Frieren and the Art of Romantasy Writing

Learning Love and Lore Simultaneously

So, I don’t really know if I’ve ever talked about this on here, but I’m a pretty big anime and manga fan. I’ve been one since I was but a small egg in my single digits and have maintained my love of Japanese comics and animation thus far into my adult life. And while I know that there will be some of you who read that and immediately check out, I encourage you to stick around to see if I can’t make a compelling case for one anime in particular:

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an ongoing fantasy comic from writer Kanehito Yamada and artist Tsukasa Abe, serialized in the acclaimed manga magazine Weekly Shonen Sunday, and adapted into an anime television series by the highly venerated Studio Madhouse. Thus far, the anime has aired one season of twenty-eight episodes, directed by Keiichiro Saito and written by Tomohiro Suzuki. A second season has already been announced, though as of this writing we don’t yet know when it will air. While have not yet read the manga, with the forthcoming arrival of season one to Netflix, I thought now would be a good time to talk about what has honestly become one of my favorite anime of the modern era and how it functions as a very well written romantasy story.

For those unaware, ‘romantasy’ is exactly what it sounds like, a portmanteau of romance and fantasy in which two much loved genres are combined. It’s definitely been having a moment these past few years, and while this series probably wouldn’t be classified as romantasy in the strictest sense, one of the many hats it wears exceptionally well is the romantic overtones that permeate the story and inform how we experience the characters and world. What do I mean by that? Well:

Our story begins with a note that will be familiar to most, whether you’re well-versed in the fantasy genre or not. Set in a world patterned (mostly) off of medieval Europe by way of Germany and Scandinavia, we begin with a note of celebration: a party of adventurers returns to a grand city, having defeated the evil Demon King who has terrorized humans, dwarves, and elves alike for centuries. While his forces remain, the simple fact is that without their leader, the demon armies have been crippled. Our four heroes have done the impossible, done what countless adventurers have set out to do and utterly failed at. They have killed what is, for all intents and purposes, this world’s equivalent to Satan.

It is a joyous occasion, and through the celebrations we meet the party responsible for such a victory: Himmel, the dashing and gallant young swordsman; Heiter, the drunken and mischievous but still pious Priest; Eisen, the sturdy and stalwart dwarven warrior; and Frieren, the aloof and disaffected elven mage. And while the boys reminisce with nostalgia and a touch of sorrow that their ten-year journey has come to a close and they will now all go their separate ways, Frieren… Doesn’t even blink. To her, this wasn’t that long of a journey at all. To her, ten years is merely one one-hundredth of her lifetime. And as a meteor shower lights up the sky, she notes that next time this happens, they should all watch it together from a more ideal location she knows. When her friends point out to her that that will not be for fifty years, Frieren still doesn’t blink. Because what on earth would be the problem there?

Elven immortality, or at least elven supernaturally long lifespans, are nothing new in fantasy stories. JRR Tolkien’s seminal Legendarium works, most notably The Lord of the Rings, helped popularize this image of elves as wise, ethereally beautiful immortals well versed in magics, but what many forget is that to a devout Catholic like Tolkien, this immortality was a curse. The expanded works of the setting spell out fairly explicitly that human mortality is a gift that allows them to appreciate life better, that allows them to learn and grow out of sheer necessity in ways immortals do not. And that is the mindset that informs this series.

Frieren bids her companions adieu and goes on her way, traveling the lands and collecting new spells entirely on her own. It goes by in a beautiful montage lasting only a few minutes, because to an immortal like her, that’s all five decades feels like. But the time comes where she needs something for a spell, something she left with Himmel for safekeeping, and she had meant to seek him out soon anyway due to the impending meteor shower. So, she travels to the city where he lives, sends for him, and is greeted not by the comically beautiful young warrior she remembers, but by a short, bald, bearded man in his seventies.

And that’s finally when it hits our girl just how fleeting human lives truly are. This man, this person, whom she once considered her closest friend, is now in the final days of his life, and he held onto what she left him for five decades hoping beyond all hope that he would see her again one day so she could claim it. But really, just because he missed her. And she hasn’t even begun to realize how much she’s missed him.

So, for one last adventure they go, travelling alongside Heiter and Eisen to watch the meteor shower from a field of Frieren’s choosing. Himmel is overjoyed to have gone on one last journey with them, with her specifically, and the light fades from his eyes beneath the falling stars, a smile on his face and love in his heart. His love of life, his love for his friends… And his love for Frieren, in particular.

