eiko

In my essay on Kill la Kill, I scoffed at the meme that "Trigger was saving anime," pointing out, of course, that plenty of well-regarded high-quality anime had released in the years between 2011 and 2013. Yet many of the examples I pointed out—such as the two Akiyuki Shinbo shows, Madoka Magica and Monogatari—did not overwhelm with sheer production value, but rather unique artistic vision. Kill la Kill itself was no exception, blending moments of high quality animation with choppy cartoonish cuts used for strategic comedic effect. Many of these works were great due to their ability to function within financial or technical constraints, whereas the anime that make waves today seem unrestrained entirely, given to an almost overwhelming excess of production quality. Jujutsu Kaisen is not particularly unique, visually; it's simply a tour de force, an extreme expression of skill (or budget). Oh, Sukuna is fighting a random monster that doesn't talk and has never in the story before? Sure, we'll make this one of the best-animated fight scenes in history. Competing, of course, with the seven or eight in the previous few episodes.

The actual Renaissance was a similar period of straightforward excess, where an incredibly well-funded Catholic Church (in the South) and rising merchant class (in the North) were willing to splash obscene amounts of money on vanity art projects. At the same time, artists were abandoning the more stylized form of representation popular in the late medieval period in favor of forms that depicted the human body, and the spaces it inhabited, with higher realism and optical fidelity. Compare Proto-Renaissance Cimabue (left, c. 1280) to High Renaissance Raphael (right, 1513), both depicting the same theme (Madonna and child):

Which isn't to say Cimabue is a bad artist; there's something striking in his use of gold and blue that cannot be replicated in Raphael's more naturalistic colors. But Cimabue is working within constraints of style, skill, and physical material that Raphael is comparatively unencumbered by. Though not as extreme (of course it wouldn't be, we're talking 10 years instead of 200), there's a similar difference between Kill la Kill and Jujutsu Kaisen.

But why? What has changed in those 10 years?

The actual inner workings of the anime industry are often a black box in the West, concealed not only by general corporate quietude but also by the language barrier. One interesting resource, however, is the 2014 anime Shirobako, a slice-of-life story about the workings of a small anime studio. Shirobako's tone is unwaveringly idealistic, and it undoubtedly leaves a lot to creative license, so relying on it for real-world information is dubious at best. Nonetheless, as the period in which it was released increasingly becomes a moment in history, it provides some insight on the anxieties of an industry that may, in fact, have been in need of saving.

An overwhelming sense of uncertainty pervades Shirobako, despite its optimism. On the one hand, this uncertainty is expressed through its protagonist, Aoi, who lacks a well-defined dream for her future or a goal to strive for. On the other, it revolves around the anime industry as a whole. The first real challenge the studio faces at the start of the show is the question of whether to animate an explosion in 2D or in 3D. This question becomes one of ideology. 3D saves time, and in the context of western animation, seems to be the future. (One side character, said to have worked on a western animated film that is basically Penguins of Madagascar, is viewed with reverential awe.) Meanwhile, the 2D animators think 3D looks like dogshit and betrays the idea of what anime is "supposed to be."

If everything becomes 3D, they wonder, will anime continue to exist?

This question is familiar. It's the same existential worry over the future of anime that the "Trigger will save anime" meme embodied. Except this time, it's not expressed by fans, but by the actual employees of the industry—both the fictional ones in Shirobako, and the real ones who created Shirobako.

It's not a groundless worry, either. In the 1990s, western 2D animation was in its own Renaissance, the vaunted "Disney Renaissance" that pumped out tour-de-forces clamoring for increased mainstream respectability. Yet after a string of flops in the 2000s, Disney shifted to 3D animation entirely, and nowadays, western 2D animation is generally reserved for cheap, raunchy adult comedies. The Disney Renaissance was both a rebirth and a final blaze of glory for an entire medium.

Anime similarly experienced struggles as the 1990s gave way to a new digital landscape. If 2026 is the anime Renaissance, the 90s are undoubtedly its Naissance, the peak of hand-drawn cel animation prior to the promulgation of the computer that fundamentally changed how anime—even 2D anime—was produced. Although the difference between cels and digital seems pointlessly technical on the surface, the visual result is immense. One need only compare the cel-drawn Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995, top) to its nearly shot-for-shot digital remake, the first Rebuild film (2007, bottom):

The digital image on the bottom has more detail and also more realistic lighting, but in many ways these differences make the image worse than the cel image on the top, where the distinct circle of light and starker colors better draw the eye toward the giant robot that is the main point of visual interest. In the bottom image, the shadows on the left side of the robot render it murky and cause it to blend into the background, whereas the vibrant two-toned purples in the top image ensure it sticks out. This isn't so much an issue of color—digital is more than capable of creating stark two-toned palettes—as it is of line and gradient. The digital lines are finer, which allows for more greebling (detail) on the walkways and walls, but also renders the giant robot less imposing, with a more delicate "mouth" and "eyes". The realistic digital gradient actually creates a darker shadow overall, but one that diminishes the shape of the robot rather than emphasizing it.

(There are also some unforced errors, like changing the little boat from gray to yellow for no reason except I guess "realism," realistically making it stand out for negative artistic purpose. Come the fuck on Anno.)

To an extent, the comparison is unfair. The original shot was specifically composed with the limitations of its medium in mind. It was designed the way it was because director Hideaki Anno—who actually appears in Shirobako—was familiar with the tools available to him and accounted for their advantages and limitations. The second shot, which uses the exact same composition but in a medium with different tools, advantages, and limitations, is inherently on the back foot. The shot was not designed with digital art in mind, and Anno makes poor directorial decisions in adapting it.

But that was the exact problem facing the anime industry upon the transition to digital. By the end of the 90s, the industry was composed of skilled animators and directors who understood their medium and the best cinematography for it. But these animators and directors weren't skilled in the medium of digital art, and struggled to adapt.

