Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End goes where few fantasy stories dare to go

polygon.com:

If you’re looking for an anime that will force you to interrogate the inevitable passage of time and reconcile with the fact that one day you, too, will be forgotten, then boy do I have a show for you.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is a visually gorgeous fantasy adventure, but it’s also a melancholy reverie about mortality. Elven mage Frieren watches the world around her change: Magic evolves, empires fall, the people she knows and loves grow old and die and are eventually forgotten to time. Yet the show is gentle and comforting, even when confronting the inescapable oblivion.

[Ed. note: This post contains some slight setup spoilers for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.]

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End picks up where most archetypal fantasy stories end: after the band of heroes defeated the big bad. They swear they’ll meet again, setting a date in 80 years, when a big meteor shower returns. From there, they split up. Frieren, the party’s sole elf, doesn’t bother keeping up with anyone else till their scheduled meetup. While she hasn’t aged at all, the rest of her party — Himmel the hero, Heiter the human priest, and Eisen the dwarven warrior — clearly have. And though that meeting does take place, it ends mournfully, because Himmel passes away the very next day.

Frieren swears she will do a better job at keeping up with her friends, but another 20 years pass before she runs into one of her party members again. Life passes differently when you’re an elf and your lifespan is hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The 10 years Frieren spent journeying with her party was just a blink to her, but it was a huge chapter for everyone else. She knows firsthand how much the world changes, how nothing is permanent.

It’s an affectionate cliche that many shonen protagonists — from Hunter x Hunter’s Gon to Pokémon’s Ash — want to be great heroes that the world will never ever forget. Even more slice-of-life protagonists, like Hinata in Haikyuu, want to achieve legendary greatness. But