Sousou no Frieren uses tropes well

Sousou no Frieren is a very trope heavy story. The world of Frieren could be from basically any isekai or JRPG of the last decade. There is the party that defeats the demon lord (there is a demon lord), with the bearded dwarf warrior, the mage elf, the human priest, and the Hero. The setting mostly consists of classic medieval Europe inspired towns and villages, or generic forests and plains. At least it doesn’t have a RPG game system, but the magic itself is also pretty bland. It’s the same old magic circles that appear when one is doing magic, and the magic does a bunch of arbitrary things. The plot is basically the party travelling towards the demon lord’s land while doing a bunch of side quests.

In theory at least, you would say that it is bland and tropey. But it doesn’t feel that way to me, and whenever I hear someone talk about it they describe it as something fresh. I don’t think it’s just because of the twist that the demon lord is already defeated and that it’s a story of what happens afterwards. The isekai genre is filled with tropey and bland stories that are the same-old- story-but-with-a-twist! that it doesn’t feel unique on the conceptual plane.

To me at least, the story isn’t about the tropes. It is a story of relationships. Frieren is someone who has lived for millennia, and has given up on making friends with humans who just die anyway. But, one day she is recruited to an adventuring party, and over the next ten years she becomes friends with them. To her, ten years is an incredibly short period of time so she doesn’t realize how important they were. It isn’t until her friends begin to pass away that she begins to realize how much they’ve affected her. What we follow is the story where she learns what the friends she outlived meant to her, as well as learning to cherish her new friends she’s making on the way.

Aside from Frieren’s age, there is nothing fantastical about that description, and none of the tropiness I talked about is present in it. I think this shows a good way to utilise overused tropes. When the tropes are so wide spread you can rely more on the audience to know of them, so when telling a story you can take them for granted. At this point you don’t need to explain why the demon lord exists or that there is magic in the world or that adventuring guilds exist. As long as they know the genre the audience has grown to expect the tropes to be present, and will probably grow bored if it is explained to them. So Sousou no Frieren doesn’t bother to.

It isn’t quite unlike how Dune starts, in that the fantastical elements aren’t explained and instead taken for granted by the characters and the narrator. The difference is that Dune eventually does it’s exposition, but (as far as I’ve read) Sousou no Frieren doesn’t. It keeps the exposition to a minimum and focuses instead on the story it’s telling. I think the way that Sousou no Frieren utilises tropey world building is similar to how fiction uses the real world. Nobody would accuse a story set in New York to be tropey or unoriginal, and few would complain as long as it doesn’t overexplain things they already know.

That is why I think it still feels fresh, despite the tropes. It doesn’t focus on the them, but uses them as short hand. Fiction with other worlds require a lot of work compared to those that are set in ours, you need to invent and populate a whole world, and then show it to the reader in a compelling way. The tropes serve as a similar function as the real world. Stories can get away with lots of things if they don’t focus on them, most of the time the parts that need a lot of work are those that the story focuses on. Sousou no Frieren isn’t particularly interested in the world, but instead put all of its focus on the characters and their story. I suppose that is what everyone finds fresh. That is what I watch the show for.

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