Frieren Season 1 & 2 Recap: Everything Before Season 3

Himmel, Heiter, Eisen and Frieren have already killed the Demon King when the first episode starts. Their quest took ten years. Before splitting up they agree to watch the next big meteor shower together, which is fifty years away.

Frieren turns up on time. Himmel is old by then, and he dies not long after. At his funeral she starts crying, mostly because she spent ten years traveling with him and never bothered to learn much about him. It’s the moment the rest of the series keeps coming back to.

Heiter is old too. He has taken in an orphan, Fern, and asks Frieren to teach her magic. Frieren stays for years. Once Heiter dies, the two of them leave together.

Their first real stop is a village where Frieren’s old party sealed a demon called Qual. Back then his killing spell was the scariest thing anyone had seen. Decades of study later, every mage knows how to block it, so the fight is over quickly.

Eisen then gives them an actual destination. A grimoire written by Flamme, Frieren’s teacher, describes Aureole, a place far to the north where souls are said to rest. If it’s real, Frieren could see Himmel again. Eisen says he’s too old for the trip, and Fern won’t hear of staying behind.

After dealing with a monster that lures people out with visions of their dead relatives, they go looking for Stark, Eisen’s student. He’s been holding a dragon off a village for years and insists he’s a coward. He kills it anyway and comes along.

The bigger story here is Aura the Guillotine, one of the Demon King’s generals, who lived past Himmel’s time. She has the Scales of Obedience. You put your mana on one side and hers on the other, and whoever weighs less does whatever the other says.

Aura offers peace talks with a city in the north. They’re a setup. Frieren gets locked up, kills the assassin Draht in her cell, and goes after Aura herself. Stark fights the demon Linie. Fern takes on Lügner and wins on speed, and he never quite clocks how strong she is.

What Aura didn’t know is that Frieren has been hiding most of her mana for nearly her entire life, something Flamme drilled into her. When the scales tip, Frieren tells Aura to take her own head off, and Aura can’t refuse.

Not much fighting in this run, and I’d argue it’s some of the best stuff in the show.

A blizzard keeps them stuck for six months with Kraft, a monk who is an elf too and even older than Frieren. Stark finds out Himmel never pulled the famous sword out of its stone. For his birthday they make him a giant hamburg steak, the way his older brother used to.

Next they meet Sein, a priest who quit adventuring years ago. His brother talks him into going with them so he can look for his missing friend, the Gorilla Warrior. Stark and Fern have their first proper falling-out over a birthday, and Stark makes up for it with a bracelet. Watching them, Frieren remembers the ring Himmel gave her. The flower on it meant something he never told her.

Frieren also checks in on Voll, a dwarf she knew, whose memory is going. She promises she’ll remember him. After a month of snowstorms Sein heads off on his own.

To keep going north, they need someone with a first-class mage license. So when they reach the city of Äußerst, Frieren and Fern enter the exam.

This arc adds a lot of new mages at once. Don’t worry about remembering all of them.

Round one has each team of three catch a Stille, a little bird that’s absurdly fast and tough. Frieren ends up with Kanne and Lawine. Fern is put with Land, who hardly speaks, and Übel, who is a bit too comfortable with the idea of killing people. Very quickly the teams stop chasing birds and start chasing each other.

Frieren freezes a lake to trap one. Wirbel’s team goes after Fern’s. Then Denken, an old court mage, comes for Frieren’s team with Richter and Laufen, and Frieren beats all three.

In a flashback we meet Serie, Flamme’s own teacher, who founded the mage association. Long ago she told Frieren she could learn any spell she wanted, and Frieren said no. Back in the present, six teams get through.

The second test, overseen by Sense, is to reach the bottom of a dungeon by morning. Its guardian, Spiegel, makes copies of whoever comes in. So everyone has to fight themselves, and the copy of Frieren is the one nobody wants to meet.

Fern knows one thing about her teacher that the others don’t. Frieren can’t sense mana while she’s casting, which is a beginner’s problem she never grew out of. Fern lands the blow, very nearly dies doing it, and the group destroys Spiegel.

Richter fixes Fern’s staff afterward, the one Heiter gave her. For the final round Serie interviews each candidate herself and fails most of them. She offers to take Fern as a student. Fern turns her down, and Serie passes her anyway.

Frieren fails, and gets banned from every mage association building for a thousand years on top of it. They leave Äußerst without much ceremony, which Fern points out is how Himmel would have liked it.

Season 2 starts with no money. Looking for work, the three of them drop into a cave full of crystals that shut off magic, right next to a very poisonous dragon. Stark carries both mages out. Wirbel tries to recruit him afterward, and Stark turns it down because he likes being the one up front.

In Fabel they clean a statue of the Hero of the South, who beat three of the Demon King’s Seven Sages. A local noble pays them to get back a family sword that a demon stole while dressed as a priestess. Frieren’s payment is a grimoire that turns red apples green, and she is genuinely delighted with it.

At Heiß, Stark asks Fern on a date as a joke and she says yes. He goes straight to Frieren for help planning it. The date itself is stiff and mostly spent talking about Frieren, though Fern tells him she liked that he made the effort.

At the Northern Plateau checkpoint, Fern’s first-class license gets them in. Not long after, Frieren is held over an old debt and made to dig silver ore. She gets through a few centuries’ worth of digging in one day.

Serie sends Methode and Genau, two mages from the exam, to a village that demons destroyed. Genau grew up with some of the people who died there. He’s sure the demon in charge survived, and he asks Frieren’s group to help hunt it.

It’s Revolte, a giant with four arms, a sword in each hand and a snake’s body from the waist down. He ambushes them and splits the party up. Methode ends up on her own while Genau and Stark go at Revolte together.

Revolte uses a demon pretending to be a child to get close to Genau and wounds him badly. Stark steps in front of the next hit. Meanwhile Fern and Methode handle the other demons and get rid of the fog over the area, and Stark and Genau manage to disarm Revolte and kill him.

The season ends quietly.

Denken visits his wife’s grave. Frieren takes a job clearing a dragon’s nest and remembers that Himmel always charged villagers a small fee so they wouldn’t feel like they owed him. To cross a lake, the party fetches a book from an island as payment for the ferry. It turns out to be Himmel’s memoirs, and the captain tells Frieren to hang on to it.

In the finale they cross a canyon three kilometers deep on a bridge built ages ago by a dwarf named Gehen. Fern takes out a beast that hunts by sensing mana, shooting it from just past the range it can sense. They stop to watch the Holy Snow Crystals at sunrise.

Last, Denken sets out toward the Golden Land to face Macht, the demon connected to it. Season 3 adapts that arc.

Before Season 3

Frieren is still headed north to Aureole. Fern has her first-class license, which is what gets them through the northern checkpoints, while Frieren is still banned from the association for the next thousand years. Stark and Fern have been on one date and neither of them has said a word about what that means. And Denken has gone to find Macht in the Golden Land, which is where Season 3 picks up.