Month: October 2023

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Toxic Yuri, Tragedy, and Catharsis in DESTROY IT ALL AND LOVE ME IN HELL!

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains mention of physical and emotional abuse, and other sensitive subject matter. Please read with discretion.

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

If this one seems a little less coherent than usual, and more like I’m jumping from idea to idea, give me a bit of a break, I tapped this out in about a third of my usual write-time because I really, really just wanted to talk about this manga.

Let’s start with this, though. What a fucking title, fan-translated or not.

Destroy It All And Love Me in Hell! You don’t get enough like that anymore. Just chunky enough to telegraph that it’s the English name for a manga, vague enough that it could be about just about anything, but promising a unique tonal space, and that space is much of what we’re going to talk about today. But before we get to that, as is always the case, it helps to know what this thing is actually about.

In a sense, this is a dark twist on the classic “status gap” setup common to many yuri stories and, really, much romance in general. Except, instead of, say, a noble and a commoner in some fantasy setting or anything like that, we have a high school populated by an outwardly-perfect student council president overachiever who’s secretly so high-strung that you could play her like a violin (Kurumi Yoshizawa) and, in the opposite corner, an absolute scuzz-fuck dirtbag of a delinquent whose idea of a crush involves blackmail and punches to the solar plexus (Naoi). No reduction to common character tropes here, while both of our leads are loosely rooted in archetypes common to the genre, neither is what she seems, and even those foundations that exist start to crumble as the pair get into each others’ heads. A third girl, Kokoro, plays a decidedly tertiary role as Kurumi’s relatively innocent childhood friend who is also (uh-oh!) harboring a massive crush on her.

We open on Kurumi giving a perfectly fine but decidedly canned speech as the student council president. It is immediately obvious from the manga’s opening pages that, other than Kokoro, nobody really likes her. They either envy her for her achievements or resent her because they think she’s looking down her nose at them. (That latter point of view is what leads to her and Naoi’s already-uneasy first interaction.) Managing this largely-friendless existence is made even tougher by her incredibly overbearing—and we later find out, outright abusive—mother, who micromanages her schedule and insists that she excel in all things. The kind of anxiety that this sort of thing kicks up can easily lead to bad habits, and Kurumi’s, evidently, is abortive attempts at shoplifting. We see her palm an eraser from a corner shop, stick it in her bag, and then, overcome with guilt, pay for it anyway.

The usage of something as utterly minor as an eraser for this bit of tension-building feels deliberate. As it turns out, we’re not the only one who saw this little stunt. Naoi, whether coincidentally nearby or outright stalking Kurumi, films her doing it. From there, editing the video to only show the theft itself would be trivial, and it is that threat that first intertwines Kurumi and Naoi, and it doesn’t take long for their encounters to get violent. Things are fraught for a little bit, but then, in a scene where Naoi explains to Kurumi precisely why she doesn’t like her, three consecutive pages, and six words on the last of those, change the timbre of the manga forever.

“What are you laughing for? Freak.”

Like a magic spell, that single question—and Kurumi’s grin in that last panel—shifts the manga from a tragic story about one girl bullying another to something very different. I shouldn’t have to say this, but let me do so anyway just to be cautious; obviously, in reality, this is not how any part of this works. But, within the wonderful world of fiction, we can explore such problematic but compelling concepts as “what if a really hot girl at your school systematically ruined your life and you realized you kind of liked it?” Further, “what if you eventually got enough into it that it kind of became a mutual life-ruining?” Thus is perhaps the driving question of Love Me in Hell.

And on that note, I do feel the need to here go to bat for this entire subgenre. Occasionally I will see people express disbelief that anyone likes this kind of manga at all, or else they’ll assume they’re made for a gawking male audience, the alleged “male majority” that supposedly make up most yuri readers. Aside from the deep irony of how a certain kind of low-rent media criticism will claim to be feminist but center the male experience anyway, this is easily rebutted here from personal lived experience. I’m a woman, and I like this stuff. I’d describe myself as something of a novice in the ways of Toxic Yuri, but the appeal is immediate and obvious. This isn’t my first foray into the genre, but it’s a dive back in with an intentionality I didn’t have when I first discovered it.