We cut to his funeral, and everyone in the kingdom is in attendance, everyone weeping over the fallen hero… Everyone remarking how cold Frieren seems. How she seems unaffected… Right up until they put him in the ground.

And this is just the first episode. ¹

So, first off, I just want to say: this scene hits really hard for me personally due my own emotional affect being… Hard to read, is what I’m normally told. I’ve been called inscrutable due to my blank face and monotone speaking voice a lot over the years, and I’ve had to spend most of my twenties training myself out of that. Even still, I get called cold or distant way more often than I’d like, and while I’m much quicker to shed tears at this point, there was a very long period where it took weeks of grief and angst building up for me to cry. So, I relate to Frieren in this. I also relate to her for a few other reasons, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

We shift gears after this. Frieren winds up staying with Heiter, who essentially became the Pope of the world’s church for a while and is now retired and raising an orphan girl called Fern. But Heiter is not long for this world, so he entrusts Frieren with taking care of Fern and training her in magic after his passing. He also leaves them a mission: to find Heaven. This is where we first learn something very interesting: the Church of the setting is patterned after Christianity but with a goddess rather than a God. And, in a flashback detailing why Heiter is so pious, we find out that people only started worshipping the goddess within the past millennia. As such, details about the afterlife are somewhat scarcely known, but at this point the direction of the series becomes clear: Frieren and Fern will travel together, gathering spells and looking for the entrance to the afterlife, so they can see Himmel and Heiter again. And this is where we start to see how this show handles the concept of high fantasy worldbuilding: by grounding it in emotional stakes, we become more invested in the world itself due to our investment in the characters. We want to find Heaven because we want Fern to reunite with the man who raised her, and we want Frieren to get to see Himmel once again. And as for what Frieren wants to do when she sees Himmel, well…

We spend an episode with Frieren and Fern in a village where a statue to Himmel stands. The locals want to surround it in flowers, and they ask Frieren what kind of flower Himmel would want. Without missing a beat, she responds with ‘blue moon weed.’ Why?

Of all the spells Frieren could do, of which there are many, the one that Himmel loved the most was one that made a field of flowers grow. She performed it once for him, thinking nothing of it, but he adored it, said it was the kind of simple beauty that made magic so amazing to him, that he loved how she went around collecting every spell she could find. Even the ‘useless’ ones. Especially the useless ones. And more than anything, he wanted to show her something about himself, a way to combine something he loved with something she loved. But the flower is lost decades later, and Frieren searches and searches for it, for even a single seed so she can do the spell. It takes days, weeks, wearing on Fern’s frustration, until finally, they find it. And Frieren surrounds Himmel’s statue in blue moon weed, puts a crown of them around his head like he did for her decades ago. And standing in front of his statue, having done his favorite spell for him one last time with his favorite flower, she realizes he finally got his wish. He got to show her the flower that reminded him of her.

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, the show makes it clear from pretty early on that Himmel was hopelessly in love with Frieren. The journey to find Heaven, to see Himmel again, to talk to him one more time, is in part motivated by her retracing the journey she took with him and the others to defeat the Demon King (the entrance to Heaven is apparently under his castle in the far north) while slowly coming to understand what he felt for her.

But what did she feel for him? What does she feel for him, even now? What does she want to say to him when she gets to Heaven? Well, that’s an ongoing process, and Frieren still needs to learn that herself. And as she learns about Himmel’s feelings, their every interaction in the past slowly taking on a new light as she begins to Get It, we learn more about the world she inhabits, that she’s inhabited for over a thousand years. It’s through this motivation of emotion, of love, of grief, that we learn about Frieren’s mentor: the human mage, Flamme (think Lady Merlin), who taught her the spell for the field of flowers, who compiled dozens of grimoires, who hid one in a place she knew only Frieren could find detailing the location of Heaven. It’s through this motivation that we meet the human warrior Stark, Eisen’s apprentice whom he had a falling out with, who joins Frieren and Fern on their quest to find Heaven so that he can become worthy of his master’s legacy; it’s through this motivation that we are lead north, into demon country.

This comes directly after Stark’s introduction, setting a pattern of following character-driven emotional arcs that reveal details of the world (such as Stark’s fight against a dragon, something he needs to learn to believe in himself to win, and by believing in himself we witness the sheer magnitude of strength and durability human warriors are capable of in this world), followed by plot-driven arcs that reveal details of the characters. In this case, through learning about demons as they try to pull a false flag operation on a human city, learning that the demons of this world are essentially soulless monsters who see humans only as food and who use our natural empathy to lure us into a false sense of security (with special attention being paid to how demons leave their spawn in the wild at birth to fend for themselves, as well as the strength-based hierarchical nature of demonic society), that we learn something very crucial about Frieren: killing demons has, historically, been her only identity.