The creators that successfully emerged out of this new digital landscape were those who adapted the most quickly.

The first big example is Kyoto Animation, perhaps the first studio to take a hard look at what digital brought to the table and craft an artistic strategy around it. In the Evangelion example, the softer lines and gradients rendered a giant robot less intimidating, but the same effect could be used in a different context to produce a result actually appropriate for the thing being depicted. Of course, the thing Kyoto Animation knew digital was perfect to depict was cute girls.

Thinner lines and softer gradients were essential for the development of the "moe" style popularized in 2006 by The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which caused an industry-wide shift in how anime looked and felt. Thinner lines meant mouths and noses could be smaller, while gradients meant eyes could be more lifelike and cheeks could give off a subtle blush. Lighting effects rendered everything softer, and the overall impression was one of the delicate and demure.

The 90s had been an era of hard things: robots and spaceships, or angular heroes like Spike Spiegel and Vash the Stampede. These were what the stark lines of cel animation were best able to depict. The 00s and 10s would, in contrast, be a period of soft things.

At the risk of sounding like a culture war agitator, this led to an overall feminization of anime. Not just in the profusion of moe slice-of-life shows, but in the profusion of the harem in male-oriented fiction. Even in a show like Sword Art Online, geared toward a male audience, the aesthetic borrows heavily from moe stylings, emphasizes the female heroines that surround the male protagonist, and even has a major domestic subplot revolving around marriage and child-rearing.

Obviously, moe wasn't the only style finding success at this time, but many of the contemporaneous works that rose to prominence did so by specifically digital innovations. Ufotable made a name for itself via its impressive use of bloom effects in its adaptations of the Fate franchise. Stein's;Gate similarly adopts a distinctive look based on washed out, overabundant sunshine gradients. Akiyuki Shinbo became established as an auteur with a visual style heavily reliant on digital collage and texture patterns. The list goes on and on.

So it wasn't that anime failed to find a way forward. Still, it was perhaps inevitable that something would seem to have been lost.

Shirobako is deeply concerned with the transfer of knowledge in the anime industry. This problem is emphasized by the nature of the fictional anime studio where the action takes place. Musashino Animation is depicted as a formerly successful studio during the cel era, gone defunct for several years before attempting a comeback in the present. The gap between the cel past and digital present is emphasized by this period of dormancy, especially since the studio retains only one employee from its early days, the aging animator Sugie. Sugie is kept on staff mostly as a courtesy (in reality, he does outsourced work for another studio), since he is incapable of assisting on the studio's new, moe-themed project. For all his experience and talent, he can't draw moe. The style simply has no overlap with his skillset.

Yet Sugie also has skills that none of the younger animators have. When a last-minute change to the plot necessitates a scene involving horses, the studio realizes nobody on staff knows how to draw a horse. Only when Aoi pays a desperate visit to Hideaki Anno for help does Anno reveal that the studio does, in fact, have an animator who can draw horses: Sugie, who proceeds not only to draw the horses but also to teach the younger staff how to draw horses, too.

The exact framing of this plotline emphasizes the hybridization ethos Shirobako takes toward the industry-wide issues it addresses. The 2D/3D problem is resolved with a similar hybridization of old and new: An animator from the cel past (based on the less famous Ichiro Itano, who worked on Gundam and Macross) suggests to the 2D animators that they teach the 3D animators their techniques for the mutual improvement of the final product.

It's an ethos of "no losers, everyone wins, everyone has a purpose." There's a kumbaya aspect to it, everyone smiling and getting along after realizing their differences were skin-deep. Though the show is skilled at never pushing it too far, it can feel a little saccharine at times. There's an underlying cynicism—in me, at least—that thinks in reality, someone's toes will need to be stepped on. 2D just is better than 3D, at least in anime. At least it was in 2014 and much of the surrounding decade, when shows like Sword Art Online and Overlord busted out CGI monstrosities like these:

Yet now, in 2026, it seems Shirobako's thesis wasn't an empty platitude. When Chainsaw Man's anime started in 2022, it received some flak for its blended 2D/3D animation, which enabled more dynamic movement but sometimes showed traces of uncanniness. By last year's Reze Arc film, those traces of 3D uncanniness were eradicated, and now the blend is seamless the way they say the CGI buildings are behind the Avengers; the 3D you don't even notice. Action scenes are more dynamic than ever and you still think it's 2D the entire time.

The development of a technical artistic skillset capable of producing these consistent tour de forces is only part of the equation, though. The other reason for anime's explosive popularity revolves around anime becoming a financial means to an end in and of itself.

The second anime Musashino Animation produces in Shirobako is an adaptation of a popular manga. Much of the drama of this arc revolves around the asymmetrical power the manga publishing company holds over the anime studio. In Shirobako, the contrast is rendered as stark as possible: the publishing company owns a giant skyscraper, the anime studio only a humdrum little office building; the stonewalling literary agent is a golfing fast-talking douchebag, the anime execs are down-to-earth friendly guys who cook food for the staff.

It's exaggerated for dramatic effect, but it does highlight that during the era, much of the actual money was in manga and light novels, not anime itself. Anime adaptations were often created primarily as advertising vehicles for the source material, since the shows could only pay for themselves via local Japanese TV network deals or overpriced Blu-rays and other merchandise. This merchandising focus for monetization dovetailed nicely with the new moe artstyle. Characters became the primary product on sale in anime, culminating in waifu merch that pushed the medium toward an increasingly parasocial bent. Shirobako itself isn't immune to this pressure; despite its attempts to present more realistic character designs for much of its supporting cast, it is still populated by moe anime girls that aesthetically clash with their costars.