We’re going to largely skimp on linear recapping here. The manga as it stands is just seven chapters long, and you can easily knock it out in an afternoon if you’re so inclined. The important thing to note is that as Naoi and Kurumi’s strange relationship continues, with Naoi continually threatening to expose her fake-shoplifting habit and demanding Kurumi do increasingly risky things (stealing from a teacher’s desk, carving another student’s desk up with threats and insults, etc.), they do grow closer in a twisted way. Based on that alone, you probably already know whether or not this is “for you,” I think it’s worth asking why this subgenre and particularly Love Me in Hell specifically, resonates with people.

I have one pet theory, myself. In the background of the manga, lurking but never directly mentioned, is of course the specter of homophobia. The idea of a “good girl” snapping under the weight of a deep-seated desire to do “bad things” doesn’t actually need all the character justification it gets in this series—although it does add a lot of depth to Kurumi’s self-destructive behavior—because it makes perfect sense. What is homosexuality in a straight society always painted as if not the ultimate transgression? What is anything that happens in this manga but the viscera of sexual exploration splayed out for us to see? Three chapters in, Kurumi is actively getting herself off1 while fantasizing about Naoi pinning her down and calling her a “bad girl”. She of course tries to claim to herself (and implicitly, though obviously disingenuously, to the audience) that she’s not really thinking of Naoi that way, but the panels show what they show, and it’s genuinely fascinating how Naoi seems to literally take up more and more of Kurumi’s mental real estate as the manga goes on. Love Me in Hell sometimes depicts her—or rather, Kurumi’s thoughts of her—as literal shadowy interlopers into the pages themselves, carrying clouds of inky black fog with them.2

Because we are to understand Kurumi and Naoi’s relationship as two-way if not healthy (it’s definitely not healthy, hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that), it’s important to point out that Naoi isn’t really the villain of this piece beyond maybe the first chapter or two, and by the more recent chapters it’s clear that they’re actively harming each other rather than it being as simple as X hurting Y. If there’s a real root of all evil here, it’s society itself; specifically the school system, and homophobia at large for allowing things to get this bad in the first place.

And on that note, if you’re straight and this kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, it is worth asking precisely why. Is it just that you don’t like to see cute anime girls getting hurt, or is there the lingering guilt of complicity somewhere in your noggin? I won’t judge, it’s in mine, too, despite my being queer, I let a lot of shit fly that I shouldn’t have when I was younger out of a desire to remain closeted, and I’m still not really a “visible” queer in a way that anyone would pick up on without asking. This stuff hurts, and pretending it’s not there doesn’t solve anything.

Of course, that’s not to say that Love Me in Hell is some kind of high-minded liberationist treatise, because that isn’t right either. There is a sense of reveling in the pain, here. Not as simple rubbernecking (do not let that imaginary male audience back into your head! Not for a second!) but as a fully intentional exploration of these emotions. A wading into, for lack of a better term, this uniquely fucked-up vibe. It may be offputting to put it this way so bluntly, but there is really nothing quite like watching two people collide in a way that could not possibly end well for either of them.

Kurumi, repressed to the point of her personality buckling under the pressure, finds an absolutely perfect foil in Naoi. It’s all but directly pointed out that it would have been “better” for Kurumi, if she wanted to break off contact with Naoi entirely, to just come clean about the shoplifting video and cut the problem off at the root. There are two reasons she does not do that. One; Kurumi’s very real anxiety from her mother’s outsized expectations of her, and as is later revealed, her outright abusive behavior wherein she threatens self-harm if not constantly kept up to date on Kurumi’s whereabouts, have made actual, honest communication between the two impossible. But equally important to the story itself is Two; being blackmailed by Naoi gives Kurumi permission to do bad things. Being “bad” with Naoi gives Kurumi a way of stepping outside of herself, an escape that no traditional outlet offers. It is a profoundly bad coping mechanism, but it is one nonetheless. Thus, the tragedy and the romance of Love Me in Hell stems not from the idea that there was no other way this could’ve gone, but because on some level Kurumi wants it to have gone this way. It is an absolutely sublime example of rotten romance, and a bit later in when Naoi starts to more obviously return these twisted feelings, the catharsis is very real.

