When I was nine I read A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time and knew I wanted to keep reading Fantasy for the rest of my life. When I was eleven my father handed me a copy of The Hobbit, and I was commissioned by the soul to write it. At thirteen the father of my former best friend, in an awkward attempt to not let me leave without a gift (which would have been fine, though I appreciated and still appreciate it), bought me The Icewind Dale Trilogy, where I first found someone speaking to me in the form of RA Salvatore’s Drizzt. By nineteen Conan The Barbarian drove me to write again, and here I am.

Along the way we all read books, listen to music, and discover art that profoundly changes us. For me, the expression of Fantasy as fiction, art, and more is a key component and goal of my entire life. Yes, I hope for success, but to just add something of quality to the canon of the genre? It’s priceless and worthy of the effort. Fritz Leiber died in a flop house, folks—you have to love this if you really want to add something to it. Enough so you don’t care that if it comes in your lifetime or not, and most of these authors only found their real success after they had freed themselves from their mortal coil.

Keep that in mind as we march together. Earthsea is more appreciated now than it was when the 🐐 was alive. And not all of us could be Bob, but should strive to be, dammit.

But sometimes you see an expression of what you do outside of yourself and what you think you can do that both drives you to be better and leaves you in wordless awe of the miles you still have to go.

That happened with me with Netflix’s Frieren: Beyond the Journey.

Simply put, it might be the best modern piece of Fantasy fiction I have ever seen rendered to its medium, which is a Japanese anime inspired by the original manga written by Kanehito Yamada and illustrated by Tsukasa Abe.

Even as I write this, tears bead my eyes and I find it hard to steady my breath. Never have I been so affected and emotionally connected to a presentation of Fantasy so pure in its intentions and aesthetic that I struggle to think about the story and not be deeply moved. Part of it is that I wrote a series about an elf dealing with grief, but more in the vein of Salvatore’s Drizzt, with high-action and a ranger at the center of a family drama.

But Frieren does something I did not dream of attempting, and that was turning the quest into a sincere, almost-idealized slice of life. The series is about an elf who finished the Main Quest as part of a four-person party that defeated The Big Bad. But as an immortal, Frieren has to continue living while her comrades, one a dwarf with a longer lifespan and the two others a mortal warrior and a drunken priest, continue to age and eventually die. And it is upon the death of the warrior, known to all as The Hero/Fimmel (who essentially was the main character, not Frieren), where we witness her deal with the profound grief of losing those we love—especially if we know we have many, many years to go after them.

(And in Frieren’s case, centuries and millenniums.)

I lost my Uncle Dave in 2024 to dementia with Lewy bodies. In 2022 my dad considered committing suicide. I have a cat who is quickly aging, and despite her spryness, she is on the backend of her life. I have also watched a genocide take place on the American taxpayer dollar in Gaza and will likely see it spread to the Palestinians in the West Bank. I’ve seen a lot of death in the recent years thanks to the pandemic, and more before that. I also had to deal with my own bout with a brain tumor, so there’s a lot.

(But that doesn’t even scratch the amount of death my wife has seen.)

I’ve come to expect different things from Fantasy in various points in my journey. In some cases, I still yearn for that sense of escape and adventure. The joy and terrors of the quest are still ripe and sweet to my tastes. But I also look now to our genre, along with sacred texts and philosophy, for a sense of how to be a better human. I think the beauty of Fantasy is that while science fiction explores the social philosophies and technological possibilities of the present in terms of how they might shape a possible future, the magic of swords and dragons and sorcery and heroes is where we can explore the landscapes of the soul, which is what our ancient myths still allow us to do, and they are timeless.

And Frieren is the exploration of the best parts of what makes us human beings. There’s a sincerity to the narrative because it is a narrative that we will all have to enact at some point in our lives. We will have to grieve for our loved ones. We will have to move on. We will have to ready those that come after, even if we lose them along the way too. We have to face true challenges. As cool and wonderful as dragons can be, sometimes I think we all want to see others make those journeys first so we know we can make them too, and more importantly, hope someone will be there to make the journey with us and cherish us when we are gone. Frieren, at her best, allows the viewer and reader to take part in her journey, which is enthralling because of how real it is to us internally.

But she’s not even my favorite character! The beauty of Frieren’s saga is that Yamada’s writing is chockful of amazing characters that I think everyone one can find a favorite in.

Mine is Flamme:

In a world of great wizards and sorcerers, Flamme might be one of the best “good” character I’ve ever seen developed episode by wonderful episode. A human child who learns magic from the elves, she has a dream that one day anyone can use magic!

Think about it! No Muggles, no schools, no special classes of people or bloodlines or any of that classist/racist shit people keep peddling!

Every child gets to know magic!

I love characters that honestly want to leave something that makes the world better for those that come after them, and Yamada nailed it with Flamme. Especially contrasted with her mentor, another character that plays a vital role in Frieren’s tale, there such a kindness expressed on the ideas of what makes a person the right person to do a certain thing, like defeating the Demon King. It’s so finely-wrought that I don’t want to spoil it, but needless to say, it carries over so well, especially as it impacts Frieren’s relationship with her human protégés Fern and Stark.

And great relationships, deeply drawn between the characters and with the world they live in, is the magic that makes Fantasy work. It reinforced something I’ve been trying to develop first and foremost in my own work, and that is having characters that people want to see do things together. That’s togetherness, stretching all the way back to our myths, is something that is vital to the genre, and more so now than anytime before.

Have you seen Frieren: Beyond The Journey yet? I hope you will now, because it is easily what Fantasy needs to look, feel, and read like going forward.