The moefication of anime pushed it toward the increasingly niche, the increasingly otaku, the increasingly fringe. It's the gacha game monetization system of focusing on hooking a few desperately addicted "whales" who will shell out thousands for their specific waifu of choice. While it can work sometimes, it's not a great system for a robust creative industry. It's not how you gross $781 million for Infinity Castle.

Shounen is the most mainstream-friendly genre of the animanga sphere. Male-centric action-adventure, it often focuses on unproblematic heroes who proceed along a simple arc of too weak > train to get stronger > prevail (with the help of your friends). Despite the genre's popularity, though, its adaptation to anime was often consigned to the gutter. Following the logic that anime is mainly a vehicle to advertise the source material, the adaptations of shows like Naruto and Bleach and One Piece (the so-called "Big Three") focused less on quality and more on ensuring an episode came out every week—and I mean every week—to keep the property alive in the mind of the public. It didn't matter if Naruto was good, only that there was Naruto, even if that necessitated the invention of hundreds of cheap, useless filler episodes.

There was shounen being adapted differently, just outside the "Big Three." Studio Bones, which emerged from the 90s cel era with a reputation for high quality fight animation, was clearly frustrated by the industry-typical procedure for shounen in their dual adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist. Their first stab in 2003 got sent off the rails when the manga's slow pace necessitated an anime-original ending; a mere 6 years later in 2009, they tried again with the far more faithful Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which focused on production value over episode count.

Brotherhood's success suggested the potential of "doing shounen right." When Bones next got their hands on a big-name shounen property, they innovated an entirely new method of adaptation. The My Hero Academia anime began in 2016 with a startlingly small 13-episode season; rather than constantly churning out content, Bones would produce about 25 episodes a year over the next 8 years, the breaks between enabling an increased attention to quality and the reduction of needless bloat.

MHA was not the first big-name shounen to receive a high production seasonal adaptation; Attack on Titan's first season in 2013 made a huge splash (and did so while digitally aping the thick lines and stark color palettes of the 90s cel style).

Despite Attack on Titan's success, Wit Studio waited four years before Season 2, at which point it began to imitate MHA's annual seasonal chunks with breaks in between, ensuring consistently high production values.

The result was that the most popular manga properties were now getting anime that were worth watching in their own right, not simply as signposts to get viewers to read the manga. Anime stopped being a vehicle to advertise a property and started to become the property itself.

The AOT/MHA model of shounen adaptation is now industry standard. It applies to Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, and Frieren—shows that have become the drivers of the anime Renaissance, with animation quality being the main selling point. This season's Witch Hat Atelier, riding the Frieren high, is the first major production of a brand new studio, and is similarly predicated on the quality seasonal model. Its success—with a second season already entering development—suggests that as long as you have the talent and start-up costs, you cannot possibly fail.

That's the idealistic Shirobako narrative, at least: everyone working together to develop technical skill, while anime is put first over manga. There are more cynical considerations, such as the role of western streaming, the outsourcing to China and Vietnam, and the constant Japanese bugbear of incredible overwork. Every fight in Jujutsu Kaisen, I hear, requires the blood sacrifice of 1,000 animators.

Frieren's initial "fresh" feeling does not solely come from its context. The story frames itself explicitly as what comes after the classic-to-the-point-of-cliché Japanese fantasy narrative: the journey of a party of heroes to defeat the Demon King. The Demon King plot predates isekai—it emerges from the progenitor of Japan's take on western fantasy, Dragon Quest—but isekai leaned on this plotline hard, especially in its more comedic iterations, where a Demon King served as a familiar shorthand on which to festoon jokes. (For example, while KonoSuba has a Demon King plotline, there is none in either of the two main works it parodies, Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei.)

Frieren is also using the Demon King as narrative shorthand, just not for the purposes of parody. Since its story is premised on happening "Beyond Journey's End," the journey itself needs to be self-explanatory, and using a simple template that the audience already knows fulfills that purpose. But whether intentional or not, there is an implicit message in this framing: Isekai is over. Here's what comes next.

Now, I don't intend to drag Frieren through the mud. I still remember in 2016 hearing about how My Hero Academia was a bold new take on shounen, how it was subversive, how it was a DECONSTRUCTION, how this time the female characters are just as strong as the boys—look! Bakugo said he respected Ochaco after he beat her in the tournament arc!—only for My Hero Academia to quickly reveal itself as the most boilerplate shounen of all time. People are quick to proclaim any new popular shounen as different from other shounen, and they're almost always wrong. Frieren, too, is deploying a lot of classic shounen tricks, and the entire back half of its first season is taken up by what is, effectively, the Chūnin Exam arc from Naruto. However, if Frieren is not wholly original, there is at least one original synthesis in its core plot structure, a combination of two genres not commonly mixed. On one hand, you have shounen, not only in the form of the aforementioned exam arc but also in the big set piece fights, which usually involve the protagonist squad encountering a villain squad of suspiciously identical numbers, allowing everyone to divvy up into 1-on-1 combat where each fighter is of relatively even power level with their opponent. (This way the hero can be the strongest by an order of magnitude while their support crew still gets to seem like they're helping.)

The genre Frieren fuses with shounen is iyashikei.

Iyashikei means healing-type. Wikipedia is a bit confused and seems to think any slice of life anime is iyashikei (it lists K-On! and Azumanga Daioh as examples), but "healing" implies that it comes after some sort of wound or trauma. The most obvious examples of iyashikei are calm, wistful meditations set post-apocalyptically, as in Yokohama Shopping Log or Girls' Last Tour, or after a real-life tragedy, as in the many Ghibli films framed against the background of World War II. Frieren, of course, is "Beyond Journey's End," set after a massive war that ravaged the countryside and brought the world to the brink of destruction. At the same time, it depicts Frieren's personal trauma; her antisocial tendencies and warped sense of time allowed all her relationships to slip through her fingers, leaving her isolated and empty. The new journey Frieren takes not only puts her in contact with towns and people and descendants of people that have recovered after the Demon King's war, but is also an opportunity to reestablish human connections and lead a more fulfilling life. Hence the "healing."