At the same time, there is a festering, throbbing kind of pain to watching all this unfold, like an infected cut that got that way because you neglected to put a bandage on it. But in its own way, that kind of pain is itself fascinating and intoxicating. And this, really, is where we boil things down to “you either get it or you don’t.” Many people, I think perhaps most people, will never try to kiss this particular snake. Those that do will know better than to complain when they’re bitten. You need to know what you’re getting into if you’re going to read about a couple whose love language is beating each other up and whose grand romantic proclamations sound like this. It is fundamentally a very different thing from “vanilla” romance, and one cannot substitute the other.

I like things like this both for that reason, the emotional, elemental appreciation of watching two people make each other worse because there is no “better,” but also because unlike a good amount of “fluffier” yuri, this stuff feels immune to being stolen from us queers. Which is not to say that straight people are incapable of reading and appreciating art like this, but rather that in order to even understand what a manga like Love Me in Hell is trying to do, you have to already accept the premise that yuri actually is largely about queer romance and queer sexuality, instead of assuming it is being made for some other reason. I cannot conceive of the kind of bland, bad-faith readings that plague more mainstream yuri and yuri-undertoned works ever catching on with this kind of thing. Who could possibly actually get through it and not understand that sometimes, there is nothing more romantic than two girls just seeing how much worse they can make each other? It’s impossible to even entertain the idea.3

On a broader level, though, Love Me in Hell taps into the same rhythms of darkness that fuel all sorts of longstanding arts. Tragic theater, heavy metal, horror movies, hell, if you wanna go truly mainstream, there are tons of pop songs about specifically the idea of tainted love, bad romance, and so on. Hell, one of them is serving as the ED theme for an anime I covered on this very blog earlier this season.

Of course, hey, let’s check off the obligatory caveat. Love Me in Hell is a monthly, and as such even though it’s run for most of 2023 so far, it is still only those seven chapters in. The most recent of these is outright hopeful, in fact, ending with Kokoro admitting her crush on Kurumi. Things could, you know, theoretically, get “better” for Kurumi. But let’s just be honest with ourselves here, that’s not Love Me in Hell. I would be very, very surprised if Kokoro, the hopelessly in love, kind of bland sweetheart that she is, got the girl. I’m not even sure that either of the leads are going to get out of this thing alive! Both Kurumi and Naoi’s households are tinderboxes; emotionally unstable parents creating absolutely untenable situations for their children. The two’s only way out is through each other, and I don’t really see how Kokoro could feasibly fit in that equation.

The manga’s title, after all, is Love Me in Hell. It would hardly be the first romance manga to end in some kind of terrible tragedy, and that title sure does conjure images of going down into a burning ring of fire; a roaring inferno that takes everything, good and bad, with it.

1: If you are concerned about this kind of thing, the scene is drawn in such a way that you don’t really see anything.

2: I think I can get away with saying I find this entire habit of fantasizing and then feeling terrible about it deeply relatable as someone who was raised Catholic as long as it’s not in the main text of the article. Thank god for these footnotes that nobody reads.

3: This is yet another reason that the imaginary “male majority” isn’t worth considering when evaluating this stuff. I don’t know about y’all, but my experience with cis-hetero men in anime fandom, at least the kind who, say, insist Suletta and Miorine are just very good friends, has not painted a picture of people with the stomach for this kind of thing.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Hell is Other People in KAMIERABI GOD.APP

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“Be forewarned that what’s to come isn’t a very pleasant story.”

-Opening line of the series.

You really need to know what you’re doing if you’re going to open a show with a deliberate, tone-setting monologue. That quote up there is just the tip of the iceberg, where Gorou Ono [Kazuki Ura], the protagonist of KamiErabi God.app, tells us that this show will not have heroes, will not have a love interest, won’t be about friendship, and won’t “tug at your heartstrings.” It’s a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, in other words, and he encourages us to just “laugh it off” if nothing else. That kind of acidic cynicism is certainly more likely to elicit laughter than any actual bracing for serious, cerebral storytelling in this day and age, that’s true. So is there actually anything to this show, or are we in for a hopelessly edgy bleed-out of self-indulgent misanthropy?

Time will tell, but if KamiErabi‘s first episode proves anything, it’s that it has enough style to be worth giving a shot. Although I’ll freely admit I’m not sure how many will make that leap. The show is a highly-stylized all-CG affair, and while this is not the instant death sentence it used to be in terms of general reception, it’s still a hard sell for a lot of people. Which is a shame! The show’s modeling and animation are very good, and I’d only point to a tiny handful of quibbles with regards to things like eyebrow clipping as faults in this regard. The series’ environments look stylish, too, with a minimalist color palette that tends to focus on making single colors pop at a time. Each main character has a distinctive image color, as well, both in their eyes and in underdye form in their hair. All told, KamiErabi looks pretty sharp.

