I believe this was the anime I recommended to the most number of people. Most didn’t really give it a shot though.
My main selling point was that the entire runtime was only around 3 hours. Only a little longer than a movie.
It can be quite disturbing though, perhaps I should recommend this less.
I’ve re-watched this series way too many times.
There are so many scenes I love from this series, one that often comes to my head is when Heiter saves Fern from potential suicide.
I randomly saw the series on Crunchyroll and thought I’ve been seeing this around. I saw a video review by Gigguk. Didn’t actually watch the review itself, but I saw that they had made a review and they were hyping it up. Since I didn’t have too much else to do, I figured I’d go take a look.
To my shock, this was one show that didn’t give you cliffhangers and didn’t make you addicted to the show. And I ended up not binge watching it. I watched two episodes of the show and went to sleep on time instead of binge watching a show until 2 am.
Frieren gave me this weird, really good feeling piece after I watch these shows. At night after work, I could watch an episode or two of Frieren and go to sleep feeling so calm and peaceful, and it was just wonderful. Every other show I had watched was trying to make you agitated, trying to make you think a certain way or feel a certain emotion, and figuring didn’t seem to do that. It was just good storytelling; it was just brilliant.
Outside of Frieren’s ability to give me peace and let me go to sleep at night, there were also so many great points about the show.
Every episode was a 10 on 10. It just felt different. One of the episodes I remember was the episode where they introduced Fern. They start off this part of the episode by showing us a scene where Fern is about to jump off a cliff and commit suicide. Then Heite, the drunk priest, comes in and saves her, not by physically pulling her away from the act, but by talking to her and convincing her of how valuable life is. It just so happens to apply to everyone; it doesn’t just apply to Fern. It applies to you and me and anyone else who is interested in the show and living a fulfilling life. It shows us how valuable the people around us are, the people who care for us are. And the show shows us how much we internally value these things.
Another scene I remember was when Heiter was talking to Freiren and asking about her faith, that if she believes in the god of the Freiren universe, and how Freiren responds with “no”, and then Heiter goes on to speak of how incredibly difficult everyone’s lives are.
You and me, Heiter. This obviously applies to the people of the show, but then again it applies to us as well. The show again points out how life for everyone is just incredibly difficult. We’ve just gotten used to it; our day-to-day is not something that’s easy to get through. We’ve just built up the resilience to get through it day after day, and then Heiter speaks about how it’s not that the god exists or the god doesn’t exist, but how Heiter wants the god to exist so there is someone in his afterlife or somewhere up there who can appreciate and praise him for having lived through the difficult life that Heiter and everyone around him has lived.
To me, the show isn’t just good storytelling; it’s how incredibly it manages to connect to its audience and then points out to the audience themselves these things that they don’t realize about themselves.
The heroes of the story are just brilliant role models themselves. When they help someone, they take a very small payment from them so that the people who receive help don’t owe the heroes anything.
Frieren and other heroes have gotten to the point where they are to become extremely powerful through immense hardship. In Freerun’s case, like a thousand years of training. To me, that also points out how we should value hardship and our ability to get through difficult times, because they built us up into who we could be.
Unlike other shows, action sequences in Frieren end very quickly as well. This is unfortunate, and people would really prefer a bit more lengthy action sequences, but honestly, a real fight would probably end quickly as well if it were fatal to one or the other party. Perhaps that’s reflected in Frieren action sequences. If you stick an axe inside a person or a demon, they’ll probably die; that’s probably the end of their life.
In other shows, the protagonist is the main character, or maybe even the evil villain. They just have plot armor; they keep coming. They’re fueled by the power of friendship and just grit, not in Frieren action ends quickly.
That doesn’t mean the action sequences are no good. They’re brilliant. I’ve seen it tens of times now.
Go check it out if you can. It’s at the very first position of myanimelist for a good reason.