It makes a lot of sense a work like this would blow up at the time it did. Rather than simply the tail end of isekai's "decade-defining groan," 2023 was also only a couple years after the period of COVID isolation that affected more people globally than any other single event in history. Frieren's healing is framed not in terms of recovering from the trauma of war, but from the deadening effect of social isolation. (The manga began in April 2020, by the way.) I'd argue Frieren is the best—perhaps the only good—meditation on COVID, even if it only tackles it metaphorically. Lord knows every work that tackles COVID explicitly hasn't done so hot a job of it. Since everyone seems perfectly eager to consign that two-year period to the memory hole, maybe a metaphorical response is the only real response possible. There's a power in that first episode when Frieren emerges from years of self-exclusion just to look down at the grave of her best friend and suddenly realize how the world has been turning without her. Perhaps far more power in the anime in 2023, in COVID's wake, than in the manga in 2020, when nobody knew exactly what this pandemic was going to look like long-term.

It's this perfect confluence of events—isekai fatigue and COVID—that allows Frieren to lead with its iyashikei aspects as its hook and actually succeed. You'd think with fights as well-animated and tailored to the shounen formula as Frieren keeps in its back pocket, it'd start with them, but no. However, the fusion of iyashikei and shounen is conceptually bizarre. One is calming, tranquil, and feminine, while the other is action-packed, violent, and literally called "boy." Frieren the character's status as a popular shounen hero is itself kind of novel, as the picture of her standing next to Jinwoo Solo Leveling in the collab advert emphasizes: she's a cute girl in a world of tough dudes. In Solo Leveling itself, female characters—even those who are ostensibly strong—exist only as damsels for Jinwoo to save, family members to provide for, or trophies to notch in his belt. It's kind of crazy to see him standing side-by-side with a girl on his own cover, and not just due to their really funny difference in height.

(As an aside, if you get into high level battleboarding, meaning arguments about who the strongest character in all of fiction is, there's a generally agreed-upon slate of potential candidates. Most of them are chalky outlines of a figure whose name is something like "The Ultimate Power" or "God," or some oogly-boogly Lovecraft monster, but one of them is Featherine Augustus Aurora from Umineko, and she similarly stands out.)

If the combination of these two genres is so novel, though, how did Frieren pull it off? How did she become The First Female Shounen Character Who Really Is Just As Strong As The Boys?

When I watched the first season, I didn't have a ready answer to that question. The second season pulls back the curtain and reveals much more of the machinery. The answer is that it doesn't really combine the two genres. There are two Frierens, the iyashikei and the shounen, and they do not intermix despite existing within the same show.

Structurally, Frieren's first season has four distinct parts:

1. Episodes 1 through 6 introduce the premise and core characters, almost exclusively through the iyashikei lens. This is "Beyond Journey's End," and Frieren's only real goal is improve her human relationships after seeing her past ones literally die. In line with the iyashikei tone, the plotlines are episodic, and even when they do involve action—such as in Episode 3, when Frieren fights the unsealed demon Qual—the fight is emphatically trivial, or else Frieren deliberately avoids intervening, as during the dragon fight in Episode 6.

2. Episodes 7 through 10 are the first non-episodic arc, though only in the sense that it takes up more than one episode. (Frieren has no real macro plot so everything that happens is in some form or another episodic—remember that for later.) Here, Frieren and company fight an equal number of demons, splitting up into several big, cinematic battles. This is the first time the series tips its shounen hand.

3. Episodes 11 through 17 return to the episodic formula of the first part. There is a somewhat recurring plotline involving Sein, the priest that temporarily joins Frieren's team, but this is mostly "Himmel used to like the Costco hot dogs" type storytelling.

4. Episodes 18 through 28 are the mage exam arc, a long recurring plotline with a ton of battles, including one where Frieren has to fight herself. Peak shounen.

My instinct was to view the third section, Episodes 11 through 17, as an aberration in the story's progression, a flawed retreat after the escalation of stakes in Episodes 7-10 that was rectified by the mage exam arc, or more charitably a transitional state to move from Point A to B in the plot. If the third section is ignored, Frieren Season 1 consistently goes from shorter, more episodic storylines to longer, more substantial ones, with the stakes rising in a way that aligns with traditional models of narrative progression.

After all, I still believe in traditional narrative progression. Which I am starting to realize is a mistake.

In the short 28-episode first season, Frieren gets away with the transition from iyashikei to shounen because there is a natural logic to it. Iyashikei is "healing." Once you're healed, though, what do you do next? Kick ass, I guess. The logic is actually quite similar to that of Solo Leveling, where Jinwoo starts out powerless, gets powerful, and then spends the rest of the series flexing One Punch Man-style on anyone in his way. Frieren is physically (magically?) powerful from the start, but emotionally and socially weak. During the iyashikei episodes, maybe better referred to as the Himmel episodes, Frieren's accomplishments are framed as some sort of cathartic coming-to-terms with her past relationship with Himmel, usually leading to her better understanding either him, herself, or her new companions. That's her version of the shounen training arc, and it pays off in the season's big final fight against her clone, which she wins thanks to her relationship with her protégé/ward, Fern. (Notable that "friendship is my superpower" is another classic shounen trope. Frieren has a bit more aura about it, at least.)

But the end of Season 1 is not the end of Frieren. Because, despite the show's subtitle, nothing can ever end.

Frieren's second season is 10 episodes, of which 7 are of the episodic Himmel type. The other three, spanning episodes 6 through 8 (not even positioned at the exact climax of the season), are a shounen set piece fight where everyone gets their own demon to battle. Even this mini-arc is a de-escalation of the stakes established in Season 1's mini-arc: it's shorter, its villain is less of a threat, and Frieren doesn't even consider it worthwhile enough to lift a finger herself.

