The best love story in anime isn’t a romance – it’s “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.”
Love means different things across different cultures and people. To some, it’s a fiery passion. To others, it’s the comfort felt in stable relationships. To others still, love is something to overcome.
“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” offers its own compelling idea of love – that love exists in the kindness that changes us and persists in the way we honor it.
“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” is a manga and anime currently airing its second season. The story follows a long-lived elf mage on a classic fantasy journey, retracing the steps she and her friends took 80 years ago.
The story begins at the end of Frieren’s first journey, with Frieren and her party returning home to celebrate their success, having just killed the demon king. To her companions Himmel, Eisen, and Heiter, this was the journey of a lifetime.
To Frieren, though, having lived 1,000 years already and expecting to live more than 1,000 more, this passed by in the blink of an eye. Her life can’t be measured the same way as the humans and dwarfs she travelled with. She takes the experience and the people she’d met for granted and quickly leaves once their journey is over.
60 years later, she reunites with them all for the first time. By then, Himmel is an old man and a forever-bachelor living alone. After a fulfilling journey to see a meteor shower with his companions, Himmel passes away happily. At Himmel’s funeral, Frieren cries, “We only traveled together for a mere ten years… why didn’t I get to know him better?”
Though she didn’t understand it at the time, Frieren’s experience with Himmel and the others had changed her. As the story marches on, watchers and readers get to slowly see more of Frieren’s history unfold and understand just how much those ten years with Himmel changed her.
Himmel became Frieren’s reason for learning more about the short-lived people around her. He changed her life, and she’s grateful for it. Himmel loved Frieren — nothing could be made clearer as the story progresses.
It’s only after Himmel is gone that Frieren is able to pay this love back. Her journey is filled with nostalgic stops to protect Himmel’s memory, the things he cares about, and to live out his values.
Frieren’s only means of connecting with Himmel becomes these small moments, as well as the moments where she’s able to show the kindness that he would have. This isn’t a fiery love or a comfortable love. It’s something that persists through the ages and persists thanks to Frieren’s changed existence.
The author takes this idea of love a step further, by showing us love that persists even after the memory of the loved one fades. In one episode, we meet an ancient dwarf who’s dedicated his life to protecting a village his long-deceased human wife loved. Tragically, he can no longer remember her face or voice.
Despite this, he persists in protecting the village in his old age. Just like Frieren, this is his only way of honoring his love for his wife and feeling connected to her. He doesn’t question his role — this is his life now.
In Frieren, love is the force that changes people. It’s not just a choice, and it’s not a cozy feeling. It begins as a shared kindness and persists as those it’s changed carry on their loved one’s memory.
Abdullah Farooqui 
Gavynn Koteles 
Riley Hurley