What will probably draw folks in is the nebulous involvement of Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro. I’m only passingly familiar with the man’s work, but nothing here sticks out to me as an obvious thumbprint of his. In terms of plot, what we have here is actually a fairly direct riff on the whole Future Diary1 setup. The show’s opening minutes aren’t worth recapping in detail, but they establish a few fundamentals; Gorou is a typical teenage boy, but also kind of a misogynist, and is an idol otaku obsessed with the singer Iyo Futana [she doesn’t show up in this episode, but the credits list her as played by Tomori Kusunoki, whose prior role as Love Live‘s Setsuna Yuki seems worth mentioning here] and also interested in a classmate of his named Honoka Sawa [Sara Matsumoto]. Interested enough, in fact, to be jealous when his own friend, the shark-toothed Yutaka Akitsu [Shuuichi Uchida] points out that she’s dating a soccer player. And jealous enough that, when the convenient plot machination of a wish-granting phone app pops up, much to his own skepticism, he still idly asks it to let him “fool around with Sawa-san.” Not a terribly pleasant guy, all things considered, although how much we’re supposed to identify with vs. be disgusted with the kid isn’t entirely obvious at this point (and does matter, as far as establishing the themes of this kind of story go).

Initially unbeknownst to Gorou, his wish actually was granted, and fate just so happens to convolute itself such that he can invite Sawa to a secluded location. From here, things get….weird. Weirder than they already were.

Sawa starts coming on to Gorou pretty strong, apparently influenced by the wish-granting app. Gorou (seemingly involuntarily? The visuals get confusing here) exposes himself (thankfully we don’t actually see anything), and is promptly interrupted by a literal exposition fairy named Lall [Ayane Sakura], who takes a moment to explain the whole Mirai Nikki-esque state of things.

And Gorou promptly freaks the fuck out—understandably so!—and runs away, protesting that he wants no part of this. Sawa follows him, not actually because she’s under the influence of the wishing app, as it turns out, but because she’s also one of the candidates. To prove her starter bad guy bona fides, she promptly kills an innocent bystander and uses some kind of arcane ritual to turn his corpse into a huge cleaver-sword-thing.

The battle scene that immediately ensues here is, unquestionably, the easy highlight of the episode. We can sit here and talk about the show’s actual writing (spotty) and directing (interesting but a bit confusing), but the fight here looks absolutely great, as Gorou runs through a version of the stages of grief for his own ordinary life; first just straight-up running, then trying to persuade Sawa that this whole thing is stupid, then passively accepting his impending death, and finally steeling himself to fight back (which he does with some kind of magic book, because KamiErabi is not keen on explaining itself).

At the end of all this, Sawa dies, although Gorou and his impish partner resurrect her somehow, possibly sans-memories of the whole death game thing, and the episode ends on a very sudden, uncertain note.

The specifics of any of that are deliberately unclear, and a brief explanation is offered only in passing, but the case seems to be that in return for Sawa coming back to life, Gorou is now living an altered life where everyone believes he sexually harassed her. There are a couple ways to take this. On the one hand, yeah, he’s genuinely taking the fall for someone else in a very immediate and direct way; he did literally save her life when he had no real moral obligation to do so given that she was trying to kill him. On the other, the show sure does seem to want to twist itself into knots to justify or at least excuse Gorou’s earlier, apparently completely genuine, misogynistic behavior.

Ultimately though, it’s too early to tell for certain what KamiErabi is going to do here, but the fact that Sawa hasn’t been entirely written out of the story is, itself, a good sign. Especially given that she, not Gorou, is the one with the real killer scene this episode. (Now, if the series proceeds to do nothing else with her for weeks and weeks, that’ll be another story entirely.)

All told, the gist of it is simply that while KamiErabi isn’t anywhere near the strongest premiere of the season so far, it’s definitely one of the most out-there. And while strangeness shouldn’t be confused for quality (a mistake I myself have made a few times this year), there is some inherent value in just not being afraid to get weird with it. KamiErabi is bizarre, lurid, stylish, and disturbing. And those are good words in my book, as far as evaluating an anime’s future prospects goes.

