Do Elves in Frieren Fall in Love? (And Where Does That Giant Pot Come From?)

I’ve watched all of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and now I’m going through it a second time. I’ve just finished season 1 again, and this time around two questions kept bugging me.

The first: how do elves fall in love and have children? Frieren herself says elves barely have romantic feelings, and yet there are elves. The second one is sillier. Frieren, Fern and Stark travel with almost nothing, so where does the giant pot at their campsite come from?

The show doesn’t answer either of them directly. So here’s what it does show, and what I think.

This post has spoilers for season 1 of the anime.

Why elves are so rare in Frieren

The clearest line comes in episode 7. An old traveler tells Frieren that he has lived a long time, but this is the first time he has ever seen an elf. Frieren says, more or less, that they’re rare: elves live a long time, but they’re missing things like romantic feelings and a reproductive instinct, pretty much across the board. And she thinks the end of the elves may be closer than you’d expect.

Then there’s Kraft, in episode 11. He’s an elf monk, and Frieren is the first elf he has met in about 300 years; he had thought the elves were already gone. The party ends up waiting out the winter with him for about half a year, and nothing happens between the two elves. Not even a hint of it.

And there’s Frieren’s own past. In a flashback we learn that her home village was destroyed by the Demon King’s army, and that Flamme, a human mage, took her in as its only survivor.

So elves were few to begin with, they rarely want children, and on top of that they were hunted. No wonder going centuries without meeting another elf is normal for them.

So how do elves have children?

The show never shows an elf couple or an elf family. But Frieren grew up in an elf village, so elves clearly did have children, at least once. I read “missing” as “very weak”, not “zero”. If it were zero, there would be no Frieren.

Real animals that live a very long time are a bit like this, too. Greenland sharks are estimated to live somewhere between 272 and 510 years, and they don’t reach sexual maturity until around 150. A species that lives that long and breeds that slowly takes a very long time to make up for its losses. That’s what makes the Demon King’s attacks so final: for elves, a few lost villages might never come back.

Do elves fall in love? What I think about Frieren and Himmel

If elves barely feel romance, what was going on between Frieren and Himmel?

The show gives us two big moments. In episode 1, Himmel dies about fifty years after they defeated the Demon King, and at his funeral Frieren breaks down crying: she knew human lives were short, so why didn’t she try to get to know him? Then in a flashback in episode 14, Himmel tells Frieren to pick out a ring. She chooses one with a mirror lotus on it, and he kneels and slips it onto her finger. The mirror lotus stands for eternal love. Whether Frieren knew that when she picked it, the show doesn’t say.

Here’s what I think. Frieren had never felt love before. And she never got to learn what it looks like by watching other people in love, either, because her village, where she would have seen it, was gone. So when she felt something for Himmel, she took it for a natural fondness. It was only after he was gone, when she felt the empty space he’d left behind, that she started to see it as love. And what she says about elves surely played a part too: the physical side of love barely registers for them.

If I’m right, the elves’ problem isn’t that they can’t love. It’s that love can come to them so slowly that they only recognize it once the person is gone.

Where does that giant pot come from?

Now the silly question. Look at what the three of them carry: Frieren has her trunk, Stark has his axe, and that’s about it. Yet at camp there’s bedding, in the north there are warm coats, and once, in one of those montages the show uses to show time passing between stories, there was a huge pot. It was a single shot, but it stuck with me.

I’m not the only one. On Yahoo! Chiebukuro, Japan’s big Q&A site, fans have been asking since 2024 why the party carries so little, where the big pot comes from and whether Frieren’s trunk holds more than it looks. I couldn’t find any explanation from the author or the anime staff.

The answers fans give fall into three groups:

• The trunk is bigger on the inside. This is the most popular one.
• They buy what they need along the way. There are roads, towns and inns everywhere, so why carry a pot?
• It’s just not shown. A Japanese blogger made a good point about this: in the manga, your imagination fills in the gaps between panels, but the anime runs continuously, so the missing luggage stands out more.

Clothes, at least, are less of a problem than you’d think. After the first-class mage exam, Fern gets to learn one spell of her choice from Serie, and she picks a spell that gets the dirt out of clothes.

My theory: storage magic that works like the staffs

My own theory starts with the staffs. Fern’s and Frieren’s staffs vanish, then appear again exactly when they need them. And they don’t come back small and then grow, either: a staff shows up full size, right in her hand, ready to use. So I think it’s kept in a pocket of space somewhere, like the item box in a game, and I think the pot works the same way.

So why not keep everything in there? My guess is that it costs mana, and the cost grows faster than the load. Say that twice the weight or bulk takes not twice the mana but the square of it: four times as much. Then ten times the load would take a hundred times the mana. With rules like that, you’d only keep what you really need in there, packed tight: a staff you have to grab in an instant, a pot too bulky to carry. Everything else goes in the trunk.

And when dinner’s over, this world even has a spell for stubborn grease. Washing the pot is covered.

The questions nobody asks out loud

While I was at it, I also wondered about the less glamorous side of a journey this long. How do they go to the bathroom on the road, especially Fern and Frieren? And do elves even have periods?

Then again, it’s an anime, and they obviously deal with it somehow. This is a world with a spell that turns sweet grapes sour and a spell that cleans the rust off bronze statues. There’s surely a spell for this, too. For periods, maybe somebody invented a kind of magic tissue.

Looking back

So here’s where I’ve landed. Frieren could love; it just took her a long time, and she only knew it was love after Himmel was gone. And the pot lives in a pocket of space that gets expensive fast, so only the things they really need go in there.

None of this is official, of course. It’s just what I think after watching season 1 a second time. If you’ve noticed other strange little things about Frieren’s world, I’d like to hear about them.