I quit Frieren: Beyond Journey's end because it failed to show me an interesting world of magic. It turned out to be surprisingly thoughtless and plain. So I thought, "Wait, wasn't there another show I liked with magic and deep relationships that has a new season?"
What's so refreshing about this story is that you can tell Kore Yamazaki is interested in both how magic works and how people work. As a result, the characters grow naturally. In other stories, if a character suddenly starts behaving differently, their decisions may feel out of character, only for the purpose of propelling the plot. In this story, the
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May 16, 2024
Sousou no Frieren
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Funny  Preliminary
(10/28 eps)
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The best part of Frieren happens early on. She reveals she has a magic spell that makes grapes more sour. It's a good joke. It shows just how niche and boutique magic can be in this world and how Frieren's goal of acquiring more spells through research and dungeon crawling is not always a noble pursuit of wisdom. Sometimes it's just a carnival game, and she might waste her time or walk away with something stupid.
But then during a flashback in a subsequent episode, one of Frieren's old traveling companions reveals his favorite snack: grapes, the more sour the better. It's not the focus of ... the scene, it's just one line of dialogue among many, and it's never referred to again. This reveals the possibility that Frieren didn't stumble upon the sour grape spell by chance, but that she actively sought it out. Why? On the off chance she would meet that companion again? Because she like sour grapes now, too? To prove that she actually isn't as emotionally detached as she believed? By juxtaposing the two scenes, the initial joke has also become a vehicle for character growth, and an open opportunity to speculate on the inner life of the protagonist. It's a thoughtful moment. Then at some point all the thought in this show goes away. It's about when we meet the demons. Demons only know how to deceive, we're shown. Demons don't understand human concepts like love or camaraderie, we're told. A demon says he doesn't know what a "father" is. Is he joking? Is he stupid? If a demon is deceptive then wouldn't one HAVE to understand love and camaraderie to deceive humans? We see three demons cooperate to fulfill a complex mission. Are we meant to believe they aren't comrades? Also, why does the jarl or whoever agree to parley with demons when it's common knowledge they only know how to deceive? There isn't even a suitable explanation, like the demons disavowing the Demon King. They just walk in and say they're gonna be peaceful. Is the jarl stupid? And how is Frieren going to take care of these demons? By hiding her Power Level. Oops, I mean her Mana Level. You see the Saiyans (oops, I mean the demons) rely on their scouters to detect mana, so they can easily be fooled by making your Mana Level seem lower than it really is. That's right: these demons, who are defined by their deception, never assume someone else is lying and are very easily deceived. The concept of demons never learning to hide their own mana levels (and thus assuming it's not possible) is so flimsy that the plot has to stop so that it can be explained via flashback. You see, just as wealthy people always show their wealth, demons always show off their mana. End of explanation. All wealthy people show off their wealth? Explain the wardrobe of any Silicon Valley CEO, then. There's a demon with a powerful relic, a scale that weighs the total mana within its wielder and the total mana of another. Whoever has the lower mana becomes a slave to the one with higher mana. You can guess how Frieren is going to solve this problem: by lowering her mana level and tricking the demon into using the scale and getting owned. You know it, I know it, Frieren knows it. But for some reason an ENTIRE EPISODE proceeds with the demon talking to Frieren about how much she's gonna love enslaving Frieren. We already have a COMPLETE explanation as to how Frieren is going to win this fight. Why are we watching this? For the character development? For who, the cool and confident Frieren who explicitly has nothing to learn from this encounter? Or for the demon, who, by virtue of being a demon, has absolutely no motivation outside of being evil and will disappear from the story completely at the end of this fight? Two of Frieren's allies are also fighting demons at the same time. The fights are improbably stretched out with insipid monologues and voice overs and they're briefly interrupted by a flashback of someone telling our heroes about the secret ability that will win a fight, called Trying Harder Than You Did Before. I was falling asleep. This wasn't the thoughtful meditation on