1: Many other works of fiction have since used this general premise of course, to the point that I think you could easily argue that the whole “god candidate” thing is its own subgenre within the broader death game setup. I’m not even entirely sure if Future Diary originated this trend or just popularized it.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, Mastodon or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: A Lullaby For You To Come Back Home – Endings and Beginnings in FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Wherefore the anime elf? This often-stylized archetype has been a standby of the medium, especially in the old-school fantasy genre, since the days of Record of Lodoss War. In Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, the archetype finds perhaps its best representative in many years. Which would mean nothing were the show itself not very, very good, but thankfully, Frieren‘s premiere is not just one of the year’s best, it’s an incredibly emotional treatment of the concept, and consequently, an examination of the brevity of life itself. Of how regrets can pile up over the decades, and of the incredible importance of connecting with those who are still here while we can.

If you wanted to be pedantic, you could argue that Frieren has something of an unfair advantage when it comes to the inevitable forthcoming comparisons to the other anime premieres of this season. Its first four episodes were melded into a single contiguous block for their Japanese premiere, and even as some streaming services (both in Japan and overseas) have sliced them back up into four parts, it’s obvious that this is intended to be taken as a single chunk of narrative. Back when Oshi no Ko made the over-length premiere play in Spring, it was an act of gutsy arrogance; an announcement that this was a massive pop blockbuster event that demanded full attention. With Frieren, the aim is much quieter but no less ambitious; it is to emphasize the sheer scale of time on which this story takes place. By my count, the combined premiere contains around 5 time skips varying in length from 1 to almost 50 years. Over this loping timescale, the hero’s journey is rendered merely a prologue. By taking this approach, Frieren reveals itself to be part of a long legacy of fiction that emphasizes the transient and fleeting nature of life itself, while at the same time demonstrating how important the people we meet, the things we do, and the memories we make truly are, even if they are little more than dust on the wind.

I have to confess to being a complete and utter sucker for this particular thematic line, and you should read everything else I’m about to say accordingly. I am a kind of romantic at heart, and stories that deal with this sort of material almost always get me. Last year I praised Vampire in the Garden for a broadly similar approach, there focusing on romantic connection. The year before that, it was Heike Monogatari with its emphasis on the crushing weight of history. Further examples predate anime as a medium. It is a tale quite literally as old as human memory. People are here and then, one day, they are not. Art is one of the few ways to truly reckon with this.

As far as the actual plot, we should rendezvous with Frieren herself [Atsumi Tanezaki]. She was the wizard of an adventuring party that, as the anime opens, has just returned triumphant from defeating (of course) the Demon Lord. A fireworks show cheekily labels this joyous occasion as “Part 6” of a story that we will never get to see in full. That night, a shower of bright blue comets blazes through the sky; the fleeting fire is a symbol for the short lives of mankind, and to hammer it home, Frieren’s companion, the swordsman Himmel [Nobuhiko Okamoto] remarks that he wishes he had a better spot to see it from. Frieren offers to see the next shower with him, which Himmel recognizes but Frieren does not is far enough in the future that he will be old by then. And indeed, when we actually see that next occasion, a full 50 years later, Himmel is a hunched-over old man with a beard almost as long as the party dwarf’s. Frieren herself, of course, looks exactly the same.

Not long after that, Himmel passes away. Frieren attends his funeral service and is forcibly confronted with her own nigh-immortality. She laments that despite travelling together for a decade (a length of time she previously dismissed as a “mere” ten years), she never really knew Himmel at all, despite him considering her a close friend.

Later pieces of the premiere imply that the two harbored even deeper feelings for each other, but, really, this scene is pivotal enough that for a time, the original manga was known by its fan-scan name Frieren at the Funeral. This marks a shift in her worldview, if one she seems to struggle to actually incorporate into how she acts.

Heiter [Hiroki Touchi], the party’s cheerful (at least on the surface) cleric, struggles with the limits of his own mortality as he takes in a war orphan named Fern [Kana Ichinose]. Frieren is eventually convinced to take Fern on as an apprentice as Heiter lay on his death bed, and she is the second main character of this story.

