Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol. 12

Frieren is back… in time!  After touching that monument at the end of vol. 11, the elven mage has found herself transported back to the time when she was traveling with the party that eventually defeated the Demon Lord.  Eisen is in his prime, while Heiter and (more importantly) Himmel are still alive.  Time travel brings up all sorts of causality issues, so Frieren isn’t about to go telling her fellow party members about her current predicament.  Even if trying to understand Himmel better was the whole point of her current journey.  Paradoxes will be the least of her problems, however, when she winds up attracting the attention of some of the most powerful demons of this era and their desire to know all about how magic has evolved in her time.

Yeah, throwing Frieren into a time-travel plot where she meets her former party does seem like the kind of thing that would break the whole premise of the series.  Fortunately writer Kanehito Yamada and artist Tsukasa Abe have a foolproof plan to get around this.  They’re just going to have her… not ask Himmel about anything significant.  Not only is that a huge cop-out, but the creators don’t do anything interesting with this setup either.  At least until the very end when Frieren and company succumb to the Black Mercy a very fanservicey illusion.

There are some cute bits strewn throughout the volume, usually involving Eisen’s durability, but things feel extremely disappointing so far.  It’s one thing for Yamada and Abe to threaten to undo the premise of the series, but to do nothing with it?  This is bad in a way that makes me worried for the future of the series if they’re pulling stunts like this and failing to deliver on them now.