Monday, October 28, 2024

2024 read #127: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 4 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 4, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe
Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’
188 pages
Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)
Read October 28
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3, if I’m generous)

I’m struggling with my attention span lately. The election (and its inevitable fascist violence, no matter the outcome) is a week away. Even short stories are too much for me right now. So back into the Frieren well I go.

This tankōbon begins unpromisingly, with a humorous interlude of Frieren, having learned that skilled cleric Sein likes older women, awkwardly trying to flirt to with him to get him into the party. Maybe humor is harder to translate than other things. It gets worse in the next chapter, which is some cringey heteronormative “boys and girls are so different!” stuff, extremely entry-level romantic manga material.

This volume eventually settles into a more typical groove, with self-contained episodes of adventure and character development, with villagers giving side quests, but even there, I’m beginning to lose some of my patience for this series. Yamada and Abe have a tendency to speed through big chunks of time in montages, and in many cases, those single-panel moments of adventure are more interesting than the rather banal focus of that chapter.

Sometimes a tinge of melancholy will pass through the story, the inescapable drift of time and memory, and I’m reminded of why I’m interested in Frieren the character and her journey in the first place. But I’m losing any hope that Frieren the manga will ever become as good as Delicious in Dungeon or Witch Hat Atelier.

Still, the final chapter of this volume introduced the human mage Übel, who looks like if Little My from Moominvalley grew up to become a leather-clad assassin, so once again I’m intrigued enough to continue.

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