In the overall structure of Frieren as a story, these ten episodes are clearly a transitional bridge between the mage exam arc and the arc teased at the end of the second season, the Golden Land arc. It is only the arbitrary seasonal division of the anime adaptation that emphasizes it as its own narrative bloc; in fact, the episode numbers tick up from 28 (the count at the end of the first season), as though to emphasize the two seasons as part of the same cohesive whole. But the years-long pause between the seasons exposes the deception. Consuming Season 2 as a distinctive unit reveals that the two Frierens, shounen and iyashikei, do not flow naturally into one another but are rather two completely different narratives that the story switches between arbitrarily.

By now, Frieren is "healed." She has been healed since around episode 5 or 6 of the first season at the latest. The episodic narratives no longer serve any purpose to her as a character, and in fact she is never emotionally challenged once across the entire second season; the Himmel statues in every town remind her of the past, but they are only idle reminders, devoid of greater understanding or even catharsis. As such, these iyashikei episodes become more typical slice of life, which puts them directly at odds with the shounen arcs. The transition is jarring. One episode features Frieren humorously being sent to the mines to pay off a debt that has collected 80 years' interest; the next involves Frieren and company gearing up for a big set piece battle against demons who have slaughtered an entire village. The show has always had its gags, even in those early episodes, but the emotional power of the iyashikei setup created a consistent sense of gravity that wedded the two halves. The second season attempts this gravity—the mining episode ends with a sublimely animated moment where Frieren uses her magic to pinpoint a silver deposit—but it's hollow, devoid of any emotional underpinning. Frankly, Frieren herself doesn't seem to care about anything that happens in the second season. Even in the shounen mini-arc, she decides not to participate for no real reason; the arc still manages some potency, but only by focusing on Genau, a hitherto-irrelevant side character who functions as a blank slate to drape fresh emotional stakes on. (The hook for the next big arc, Golden Land, similarly suggests it will emphasize Denken, a side character tangentially relevant to Frieren.)

My question becomes: Why is the story like this?

The second season reveals that the stretch from episodes 11 to 17 was not a fluke. The story is designed to be the way it is. It will not escalate linearly. It will always return to its episodic, slice-of-life storylines, no matter how grandiose the shounen arc that preceded them. Even its shounen arcs are increasingly episodic, modular, able to be mixed around in whatever order. Why did the story not end with Frieren and Fern teaming up to take down Frieren's clone? What, really, does this story still have to tell? Why is this story so long?

If Frieren the story has a single overarching idea, it's the passage of time. Frieren is immortal, but her friends are not, and this creates the story's first conflict, when Himmel dies of old age after Frieren spent the previous 60 years faffing about. Much of the early episodes involve Frieren needing to learn to respect time, as she constantly wants to spend years doing some irrelevant special interest activity, forgetting that her human companion Fern can't afford to waste so much of her life. Every episode begins by announcing the number of years that have passed since Himmel's death; almost every plotline involves history, or descendants, or something that happened years ago. The show is a master of montage, able to convey the passage of time—either great or small—through a series of images without dialogue.

The speed of time's passage quickly scales from wide swaths of years in the opening episode to the needlessly quotidian by the second season. This scale represents Frieren's own sense of time, which she recalibrates in response to Himmel's death and Fern's needs. By the second season, one of only two meaningful time skips is instigated at Fern's urging, against Frieren's protests, when the party wastes several months opening a seal in exchange for a few gold pieces. (Like time, money means nothing to Frieren, at least until she is sent to the debtor mines.)

The obvious argument is that the form mirrors the meaning. Frieren must learn to appreciate time, so the story shows every little moment of her journey, regardless of its relevance to the broader narrative, as a representation of this day-to-day appreciation. Yet ironically, in proclaiming a message about respecting time, the story starts to waste its audience's. Is falling into this endless sinkhole of villages with Himmel statues and demon teams with convenient one-on-one opponents anything other than its own form of special interest isolation for the viewer, the sort of useless magical knickknack Frieren collects for no reason other than that it tickles her fancy? Again: why is this story so very, very long?

The very, very long story is a relatively new phenomenon.

The Bible is just shy of 800,000 words. Throughout human history, this has typically been the upper limit of how long a book can be, though the Bible is not really a single story, rather a collection of stories written by different people, in different countries, across several different centuries. Despite the name, ancient epic poetry is not particularly long by modern standards—The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid are all under 200,000 words (even accounting for different translations), making them all shorter than Moby-Dick. Even as the novel rose to prominence in the 1800s and authors produced massive tomes published serially, the longest—War and Peace, Les Misérables—are just short of 600,000 words. Infinite Jest is 550,000 words.

The web serial Worm is 1,700,000 words.

Consider that. Prior to the internet, no novel even came close to 1 million words. Worm is over 1 million words longer than the longest novels.

I single out Worm because the digital format enables a "single work" to exceed the physical limits of bookbinding, making it a more impressive figure, but in truth there have been longer stories that predate it due to the emergence of the novel series. The 7-book Harry Potter series is a million words; the 15-book Wheel of Time series is 4.4 million. Though split up across multiple novels, each of these series comprise an overarching narrative with its own beginning and end, thus a complete singular "story."

One could technically argue the Bible also comprises a singular "story"—of God, perhaps, or Earth—but the actual reality on the ground is that Exodus and the Gospel of Mark are two completely different narratives. Most mythological or religious compendiums are similar, and even the omnibuses that collect these myriad narratives don't reach the length of your average fantasy franchise today. The same can be said for the great narrative cycle of the late Middle Ages, the Arthurian romance, which does keep a consistent cast that it follows from beginning to end as though in a singular narrative, but is only reaching about 300,000 words in its most comprehensive collections like Le Morte D'Arthur.