Dubbed ‘Frieren the Slayer’ by her foes, her journey began as a small girl when her elf village was razed by demons. In a night, everything and everyone she’d ever known was gone. However, the human mage called Flamme found her and taught her in the art of combat magic, honing her skills for the entirety of her life until her pupil surpassed her as a weapon of mass destruction. For her whole life, her incredibly long life, Frieren has been a weapon. Until she met Himmel. Even in recruiting her to his cause to kill the demon king, he encourages her to be proud of her less destructive spells, praises the sheer depths of her knowledge, tells her that what she can do is beautiful. He’s the first person who makes her feel like a woman instead of a weapon².

And this is the show’s ethos in a nutshell: through this lore, and Frieren’s connection to it, our understanding of her emotional growth becomes clearer. We learn more about her, and about why Himmel is so special to her, why she’s still so fixated on him, why she needs to see him again so badly. But the question at that point is: does she love him? And if so, is it romantic love, or something else?

This is complicated by another worldbuilding detail we learn shortly after Stark’s introduction: there are not many elves left in the world. For most people Frieren meets, she is the first elf they’ve ever seen. Not only were most of them wiped out by the Demon King and his armies, they, to paraphrase slightly, don’t go for love or sex, and as such her long-lived species is slowly dying out. In other words, Frieren was raised in a culture where she was essentially expected to not have a sexuality, and thus it doesn’t occur to her that loving Himmel romantically was ever an option to begin with. In addition to her general difficulties in reading social situations and lack of emotional tact, the mere concept of being attracted to Himmel, of being attracted to men in general, is entirely foreign to her. But the more and more she thinks about their interactions, the more she begins to realize that perhaps something was there after all.

In particular, one arc in which the trio is traveling by wagon sees Frieren lose a ring she’s been wearing for the entire series thus far. She’s beside herself for having lost it, combing the woods up and down yet again at the expense of Fern and Stark. The wagon driver they’re with mentions that of course the ring is special to her: the design is one representing everlasting love.

Three guesses for who gave her that ring. First two don’t count.

And when Fern points out to Frieren what the ring means, she’s unable to comment, absolutely overcome with emotions until she finds it. At which point, we see the exact circumstances of Himmel giving it to her. They were at a market, and he told her to pick something out as a gift. At random, Frieren picked the ring, and Himmel simply looked down at it and smiled before doing this swoon-worthy bit of gentlemanly gigachad behavior:

Yes, that’s right. For all practical purposes, Himmel straight up proposed to Frieren… And she didn’t get it! But, judging by how she looks at the ring after finding it with a sad yet contented smile on her face, it would seem that she’s beginning to. It’s an absolutely magical scene of someone recontextualizing their past as they learn new information about themselves and about their world that brings them closer to a complete emotional understanding. Genuinely, it’s one of the best moments in the entire show, dripping with pathos and beautifully animated. And it hits me extra hard because…

Okay, confession time. For me, there was also a Himmel. I met him before I came out as trans, became best friends with him as I slowly came to recognize and accept my womanhood, and all the while I fell hard for him without even realizing it. Because for me, like Frieren, the idea that I was even allowed to be attracted to men was a foreign concept. The idea that I could love a man, let alone this handsome, charming man who thought the world of me, genuinely did not occur to me. It took me a bunch more years to accept my bisexuality, and it was only afterwards, by which time he and I had drifted apart, that I started to look back on his and I’s friendship and realize the love I felt for him was romantic. Mind you, he never felt the same way about me- I know that much for a fact- but still: because of that personal history of mine, this story of a girl who was staring the love of her life in the face but didn’t realize it until it was too late to do anything about it hits real close to home. And that we get all this in the context of an achingly personal journey through a fully-realized fantasy world with a rich history and a fascinating magic system with gorgeous animation, epic battles, and a humanizing sense of humor and fun certainly helps.

