Frieren is an anime currently streaming on Netflix. It is based on a manga of the same name and has a simple premise: the hero’s party have defeated the world-threatening demon king before the show starts – this is about what happens after.

Bit of business to do first – this is an anime without fan service; if you’re not sure what that means, it means there’s no male gaze. No lingering shots from their feet up their skirts, no grotesque episodes of girls in lingerie (I’m looking at you Eminence in Darkness), no unnaturally large bosoms moving of their own accord. Frieren is interested in its characters and those characters are actual people.

Second, the animation is gorgeous – thoughtful, detailed, stunning backgrounds and deeply evocative and always in service to the story.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the actual show. Frieren is an elven mage, already over a thousand years old by the time she works with the heroes to defeat the demon king. Imagine Gandalf standing alongside Aragorn.

Yet, if anything, this show follows what happens to a Gandalf that stayed in Middle-earth, who walked its landscape, alone, after those he saved the world with fade into history, dying even while he remained unchanged. The key phrase here is alone. Frieren leaves her friends to travel alone, seeing their relationships as something inconsequential in the span of her life – after all, what’s 10 years when you’ve already lived a millennium? Although they clearly disagree, they let her go, because they love her.

The show is told with a swathe of flashbacks to give context to Frieren’s later decisions – but the key thing here is that her friends, knowing that at some point she’ll realise that she made the wrong decision about abandoning her community, put in place a plan for her to come to terms with what she’s lost in leaving them.

In that sense, Frieren is about community. You could argue found family, but I’m increasingly arguing that found family is actually community, it is society and that, just like found family, society is good, actually. Frieren, seeing how much changes, how the world persists regardless of what we do, rejects her community as too awkward a pull on her. Her friends, knowing loneliness will eventually beat her, refuse to leave that alone, even knowing the plan they put in place to help her won’t come to fruition until they’ve died of old age.

And this is where Frieren shines – because it’s about loss and friendship and love, not in sentimental or nostalgic ways or even in ill defined ways. It is about the shape of loss, how we can miss what it’s doing to us, how it can drive us to make decisions we come to regret. It’s about how friendship sees us, warts and all and still accepts us, even if it calls us out – especially so in fact. And it’s about love; how, sometimes, we’ve been in love with the people around us and we are so unused to talking about what that is and what it looks like that we can’t begin to even realise this truth for ourselves.

All of this is couched in Frieren‘s second great decision: to tell this story essentially as a pilgrimage – as flowering during Frieren’s long walk of all the places she and her friends travelled in their battle with the Demon King. This act of physical remembrance has caused me to cry multiple times over the course of the series because, as I happen to be going through the impact of a life-changing illness, I too have been reflecting in the exact same way Frieren does in this show. It has hit me at a point in my life where I’m absolutely vulnerable to these themes – but I don’t think that takes away from its objective brilliance, only that it enhances it for me.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but I do want to talk about the last part of the show’s structure – its reflection on the cycles and stages of life. Frieren is old and has seen many things, not least of which other people’s lives coming and going over and over again. The writing here does a superb job of capturing what is, honestly, an alien perspective for the rest of us, but it grounds it in emotion, in the truth that Frieren’s own life has been changed because of singular moments, not because of thousands of years.

Quite close to the start of the show she decides to visit a place where the spirit of the party’s now dead leader, Himmel, may be present so she can talk to him again. We only realise through the course of the 28 episodes released so far that their relationship was much more than a friendship and just how deeply he changed her life and how deeply she misses him. I’m going to stop because I’m about to cry again.

Verdict: Just, please, go watch this show, it deserves your time and your attention. 10/10

Stewart Hotston