In addition, these older compendiums formed the groundwork for shared cultural consciousness. Christendom was culturally united by a common understanding of the Bible—even including the heretics and schismatics—just as Greece was united by a common understanding of its mythological cosmogony. Though some of the long works of today, like Harry Potter, have attained a similar level of reach, it's increasingly startling to me how there are 100 random stories on RoyalRoad you have never ever heard of that are similarly gigantic, not to mention the endless array of long-running manga, of which Frieren is only one (and nowhere near the longest), well-known in this internet niche but not so much in society at large.

This last point could be a byproduct of the fractalization of culture. The Bible helped medieval man reach a shared understanding with every person he was likely to interact with in his life, and thus was to an extent necessary for his social existence. Frieren might help modern man reach a shared understanding with his friends on Discord. Of course, to modern man, the Discord friends might be as much a cornerstone of his existence as the village was to the medieval. Yet even within the Discord framework, Frieren can only ever be a small scrap of the overall fabric of culture. You also better keep up with Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... A better comparison might be to the educated minority of the past, whom were expected to know a "canon" of classical texts, which in sum total was quite long. Unlike Frieren, though, in its holding pattern of redundant, episodic, interchangeable parts, most of the classical canon expressed a diversity of ideas from a wide variety of authors.

The alternative to social enrichment is that watching Frieren—or any of these endless stories—provides personal enrichment. Even when nothing is happening in Frieren (i.e., always), the show has charm, it has quality directing and visuals. We're currently in an anime Golden Age; many of the best-animated shows of all time have aired in the past few years, and Frieren is among them. For all its lack of stakes, the mini-arc in this season works. The action is excellent, the ebb and flows of the fight are exciting, there is emotional weight even if it comes via an otherwise-irrelevant side character in Genau. The directing, especially in the episode establishing the situation before the fight proper, fosters a heavy, somber mood as it lingers on the ravaged buildings or the villager corpses lined up in a church. There is a Miyazaki-like attention to detail as Genau carries a wounded man on his back and the man's subtle but clearly-conveyed twitches and shifts indicate his exact procession to death. As a three-episode short story, it's fantastic. As a piece of the broader tapestry of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, though, it's deviously pointless. Underminingly pointless. Frieren is paying closer attention to the details of time, but in service of what? Is this obsession with minutiae not simply another form of Frieren's obsession with useless grimoires, just for the audience instead of Frieren herself?

And in yet another way, Frieren is becoming exactly like the isekai it suggested it was different from: Its journey will never end. How many isekai heroes have actually defeated their Demon King? Is this a journey at all, or just a treadmill?

Given the audience for this essay, I'll start by explaining Shiboyugi's premise, though its full translated title offers some hints. Shiboyugi tells the story of Yuki, a shut-in loner who competes in death games as a full-time job. Rather than a single game, the show depicts a series of them, arranged in non-chronologic order. The games vary in scope and rules. Some are escape rooms filled with deadly traps, while others are glorified battle royales. Rather than react with terror or panic, Yuki approaches these challenges in a detached, professional manner, doing what is pragmatic to win without being excessively cruel to her fellow competitors (usually).

I have a theory—perhaps it applies only to me, but I believe I've seen it in others, too—that the most important determiner of whether someone likes or dislikes something is based on whether its premise innately appeals to them. (Or, similarly, that they find a major character relatable.) A work's technical quality, uniqueness, narrative consistency, and so on are secondary factors in comparison, and when a reviewer brings up these elements to explain why a work is good or bad, they are typically dancing around the core issue.

For instance, someone who is personally interested in robotics, transhumanism, and speculating about the future—or even a more general interest in science and technology—will find a cyberpunk dystopia an innately appealing concept for a story. Upon a viewer being "hooked" by the premise, the work's technical qualities will enhance its appeal, while its technical flaws will be acceptable or even ignorable. Whereas someone like me, without much interest in robots, might find the work boring even if it is well-made, and its few technical flaws will stand out more glaringly.

Despite this, I find that a lot of criticism is often rooted in these secondary details. It makes sense, since "I like Cyberpunk Edgerunners because I think cyberpunk is cool" is not a particularly interesting argument, whereas analyzing technical details lends a sense of objective nuance to an opinion. But I find this type of review disingenuous, which is a big reason why I don't typically write about whether I liked a work or not.

With that preamble out of the way, Shiboyugi is, at its core, combining three things that strongly appeal to me:

Death Games. I love death games. To me, they are similar to slasher horror stories, where the core tension is the question of who will live and who will die, a question that more conventional narratives—even ignoring the question of the protagonist—often resolve with predictable tropes (i.e., the likeable comic relief character lives, the old mentor dies). A death game has an element of unpredictability to it, combined with clear and immediate stakes (win or die), that immediately piques my interest.

Ennui. I wrote a whole novel about this one. I find works about the existential emptiness of contemporary life compelling and relatable. The question of how people create meaning for themselves in a fundamentally meaningless environment is one that matters a lot to me.

Liminal Spaces. Shiboyugi's death games take place in surreal locations that are often uncanny and unsettling in their layout and presentation. As someone with a strong interest in geography, I've always found strange permutations of space—including the internet itself—to have a fascinating pull. The popularity of liminal spaces in independent internet fiction has only magnified my interest.

Simply by being about these things, Shiboyugi already "hooked" me before it really even lifted a finger. If none of these appeal to you, you might not have as powerful a reaction as I did, and that's something I intend to be upfront about, rather than present a bunch of excellent technical details (of which there are many) to claim they make Shiboyugi "objectively" good or some nonsense like that.

