My thoughts on Frieren S1!
I love this cozy, fantasy, DnD-esque world and slice of life adventures that let us soak up this beautiful world and slowly get to know all of these deep characters and see their relationships grow and become so meaningful. The first episode made me feel every emotion that comes from a lifetime before I ever came to know and love these guys. The love they have for each other made me fall in love with them.
Frieren took a thousand years to understand people, only realizing she truly loved them after their gerbil-like lifespan of 90 years was over. Human lives are slow enough that Frieren was giving up more than it seemed to raise her friend's child after his death. A lifetime to her will be a month to Frieren. An elf spending a weekend with her friends is an entire life to them. She can't give enough of her heart to them just as she also can't guard herself against their soon death within 80 years. They can see how their dynamic is growing, but she can't. All she knows is that her feelings of love have stayed the same, unable see the social changes as they become a family. Her internal world is so huge and easy to lose herself in that she forgets other people have their own worldviews. Frieren and Eisen are both great and terrible parents. I appreciated how the narrative didn't show either as bad people at all. Just realistic ones who can mess up in big ways but still love their kids. Frieren and Fern are just like girl Obi-Wan and Anakin, lol. Powerful wizards with a master/apprentice relationship that feels parental as they go on adventures, wear cool robes, and struggle to communicate with each other.
Frieren hating every demon felt so wrong at first... until that demon child pretended to cry out for its nonexistent mother to gain sympathy, ate a child, and killed a man only to treat it as a silly social blunder. Man, that reminded me of the show's rating. Frieren's hatred doesn't feel illogical at all. I've never seen the moral be "sometimes people can't be redeemed and deverse to have their race hated" before in a show.
I love how everyone in their party is socially awkward and how they just spend their days hunting down old books and making flowers grow with magic. Frieren spent her thousand years of life learning how best to live, while her master's master still thinks like a 5 year old who wants all the power in the world. Humans with short lives should appreciate time all they more, but we don't. Fern doesn't appreciate spending months finding a flower because time is so much faster for her. Humans think we need to rush and figure things out. Frieren knows how to spend every day doing what you love. The goal is not the point. The journey is. And Himmel taught her that. The flowers mean nothing to the dead. But they mean everything to what Frieren and Himmel once had and what Frieren still feels. She only learned he might have possibly loved her in another way 80 years after he gave her that flower clip... love can span so many decades. Frieren's new party all seemed to correspond to one of her previous companions. Except Himmel. Nothing could replace what he was to her.