Sometimes all you want is to taste an old friend’s freshly baked bread one last time.
What They Say:
“A Demon-Slaying Request”
A village on the Northern Plateau is wiped out, and the victims’ distinctive wounds point to a certain demon.
Review: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This season of Frieren seems to be neatly divided into two halves. First we had five episodes of relatively low-stakes, episodic adventures composed of at least two individual stories per episode. Then we had a week off, and we return this week with the beginning of what we assume will be the final five episodes focused on this much heavier arc dealing with a particularly threatening demon. The episode certainly starts with the implication that things are much more dangerous now, as the cold open depicts an entire village getting massacred with no challenge.
This feels like an endlessly wide world, but our characters have a tendency to run into the same people throughout their journey, and of course the quantity of characters introduced by the first-class mage exam builds up that supply of familiar faces substantially. In fact, Frieren’s party ran into several of their fellow applicants the very episode after saying goodbye to that arc and city. It was a given that we’d continue to see some of those characters again, especially those that actually passed, but not all of the proctors got the same level of attention at the time.
Genau is one such character, seeming even less prominent because of how cold and aloof he’s always been. He was never very likable, and it’s a tall order to suddenly position him as the main character and expect us to be engaged. However, we know from that arc that Frieren never has one-dimensional characters, and that the more clear-cut a personality appears, the more they’ll surprise us to the contrary. There’s no better way to test the unflinching Genau than by throwing him straight into his own village as it has been completely destroyed with no survivors. In the cruelest irony, the one person still clinging to life is Genau’s childhood friend, who inevitably lives just long enough to die in Genau’s arms, dashing the one hope of saving anyone by coming to his old village.
Genau is paired with Methode, one of the less memorable participants in the mage exam, especially among those who ended up passing. Although she mostly stays similarly stoic, she and Genau do differ in that she projects much more warmth and empathy, represented by her Goddess’s magic despite being a mage instead of a priest or priestess, and of course has a soft spot for cute, petite women. It’s especially interesting to bring us into this storyline with these two of all characters: a village we’ve never seen being annihilated in moments, an unlikable proctor who never showed much emotion, the passing applicant who didn’t get nearly as much development as the rest, partnered together despite not interacting in any notable way prior, and the identity of the true culprit still a mystery.
As much as Genau tries to act unaffected by the destruction of his home village, he can’t help but feel the injustice from his survivor’s guilt. He and Methode don’t seem like the obvious party, but between the time they’ve spent together working for Serie, Methode’s inherent empathy, and how poorly Genau hides his feelings, Methode does manage to reassure him with sincerity. Like a soldier who watched better soldiers die (or worse, arrived home only to find his civilian family killed in warfare) or a doctor who couldn’t save a patient, what Genau needs is to be told it’s not his fault, and that there’s nothing he could’ve done differently. Methode is a good partner to offer this kindness, even if Genau is experienced enough to know that these injustices will continue endlessly.
However, it doesn’t take too long before our party crosses paths with them, as Fern was another first-class mage summoned to the call for help, just like Genau and Methode (in a particularly adorable way, I might add). In a callback to Genau’s own exam, he is initially alerted to their presence by the capture of one of his birds acting as his eyes around the village, executed in much the same manner Frieren’s team employed during that very exam. The episode has a solid offering of great action animation and shot composition, from the initial destruction of the village to Genau cleaning up the weak demons to the almost very bad encounter between recent acquaintances. Each of these is delivered with different enough techniques and aesthetics to not only introduce greater visual variety but also convey different tones in the respective tension.
Once the parties meet and quickly realize each other’s identities, the action is essentially done for the episode. Genau shares his theory that the demon responsible for this wanton destruction was on a much higher level than the ones Genau easily dispatched upon his arrival, and therefore must still be out there. This gives them all a reason to stick around and work together, and the lack of any more immediate enemies affords them abundant time to work on identifying the demon at fault and plan out next steps. The dynamics between different combinations of the many characters introduced in that arc are always fascinating to see, especially with the members of our own party, perhaps Stark most of all given that he was the only one who hadn’t interacted with most of them at the time.
