Determined to avenge the fallen village, Frieren and co set off to eliminate the demons responsible. However, the demons, expecting the party to split, give themselves a dangerous advantage.
Divine Revolte & A Magnificent End
Revolte is… disappointing.
For the three weeks we’ve had to build up this demon as being something beyond comprehension and being a first-class mage killer (and killing someone stronger than Stark!) It makes it surprising that the duo of Genau and Stark was enough to get the victory. Frankly, there isn’t much going on with these episodes beyond just mindless action.
For as great as the animation is, the combat feels somewhat uncreative. Not in motion but mostly in that Frieren, Fern, and Stark’s abilities are surprisingly simple. For all of the interesting magic and curses that the series employs in its calmer episodes, the actual fighting tends to look like big swings and big lasers. Most of Fern and Methode’s fight with Revolte’s sidekicks was quite pointless to the overall story, other than just separating the group away from the Revolte vs Genau fight.
Even then, despite being one of the strongest first-class mages in Serie’s group, Genau’s powerset isn’t very interesting either. He just has black wings that he can fly around and use like sharp blades… and that’s about it. Though I did have similar issues with the first class mage arc not employing more creative magic, even those episodes had more interesting environmental factors to make the action slightly more interesting. Here, there isn’t anything like that.
Genau himself is also a very played-out character, a silent badass with a crippling desire to care about the people he outlives. I just couldn’t get much out of him as the protagonist.
This arc also brings up a bigger issue that plagues Frieren’s narrative.
Demons Just Aren’t that Interesting
The first being that demons, despite being the main villains of the show, aren’t very interesting characters. In their introduction, demons were a fascinating threat because of our expectation of their human-like designs and personalities, implying there was a little more to them than just evil beasts. Frieren establishes early on that demons only mimic human emotions and sympathies as a way to lure in their prey. No demon is worth investigating beyond just killing them.
The issue with that is that introducing more demons beyond the Aura storyline in Season 1 means that we already understand their gimmick. Demons have no personalities beyond strength and homicidal tendencies. Revolte initially seems to have something more with his demon child partner and his lust for battle, yet in practice just uses the kid as bait and has no real motive beyond just battle and killing.
Conclusion
In a series that spends so much time observing the passage of time and the way it changes people living year by year in such a hostile world, Demons are a disappointing outlier because of how rigid they are. Perhaps the contrast of Demons being so alien and unlearning is the point, but I feel like the Elves do this so much better while still having very complex personalities.
Just a couple of episodes ago, we had a truly petty and despicable antagonist in Milliarde who never walked up and killed anyone, but put humans on a useless quest with the intention of wasting most of their lifetimes out of boredom.
It makes it a frustrating shame to me personally that whenever Frieren delves into a multi-episode arc, it tends to focus on the weakest aspects of the story when the rest of the series is so thoughtful and capable of so much more.
Stray Observations:
- I couldn’t really discuss Episode 7 on its own last week because it didn’t have much material to work off of, which I think shows how much Frieren’s action setpieces tend to create a lot of empty space thematically. It sucks being negative about this part of the show, especially when the animation is doing a lot of work to make this batch visually interesting.
- One of my favorite shots is even the one where Stark runs across the whole village to strike Revolte off the windmill.
- It’s kind of interesting that Serie visits the graves of first-class mages. That’s a surprising sentiment or forced ritual she puts on herself for someone who’s so deeply disappointed in human progress.
- The burial ritual at the end was quite touching as well.
- Also, Ep 7 implies that Genau knew about Revolte’s abilities even before listening in on the table strategy… couldn’t he have… at least given a guess to help them out?
- Ngl, while denying Methode’s offer for a healer is kind of stupid… she’s kinda creepy. I’m glad they left her behind.
- Also, Sein mentioned : )
- Also wait… Frieren doesn’t know how to do healing spells??? Did she really not have a use for it for hundreds of years?
As season two continues, keep up with the episodes on Crunchyroll.
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