This episode was just awesome, no doubt about it.
But character-wise: Stark > Fern.
We can see this most with their infiltration of the mansion. Stark has to swim through the moat while Fern water walks, Stark is freezing wet but still carries on, he Parkours up the wall and even turns to give Fern a hand up, but Fern just flies over the wall while Stark is left there. Yes all that is an amusing scene, but it really says something about Stark and Fern. Stark has to do everything the hard way, and even suffers for it, but he still offers a helping hand. Meanwhile Fern has immense power which she uses to effortlessly achieve what Stark does with much effort, but Fern doesn't use her powers to help Stark. Fern is just selfish and kind of full of herself, or at least she not a good team player and immature. Whereas it's really inspiring to see the effort Stark is putting in, and is admirable working through his fear to accomplish noble things. It's not only quite the contrast of Stark's background of him being a coward who fled his village being attacked by monsters to where he is now, but it's also quite the contrast to compare him to Fern; who's background was she worked hard to become a powerful mage, only to grow kind of selfish and full of herself with the power she's obtained. Fern has achieved "paying back her master" by becoming a mage before her master pasted away, but Stark is still in the process of "paying his master back" before Eisen passes on. Fern is sure of herself, maybe too confident in herself; whereas Stark is scared and not that confident in himself, seems to be always under-estimating himself based on what others think of him, yet despite his fears he carries on to prevail. Stark notices the demon guy sees Stark as zero threat, and Stark is terrified of the demon guy just because of his under-estimation of Stark. The same thing happened with the dragon, it looks like Stark needs to learn to not hold other people's opinion of him to such high regard because it isn't always accurate. I think the same thing could be said with Eisen, Stark thinks Eisen thinks Stark is no good because Eisen never praised him, whereas Eisen told Frieren that he believes Stark to be even stronger than him. Stark also thinks Eisen punched him because Eisen was mad at him, but it turned out Eisen was reflectively scared of Stark's strength.
Anyways I'm rambling, I think Stark is way better of a character so far than Fern. I admit that Fern has her moments, but she seems to be how Frieren used to be with her old party, a little cold and aloof. There's emphasis on how Frieren has changed since, so I think Fern is to highlight how Frieren used to be versus how she is now. Which means Fern is probably going to run into similar problems Frieren used to.
I'm actually really blown away, and liking how the anime is treating Stark. He's coming off as the typical bumbling joke character who's loud and obnoxious, but in this case Stark isn't actually obnoxious and bad. They're actually still getting the same comedy out of that trope character, but Stark is doing things right and is looking mighty admirable for such. Where as Fern is the typical tsundere character that conflicts with the joke character, but she actually does stuff wrong and comes off looking bad because of it (or at least to me). It's kind of funny because Fern's the stick in the mud nag who is forcing Stark and Frieren to do the typical hero's "go out the way to save the town, and protect the people" and other do-gooder stuff. Whereas Frieren and Stark seems to be aligned pretty well at not doing all that. I really like that while Fern maybe cold towards Stark, and tries to humiliate him, the anime itself is not trying to humiliate Stark like other anime's do to that joke character. It's quite the subversion, and it's working really well with Stark's character development.
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