Stark and Genau have a particularly somber exchange set to a new piece of music composed for the latter. Genau remains committed to his image as an uncaring rationalist, but the personal nature of this tragedy continues to crack at his facade and let loose some of the deeper truths of his character. Stark wears his heart on his sleeve and is unfamiliar with the Northern Plateau, which leaves Genau to educate him on the reality of living in a demon-infested area like this, which affords little sentimentality for fallen humans. Stark naturally assumes that they’d all receive proper burials, but Genau must weigh his own feelings in the matter against the practicality of the situation. Here are two young men of different ages, occupations, and homelands, both born decades after the Demon King was slain yet both having seen their hometowns lost to the viciousness of modern demons.
It’s interesting to face this paradigm of a “demon slaying” plot in a series that positioned itself as the one that needn’t show us something as unimportant as the final battle against the king of demonkind. It can start to veer dangerously into the realm of the tropes that its premise was inherently designed to subvert, but the reason it remains effective is that the tragedies are felt on these personal levels, mirroring the real world’s cyclical patterns of wars. No matter how many “wars to end all wars” we have, they manage to just keep coming.
To that end, the subject of valuing the humble villager’s plight as much as the epic showdown between hero and lord of demons has long been a critical theme to Frieren’s worldview. Genau doesn’t yet react nearly as emotionally as Frieren did in the first episode, but he follows a somewhat similar path of acting impassionately until the tragedy hits home and it’s not so easy to view everything as objectively anymore. He’s a first-class mage working with the master of magic and proctoring exams for the finest mages in the land, but he’s sitting here crunching down on “bread” that threatens to break his teeth because he was too late to save his old friend who had honed his craft at baking fresh, soft loaves like his father before him. Unlike priests and the exceptions like Methode, mages are largely human weapons; not only should their lives be shorter than their civilian counterparts, but in an ideal world they wouldn’t need to train their destructive magic at all.
The women are equally frustrated by their rock-hard rations, but their conversation has a somewhat lighter tone for the most part. Methode’s predilection for women of Frieren and Fern’s frame certainly helps, and she explains why she is working with Genau and was at the village before Frieren’s party. It was clear that Serie wouldn’t bother to teach any mage she didn’t deem worthy of the first-class distinction, but apparently once you get the title, becoming her student is a fairly common path. Methode seems the type to follow the formula and be the best student she can be, rather than go off on her own adventures and only use the first-class title to bypass checkpoints. She appears to thrive on order where several of the others we’ve met thrive on chaos. The one first-class mage examinee who Serie liked enough to immediately offer a place as her student was Fern, who proudly announces to Frieren that she turned down the legendary mage, for which Frieren praises her. The strength of that bond is so powerful that Fern could never even consider an alternative to being Frieren’s student, party member, and family.
Despite the promise of a brand-new arc against a fearsome demon after half a season of episodic antics and a week off, this episode effectively serves as table-setting for what’s to come, finally teasing the existence of the demon in question only in its final seconds. So in a way, the real conflict will begin in yet another week, but again, that has never truly been the point. If we get some spectacular battle animation, great; this series is very good at delivering that. But there has never been a demon encounter without some degree of moral and/or philosophical exploration, and now that we’re moving into only the second real demon-centric arc of the series following its very first brief arc around Aura, I hope it’s safe to assume that we’ll have a lot more depth to analyze. If a series starts by saying “Yeah, they just battled the Demon King, but don’t worry, it wasn’t that important,” it doesn’t have the option of letting the spectacle of a demon fight carry a storyline. There has to be something real and human to keep it grounded and meaningful, and I have faith that Frieren will include that in the remaining episodes.
In Summary:
A larger story begins to develop in the latter half of this short season of Frieren, but it’s still mostly buildup for the antagonist to be introduced and for the big battles to take place. What we get in the meantime continues to make us wait for the big showdowns, but it adds some necessary world-building and character development, especially from characters we haven’t gotten to know very well before now. Genau is a more complex character than he ever appeared to be, accentuated by dropping him into his childhood home just after its total destruction. The way he still holds back his emotions teases a lot of potential for his role in this arc, and we also see Methode as a fully realized character more than we ever did in the exam arc. Ultimately, no matter how good the coming action may be, that is never the point of this series, so setting up these deeper connections will likely prove very valuable in the long run.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Advent Seven 
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