Sousou no Frieren – Episode 25

Episode Synopsis:

The assembled mages discuss how to defeat Frieren’s doppleganger.  Frieren reminisces about the second time she met Serie, after Flamme’s death and at the start of humanity’s magic research.  Frieren and Fern engage and defeat the Frieren doppleganger while the other mages prepare to fight the other dopplegangers.

Episode Review:

Another trademark Sousou no Frieren episode, with very long stretches of discussion or Frieren’s memories, punctuated by short bursts of intense action.  There’s not a lot to talk about with the main plot of the episode (the mages talk about fighting Frieren and then they do it), so I’ll focus in on two items of interest to me.

One was the appearance of one of the mages in Edel’s party that had run from the Sense’s powerful hair-attack doppleganger.  He shows up in bad shape, having been stabbed right through by one of the hair thrusts.  Just as I was wondering why he hadn’t already used his golem to escape, someone asks if anyone can heal him.  And out of a party of 8 of the most powerful mages ever assembled:

Just ONE of them has thought far enough ahead to have brought some healing magic. Now I know that the show has explained that holy magic works differently, you need to possess a physical copy of the scriptures and either have an innate talent for it or not… but it seems like even those without the talent can use at least the basics.  So the question from me is – what is wrong with these (high level and otherwise extremely competent) mages, that none, save one, of them are carrying a scripture?  They know about the high failure and even death rate among test takers historically.  Many if not all of them have fought the powerful and dangerous monsters that roam this world.  Is it just that they’re too arrogant to believe they’ll ever need to heal themselves, and also too focused on themselves to think they’ll ever have to heal someone else?  This is after, mind you, that injured guy’s other teammate probably sacrificed himself to allow him to get here.

Like, what was the plan here?  Neither of them use the life-saving golem just to give injured guy a shot at passing the test, but also neither of them can use healing magic and maybe none of the other mages can either. It’s just not adding up for me.

The other item of interest was Frieren’s memory of Serie.  I really wasn’t expecting to make a The Incredibles reference while watching this show, but Serie is taking a sort of nega-Syndrome approach to magic.

She doesn’t want everyone to have magic, she wants it only for the talented and is very unhappy that Flamme has effectively unlocked magic for the masses. It sheds some interesting light on the observations Frieren has made, that the number of human mages has been on a downward trend for a long time.  Perhaps Serie, from her position of authority atop the magic organization, is trying to revert things back, so only the talented can use magic and the “folk” magic traditions that are always producing the interesting spells that Frieren loves to learn are forgotten.

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