Frieren Beyond Journey’s End and the Art of Doing

Growing up, I had ideas of the things I would be doing with all my time. This hyperproductive individual existed in my mind and worked all day, bettering himself, and finding peace in only that. As I grew up and acquired more skills I became worried about why I wasn't doing anything productive with those skills. Sure, I had engaged in some extracurricular activities and did well enough in school, but 11-year-old me was convinced he would be working on his first video game at 15.

I had been thinking about this a lot more as I came out of my several-year-long anime hiatus for Frieren Beyond Journey’s End which I had been seeing a lot of fuss about. I should warn you at this point if you care to experience Frieren, please stop reading and do that now. This blog post will always be here, but that story is best experienced as doe-eyed as possible.

Frieren Beyond Journey’s End is an anime set after your standard fantasy story has unfolded before the start of our story. Instead, we are following the elf mage of a legendary hero party after she has outlived most of said party some 80+ years later. Frieren is a story about numerous things, but at the start, you could be forgiven for thinking the anime is not about much of anything at all. Even as stakes get introduced, they are pretty rapidly undermined by seemingly meaningless tasks.

This lack of stakes initially gave me pause when watching Frieren, but then something shifted. Blink, and you may miss it; a subtle shift, but you get pulled in. You watch an effectively immortal person continue to do seemingly menial things despite the pain. As we learn more about the people Frieren has lost and the lives she can no longer experience, the seemingly meaningless tasks become beautiful.

We watch Frieren’s grandiose displays of capability as a mage occasionally when she makes quick work of even the most powerful foes without much effort. But we watch Frieren carry out such a task with as much enthusiasm as she cooks a new party member of hers a birthday dinner. In the world of the show, everyone praises Frieren for her magic.

By all literal definitions, Frieren is a legend, and the people who know of her understand her as potentially one of the strongest people to live. Few regard her as someone cooking a traditional warrior's dinner. Only the ones who come to know her would ever think to praise her for such a thing.

The obvious parallels here to the real world are apparent even through the big spectacles of magic. As a kid, I was convinced coding was the pinnacle of achievement, that I would spend all day coding and becoming the best programmer who had ever lived. As I grew into a composer and artist, I became convinced I had to compose music every day and become the best composer. This line of thinking consumed my life and created an unreal expectation that paralyzed me. We can see this exact concept mirrored in Frieren’s several hundred-year-long isolation.

Now I’m 22 years old. Many of the notions 11 and 15-year-old me had of who that person was supposed to be were wrong. Even though I want to be self-employed, I have a long way to go before I can be considered the most “productive” creative. However, what even is productive? Can our productivity be defined by the things we monetize? We are a collective of the things we do, all of the things we do.

In Frieren, there exists a recurring spell that comes up throughout hundreds of years. A simple spell meant to grow a patch of flowers of your choosing. The strongest mage alive will later refer to this spell as a total waste of time. Despite that, many characters in the show, Frieren among them, call it their favorite. It happens to be my favorite also, though frankly, I don’t care much for flowers. I like to bake desserts. I enjoy painting and going for walks around neighborhoods in Boston. I enjoy discovering new buildings and new places to eat.

Giving myself the grace to indulge in these things this year, the wastes of time, I can bring myself to do this. I’m writing this blog because I allowed myself to go out and do things that seemed like waste before this. To remind myself, that flowers are beautiful, especially on the trees around here this time of year.

I can’t say whether or not this blog will continue to be updated or with what frequency. My current dream is to develop my own game and build a small little community around me. But I’m allowing myself to try to do everything I want equally and remain balanced in the things that I do.

If you have read this far it’s probably because you know me personally; this is the part where I say thanks for believing that I can do this. It’s because we are together as humans we can do this.

For the foreseeable future, the plan is to continue writing blogs in a similar vein. I enjoy media analysis, I’ll probably do a lot of it here, (stay tuned for next time if you like video games) I’ve made it a goal of mine to display the vulnerability I think we all need to really connect. It’s scary and hard and frankly kind of “cringe” but I am going to do it because there’s nothing else for me on this earth other than to do.