Speaking of which: let’s talk about magic systems. There’s been a lot of scuttlebutt amongst fantasy fans in recent years about the idea of hard vs soft magic systems, i.e. rules-based magic that essentially works like science vs magic as something mysterious and unknowable that even experienced practitioners can never fully hope to control³; Frieren opts for a middle ground between the two. Magic can essentially do anything, but it’s also a constantly advancing field of study that has progressed significantly over time the same way a piece of technology would. We get our first hint of this when Frieren and Fern go up against a demon who’s been encased in stone for many years, but who was well known for destroying his enemies with the killing magic spell known as Zoltrak. He awakens, expecting to use it to wipe out the elven mage and her new apprentice… Only for them to no-sell it, because in the decades since the Demon King’s fall, Frieren and various magic institutions have reverse-engineered Zoltrak and repurposed it into what is now considered standard offensive magic. What was once a leveler of battlefields is now something Fern mastered before her thirteenth birthday, and she and her teacher make quick work of the demon as a result.

The reason I bring this up is because it heavily informs the last arc of the first season. Long story short, the party needs certain licenses to travel where they’re going, and to get those licenses they need to pass a magic exam run by the Continental Mage Association. And the person in charge of that institution is Serie, the elf who trained Frieren’s mentor, Flamme. This arc allows us to see a lot of different types of magic, with a wide variety of applications and styles complimenting a colorful slew of supporting characters we meet along the way. And it all builds to a final test in which Serie must personally approve you for the rank, while she hopes that one of the applicants will finally be able to see the fluctuations in her magical aura.

When Frieren’s turn is up, however, we get a better sense of the dynamic between the two of them: namely, Frieren kind of hates Serie. Maybe hate is a strong word, but the previous times they met saw Serie openly belittle Flamme while refusing her request to help run her proposed Continental Mage Association. The reason? Flamme’s favorite spell, of all the ones Serie taught her, is still the one that allows you to grow a field of flowers. She showed it to her when she took Flamme in as a child, and Serie dismisses it as a trivial application of magic. However, the sad, nostalgic smile on her face as she tells the story alongside her memories of Flamme as an adorable, wide-eyed little girl tell a different story, and the fact Serie became head of the Continental Mage Association anyway would indicate that, despite her being even more emotionally repressed and socially inept than Frieren, she genuinely did care for Flamme as a surrogate daughter in her own way.

Still, she dismisses the spell and fails Frieren when Frieren plainly calls it her favorite spell of all. Because it’s the one that brought Frieren to this point. Because, as we find out, the first time Frieren met Himmel, when she stumbled upon him by accident when he was just a scared little boy lost in the woods, she did that spell for him to cheer him up before walking away, and that moment stuck with him for the rest of his life. That moment is what made him fall in love with Frieren in the first place, what led him to seek Frieren out years later to join his party of adventurers to kill the demon king, what led to the Demon King’s defeat, what led to Frieren becoming Fern’s mentor.

And that mentorship allows Fern to do what nobody else, not even her mistress, can do: see the fluctuations in Serie’s aura. That silly, useless spell saved the world and allowed Fern to pass her test. That spell that represents Frieren and Himmel’s love is ultimately what allows our trio to advance on their quest to find Heaven so Frieren and Himmel can be reunited. Because for everything we learn about magic in this arc, in this season, all the amazing, horrifying, destructive, creative things it can accomplish, it’s the simple beauty of the field of flowers that is the solution. Love is the way forward. Fern still has a lot more to learn about magic, and Frieren still has a lot to learn about love, but by passing this test, and passing it in the way they did, they’re both well on their way.

Love is the key to it all, really. It breathes life into what is, on the surface, a fairly typical fantasy world, gives a fresh sense of pathos and direction to character archetypes we’ve seen before, guides us forward and allows us to see just how unique this world and these characters truly are. Frieren can teach Fern everything she knows about magic, but it doesn’t mean anything unless there’s someone she can do it all for. Someone who she can show the beauty of magic to. For Fern, that’s (probably) going to wind up being Stark, and for Frieren, as she’s slowly realizing more and more with each step northward towards Heaven, it was Himmel. It was always Himmel and always will be.

And it’s fucking beautiful.

I love this show, and I think y’all will too. Happy viewing, everyone!

1. The show is available in both Japanese and dubbed into English. I personally watched the English dub and greatly enjoyed it, but it’s a bit easier to find legally sourced clips with the original audio track.

2. I could comment on the idea that Frieren’s whole journey of slowly coming to understand humanity and in doing so becoming more human herself can on occasion read as trans femme coded, but… Actually, fuck it, I’m, commenting on it: Frieren is trans femme coded and I love her for that!

3. For a good example of the former, see Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, and for the latter, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.