Review of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Get this garbage out of #1. It is embarrassing for us as a community. This medium contains the highest of possible art, the deepest and most meaningful of story; yet this show is not amongst that. This is a sloppy collection of annoying characters and intentionally mundane meaningless plot lines. The vibes are not cozy, the moments are not wholesome, and the show is not good. I will not be holding back at all with this review and I will be holding this show to the highest possible standard. If it Is truly the best show it should hold up against the highest level ofcriticism.

I will start with the positives. Freeren is number one amongst all anime in one aspect. The first outro of Freeren is the greatest anime outro I have ever seen. It is absolutely gorgeous and compliments the show perfectly. For a show that is supposed to focus on the stuff in between the action, the action is pretty much the only enjoyable part, and a lot of it is quite good. There are two arcs of the story that I found generally quite enjoyable. These are between episode 7 and 10, and between episode 18 and 21. This series contains one episode that I would consider to be really good, that being episode 9. This episode features two very high quality fights that have multiple points where I found myself rewinding to rewatch sections of the animation because they were so well done, which is something I do not do very often. I do not mind the characters Fern and Shtark. I enjoyed many of the moments that these characters shared, And will admit that some of these moments could even be considered mildly wholesome, although I do not take back my previous statement. I also didn't mind a couple of the Mages they added during the Mage exam. Many of the monsters and demons have great designs, and many of the landscapes and settings looked quite nice. There are a few high quality moments of small intricate dingdongmenship relating to ideas such as memories and flowers.

Now onto the negatives. If something is to be considered the greatest show, I would say a reasonable minimum requirement is that it doesn't contain any mistakes. This is not a standard that Freeren meets, There are many objective writing errors in the show. This is not my opinion, this is A fact about the show. None of them that I was easily able to catch were that significant or seriously affected the show, yet they are still there.
For example I will break one down in detail so you can understand what I am saying. In episode 15 there is a quick flashback where Freeren Is caught by a mimic right in front of Fern. Although it is not directly shown, This scene logically requires that one of the two following options has happened. Option one is that Fern gets Freeren out of the mimic, requiring that Fern learns how you get someone out of a mimic. Option two is that Freeren gets out of the mimic herself, Requiring that Fern learns What happens to Freeren’s hair when she gets herself out of a mimic. By episode 15, Fern is required to have learned a minimum of one of those two pieces of information. In episode 23 there is another scene, in the present, of Freeren getting caught in a mimic, In this scene Fern reveals that she does not know how to get someone out of a mimic, as she has to be told by Freeren how to do it. Fern then immediately reveals that she also does not know what happens to Freeren’s hair when she gets herself out of a mimic, as Fern has the aha moment of “So that's why sometimes you show up with a completely different hairstyle.” It is impossible for Fern to be learning both of those pieces of information at that point in the story, yet this is what the scene is. If one was to intake extreme quantities of copium, A scenario could technically be invented where During the events of the original flashback Fern was separated from Freeren while she was still in the mimic, and then Freeren Gets out of the mimic by herself, and they remain separated for long enough for Freeren’s hair to go back to normal. Yet this scenario of course requires a pretty extreme assumption, along with the assumption that on their previous Journeys Freeren was only caught by a mimic that one time in front of Fern, as well as this Behavior requiring a pretty significant bad-girlesk break of Character for Fern. Thus this is an objective writing error. Again this small little detail does not really affect the story in any meaningful way, but in my opinion something that is considered the best should not contain errors like this.

Two more examples of Inconsistencies. Once they enter the northern lands it is the beginning of winter, and it begins to snow, and thus they find a cabin to stay in, they then stay in this cabin for 6 months to wait out the winter. At the end of this sixth month period, at the beginning of Summer, it is still snowy all around them. The next scene, presumably happening in the middle of summer, is them getting caught in another blizzard and having to find shelter again. (Freeren during this time also reveals that she does not know any spell that produces any type of heat, fire spells do exist yet she does not know a single one.) They could have justified this scene by simply saying something along the lines of, they're traveling through the mountains now, so the weather is like this even in the middle of summer, and if it was winter then it would be 20 ft of snow or something. But they don't do this, it doesn't explain, it just gives us the characters stuck in a blizzard in the middle of summer and expects us to figure out why. It feels like they were so obsessed with having time pass that they forgot to have time actually pass.
Early on in the show there is a section where Freeren and Fern decide to clean a massive beach for a fake book. We are then treated to a couple of scenes where Freeren, the most powerful Mage in the world, is picking up 10 little pieces of wood at a time. It then clarifies that Freeren and Fern stay here and are cleaning this beach for 3 months, meaning that both of these Mages have spent a minimum of 3 months exclusively training their floating magic ability. Later on in the show it attempts to justify why Freeren was only capable of picking up small quantities of wood at a time, by saying that no one other than demons and monsters had the ability to fly or float until very recently. (And although spells being made recently is an advantage for things such as zoltrock derived spells it's not for floating Magic.) And even though we know they spent months exclusively training this ability they are barely able to actually use it when they need to. And at the end we see an elf using floating Magic 1,000 years before the events of the story, which from my understanding is not a monster or a demon. It's just sloppy, weird little inconsistencies like this shouldn't exist in the best show ever.

