Frieren: How Love Defies Time

vodan is an elf who has lived for over a thousand years she has seen lives come and go like the seasons faced countless foes Master many Magics of her world she should be Untouchable uncaring as the world changes around her so how does a mere 10year Journey not even one 100th of her life affect her so much how does it bring her to tears in an anime season of shiny new shows foden is is the antithesis a tolken esque refrain on what comes at the end of a fantasy Adventure Vian is an Elven Mage and a member of the heroes party of this world after 10 years feden himl the hero hether the priest and Eisen the warrior returned to the kingdom having defeated the Demon King there's a celebration shooting comets that appear once every 50 years a joyous occasion and theodan feels detached her party members Revel in their time together but she's confused it was only 10 short years not even 1/ 100th of her life she acts coldly as if this was purely a small side quest to the story of her life she will take no Apprentice she will wander the continent for another hundred years and stop by again for the next Comet fall and show them her party a better spot to watch and true to her word theodan travels and we see time fly by in a blink of an eye the beauty of the world of 50 years goes by vieden reluctantly returns to the city and meets her companions again for the first time in half a century they are different even the Stout Eisen who looks almost the same feels the pain of aging and Himel is near unrecognizable except for the Sheen in his eyes and the kindness in his voice and they go on one last tiny adventure to see the falling comets and our last shot of the party together as a whole is as they sit at the bank of this Lake watching the lights of the world around them and we hear the music beautiful and heartbreaking not long after himl dies and at that moment we don't quite know what this means for them the group makes light of the situation himo was an old man now after all and he died happy and it seems like that will be all and as they lower him into the ground we finally get the first Real Bout of emotion from feden of regret we only traveled for a mere 10 years I knew human lives were short but why didn't I try to know him better and that hits us hard that hit me hard because it's easy to Simply have a character cry over another character's death and make it feel almost meaningless but here there's a weit to that regret that feels real families friends I guaranteed there's someone in your life you wish you could have had a second chance with because you realize you didn't put in enough effort to know them or to love them as you wish you could but death and time are immutable there is no stopping them and it's easy to coldly grow apart because then you don't get hurt but as Eisen says to feden that's not how relationships work it's not about how long someone stands next to you but how much they change you in the short time that is our lives how the purest form of love is remembering these moments and these people for as long as you can theoden's life is anything but short but now she knows that she must learn the value of a life of friends and Company and limited time that we have what those short 10 years truly did to her fan Beyond Journey's End is a tale of two stories told side by side as fedan retraces the steps of her old party no no party is not the right word because they were her family and now with her new family she goes searching for a way to see him one last time and this anime oh this this anime is going to make you feel things this animation is gorgeous like a constant painting it can be fluid and it can be calming it can be Acy and the music the music is easily the best of almost any anime I've seen this year it is good enough to make you cry on its own don't let the energetic opening of the show fool you it's a bit of a tonal dissonance Deen's music throughout the rest of the show is an orchestra of emotions it sounds like remembrance like a Journey's End if that makes any sense when I said tolken esque at the beginning of this review I meant it with all my heart and it is emotional not in the oppressive sadness that you might expect but in an appreciative longing a nostalgic longing the same Nostalgia we see in thein's eyes as she sees the statues of her friends visits Villages she once saved many years ago reminisces of the promises Himel made to her and instead of tragedy there's a sense of Triumph in these moments of these recollection of memories because it means that the journey that small 10-year Journey for fean not only changed her life but the lives of near countless people she met and never fully realized in the moment and to go with this emotional story you have to have these mature good-natured characters that surround Fan's life to start her original party who we see in the first few episodes are now long gone but we still get glimpses of them through well-timed flashbacks throughout the show piter a drunken priest turned adopted father of a young orphan girl a trickster who at the end of the day did his best to make up for his own shortcomings by making the world a better place and Eisen probably my favorite depiction of a fantasy dwarf in year Stout and stalwart and even afraid and vulnerable at times Himel the hero a vain but kind man who is far more of a character than we truly realized the first time we meet him and who I'll discuss more closer to the end of this review and while normally in a story knowing that a character is dead and gone would make it very tricky to get us invested in their stories and their lives especially through flashbacks there's something to these flashbacks the flashbacks themselves are rarely of the party being Heroes more often it's the aftermath of their heroics or the moments in between the fun of their journey and slowly we begin to love them through their interactions with Fen they never overshadow our current party but in these brief glimpses we see so much of who these people were and why feden remembers them so well and they do feel like Heroes and most importantly these memories follow the same path fan now retraces allowing us to relieve these moments in these locations with her as if we are remembering those times which we didn't appreciate as much as we should all that time ago we are in fen's shoes and for the new faces of her group we have the ever adorable Fern the orphan that heer tricked Fen into caring about a gifted Mage and daughter SL sister to fuden in a way who we see grow from an unsure quiet child to an experienced somewhat stubborn mage of exceptional skill and the newest addition to her group Stark is a subversion of the Trope of a coward a hero who thought he saved the town through sheer dumb luck is really a man terrified but resolved to fight and truly has the ability to do so even so much as to easily kill a dragon he was afraid to fight and lastly what would this crowd be without foden Now fedin isn't naive about the world she's incredibly smart and Incredibly talented she's been around for a long time but she doesn't feel old as much as she feels experienced she loves sleeping in she takes pleasure in wasting time spending years doing the most mundane of things she's very fond of magic and likes to collect grimoires no matter the danger and no matter the spell inside them she's a bit Reckless and a harsh teacher but even if she wasn't certain At first she does care about the