Review of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

The amount of terribly placed exposition, hand holding, and flashbacks in Frieren should be studied as a what not to do in the animated medium. For those who want a bland, unbothersome, soothing experience of anime style medievalcore, Frieren isn't a bad way to soothe away an afternoon. However, it is the worst example of storytelling in the top 50? 100? of MAL anime. It has some of the worst storytelling I've seen in any anime, ever. I have watched tropey anime. I have watched trite anime. I have watched anime that felt like an AI compilation of all the older, successful anime in itsgenre that came before it. Yet all of those presented their story more subtly, effectively, and cleverly than Sousou no Frieren did. Perhaps Frieren wanted to capture something of the LoGH OVA style of telling history through narration; if so, it shouldn't have pretended to be about a single character's internal change and journey.

It's hard to understand how an anime that is primarily exposition, tell not show, montage, and flashback could ever be successful as a piece of media; all the more baffling that it has been *this* successful. Perhaps, like certain political movements, it caught a certain zeitgeist at just the right time. It's difficult to explain otherwise.

The best test of how good a series is is how the characters speak to one another. Are they communicating with each other or with us, beyond the fourth wall? The characters in Frieren almost *never* communicate with one another. They are all, near unequivocally, communicating with the viewer. They are there to explain a plot point. They are there to provide worldbuilding, exposition. They are there to force feed us some convoluted yet astonishingly banal piece of life advice. This is a show that says nothing, yearns for nothing, and offers nothing. At best it is visually enjoyable and aurally comforting.