But while I said technical excellence is a secondary factor in whether one finds a work good or bad, it is a factor. A shot that looks good will look better than a shot that looks bad, even if you're more interested in what the bad shot depicts. My love of death games and slasher horror has put me into contact with a lot of low-quality works that are "doing the thing" I want, but that I am forced to admit flub the execution. In fact, sometimes my most hated works are those that are something I should ostensibly like, but which are such an unmitigated disaster that I am more personally offended than by a worse work I had a neutral interest in. A work I particularly dislike is The Hunger Games, which takes a death game premise and does everything in its power to cram it into the shape of a conventional, predictable narrative that goes against what I find so exciting about the genre to begin with. (A death game with deemphasized death game, if you will.)

As such, when I first started watching Shiboyugi—knowing nothing about it beyond it being a death game story—I felt my stomach sink in dread as the first few minutes played out. Shiboyugi's tone and visual style is one of quiet detachment. It is, in a word, "artistic," established via very pretty backgrounds and an unexpressive protagonist (whose silence, surely, means she is ponderous and profound!), which frankly suggested to me that Shiboyugi would do everything in its power to distance itself from the chaotic brutality that makes the premise so appealing.

I was afraid it was going to be pretentious.

I don't like using the word pretentious. It's a word that gets thrown around often, and in an online milieu where people like to think they are smart but do not like to think, I tend to worry that "pretentious" is shorthand for "I didn't understand it and don't care to try, secure as I am in all the facts I already know."

Even so, there is stuff I do find "pretentious," especially in anime, a medium primarily targeted toward teenagers. Stuff that presents a lofty tone, but when it comes to substance seems to express almost comedically childish concepts. (Do you think the light, will defeat the darkness? No, I think the darkness, will defeat the light.) More generally, if a work's tone doesn't appropriately complement the content, the work starts to feel emotionally manipulative. How well, I wondered, would an elevated tone complement a death game?

The answer to that question came about 20 minutes into Shiboyugi's first episode. After a lot of meandering, a lot of pretty backgrounds, a lot of atmospheric music, a quaint and bloodless blowgun trap, and most of all plenty of silent thoughtfulness, suddenly the lights go out. The ceiling opens. The players, chained to the wall, look up. Eighteen buzzsaws start descending. Everyone has to fight among themselves for the key to escape before they are gruesomely ripped to shreds.

It's essentially a trap from the Saw franchise—it even features saws—and despite the elegant if increasingly surreal setting in which it takes place, it is every bit as savage. What's more, the tone of the preceding 20 minutes emphasizes, rather than detracts from, the savagery. The opening produced a false sense of security, a feeling that despite this being a death game, it would adhere to a sort of sporting propriety, a PG-13 distance from its own concept, and the reality crashing down from the ceiling is such a stark juxtaposition that the emotional impact is phenomenally potent despite the short amount of time spent getting to know the characters beforehand. The airy, atmospheric music of before continues to play, layered with the loser's horrific screams as they are diminished into pulp over a period of several excruciating seconds. For almost a minute afterward, stillness and silence reigns as the survivors stare at the unrecognizable remains, broken only by one—the last to escape, dooming the loser to their fate—softly repeating, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

This was the moment when Shiboyugi gripped me. The "pretentious" tone was, in fact, being employed for a reason, one that generated an impressive amount of power regardless of its intellectual content. Shiboyugi is punctuated by many more examples of sudden horror movie brutality that is made more impactful by the refinement on display everywhere else, and any punches it seems to pull are only the setup for a harder punch somewhere unexpected. For example, it's established that the participants of the death game are injected with something called the "Preservation Treatment," which causes their blood to turn to a cotton-like material when it leaves the body. While this at first seems to be a Danganronpa-esque blood substitution censorship, it ultimately leads to even more extreme dismemberment and body horror, as players are able to survive grievous wounds without bleeding to death. Despite the lack of blood, the show doesn't shy away from showing exposed bone and internal organs after a character is disemboweled.

Not to mention, the cottony blood creates the unmistakable impression that these bodies are doll bodies, that these players are something less than human.

This is where the second aspect of Shiboyugi that innately interests me appears: ennui. The elevated tone and impressive visual framing doesn't only enhance the impact of the death game formula, it also feeds into the protagonist Yuki's unsettling and sometimes sociopathic emptiness.

Yuki is Shiboyugi's second great surprise. My initial impression of her was that she was a fairly generic protagonist whose primary purpose was to provide a consistent, objective point of view. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as a neutral perspective character helps place the emphasis on the things they see, which in this case would be the death games. It does, however, diminish some of the surprise factor of the death game format to have a clearly defined protagonist who the audience can expect to survive. Though I theorize the ideal death game would have a fully ensemble cast with no protagonist, that's not an easy narrative for most authors to pull off, and honestly I've only seen it done once in a death game before (the second arc of Magical Girl Raising Project). Even a story like Battle Royale, which creates the feeling of an ensemble cast through its anonymizing uniforms, has a singular protagonist.

But even with the limitation of a protagonist, a death game story can still play to the strengths of the genre by showing the perspectives of other characters and emphasizing their importance, rather than leaving the non-protagonist cast as virtual nobodies who only exist as cannon fodder or challenges for the protagonist to overcome. Shiboyugi does a trick I enjoyed in Magical Girl Raising Project by stating upfront that several people are capable of surviving the game, not just one; this immediately invites the viewer to invest themselves in the side characters, as they have a legitimate chance to win too. Within this framework, Shiboyugi is quite good at making its survivors unexpected. Sometimes side characters who have a lot of emphasis survive, sometimes they die; sometimes minor supporting characters wind up being fodder, sometimes they unexpectedly crawl past the finish line. The show never falls into a pattern; I, at least, wasn't able to reliably pinpoint who would live or die.