people around her even if she sometimes is too late to realize it and she does try to make an effort when she can especially now with Fern and sometimes that's enough but in a way she's also still a child easily predicted even by her Mentor with a Thousand-Year hard read on her greatest regret easily predicted by Himel and heer and Eisen who all understood that she wasn't cold because she was cruel but because she hasn't yet understood what was important to her but now she does remember how I mentioned she enjoys collecting grimo it's not just because she's obsessed with collecting magic but it's a vidual love she gained because her friends used to have so much fun with the little odds and ends spells she knew and she loved that they loved them even to this day she found a grimoire that makes grapes more sour which sounds like the stupidest spell ever until it's later revealed that that's eisen's favorite food and he doesn't even travel with her anymore she just wanted to collect it little story beats like this the subtle World building and character work we seen feden helps to elevate an already compelling character story into what I consider to be seven episodes in an easy anime of the Season Contender and all of it is built around the passage of Time Each episode we see how many years it's been since him's death how long f lingers in a single location because fedan does linger she could stay in a village for 5 years and not bad an eye and the only reason she keeps moving right now is because Fern insists that she doesn't want to stay in a single place for what feels like forever for her and no time at all for fedan time moves in this anime when fedan returns to an old town to confront what was 80 years ago a near Unstoppable monster she's able to wipe the floor with him because at this point in history that Monster's magic has been studied to to death and is now considered nothing more than basic attack magic and it's smaller pieces of time that changes too how Fern physically grows how the seasons change time and death permeate this anime and as episodes go by you're worried that there will be a jump at some point and you'll miss something just like foden did just like fan did because that's what this anime is about time and memory and the fear of loneliness and being forgotten and it hurts because everyone feels like this in some way we fear not only being forgotten but forgetting if you went to sleep one night and woke up 1,000 years in the future you wouldn't only be distraught because the people you love are gone you'd be distraught because there'd be no one else to remember them with you no one to share that memory as jangi puts it and while the genin voice line is Meed to death it's nonetheless true time kills all things and we watch through Fan's eyes we are looking through the eyes of someone who wakes up a thousand years later again and again and again Vernon Stark will die the world around her will be destroyed and built up again and there's nothing she can do about it but remember so it means so much that she can still remember and that she still cry when a mere 10-year Journey can affect her so much it gives us hope and it's beautiful the whole anime is beautiful it's not action-packed it's no jiujitsu kaisen the best way I can describe it is the feeling you get when you play a jrpg that you love Dragon Quest or Pokémon or octopath travel or anything like that one that took you a month to complete that you played slowly that you just finished the main quest and now to fill that hole in your your heart you spend the next few weeks completing every side mission getting every collectible Reminiscing on the adventures that you and your little pixelated party took and even though it was only a month of your life you will remember it for a long long time be and Beyond Journey's End is that experience distilled and animated a combination of violet evergarden and probably the greatest fantasy anime genre you can imagine it is poignant without being forlorn it is triumphant in its emotions it is quiet and thoughtful as its characters stare up at the Sunrise and realize the importance of Simply being together in that moment and it's beautiful there's no better place I could think about inserting this piece of the review in so here it goes but speaking of beautiful I want to talk about himl the hero the vain man who had me fooled from episode one up until episode 7 which is the last one I watched before writing the script Himel the hero leader of the party comes off originally as a kind of jokey character who loves to look at himself in the mirror you can't initially see how he of all people led the party that defeated the Demon King hell he spends most of his time after saving a town insisting that they make an accurate statue of him in the party and putting it somewhere visible it's often the only reward he asks for and I mean how could a guy be so full of himself self and my God was I wrong and it hits hard when Fen asks him why he has these statues made and he replies rather you know traditionally that he wants people to remember them humans don't live that long and in my opinion have even shorter memories but that's not the only reason we see earlier this episode theodan reminiscing about her master and coldly points out that after over a thousand years Jan's probably the only one who still remembers her Master's face even her master's writings are this point are just the thing of Legends to the rest of the world Flamel the wizard is merely a fairy tale and him himl was listening and you can barely see it in the animate he's right there and then we see later this episode he turned to fean and gives her the real reason I guess the biggest reason is so you won't be alone the future we're not fairy tales Fen we really existed him throughout this whole journey made time to know fuden to make sure that she remembered him and set the world up to be able to share those memories with her long after he's gone and that's when I realized for certain that him will loved her there was no doubt in my mind and even so it seemed like he never asked her for any anything in return even when she didn't visit him for 50 years at the end of their Journey he held no grudge he was simply happy when she showed back up again and I wrote this tearing up because I know Fan's greatest strength now it's showing the love of these people new and old in these memories a pure love of sharing moments together of Simply standing next to each other of remembering each other's faces This Love that defies time despite knowing that it can't hold out forever Bean 2 will eventually die maybe in a million years but she will still die and the memory of the hero's party will fade from existence along with those statues but in the moment that doesn't matter in the moment it's still beautiful and I think fedin knows that too [Music] thank you for watching let me know in the comments below what you think of fedan and this review no spoilers please leave a like and comments something stupid if you want it really helps with the algorithm and if you want more dives into anime or want me to cover Feen when it finally ends then subscribe thank you all so much for watching like comment subscribe my name is llin star eyes and I will see you next time bye-bye

Channel: Locklan Stareyes

Views: 283,467

Keywords: anime, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Id: L92_ICkgiYA

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023