This is How Frieren Saved My Sanity

Why Frieren came to me at the perfect time

In early 2025, I undertook the monumental task of reading Berserk. I got about halfway through the manga before I just had to stop. I don’t plan to continue.

My biggest issue with the series is that all the women in Berserk are raped, or almost raped. Not just once, but multiple times throughout the story. They have characterization. They have personality. Some of them feel like real people. IMO, that makes it so much worse.

If the guy just wanted to draw monster hentai, he could have just drawn monster hentai. He’d have his audience and could have left the rest of us alone. But no, he had to go and write a really compelling, well-crafted story filled with great characters . . . who are constantly threatened by tentacle monsters.

There are some Berserk fans who seem incapable of accepting that Miura was a weird dude. They worship him like he could do no wrong. I believe the word for that is fanboy. Well, I’m here to tell you I’ve seen the artwork with my own eyes.

It was straight-up pornographic when he destroyed Casca, my favorite character. And I mean destroyed in the literal sense. She’s essentially a lobotomy patient for the rest of the series. I know because I had to look it up, though I usually avoid spoilers. She’s nonverbal—can’t speak and doesn’t seem to understand what others are saying.

It’s not that her trauma changed her as a person, which it obviously would. She’s not even a person anymore.

Miura needed to make Guts’ (the protagonist) struggle compelling for the audience. So he went with the laziest possible way to do that. Don’t grant the love interest the mercy of death. Don’t bother giving her an arc where she gets over HER trauma, even though the whole series is about Guts getting over his.

Just have her betrayed by someone she loved, then leave her lobotomized for the rest of the series. Now she can wander off into more danger, and Guts can save her again.

I don’t care if she got half better right before Miura died. He took over 200 chapters to get there (nearly twenty real life years), and she had zero agency making it happen.

His best friend took over the manga, with his blessing. The first thing he did was have the guy who raped Casca kidnap her and turn her into a literal sleeping beauty, locked away in his castle. I’m completely serious. Supposedly that’s right out of Miura’s notes. And that, yet again, makes it so much worse.

Let me be extremely clear. I’m not saying Berserk fans are bad people. I’m not even saying they have bad taste in fiction. There’s a reason we’ve gotten three separate adaptations of the Golden Age Arc. It’s THAT good!

There’s also a reason we’ll likely never see the rest of Berserk animated.

Funny enough (not really, but that’s the expression), Casca is essentially killed off at the end of Golden Age. Let me rephrase that: I wish she was killed off at the end of Golden Age. It’d be better than what we got, anyway.

I’m not saying anyone’s bad for liking it. The only thing I’m saying is the experience was so miserable (for ME) I won’t continue reading. Life is hard enough. I won’t subject myself to media that leaves nothing but a hollow pit of misery where my heart used to be.

This is entertainment. We’re supposed to get some kind of enjoyment out of it, aren’t we? Otherwise, what’s the fucking point? No amount of “but the themes!” changes that.

That doesn’t mean what I like and dislike is the right answer. There is no right answer. There isn’t even an answer. This isn’t science or math. Many would call art the total opposite. It’s subjective. So is enjoyment. Different people like different things for different reasons. I know, what a profound concept. There are way too many people who don’t understand this.

As long as no real people are hurt along the way, or at the end goal, I believe in live and let live.

I totally understand why Berserk has so many loud and proud fans. Its major draw is Guts’ drive to fight and survive, no-matter the horrors he’s subjected to. No matter how many times he’s beaten nearly to death, he gets back up and keeps swinging. He’s a Rocky archetype, fighting Lovecraftian demons with his giant sword and a cannon built into his metal arm. It’s really cool!

The problem is that most of those monsters have monster penises . . . and use them, or try to.

If you’re a Berserk fan, and can handle the fact that I’m not, then welcome to the party. If you’re a fanboy and feel personally attacked because I stopped at Millennium Empire, you might as well leave right now. I will not apologize, and you will not change my mind.

On the other hand, if you’d look down on someone for being a fan (not a fanboy, but a fan) of Berserk, you should leave too. We won’t get along either.

While I’m at it, because this is as good a time as any, I’ll address one final group of people who should leave right now. If you don’t like that I use em dashes “—” because you think it’s “AI writing,” get the fuck outta here. And no, it’s not called an “AI long hyphen.”

AI use em dashes because they’re in all those pirated books they were trained on. Why? Because its real fucking punctuation. If you’ve read more than one or two books over the course of your life, you should know that.

. . .

Wow, that was way longer than I thought it’d be, and went in a bunch of different directions. Gotta love ADHD. Again, I will not apologize.

