Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (Episode 10) – A Powerful Mage
Aura the Guillotine is a demon who has been studying magic for five hundred years. As a result, she’s confident that she can make Frieren submit to her. However, she may have underestimated her opponent!
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (Episode 10) – A Powerful Mage
What did you watch?
We’ve been waiting patiently to see how the fight between Frieren and Aura goes and it looks like we’re going to do it. This show has continually blown my expectations out of the water and now it’s time for the first really big fight, or at least the first time we get to see Frieren standing on her own against a truly powerful opponent. I am so excited that I’m worried my expectations may get ahead of themselves, but somehow I doubt that will happen. Why you ask? Just a feeling!
What happened?
Lugner had been defeated. His body was not able to recover from Fern’s last attack, however, he seemed confident that Aura couldn’t be beaten in a direct conflict. That gave Fern hope as she knew Frieren would engage Aura directly, just as she hadn’t with Lugner. He finally saw what was going on and he hated it! Frieren had been the only survivor of an elf village attacked by demons. She had defeated a powerful demon but it saved no one, and had it not been for Flamme passing through, she would have died too. Flamme saw potential in Frieren and decided to make her an apprentice, however, three demons emerged from the forest and demanded that Flamme hand over the elf. She placed Frieren on the ground and obliterated the demons in a second. Their biggest weakness was that they underestimated Flamme. She was going to teach Frieren how to do the same.
Since Frieren had a much longer lifespan than Flamme, she would be able to increase her mana to unbelievable levels. The real trick, however, was being able to suppress it. This would give her the element of surprise when it came to the demons who wore their mana like a badge of honour. They would never suspect that someone would deliberately hide their own levels. Aura was delighted when she saw that Frieren’s mana had not changed since last they met. Without the heroes to protect her, it would be easy. After all, Aura had been practising magic for five hundred years. No one had heard of Frieren before she joined the hero’s party, eighty years ago. This should be easy!
What did you think?
It’s done it again. How is that possible? I come away from every episode giddy from holding my breath. I absolutely love this series. It’s better than anything I’ve watched in a long time. Frieren is utterly savage. I can’t believe she revealed her mana to show Aura just how much she had underestimated her. Aura’s face was insane. And then, Frieren turns and walks away as she says “Kill yourself”. She didn’t even look back. The ice queen has cometh and her name is Frieren! Of course, there’s much more to it than Frieren being stupidly strong and the demon’s being overconfident. This isn’t an accident. That’s what makes it so special.
What was your favourite moment?
I loved the scenes with Frieren and Flamme and how that directly influenced everything that’s happened to this point. Flamme taught Frieren to suppress her mana to fool the demons. She told her that they would use mana to deceive the demons the way they use human language to deceive humans. Not only that but when Flamme died, she asked Frieren to hide. Her goal was to slowly increase her mana until she was stronger than the Demon King. She would do this unnoticed by the world so that she would always have the element of surprise. Flamme plays the long game like no one I’ve ever seen.
Of course, the pinnacle of this was when Himmel and the hero’s party came searching for the mage who had lived in her town for a thousand years. Frieren assured them that she was no one important. She was barely a strong mage, however, Himmel said that he believed she was the most powerful mage he had ever encountered, even while she suppressed her mana. She asked him why he thought that. He said “Just a feeling.” It was the same thing Frieren said to Flamme when she realised how strong Flamme was despite her hiding her true strength. It just comes together beautifully.
Who was the most impactful character?
I want to say Frieren, but it has to be Flamme. Flamme lived a life of obscurity. She was probably the most powerful mage in the human world but she hid it, waiting for a time when she could use her power to eradicate all demons. However, she must have realised that she would never reach the heights she needed to in a normal life. So, when she found a potential apprentice who was also an elf, she must have been delighted. Frieren was just like Flamme. They both loved magic, they both hated demons, and they both lost everything to the demons.
The fact that she was able to convince Frieren to lay low for so long is incredible. Flamme set out the plan for the longest game ever and found a player who was willing to follow the play to the letter. I loved the way she explained that using magic to deceive was like the demons using language to deceive. It wasn’t fair, but then the demons didn’t play fair. You have to fight fire with fire. I was so impressed with the way this episode pulled all these different moments in time together and even linked them to every episode we’ve seen so far. You can find connections everywhere and that just adds more importance to everything.
What have you learned?