relating to others and understanding yourself the opening episodes suggested. This was just shonen slop. I skimmed the descriptions of the episodes that follow. They all involve Frieren getting her magic license. Since this sounded like a preposterous premise, I quit watching. It's so hard to accurately judge an anime based on the first 3 episodes because so many of them completely fail their concept after that. Throw Frieren on the pile with the rest of them. Here are some fantasy anime that put more effort into their world, magic, and characters. Delicious in Dungeon The Ancient Magus' Bride Slayers Other thoughts. - Frieren's goal is to collect as many spells as she can. She has already collected nearly 1000 years worth. Does she EVER use ANY of them to solve her problems? I feel like all she does is levitate objects and shoot laser beams. This show about the incredible possibilities of magic, and she solves nearly every problem by shooting laser beams. The reason her sidekick Fern becomes a master mage isn't because of some journey into the soul or a delicate understanding of the balance of nature: it's because she gets good at shooting laser beams. Why write a story about magic if you're not at all interested in magic? - There are a lot of dialogue-free montages to show the passage of time. That makes sense, since the journey is long, and Friren's life is long. But it's weird that the Frieren seen in the montages is basically a different character. This is the only Frieren we see being goofy and lazy and getting caught in mimic traps. It's astonishing to think that Frieren has a deeper personality, but the show has decided that it's somehow not worth spending time with those moments, as though it's saying, "No, no, fun and silly Frieren isn't canon, Frieren is just cool and confident." - Frieren is a taciturn genius mage. Her sidekick is... also a taciturn genius mage. Why give yourself such hard characters to write? You didn't have to do that. - Stark can cut holes into mountains. How? Is this incredible power somehow different from magic? Despite the fact that most people in the world don't use magic, do we never investigate how the martial warriors are able to power such inhuman feats? Is just because they had a master who told them to Try Harder? - The towns are so ugly and plain. They all have the same cobblestones and red roof shingles that they use in all the other shows that look just like this. It's like they took Eren's hometown from Attack on Titan and somehow made it even less distinct. I don't have an understanding of how the towns are related geographically or culturally. - I was really hoping the subtitles would find some other ways to translate "corrupt priest" because I got sick of hearing that guy get called a corrupt priest by his friends. The story tries to convince us there is some deep and hidden affection amongst the hero's party, so why do they all talk like they've just met each other in each scene? - Stark (Schtark?) orders an ice cream sundae and then goes to another town to order the same one. Is there a franchise? Do they both have refrigeration? Does Stark keep ordering Berry Specials for the same reason Heiter keeps getting called a corrupt priest: because the author was too lazy to come up with new ideas? - These names are awful. Himmel, Heiter, Eisen, Stark, Flamme, Draht, Frieren. Nobody sounds like who they are. Am I just racist against Germans? More to the point, why are they German? + The ending sequence is mesmerizing and one of the coolest I remember seeing recently.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Sep 26, 2022 Not Recommended
It's not unusual for an anime to introduce mysteries and then utterly fail to meaningfully resolve them. That's the default state of any given anime.
But it is striking for any thematic weight, emotional growth, or even moment-to-moment stakes to be completely sidelined by disgusting moments that are quite literally gratuitous. Imagine what could have been accomplished in establishing the motivations of our characters if screen time was not instead given to MORE THAN ONE conversation about a child's penis. You never learn the motivation of the antagonist, the lynchpin of the movie, but you may not notice if you're a perverted freak. Ultimately, Made in Abyss ... is without depth. Talented craft people trying to stitch together awful ideas with no story. I will not be returning for season 2.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Aug 29, 2022
Yakusoku no Neverland
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Spoiler
In episode 1, Norman and Emma find Conny’s plush toy, Little Bunny™. It appears Conny had forgotten it while she was whisked away from the orphanage to her new adoptive family. Conny might still be at the tunnel that acts as the only exit from the property they live on, so Norman and Emma rush to deliver the toy.