Much of the premiere, in fact, consists of Frieren and Fern taking on various odd jobs. Frieren is rather fey in a way that elves in more poppy works tend not to be. She is an aimless loreminder, and travels throughout the land collecting spells. To her, something to heat up a cup of tea or turn sweet grapes sour is just as valuable as any great or destructive magic anyone could conjure. Similarly though, when either she or Fern are shown in deep concentration or meditation, they do so amongst nature.

That Frieren is so mindful of the natural side of spellcasting elevates it above most work that reduces magic to the merely flashy. This connection with nature becomes important when, at one point, the two search for a type of flower that Himmel was fond of to decorate a statue raised in his honor many years prior. The search takes months, and Fern, who has quickly grown into the more practical of the two, thinks it may be extinct. But sure enough, Frieren is able to find a hidden store of the pale blue beauties, and rescues the species from extinction. (The flowers are blue and seem to deliberately recall the comet earlier in the premiere; that’ll be another symbol for the tragic brevity of life, if you’re counting.)

The flowers are also important to Frieren’s actual goal throughout the premiere. As the story advances and Frieren repeatedly reflects on the departure of Himmel (and, indeed, Heiter), she resolves to retrace her adventure with Himmel nearly a century after the fact, before all sign of it fades away and is subsumed by time’s tides. This smoothing-out of all of history, good or bad, is another of the anime’s key ideas.

Another example; 80 years before the show’s present, Frieren and her companions sealed away a demon sage as part of their adventure, trapping him in stone. During the present day, when the seal begins to weaken, Frieren and her still-relatively-green apprentice are able to simply dispatch the demonic wizard with ease. The once-unthinkably destructive magic that the demon pioneered has since become a standard part of every magician’s arsenal. In some sense, his contribution to this branch of magical theory, stripped, perhaps deliberately, of any context by the march of time and tides of history, is the real “evil legacy” of the Demonic Kingdom. Of course, on the other hand, the magical analysis of this kind of spell has allowed it to be overcome in the form of the protective wards that Frieren and Fern cast to defend themselves, so it’s not all bad. Still, one must wonder if the demon sorcerer doesn’t in some sense get the last laugh here.

A similar flattening and smoothing is applied, very much in the other direction, to an utterly ancient genre-standard gag. A skirt-flipping brat 80 years in the past becomes the wizened old man leading the village where the demon is sealed in the present. Time, Frieren puts forward, takes the impact out of anything, be it atrocities or dumb pranks, for better or worse.

When the past becomes truly important, it argues, is when it is manifested in the present. A later tale sees Frieren making sure she can witness a New Year’s sunrise. Not because she has any desire to do so herself, but because she did not do this with her companions during her quest decades ago. In a sense, she’s righting a wrong; even if Fern has to almost literally drag her out of bed for this to happen.

Later on, the past meets the present in a more immediate and dramatic way when Frieren and Fern reconnect with the dwarf Eisen [Youji Ueda] (another member of Frieren’s old party, and the only one other than Frieren herself who is not deceased by the premiere’s end).

From that reunion, Frieren’s journey seems to go full circle. The late elf magician Flamme, Frieren’s own mentor, is a fascinating, looming presence over this story. She taught Frieren much of what she knows, and time and legend have ascribed to her the power to speak to the dead and physically visit heaven itself. In the end, a book she left behind sets Frieren on a new journey, once more, a “mere” ten years to the lands of the late Demon King, as she chases the trail of her dead mentor and, conveniently, still sticks to her goal of retracing her steps with Himmel’s group. Frieren’s journey begins again, a loop nearly a century in the making.

I would not be surprised if future episodes of Frieren are less direct with alluding to this particular circle. Then again, maybe they won’t be. Frieren is nothing if not holistic; no part of the premiere feels easy to divorce from any other part of it. It’s in a way criminal that I’ve held until now to speak about the show’s craftsmanship, which is absolutely superb. Keiichirou Saitou returns here, from his directorial debut with last year’s Bocchi the Rock! working in a very different mode, intent on capturing the beauty of a lived-in, weathered fantasy setting that feels utterly timeless. The series can be surprisingly funny, too, with a charming, character dynamic-based sense of humor that never overstays it’s welcome. These things add to the show’s immense capacity for resonance; be that in joy or sadness. At the end of the day, all of this is Frieren, and it all ties back to the series’ core themes. This is my life, this is your life. We are all on some journey to somewhere.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.