If you look at classic epic fantasy stories they usually start slow, introducing a character here and there and letting us get to know them before they thrust them into an insane quest that would push them beyond anything they’ve considered doing before. Surprisingly, those sorts of stories go against most modern ideas of storytelling. We’re told to thrust the hero into action immediately. Show the audience what they’re made of and then build on it from there. Hollywood has a big part to play in this shift. Anyhow, it’s an absolute joy to find a story that utilises the older methods of storytelling. As a result, I feel like I understand the characters better and that makes the action that much more exciting. It’s not relying on flashy gimmicks. It’s made some connections and now we get to experience the story through them.
Other posts in the series
- Season One
- Episode 1 – The Journey’s End
- Episode 2 – It Didn’t Have to Be Magic…
- Episode 3 – Killing Magic
- Episode 4 – The Land Where Souls Rest
- Episode 5 – Phantoms of the Dead
- Episode 6 – The Hero of the Village
- Episode 7 – Like a Fairy Tale
- Episode 8 – Frieren the Slayer
- Episode 9 – Aura the Guillotine
- Episode 10 – A Powerful Mage
- Episode 11 – Winter in the Northern Lands
- Episode 12 – A Real Hero
- Episode 13 – Aversion to One’s Own Kind
- Episode 14 – Privilege of the Young
- Episode 15 – Smells Like Trouble
- Episode 16 – Long-Lived Friends
- Episode 17 – Take Care
- Episode 18 – First-Class Mage Exam
- Episode 19 – Well-Laid Plans
- Episode 20 – Necessary Killing
- Episode 21 – The World of Magic
- Episode 22 – Future Enemies
- Episode 23 – Conquering the Labyrinth
- Episode 24 – Perfect Replicas
- Episode 25 – A Fatal Vulnerability
- Episode 26 – The Height of Magic
- Episode 27 – An Era of Humans
- Episode 28 – It Would Be Embarrassing When We Met Again
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Beautiful post ????
Flamme may be the most important character in the entire series. It is a fantasy-adventure series but there’s a deeper lots and that is about mortality and the passage of time. What does the world look like to one who is hardly effected by it? Frieren cannot allow herself to become too deeply attached to anything because she knows it will be gone in an instant and she will remain.
But someday even she will grow old. Ten thousand years will have passed and it will seem at the end like an instant.
Yeah. The fact that Flamme must have realized that she would never become strong enough to defeat all demons that she has to put in a legacy plan using Frieren is amazing.
She shaped everything that we now see so that Frieren would be able to follow through with her plan. Even the protection magic that keeps the cities safe was her doing. I’ll bet she’s got a couple more tricks up her sleeve.
“Frieren is utterly savage” That about sums it up!
Yeah. What a way to completely own your opponent! She has no hesitation too which is nice. Too often we see the hero hesitate when they have to do something like this. We saw it with Himmel in the flashback, but not Frieren. She knows exactly what demons are.
Yep. And to think that there are people who completely miss the point and think Frieren’s just a racist who wants demons destroyed for the sake of it, and want the latter to be more sympathetic! Yeah, no. Some things just require no sympathetic backstory and only the Frollo treatment.
I was not aware that people had taken that stance which is completely nuts. Did they miss all the moments which showed that the demons literally only used human form and speech to trick humans do they can eat them? There is no reasoning with them. Frieren is right.
You better believe it! Here’s the post in question, which got rightfully bombarded with tweets denouncing it: https://twitter.com/Tharizdun03/status/1727383649228628387
After all, such a view would completely break the worldbuilding and character dynamics of what Frieren is all about, I agree. Not to mention it’d completely wreck the whole moral stability of the story. What good is a series that tries to justify evil characters for the sake of three dimensionality?
Reminds me of two verses from Scripture: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: ” (Isaiah 5:20) and “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (St. Matthew 10:28)
Haha! That’s hilarious. Some people seem to want to find fault in everything. You wouldn’t try to find a peaceful resolution with the xenomorphs from Alien! However, the only difference between demons and a xenomorph is that demons look more human. You can’t negotiate with either. Both are predators and we are their prey.
Imagine that too, trying to justify someone using your own thoughts/words against you just on the pretext of a good villianous backstory. If you wouldn’t want to excuse that happening to you, then why would you even think of writing that down let alone in a story? That claim just feels unfounded tbh.