They discover Conny’s corpse inauspiciously splayed out in the bed of a truck. I had the thought, “If I were trafficking children for secret and nefarious means, I might make a point of murdering them after the gate they had just passed through had been closed shut ... to prevent witnesses or escape. But maybe I’m overthinking this.” Norman and Emma hear someone approaching and hide under the truck. Soon, the orphanage caretaker appears, along with a set of demons, who discuss the details of raising and killing children with the intent of feeding them to demons of high status. They take Conny’s body off of the truck and put it in a special container of blue liquid. I had the thought, “Why do the steps of this process appear to be killing the child, putting them onto a truck, and then taking them off of the truck to put into a special container, only to put them back onto the truck again? Why not complete the entire process in one of the smaller rooms connected to this tunnel? But maybe I’m overthinking this.” One of the demons seems to smell something – apparently the rich scent of edible children – and slowly moves toward the truck. On peeking beneath it, the demon finds nothing. Cut to: Norman and Emma running out into the field between the exit tunnel and the orphanage, catching their breath. I had the thought, “If I were one of four tall creatures in the midst of completing a secret transaction, I feel I would be easily able to see and hear anyone leaving the immediate area, especially if it’s a tunnel with only a single viable exit. But maybe I’m overthinking it. Moreover, maybe this just isn’t a story that focuses on the logistics of this fictional world and the specific consequences of which character performs what action in which location. Maybe it’s more about thematic exploration of the pains of growing up, and the moment-to-moment emotional conflict between characters. A moment later, Mom, the caretaker of the orphanage, is shown having found Little Bunny™, meaning she knows that there were witnesses to the demonic child food transaction. I had the thought, “Oh. I guess this is a story that focuses on the logistics of the world and the specific consequences of characters’ actions. But only when they’re leaving behind stuffed animals, not when they’re escaping demons from closed quarters and their life is in immediate danger.” To the show’s credit, I wanted to keep watching even as I saw the cracks in the foundation. It has the attractive quality of many mediocre anime: the anticipation of seeing a unique world presented visually with as much detail as you could conjure in your own imagination. Many anime have been viewed to completion with the faint hope that they could possibly live up to the expectations of their high concept. Much as Mom successfully mimics a caring mother, Neverland’s imitations of a genuine thriller are often effective. The immediate challenges the children are presented with – having to devise an escape while their enemy is closing in on them – offer tantalizing opportunities for dramatic, high-stakes situations that could lead to trauma and death for any of the children. Soon after, the orphanage welcomes another child – reminding us that the orphanage has a schedule that will soon claim yet another life – as well as another devious adult, doubling the threat to their secret plans. It’s a perfect opportunity for the viewer and the children to start on the same page and begin strategizing an escape. Unfortunately, the subsequent pages become by turns less scrutable and more pedantic. Our heroes quickly discover the tall wall around their property and decide climbing it is the best method of escape. They cleverly decide that the best way to train their friends to run and climb the wall is to play Tag competitively. This in turns lead to the new adult, Sister, participating in the game and showing the sheer power an adult can have over even the quickest children. But alongside the training, the focus of our heroes’ investigation are often strange or unfounded. An inordinate amount of time is spent on divining the logistics of the tracking devices implanted into each child, where they are, and how they can be removed or deactivated. In real life, this would be an important consideration for an escape, but it’s a strange focus within a constructed narrative. Ray reveals that he has a plan to deactivate these trackers. Norman and Emma do not push for more information, and then he fails to elaborate for multiple episodes. The existence of tracking devices are neither the most illuminating bit of world-building nor the most obvious obstacle to the escape plan. They haven’t actually made sure they can even escape, but they’ve jumped ahead to what may happen if they do. Another cul de sac for the investigation involves the discovery of “property of” labels inside various books that have been donated to the orphanage’s library. These labels have secret Morse code messages. When decoded, random nouns are revealed: farm, monster, promise. They seem to have been donated for the expressed purpose of letting the children know that they have an ally on the outside – only actually useful if the children have already discovered the orphanage’s secret for themselves. While watching these scenes play out, I began the work of thinking like a character living in this world. For example, if I’m a caretaker of a demonic orphanage, why would I have any books from the outside world at all? Aside from being an obvious