Anime Log

Christening this newly remade section of my site with my thoughts on Sousou no Frieren. I wanted to wait until it was pretty far along to sit down and watch it because I'm a bingewatcher. I knew practically nothing of Frieren besides it being a current favorite. I think my timing can either be viewed as unfortunate (I have been dealing with some deaths in the family for the past several weeks, hence the very slow/small updates lately!) or fortuitous really (helping me cope and process stuff.) Frieren has themes of moving forward, healing, and the inevitable passage of time—and what we do with the small amount of time we, as mortal beings, are gifted.

• It's a fantasy that is not isekai harem garbage. Thank god!!!! I've been missing the high fantasy flavor of anime that Record of Lodoss War introduced me to so many years ago. While it's not the same, it does fill that hole a teeny tiny bit. I really do like that it focuses on the "after" part of the heroic quest.


• The ~vibe~. One of my friends told me that she felt it had a similar slow-paced, melancholic vibe as S1 of The Magus Bride. I can kind of see what she meant. I really enjoy shows with these kinds of vibes, slow-paced and thoughtful. I think you will not enjoy it if you need constant fight scenes, tension, and explosions in your anime.


• The music. I had mentioned to Poopy offhand that whoever the composer was (assuming they were Japanese) was able to mimic the style of music that you so often hear in Western fantasy medias. I looked it up later and discovered the composer is an American. The OST is very pretty and is something I can see myself listening to when drawing/reading certain things.


• The characters. I really enjoyed Frieren and Fern as characters. Motivated, hardworking, and mature with their moments of cuteness. Some stuff veers a little too 'moe for males' for me but it wasn't in huge amounts, thankfully. I also really liked Himmel, the kindhearted Hero with a playful and narcissistic streak. Cute.

All in all, I really did enjoy this a lot despite some small nitpicks (like some of the character designs were very generic fantasy or genuinely ugly to me.) I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys stories about personal growth, learning, and healing as main themes.

I was conned into watching this after being told it was a really cute and fun shoujo. I tried to push through after something that immediately gave me The Ick™ in the first episode. I guess I'm too feministpilled (or old LOL) to laugh at or "enjoy" dumb jokes but it quickly made me sour and I sent a text to my sister like "why????" and after looking it up (I don't really keep up with most manga/ka..) it all made sense. Horimiya was serialized in Monthly G Fantasy a SHONEN magazine. Onto the joke that made me check-out mentally immediately: A grown male adult teacher tells Hori that he loves flat-chested girls. He thought it would cheer her up.

This happens literally in the first minute-and-a-half of this show (at like 1:10 to be precise.) I tried to give it an unbiased chance after but I just couldn't...it's kind of sad that the show couldn't even make it 10 minutes without throwing a weird breast joke towards the underage femc. Besides this, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief about Miya's (ugly) tattoos or Hori's dumb parents, the stupid problems that arise that could've been easily solved by communication, etc. They try to lure you in with the plot point of two characters that can only show their true faces to each other! but it's really only used as a means to get them to date and is not explored further afterwards. The quiet loser boy with a "manly" rebellious and violent side (yeah 'cause this doesn't exist irl...) A popular pretty girl with a temper (because the worst thing you can do is have opinions and be angry as a girl!!!) Yawn. Now, I know I will have some weebs come at me with "but da culture...🤓" and here I will tell you that I don't care!! It's 2024. And as an Asian woman, I know what kind of behavior is expected of us and I still don't care.

Please write about something else... a loudmouth girl is not subversive or shocking. Hori's "flaw" was very surface level anyways. There was a part in an episode where Miya gets the intrusive thought of planting his foot on her head while she's doing his nails and this makes her realize she wants him to hit and yell at her and that scene just reiterated to me that this was NOT for me. Anyways, I didn't find the humor in this show funny and I found the cast mostly boring or annoying.

Bland, basic, boring. I dropped it at S1E12. I know I'm not in the target demographic for this one but it's still baffling to me that so many adults obssess over it.

WIP WIP WIP WIP

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Okay, so I wrote a tiny blurb about the manga back when I first started reading it and I really need to go back and rewrite it! Because I actually like it more after watching the anime and re-reading it. Though, it is not a masterpiece by any means, and the critcism against it being slow or uninteresting...well, it's kind of true? But I got invested because of where I am in life currently (in need of cutesy stuff versus my usual tastes in anime haha.)

The story isn't anything amazing, in fact it's extremely surface level and there is hardly any conflict. There are elements of love triangles but there's not much drama to them and it all gets resolved pretty quickly. There are some shoujo cliche side characters, one of them being the other boy that is in love with Yuki (who I hate because he's a possessive tsundere type that wants to keep her world small.)

I cannot recall a single piece of music from this anime, and the OP & ED were also kind of bland. The only thing that really stuck out to me is the beautiful art! I think it translated very well from manga to anime. There was a lot of thought and work put into properly animating sign, at least a lot more than what I was expecting for an anime. A lot of frames are visually pretty, the colors were soft and pleasing. Yuki is so, so cute (this opinion of mine has not changed from the first time I read the manga. She's adorable.)

I do wish she had more of a personality because she's just really "soft" if you know what I mean...though she does work hard and has gone through hardship. I wish the story focused more on her navigating life, school, and work as someone that is hard of hearing. The story fully focuses on her and the MC (sorry I forgot his name already lolol) and the development of their relationship. Honestly I can only really recommend this if you are first and foremost a big fan of extremely vanilla and kinda boring shoujo, and would like to see something that is easy-to-watch and extremely fluffy.