Now we can finally dive into the meat of today’s post—how Frieren saved my sanity. After becoming emotionally attached to Casca and watching her suffer a fate far worse than death, I really needed a female character who’d be okay by the end of the story.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

I’d kept hearing about this show called Frieren, and it looked like a cozy fantasy story. Exactly what I needed. Little did I know I’d be bawling my eyes out in the very first episode. Then the second, and so on through the entire show.

Within the first half of the first episode, I was in tears, blowing my nose, the whole thing. And this is anime, with 30-minute episodes. I hadn’t spent weeks, or months, or years with these characters. I knew them for 10 minutes, and I’m getting choked up just writing this, months after my last rewatch.

That had never happened to me before. Sure, I’d wept at a good story before, but never that quickly.

You see, Frieren is a show about coming to terms with regret and loss. If you’ve read Berserk, you can probably guess why this was exactly what I needed.

Maybe it’s what the world needed, because it became the highest-rated anime of all time almost as soon as it came out, and will probably remain that way for a long time.

I watched all 28 episodes and then, either that same day or the next, I started with episode one again. And then I watched the whole thing two or three more times.

Once again, something I hadn’t done. Sure, as a kid and even as an adult, I’ve watched a favorite movie over and over. But this was 28 episodes, about 15 hours of a show, and I binge-watched it 3 or 4 times that same month.

Now that I’ve given you my experience and told you just how much I love this show, I’ll actually talk about it now.

Meeting the Party

Frieren is an elven mage who has been alive for over a thousand years. She lived a humble life as an herbalist for many centuries until one day a group of adventurers showed up looking for a mage. She didn’t want to go at first, but she got wrapped up in an adventure that changed her life forever.

But we don’t know any of this in the first episode. All we know is that Frieren, Himmel the Hero, Eisen the Warrior, and Heiter the priest have just returned from a 10-year adventure in which they journeyed to slay the Demon King and free the land once and for all.

That’s right; we start at the end of the journey. Hence the English title, Beyond Journey’s End. In Japanese it’s called Sousou No Frieren, which can translate into both Frieren at the Funeral and Frieren the Slayer.

They return victorious to the capital, and the entire city celebrates. Then, 50 years pass in a heart-wrenching time skip. Because Frieren is functionally immortal, 50 years is nothing to her.

But it’s a lot to her party. She returns, having promised to take them to see a meteor shower. Himmel, the once strong and brash young hero, is now a decrepit little old man. Heiter is also human, and quite old. Eisen is a dwarf, so he’s about middle-aged now.

She takes them on one final adventure to see the meteor shower she promised them before her wanderings. God, just writing about this is getting me weepy.

Then we cut to Himmel’s funeral. Hundreds mourn the death of the hero who saved the world. Frieren stands with her remaining friends, stoic, unmoved. Then, a few women in attendance call her out on it. How can she not even frown? She should be ashamed of herself.

Though it was a cruel thing to say, it snaps Frieren into the moment. She stands at his graveside as the dirt is thrown in, and she realizes her mistake.

10 years.

They adventured together for 10 years. Nothing. No time at all. Not nearly enough time to get to know him properly. Then she weeps, a wave of realization smacking her in the face. She’d had 50 more years to get to know him and squandered all of it.

She’d simply wandered off into the wilderness to collect spells and learn new magic. She didn’t even think about it until it was too late.

I’m sure we can all relate to that feeling. Maybe the person’s dead and gone, or maybe they’re just not in our lives anymore.

As the show progresses, we, the audience, and possibly Frieren herself, realize that Himmel loved her. He even said he’d spent those 50 years wanting to see her again, but not daring to hope.

Human life is short. We die easily, and quickly. To an elf who’s been alive for over a thousand years, it’s not even like dog years. It’s ant years. Or that fly that has a one-week lifespan.

She doesn’t seem to have looked down on humans; she just didn’t give us much thought. She was detached and apathetic toward our existence. Until Himmel.

After the funeral, she goes off again and wanders for another 20-year time skip. That’s right, we’ve gone forward 70 years in the first half of the first episode.

It’s only when she goes to Heiter’s house, as he’s preparing to die, that she decides really to do something about that. She wants to be there for him for however long he has left. A year, a decade, it’s practically the same, just a few weeks to her.

It turns out Heiter has adopted a war orphan named Fern. He asks Frieren if she’ll take her with her when he’s gone. She says flat out she can’t do that. Fern might be training to be a mage, but apprentices die all the time out in the wild. She couldn’t do that to someone her friend charged her to protect.

So Heiter changes the subject, asking if she’ll translate an ancient tome he has. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a way to extend his life in there.

Now, I’ve seen some reactions to this show, so I know some of you might think, “Oh God, is he the villain?” He wants to extend his life after all. That never ends well in these stories.

She spends the next few years translating, and in her downtime she trains Fern in the ways of magic. By the time she’s done translating, Fern is unquestionably a real mage. But there’s no secret to immortality in the text.

