Highlights
- Frieren: Beyond Journey's End delivers a satisfying reveal about Frieren and Fern's ability to defeat strong demons by cloaking their mana levels, adding depth to the characters.
- The conversation between Frieren and Flamme explores the demons' metric of worth being tied to mana, providing an interesting perspective on society and status.
- The climactic showdown between Frieren and Aura, while predictable, still manages to elicit excitement and anticipation through excellent direction, music, and animation.
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Episode 10, "A Powerful Mage," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
A power system in an anime can make or break a story because, apart from denoting the strong and weak, it can serve to further explore a story's philosophy behind the action. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End intermixes the much-anticipated stand-off with Aura with a flashback of the relationship between Frieren and Flamme, and the secret behind the titular mage's power.
Last week was a big one for the series and possibly one of the best episodes of anime this year - at least until Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 finds a way to raise the bar higher. Stark and Fern each fought one of the remaining two envoys from Aura's army, the former achieving a hard-fought victory and the latter spectacularly decimating her opponent, leaving only Frieren and Aura.
A Cowardly Way To Fight
Few episodes before now have seen fit to visualize the characters' mana levels, at least not to the extent that this week does. Added to that, rather than just a visual shorthand for a combatant's strength, it almost immediately recontextualizes Fern's fight with Lügner last week. Initially, it seemed as though she was compensating for a lack of mana with impeccable control and speed over what mana she did have, but that wasn't quite accurate.
The audience isn't told the exact truth immediately, but whatever it is, it sure angers a dying Lügner, who calls Fern "a disgrace to all mages." It's an exciting build-up for a reveal that, in all honesty, is pretty simple. The reason that Frieren and Fern can defeat strong demons is that they are always cloaking their mana to appear weaker.
Normally, such a reveal might seem underwhelming, because while it's shown to be effective, one would think that people would become wise to such a trick after so much time. But it's not an effective trick in itself, but rather because of who Frieren is fighting; the demons. Through Frieren's flashback, the audience gets the most extended look at her and Flamme's relationship so far, and the explanation of the importance of mana to demonkind.
There's a fascinating discussion between Frieren and Flamme about why the demons wouldn't mask their mana, which turns into a dialog about society and status therein. Humans tend to denote their importance through their status and wealth, but for demons, their metric of worth is tied almost exclusively to mana.
So, despite how cunning and deceptive they are, they will not cloak their mana, save for when they want to sneak up on an opponent. This is the first time that the story has presented a quality about demons that suggests something they value, which serves to deepen them as characters. Consequently, it also paints Flamme's technique as "cowardly" as it spits in the face of the demon's pride, something passed down to Frieren, and now to Fern.
"Aura, **** yourself"
This all culminates in Aura weighing her mana against Frieren's, and the episode almost kills its hype in this regard, if only because it's so obvious what's going to happen. With the amount of time Frieren has lived, it seems obvious that her true mana completely outmatches Aura's. However, it's a testament to the directing, music, and animation that the decisive moment is still so satisfying even with it being predictable.
Aura's confidence slowly shatters as the scales begin to tip in Frieren's favor and the dialog reflects this building of tension. The foreboding swell of the choir in the background amounts to a crescendo that manages to exceed an already-expected outcome and still elicits quite a thrill. Then, having completely defeated her opponent, Frieren delivers the coldest line of the series so far.
It's a brutal, almost frighteningly vindictive utterance that's delivered as effortlessly as the word "goodbye." Frieren's stoicism can be truly terrifying. There were high expectations after last week's episode, but rather than straining to raise the bar, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End went in a different direction and indulged in a more patient climax that puts Frieren's conflict with the demons into a fresh and exciting perspective.