Now onto the character of Freeren. I do not like this character. First of all this character is an elf, and elves live a long time. She is very proud of this aspect of her existence, and she will bring up how old she is and brag about it every chance that she gets. Yet at the same time if anyone else brings up how old she is she gets insecure about it. She is extremely selfish and narcissistic most of the time, but then sometimes decides to be absurdly generous. At the funeral for her friend, She begins to cry, and she clarifies that the reason she is crying is not for them, but because she feels bad for herself because she didn't get to know him as well as she would have liked. This is the same friend that she had spent the last 50 years ignoring for no reason other than she was too distracted in pursuit of her own personal Joy. If time is truly that abundant for her it would have been no issue for her to send a couple of letters back and forth, at the absolute minimum at least once every couple years but she couldn't even manage that. It only takes 10 years to make it across the planet, so she was likely in his vicinity a couple of times assuming that she was just wandering around the southern lands. This strange feeling of guilt is the thing that inspires this whole story, Yet she is fully responsible for how she feels. If she had just acted like a normal person She wouldn't have this issue in the first place. She has had hundreds of years to learn how to act mature and she still doesn't. It also doesn't make sense why she is having these feelings in the first place, As there is only one person that she has ever known better than Himll, this being her master. Meaning that in comparison to pretty much everyone she has ever known she knew him very well. And she is making the judgement that she didn't know him very well based off of a singular slightly deeper relationship that she had 1,000 years earlier. It is impossible to have any sympathy for Freeren, in her 1,000 years on that planet she should have learned how to have/be a friend, And it never gives any reason as to why she is so closed off to everyone. Just the fact that she is old and from some perspectives it doesn't matter as much, Doesn't work to explain it very well. I think that the character is pretty annoying as well, I usually like characters that are annoying, but not like this. The way that she acts around grimoires is so contradictory to the way she acts around everything else that it feels like she is breaking character and doesn't feel like some natural quirk. It feels like an excuse that is employed to get this character to do anything, as without it the character wouldn't be willing to do anything. Any good character is flawed, as this is how a character develops, they have a flaw at the beginning and have character development by changing. Yet, at the end of this series there's a scene where an old lady drops her basket of goods onto the ground right in front of Freeren, It would take Freeren essentially no effort at all to help out this old lady, The show clarifies that in this moment the thought to help this old lady crosses her mind, and it shows her actively making the decision to not help. In the final episode of this series it clarifies that Freeren Has not had any meaningful character development, and is just as selfish as ever. Yes, she now has a regret, but she is still acting the same way that caused her to gain that regret in the first place. I would assume that eventually in this story she probably learns to have a heart in some way, to act with a little bit of humanity, but that didn't happen in this series, so this is my interpretation of the character.

I believe there is a place and time for Slice of Life anime. But that place is not number one, and that time is not all time. I am clearly not whoever this show is meant for. Slice of Life is not really the type of story that appeals to me, I view it as a valid part of what anime has to offer, yet I do not believe it is where anime truly shines. I went into this story knowing that it was very unlikely I would view it as a masterpiece, I only expected a high quality fantasy story. And I still feel disappointed, it did not even deliver on that. There are so many more criticisms I could give But I feel that I have already said enough. I know somehow I am in the minority here, there is some sort of fundamental difference between what I enjoy and most people on this website enjoy, as was clearly indicated by how much respect people give to things such as Steins Gate. And even acknowledging all of this, I still believe that this show is not very good, The story is not well written, it is full of objective errors, The characters are annoying and not relatable, The ideas are not fun or interesting, And I genuinely do not recommend watching this show.