Turns out Heiter was a clever old bastard, and didn’t care at all about the book. He just needed to find a way to keep Frieren around long enough so that she could train Fern into a proper mage. Now she has no excuse not to take her along when he’s gone.

The Real Journey Begins

Now the real show begins, and we stop having these long time skips. Frieren is essentially a mother now and has to take things much more quickly. She could take years looking for a flower before; now, she doesn’t have that luxury. She has to learn to live in the moment and enjoy it.

Frieren is finally ready to savor life, to get to know the other people around her and relish in them. They quickly add a warrior, Stark, to their party, Eisen’s greatest student.

He carries himself like a powerful warrior, but he’s a coward. He’s terrified of the dragon that he’s somehow keeping at bay from the village Frieren and Fern find him in. He’s convinced that whenever it comes back, he’ll be helpless to stop it from burning everything and everyone.

They convince him to help slay this dragon because Frieren wants something in its hoard. He launches into what can only be described as an epic, badass fight against a fire-breathing dragon. He smashes it to the ground and begins screaming for the mages to come help. But they don’t. He panics even more until he realizes it’s dead already.

He killed it even though he didn’t think he could.

I look forward to Stark’s development, if he gets any, into a more confident young man. Even if he remains fearful, his courage comes through when it counts.

He shows great heroism despite tremendous fear.

We could all learn a lesson from that, I think. Whether we’re self-proclaimed cowards, or just fearful of certain situations, action despite fear is the true meaning of courage.

I must also talk about Fern. If you know anything about anime, you know the tsundere archetype. The overly aggressive girl, who’s sort of a bully but secretly has a soft spot. Fern is like this, but rather than being annoying like so many are, she’s endearing. At least to me.

Unlike many tsunderes, who get defensive and more aggressive when they get called out, she apologizes when she’s being a bitch. It’s just her nature, but she’s also a kind and caring soul who doesn’t like hurting her friends.

The facial animations are yet another breath of fresh air. No overly exaggerated grins or anything else. Even though they’re animated, they look and feel more like people. They react in a more realistic, more restrained manner compared to a lot of anime characters.

Too often they’re so much larger than life that it just takes me right out of the story. Not the case with Frieren.

There’s no over the top, melodramatic screaming during battle. In-fact, the mages are very stoic and reserved as they fling enormously powerful and destructive magics at one-another.

People keep saying there are no original ideas. Many novice writers worry that they simply can’t do anything new. Frieren proves otherwise.

New can exist. New ideas are still waiting to be invented. And people are hungry for new things. I also see people complaining that this or that entertainment medium (movies, TV, games, anime, etc. ) is dead.

Nonsense.

Frieren is a cozy fantasy adventure unlike others in that genre. It’s its own thing, and millions of people around the world love it for that very fact.

Its core themes are also part of why it’s so beloved. The entire series is about Frieren retracing her journey with Himmel and their party. She goes somewhere with her new companions, and we get flashbacks. Half of the show is done in flashbacks.

Yet another thing many say you should never do, yet is done to perfection here. It wouldn’t be Frieren without the flashbacks.

What’s happening now matches thematically with the events of 70 years ago. Small things. Large things. Finding places that celebrate Himmel the Hero, already forgotten by most except for those old enough to have been saved by him, and Frieren and the others.

The first end song starts in English with “Can you hear me,” and ends in English with, “I’m singing a lullaby for you to come back home.” The second end song starts with “I hear you.” And Frieren lies down beside a gravestone to look at the stars.

I’m not crying; you’re crying!

Though she lost Himmel before she could get to know him, though they could have had some kind of life together, it’s only after his loss that she learns how to be happy.

It was Himmel who got her into her hobby of collecting folk spells. Before that, she went through life much more passively. After his death, she learned how to befriend humans and appreciate us for what we are.

Through loss comes great learning and advancement. Yet again, a message most of us could live by. I think Frieren is so beloved because it’s both a timeless and timely story.

Why Frieren Resonates Today

Most people never make that change, whatever that change may be. Maybe it’s connecting with other people. Maybe it’s pursuing the dream that they’ve always had but repressed because their parents or friends said it was stupid or couldn’t happen.

Or worse yet, like Stark with the dragon, they tell themselves they can’t do it without even trying.

Until a serious loss happens, most people never make that shift. We go through our day either regretting yesterday or worrying about tomorrow. We coast through life with no genuine connection or meaning. Thanks internet.

That’s only half a joke. The internet has brought about many great things. You wouldn’t be reading this, or have any idea who I am, without it. But it’s also brought isolation to many people’s lives.

