having been asked to take on Fern as an apprentice by a dying Heiter, the priest she defeated the Demon King with, Frieren is resistant at first. To take on an apprentice feels impractical for someone who will inevitably outlive everyone she meets. Investing emotionally seems pointless when loss is guaranteed.
But, over the course of the 6 years Frieren spends with Heiter as he approaches death, she begins to form a bond with the girl. Still battling the regret she feels about Himmel and the time they lost, their relationship develops quietly. Through Fern, Frieren is given a chance to experience companionship differently from before. That is, she learns that relationships being temporary does not make them meaningless. If anything, it allows her to cherish them more.
The beauty in the ordinary
Frieren captures the quiet moments in life perfectly. Set in a world filled with monsters, demons and magic, Frieren rarely focuses on the spectacle. Battles occur, yes, but they do not center the story. The narrative focuses entirely on the quiet moments. My favourite moment in the series is not some action-filled battle with mage spells flying about. It is when Frieren searches for Himmel’s favourite flowers so that she can decorate his statue with it. The musical score, the emotional impact, and the visual imagery come so perfectly together during the scene, it is impossible not to shed a few tears for the bond that manifested too late.
A journey becomes beautiful and meaningful through ordinary days strung together. Frieren’s journey is not characterised by moments of grand sacrifices or dramatic turning points but by quiet moments of reflection. This pacing may feel weird and unusual for a lot of anime fans, especially those who consume mostly shounen anime, geared more towards action and drama. If someone calls it boring, I can only assume they were waiting for explosions while the story was busy being beautiful.
Learning too late
At its core, Frieren is about understanding arriving too late. The series acknowledges a deeply human flaw: we often realise the importance of people or moments only after they are gone. For Frieren, such instances are exacerbated due to the sheer amount of time she has been alive. But such is also the case for us humans, isn’t it?
As Frieren travels with Fern, and her new companions, we see her begin to engage differently with the present. She listens and cares more deeply and learns to love while it can still be appreciated by the object of her affections. Her journey this time is not about defeating another enemy but about learning how to value time as it is still passing.
By the time I finished Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, I had already realised that it would be one of those stories that will just stay with me. It didn’t provide me with a neat resolution wrapped up like a gift. Instead, I was left with a sense of melancholy and the understanding that endings often arrive way too fast, and that maybe that is just how life works. So, I want to just sit with this story and remind myself to slow down and notice the people around me, the people I cherish, while there is still time to do so.
I will text my friends, I will call my parents, I will annoy my brother. Because time doesn’t slow down for us. All we can do is meet it halfway and hope we’re not laden with regrets when the time comes for us to hang up our hats.
(P.S, cannot believe I finally understand what my teachers meant when they said “It’s about the journey, not the destination”, and somehow it took an emotionally distant elf and a fantasy anime to finally make it make sense)