(I watched with a friend of mine, and during one hectic death game we disagreed whether a certain inconsequential minor character had died; my friend said they had, while I said they hadn't. When said character showed up alive at the very end, I had a massive pop off. This is the stuff I live for.)

Nonetheless, that still leaves Yuki. As far as "plot armor" goes, she sometimes has the strongest of all: the non-chronological order of the games often means she is guaranteed to survive by default, since the viewer has already seen her in a future game. (Hence why I can bring this up, despite my statement I wouldn't include any spoilers.) What makes Yuki compelling despite this is the unexpected complexity of her character.

At the beginning of the first episode, Yuki introduces herself to the other players as someone who plays "altruistically," willing to help as many people survive the game as possible. Given she's already a 28-game veteran by this point, the newer players glom to her for help. But while her description of herself isn't a lie—at least from her perspective—it slowly becomes clear that her perspective is not, in fact, a neutral one aligned with the perspective of the audience. Yuki is startlingly sociopathic. Her emotionally detached pragmatism reaches extremes that come across as outright cruel. She is without scruple and also without hesitation. She truly will help as many people survive as possible—under the belief that doing so means a survivor might help her in a future game—but "as possible" does the heavy lifting in that statement. These games, despite their Saw-like brutality, lack Saw's twisted morality; they are often designed sadistically, and Yuki is perfectly willing to act sadistically as soon as it is required.

At the same time, though, the non-chronological nature of the games presents Yuki as a much more dynamic character than one so pragmatic would at first seem to be. She appears as both a hardened veteran and a more uncertain rookie; she is shown both strong and vulnerable, in control and out of it. In one game she taunts a girl with a knife just for fun, while in another she risks her own life to save others. Similar to Memento, there is a somewhat erratic nature to her personality that only makes complete sense once the games are rearranged into chronological order, at which point it becomes clear that her actions are a reaction to whatever happened in the game previous.

That begs the question of why the games are non-chronological to begin with. To an extent it enables a more logical drip-feed of information, but in depicting Yuki disjointedly it emphasizes her sense of disassociation.

Yuki is viewing herself from outside herself. At times she slips into third person, or else her voice is layered, with one track using first person while the other uses third. She is unclear what day of the week it is. She lives in a squalid apartment overflowing with trash and seems to do nothing but rot in bed during the day. At night she goes for aimless long walks to nowhere. She walks to the same spot on a highway overpass and stares down at the cars passing, which leads to a brilliant fridge realization I won't elaborate on.

Yuki cannot clearly communicate why she competes in death games. The show's title, Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, is kind of a lie. Yuki lives in squalor by choice, not circumstance, unlike many of the other competitors who are in debt or similar dire straits. Yuki doesn't need money.

The Japanese title, Shibou Yuugi de Meshi wo Kuu, is a bit more ambiguous, with "Meshi wo Kuu" translating more directly to "Eat Food." The ambiguity of what "food" Yuki is actually eating correlates to her aimless attempt to create meaning out of her meaningless existence. If anything, she is "eating" the people she meets in the games themselves, taking on bits of their personality from game to game. Even her stated goal of completing 99 games is stolen from someone else.

This is where the show's liminal spaces come in. Yuki constantly refers to the "world" of the death games as its own distinct environment, divided from the real world. It's akin to an escapist fantasy: a gamer transported to a video game world where their exact skillset allows them to thrive. Yuki is a permanent zombie in the real world, a skilled and successful elite in the world of death games. But unlike Sword Art Online, which presents its game environment with an uncritical allure, Shiboyugi's games take place in unsettling, uncanny, and twisted realms, disquieting structures that seem subtly impossible. The calming and peaceful music, the pretty visuals, the serene pace lure the viewer into Yuki's perspective, suggesting the beauty that she sees, but the lurking menace always remains, and when the buzzsaws descend, the disconnect between the viewer and Yuki is severe and uncomfortable. The space itself is the threat, as unlike most death game stories Shiboyugi almost never shows any host or gamemaster, and its uncanny presentation is similar to the presentation of Yuki herself. It is a hole made only for her, though what comes out the other side is increasingly nonhuman.

I've said all of this while only barely touching on the actual directing, which is some of the strongest and most unique I've ever seen in anime. Most anime that look good—including this season's many juggernauts, like Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren, but also more historically respected works, like those of Studio Ghibli—look good because the director understands animation, and is able to bring out the stunning details of movement that allow anime characters to really impress. Shiboyugi, the directorial debut of Souta Ueno, generates its stunning visuals less through animation than through an eye for framing and composition more reminiscent of western live action auteurs like Kubrick. Every episode has five or more shots that wow, not just by looking aesthetically pleasing but by weaponizing that aesthetic into emotional impact.

Similarly, the director leans on the visuals, rather than dialogue, to communicate meaning, a technique that massively revolutionizes the show's pacing. In 11 episodes, Shiboyugi adapts four different death games, each with their own characters, rises, falls, and climaxes. On paper, it's a blisteringly fast pace—fewer than 3 episodes per game on average. Because of the effective visual storytelling, however, the games unfold at a calm, quiet pace, establishing the tone necessary for every brutal rug pull. The visuals are aided in this regard by the story's sharp focus on the games themselves. Shiboyugi went to the Battle Royale school of justifying its death game; other than a single card of text ("This is a story about a deranged world," with the world in question as ambiguous as the "food" being eaten in the title) and a few offhanded statements here and there, there is no emphasis on why the games are being hosted, who hosts them, or any other ancillary details that would detract from what Shiboyugi is actually about. Minimalism in some areas is paid back with depth and complexity elsewhere.

Studio Deen, who produced the show, lacks the budget of Mappa or Madhouse, but manages to create something equally if not more visually impressive on the back of the fundamentals of cinematography. I probably would have enjoyed this show even if it looked like any other anime, but the incredible filmmaking is what pushes it into the territory of masterpiece.