method of distributing messages from the outside world, it provides the children with expectations of future lives they can plan for. Books are needless vectors for instilling hope. Any child that was given dreams for their own future by reading these books might become radicalized if they were to stumble upon the truth in the open back of my delivery truck, and then plan an escape, threatening my livelihood. If I did need a demonic library in my child farm, I would only stock it with demonic propaganda. In fact, I wouldn’t keep anything secret at all. I would raise the children from birth to be extremely excited to grow up and be a wonderful offering to the great Demon King. I would frame their entire existence as a journey toward becoming the happiest and smartest little child any demon has ever eaten. I might even give fake history lessons every day to make this fantasy more believable and palatable. My whole strategy would be devoted to making sure they never even dream of escape. Curiously, Mom is never seen giving school lessons to the children. It could be that their education is more experimental and self-guided. I would think that, except that their education seems entirely devoted to taking standardized tests. These tests are taken on digital apparatuses, requiring the children to interact with screens, headphones, and barcode readers. This is the only modern technology the children are ever seen using, making the testing process extremely strange and conspicuous. The children’s entire worth is based on their test scores. The greatest indicator that a child’s life is soon coming to an end is their test score. A perfectly natural question occurred to me: What is up with these tests? What is in them? What do they measure? How can they be used as a tool by our heroes to divine what demons think is important about children? I anticipated the next scene in which the children would take their test. I wanted to see how our heroes would react differently during a tense testing session now that they knew the truth of their purpose, or if any clues were discovered in the test questions. I was extremely hung up on these tests because they seemed like such an obvious avenue for social commentary. A standardized test deciding how soon a child will be discarded from society or consumed by it? Perfect. It’s just the edge a story like this needs. Otherwise, what is this story about? It can’t just be, “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if an orphanage was actually a farm for demon food?” We never see the children take the tests again. It truly seems the presence of these standardized tests are meant to make one thing certain: our main characters are geniuses. They have the documentation to prove it. This story, in fact, holds that standardized tests, demonic or not, are an efficient way to measure one’s intelligence, their juicy brains, and their value by extension. A genius mind is indeed highly valued in this world, and is also the most common trait in our main cast. Norman and Ray continually pursue even the most inane line of thinking as close to its conclusion as possible, easily filling in gaps with wisdom received from reading books far beyond their age level, casually dismissing plans or hypotheses they deem improbable. Norman is a genius who attempts to be kind. Ray is a genius who is intensely cynical. Emma is mostly just naive, and exists for the others to explain things too – or she should, but her absence doesn’t stop them from explaining things to each other. A story set in an orphanage where children grow up close together begs for a colorful ensemble, but even the main three characters come up sepia, with barely enough personality to split between them. Their conversations mostly have two rhythms: Ray and Norman consider a plan, and then one of them just does it; or, Ray and Norman consider a plan, Ray introduces an inhumane or misanthropic option, Emma rejects it, and Norman convinces Ray to go with the humane option. Up until the end, no one is forced to change the way they think. You can imagine then how the rest of the cast fares. Most of the children aren’t named, and many of them don’t have enough funds to stay on model. The main trio do induct two other members to their team, Don & Gilda. They each have one personality trait, one being brash and one being timid, but ironically they are a welcome presence in the cast because their childish faults contrast so much with the mature genius of our heroes. The story seems to hold their normal-ness against them, as scenes often refuse Don & Gilda’s presence. On more than one occasion they just sort of excuse themselves from a room so the three mains can mope about something. On more than one occasion, our heroes devise a plan that involve splitting into two groups: Ray, Norman, and Emma in one group, Don and Gilda in the other. In another ensemble show, opportunities might be taken to pair together different characters with different personalities in different situations and show how they each might influence the other’s values and view of the world, to challenge their assumptions and grow their relationship, or ignite emotional conflict. Time and again, Neverland proves that it’s not interested in emotional conflict, or really any conflict, as much as stuff happening, or the hypothetical threat that stuff may happen. It’s less a story about how people suffer consequences from their behavior, and more about how actions have reactions. Less about how a