Many in Genz, my generation, could use more IRL connections. That relates to how the corporatization of the internet has sort of ruined society. But that’s a topic for another time. I guess I have a new post to write now, yay! Content.

Anyway.

WTF is structure?

East Asian storytelling has never been constrained by the three-act structure like Western stories have, despite what Joseph Campbell tried to convince people in his Hero With a Thousand Faces. He clearly did not read any stories from China, Japan, or Korea.

Frieren takes this to a whole other level.

We’ll spend half an episode looking for a flower. There’s no bad guy. There’s no ticking clock, aside from Fern’s impatience. We’re just wandering the forest for 15 minutes to find Himmel’s favorite flower to plant around one of his nearly forgotten statues. Once again, it’s time to cry.

But it’s not the “I’m so destroyed I want to go to bed because I’m depressed,” kind of cry. It’s the “Life is so tragic yet beautiful I want to get more out of it,” kind of cry.

I’m not even sure how to pinpoint it. I don’t know what the mangaka did, but they did it spectacularly. The things they use to pull at the heartstrings are all pretty universal. It’s not like they invented something new there. But the execution is so perfect.

I hope to capture that same level of emotionality in my writing. I hope the mangaka knows just how magical Frieren is, in a literal and artistic sense.

I can’t say this with most things, but I think everyone should watch or read Frieren. It’s not very graphic or descriptive, so younger audiences can engage. The themes might be simple, but they’re as deep as it goes.

I feel a lot of existential questions go off-kilter and way beyond practical concerns. Life, friendship, family, the fabric of our lives. This is what Frieren looks at through a cozy yet melancholic lens, and it’s simply spectacular.

Yes, you can be like Frieren before Himmel, just coasting through the decades in apathy; or you can go on a weekend adventure with your friends to save the world and choose to grip life by the reins and make every day count. Because that’s all we have in the end. Today. Yesterday is over, and tomorrow isn’t here yet.

So many of us today are rushing. Rushing to get to class, to work, to retirement (if that’s even an option for you). Many Gen-Zers look at life as this hopeless void moving ever steadily closer. I felt that way for a long time, especially during lockdown.

I think Frieren was part of how I got out of that trap.

This is even more relevant in Japan. We think we know what grind culture is in the US, but oh boy, it’s on a whole other level. Hussle culture here is lazy by comparison. We have people peeing into bottles over here; they have people dying of exhaustion over there and committing suicide.

Even the manga industry is like that. No-wonder the Frieren manga has had so many hiatuses. The publishers basically want to work you to death and make you thank them for the privilege. But a lot of mangaka are happy to work that hard because it’s just part of the culture.

As a writer, I can relate. If the only way for me to make this my career was to work on a publisher’s schedule, I’d still rather do that than anything else. It’s a double-edged sword, and balance is hard to come by, even in a culture that has balance as a core tenet.

Frieren Enriches Every Life She Touches (except demons)

She helps Fern become a mage; she shows Stark he’s far stronger than he thinks he is. She might be bubbly and hard to read, but she has insight. She’s been around a long time and doesn’t need to kill something evil to help people.

Everywhere she goes, there are the grandchildren of the people she saved, and some of the people who were still alive from back in those days, who are grateful, even if they don’t know who she is.

Most of the time she isn’t recognized. Everyone knows what Himmel the hero looked like; he had statues of himself built all over the continent. Sure, he was arrogant to do that, but he also knew Frieren would long outlive him. He didn’t want her to forget him.

Final Thoughts

During the city’s celebration of their victory over the Demon King, Frieren talks about her lifespan. Eisen asked if she’ll take on an apprentice. She says, why bother? They’ll just die. This adventure, 10 years together, was less than 1/100th of her life.

I’d put that at, stretching it, a month in human years.

Later, she visits him again and decides to go off to find a way to speak to Himmel’s spirit and say goodbye properly. Eisen mentions what she’d said all those years ago and says, “Isn’t it remarkable how much that 1/100th changed you?”

That’s it. That’s this series’ mission statement. So what if it was only 1/100th of your life? One adventure can change the rest of your life for the better, one friendship, one relationship. Yes, one person can cause great suffering, but one person can also bring great joy.

There’s so much more I could say about each adventure Frieren’s two parties went on, past and present, but I think this is long enough.

It’s the perfect comfort anime, and I will certainly return to it again. I look forward to season two, though we’re only getting 10 episodes this time.

It’s not at all the same tone, but I’ve written my first dark, epic, historical fantasy novel. It’s got night elves with a culture based on Song Dynasty China and a ninja father and daughter struggling with their double lives. There’s deception, sex, ninja battles, and deep lore. Not at all family-friendly like Frieren is.

If that’s the sort of thing you like to read, you’ll get free access to the first five chapters of The First Ogre King Book 1 when you sign up for my reader group right here.