Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 1 (2022)

By Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe

192pp, Fiction

Notes

2024-12-06

Wonderfully melancholy fantasy. It starts with a group of heroes returning home after an epic 10 year quest to defeat a fearsome foe and follows Frieren, the party's elf mage who lives many times longer than the rest of them, as she sees the world change and her companions die off over the next few decades. She's heavily autistic coded and much of the plot is her struggling to understand how she's seen by others and her feelings towards them across a chasm of perspective, understanding and tempering her obsessions so as to accomodate the people she finds she cares about.

I'm keen to read more and would love it to continue in the same leisurly and reflective mode (though they've just decided they need to revisist the demon lords castle so it may be a vain hope).