decision might lead to regret, and more about how a ball will roll if you nudge it. What will happen if one of the adults joins a game of Tag with the children? Well, they’ll mostly just end up playing Tag. What will happen if a spy is discovered in the group? Well, the spy will agree to work with them. What will happen if Mom corners them in her secret lair? Well, they’ll just escape during a cutaway. And what will happen if Mom sneaks up on them in the woods while they’re holding the rope they spent so long gathering the fabric to make? Well, they’ll just chuck it deeper into the woods. The children never really suffer setbacks to their plans, just brief interruptions. Neverland does attempt to mimic a true consequence in a classically dumb way, by giving two of our heroes battle scars, but dramatic tension goes slack when it becomes immediately apparent that at least half of those wounds were completely gratuitous. Neverland spends so much time avoiding emotional growth and grappling with each character’s ideologies so it can instead just set up some dominoes with the intent of knocking them over. And even after including so much prattling about hypothetical scenarios from alienating wunderkinds, genius is almost never a vital component to the action. It doesn’t take an Einstein to lie about the location of a bag of rope, or to hide that bag in a bush. To be clear, in the end, their final escape plan is to 1) light a fire and 2) run away. This scheming goes from disappointing to just pointless when you step back and realize just how incredibly lazy their antagonist is. As a reminder, Mom is assigned as the caretaker of the single most valuable child farm in the demonic world. And this is not a part-time gig. Rearing and containing these children is her sole responsibility. She has a child tracking monitor on her person at all times. The children never think to steal it or replace it with something else, because the fact that she simply forgets to look at it for long periods of time is basically the key to their entire plan. She routinely avoids checking it when our heroes are surveying the perimeter wall. She routinely avoids checking it (or apparently just looking out the window) when the children’s training escalates from games of Tag to explicitly building and using zip-lines to cross a great distance. She correctly surmises that her temporary assistant, Sister, is attempting to betray her, but rather than manipulate her with a promise of a promotion (something easily within her power), she plots her death, and then fails to hire a replacement, giving up her greatest advantage. Again: all while knowing that an escape plan is being devised. The children are also responsible for cooking and cleaning apparently, so what the hell does Mom do all day? Aside from act as a perfect distillation of the incompetence of the managerial class. (Really, why kill Sister at all? Sister believes she can expose Mom’s failure to adhere to protocol and steal the prestigious position of caretaker for herself. However, Grandma, the head honcho, conspires with Mom to kill Sister. So if Mom is already a star employee and Grandma is on Mom’s side, Sister has no leverage over Mom. So how is Sister a threat? How is she more valuable dead than alive? Her death makes more sense as a shocking moment in the middle of the season to stave accusations that nothing important is happening.) Despite being very stupid, Mom is close to being the most interesting character because of her background, at first strongly hinted at and then outright presented, as a potential child meal herself who was then steered toward a leadership training course that ultimately led to her position as a caretaker. We see how she was incentivized to uphold this cruel system for her own safety, and eventually as a misguided way to give the children happiness prior to their deaths. We are finally, finally shown a long-lasting consequence of living in this fictional world that poses the uncomfortable yet relatable question of what it is that we force others to sacrifice for our own comfort. Oh, accept that we already saw this same backstory when Sister died. Once again, Mom is too slow to make a difference. In the end, it’s unclear what the point of it all is. The innate spark of hope in all children is the best tool for survival in a cruel world? No, all the children who act like children are just led around by mature super geniuses who make a point of not thinking or speaking like children. Childish innocence must be shed to survive in a cruel world? No, their first plan to escape death with all of their friends was framed as naive, but then that’s exactly what they did. That it would be fucked up if an orphanage was a child farm for demons? Well… not even that, really. After the very beginning, threats to the children fade to the background. The children learn everything they need to escape in their own library, and they constantly break curfew and get into screaming matches and no one ever cares. One lesson you can take away from Neverland is that it’s good to have a stunning intellect or great athleticism, but it’s even better to retain all of your memories from when you were a fetus. If you like the threat of death hanging over childhood friends as they seek to understand and escape a strange and cruel world, instead consider: Attack on Titan From the New World Never Let Me Go
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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