Frieren: from Meme to Meaning
Issue 4
I have decided to join the Frieren meme with the following drawing, since I have eventually become a big fan of the show. But what is the Frieren meme?
Last month a redditor named SpaceDev1158 posted a drawing of Frieren, the protagonist of the homonymous anime, looking at the sky and framed from a low camera angle. The artist asked for advice on how to properly depict the character from such a difficult point of view, and that post has generated an overwhelming reaction from artists all over the internet.
Some of them tried to explain how to proper break-down a character’s head in planes and volumes to move it easier in space, while many others just took the challenge for themselves: that one actually is a very tricky camera angle! Of course, once it became a meme, many artists just decided to have fun with it, with playful and crazy outcomes.
But I want to focus on the first reaction: the support, the suggestions, the participation to something that surely gave a bit of frustation even to the most skilled designers. In an era in which the AI propaganda sells quick results with no control over the process and labels as “lame” any celebration of the effort, I think there is much to cherish about this meme: 1) first of all, an art-student who is not confident about a personal drawing who asks for help on the internet, which reminded how social media used to work (specifically the art-groups in Facebook, and before that in Forums), focusing on help each other growing and not so much on growing your own audience and followers; and believe me, this is not “web-nostalgia” this is how real life art-schools work, or should work; 2) then the response of the more seasoned and/or confident artists who basically offered free tutorials to everybody, proving once again how farfetched and in bad faith is the accuse of artists being gate-keepers, until AI came to “democratize art”: well guess what, the Internet is FULL of free or cheap learning-material, you just need the desire to learn; 3) finally the humbling and humbled participation of the many more artists who spotted (not only a trend but) a challenge for themselves, like a free entry to the gym: they knew it was a tough exercise but decided to jump in the training session nonetheless.
It would have been a “deep” meme for this alone… but the fact that among all the possible animes, it has grown around an image of Frieren, made the meme thematically exquisite. For those who don’t know (and I will avoid specific spoilers) “Frieren” is the story of mage who, being an elf, has an immeasurable life-span, and it focuses on the point view of the protagonist, Frieren, who has to live in a world that is tuned to the humans “clock”: cities, kingdoms, laws change so fast but most of all the human life is so volatile that it almost makes no sense to invest in knowing someone, let alone theaching them something… they will soon die, and everything learnt will go lost. But simething changes in Frieren’s heart (you need to watch the first episode to know!) and so the show not only put the viewers in the impossible perspective of an incredibly long-lived character, exploring the ins and outs of her conditions, but it also works as a mirror (a “Spiegel” 😉): it talks about the human condition.
And so we end up meeting a lot of human mages who despite their mortality, decide to study magic, for the most diverse reasons, and they also specialize in specific spells, the ones that are more fitting to their personalities. They have… so to speak… a “style”. And Frieren, despite having accumulated an impossible amount of knowledge, still addresses them with respect and curiosity: their mortal limit is their strenght. And the parallel with artists (and I shall say “people with a passion”) is even stronger when the anime shows how much more powerful those wizards are when they cooperate and put their crafts together, without losing their individualities, to achieve a greater goal. At some point Frieren also faces another ancient being, just like her; for both of them 50 years feel like few months, a perception of time that has filled that creature with much arrogance, but not Frieren: she has to remind him that 50 years for humans are a lifetime, and that realization makes them put an incredible amount of effort to study, learn and get better at things. In the end, among many other things, Frieren is also a celebration of human craftmanship, a story of people who are not yet that good at things but keep trying, with no shortcuts but taking the right time to explore, to discover themselves, to learn their signature and eventually to find their style.
PS: some art resources available onlie
Domestika (which is very cheap although, lately, a bit shady with staff and artists)