dismallyOriented

My wife and I have been rewatching the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. It's a very good fantasy adventure series, one we first watched while they were going through their initial Teeth Troubles back in 2023. It's about the titular character, Frieren the Mage, who was once part of the adventuring party that slew the Demon King. The show begins 80 years after the end of that quest, when the party leader, Himmel, dies of old age. Frieren, who is an elf with a lifespan measured in millennia, is abruptly confronted with the passage of time, the mortality of her human companions, and the fact that this 10-year journey of hers actually meant way more to her than she realized. After Heiter, the other human party member, passes away, Frieren begins questing with his student, reckoning with the weight of her past, and the ways the world has moved on after 80 years (for better and worse).

I love the ways this show grapples with legacy, generations, and time. It constantly finds ways to rhyme the events of the present with the quests and memories of Frieren's past, in a way that I find thematically interesting and convincingly done. I love the way the deceased characters echo throughout while the weight of their absence stays real and present. I do think the entire premise of the show is beautifully rendered in the opening titles of cour 1. The theme song ends with a split screen panning in opposite directions - Himmel and the old party panning forward on the left side, the successor party panning backward on right side, and then both halves of the screen merging into one shot as Frieren emerges from the seam in the middle. Chef's kiss. Cinnamon tography.

The other thing I wanted to bring up is the ways this show thinks about and portrays immortal/long-lived people. There's a really interesting conversation Frieren has with another elf she meets. He's a monk, a follower of the main (only?) religion of the setting, while she's more of a skeptic. They ask about each other's reasoning - Frieren finds it unusual that the goddess has never appeared since the mythic Age of Miracles. And the monk's reason for believing is that nearly everyone else he's ever known in his life has long since passed away. A lot of the notable things he may have once done, the people he's been, nobody living now really knows them anymore. Having an immortal deity in his world means that there is Someone Else, who will be eternal and who will always know him wholly and has context for the entirety of his life, and will address this fundamental loneliness that's a consequence of his longevity. Once he dies he will go to Heaven and meet his long-dead loved ones and the goddess, and be praised for the life he's lived.

That's a super interesting and compelling reason for a long-lived person to believe in a religion! So often it feels like I see the atheistic tack that Frieren takes, that living so long and seeing so much reduces the space in the world for a deity to be hiding. But to have an almost-immortal who draws real significance from holding a faith, and in a way that's unique to his longevity, is cool as shit.

So my wife and a handful of internet friends are planning a Songs for the Dusk game (a very cool post-post apocalypse game which features such touchstones as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, N.D. Stevenson's She-Ra, and On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. Someday later I will talk more about it). In the course of brainstorming we ended up on the topic of dragons, which inadvertently reminded me of this very very good short story by Zen Cho, first published back in 2018.

It's about a creature from Korean mythology called an imugi, a serpentine proto-dragon that can ascend into a dragon after 1000 years and careful study. My only point of reference for them is Wikipedia and this short story, so you will need to look elsewhere for a better explanation. But essentially, Byam is an imugi who has tried and failed to attain dragonhood after 3 different attempts, and after the 3rd and final failure, swears to kill the human who thwarted its last attempt (Leslie, a depressed Korean PhD student who was hiking in the mountains during the ascension, and spotted Byam mid-flight). By the time it finds her again, she's an astrophysics professor. When it goes to her office in the guise of a heavenly fairy, however, Byam spies the textbooks on her shelves, which it recognizes as akin to the study it did when trying to become a dragon. Its interest in the topic stymies its revenge for long enough that they start to get to know each other, and the story proceeds from there.

It's a very good story about failure, how to cope with failure, and what it takes to eventually try again. While the free version on the B&N blog isn't available anymore, wayback machine still has it available. It's a very short and affecting read, so I highly recommend that you go check it out if you can. In the meantime, I have my big ol' Review of Feelings to follow.

( May the feelings commence )

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( Wifefeels )