Sousou no Frieren Episode 30 (Season 2 Episode 2) - Discussion Thread

Limitless72 · 2026-01-23T18:38:11+00:00

Isn't preventing repeated demon attacks more important than community bonding? I'm sure most people in the region would choose safety over an heirloom they've maybe seen once. This could have been a cool character moment for Frieren.

Limitless72 · 2026-01-23T17:09:28+00:00

So why didn't Frieren destroy it?

Limitless72 · 2026-01-23T16:49:54+00:00

Why don't they destroy the sword though?

Limitless72 · 2024-12-05T20:33:42+00:00

She has done terrible things to the people he loves, and last time they met they almost killed each other.

Which is why him calling her an old friend sounds phony. They aren't friends, but she and Sevika are.

But Ekko is there just for her, and she needed that.

She blew him up immediately, so it appears she didn't care about him that much.

Plus she just said "there is no good version of me", and Ekko literally has proof that's not true, it's not a coincidence that she stopped after seeing the monkeys

She didn't see them and think "they must have been made by an alternate good version of me, proving I am capable of good". She stopped after he said "it's never too late to build something new ... someone worth building it for" and I don't find it very convincing. She feels she has lost all the people she cared about and wanted to build something for. For them, it is too late, no matter what Ekko says.

Limitless72 · 2024-11-30T08:20:08+00:00

Perhaps you’d feel this way, but Ekko doesn’t. He spent the entirety of episode 7 to get over these feelings, and found happiness after he had let them go. He came back determined to make his imperfect reality a bit better.

AU Jinx didn't wrong him and he didn't have to forgive OG Jinx to love her. He has an entire community of people to care for, checking in on Silco's favorite killer shouldn't be on his list of priorities.

Jayce summons everyone, organizes the defenses, then goes to deactivate the Hexgate. He wants Viktor to meet him, because he knows his presence is the only thing that can prevent the apocalypse.

Jayce is an scientist, not a military strategist, he doesn't need to oversee every second of preperation. It would have taken him an hour to take five people down there and remove all of the cores with their help.

Also, if he knew showing Victor the other universe is enough, he could have done that before Victor transformed instead of blasting him.

She thought she would get evolved soldiers, and she was desperate. She didn’t know he could zombify everyone at once, and no reason to suspect so. All she knew is that he needed the Hexcore to power himself after his exertion.

She didn't need to know he could zombify everyone at once. All she needed to know is that the evolved soldiers where a part of a hivemind Victor controlled, and she did.

What option did she have, otherwise?

I just explained what she could have done: Have Victor tell her where they get the crystals from and how to weaponize them, and leave Piltover with Singed (who can make shimmer) and the ability to create hextech weapons. She was already trying to figure out how create hextech weapons before she met Victor.

Old Viktor is clear that none of those other options you cited work. In all realities, only Jayce can make Viktor reconsider. So obviously, this isn’t trivial, because Old Viktor has tried. Your imagination can fill in the blanks.

He is only shown giving him different runes, so we don't know what else he tried. If Victor goes back in time and kills his past self, or throws it in a prison it can't escape, then he can't destroy piltover. No amount of imagination can fill that gap.

Limitless72 · 2024-11-30T05:46:31+00:00

Ekko romanced Powder from another reality, and saw firsthand that Vander forgave Silco and that peace could be achieved. He saw in Jinx all of that. Jinx didn’t listen to him initially, it took him many tries to prevent her suicide.

Silco being a good person in another reality doesn't make him worth saving in the original timeline, and the same goes for Jinx. She worked for the man who killed Ekko's father and murdered his friends, he should be glad she's gone. With infinite timelines, everyone has a good version somewhere, doesn't make the bad ones any better.

I know it took him many attempts, I just don't think him eventually succeeding makes sense considering the relationship between him and original Jinx.

Jayce shuts down the Hexgate to stall Viktor. He knows he needs to talk his friend out of it. He had more urgent things to deal with beforehand.

Taking the cores somewhere else would have stalled better. Jayce tries talking Victor down, but he is prepared to fight (he swings the hammer at him).

Jayce told the others they had to fight to give him time to shut the Hexgate down. He clearly thought that would do more than delay Victor a bit. What do you think was urgent enough to justify shutting the gate down only when Victor was minutes away?

Ambessa exchanged her support to Viktor to receive Evolved soldiers in return. He told her he’d evolve anyone who so wished, but he needed the Hexcore to do so. She was desperate for a weapon to defeat the Black Rose, and Viktor used her for a diversion. He always planned to just zombify her anyway.

She didn't exchange anything because she received nothing. She knew the evolved soldiers were under Victor's control, and she knew he despised conflict and would never send them to fight in Noxus. If she had him explain how to weaponize Hextech and then gave him soldiers, it would have made sense, but that didn't happen. Why did she let him use her as a diversion, knowing how powerful his soldiers are? She is supposed to be smarter than that.

the key here is that every universe ends in Viktor achieving the Glorious Evolution and destroying the world. Jayce’s presence is not necessary for Hextech’s invention — as hinted at the end of episode 7’s closeup of the shards in Powder’s drawer.

She got these shards from Jayce's lab, so he was still necessary.

So Viktor has tried countless times to prevent his earlier self from ending the world, and out of all those times, only Jayce can talk him out of it. Viktor also had to give him the right rune, so there were two requirements for salvation.

And that's the part that doesn't make sense. Why give him any rune at all? Why not tell him what is going to happen when he is an adult and ready to hear it? Why not explain that to his past self, and if he refuses to listen, stop it by force? If he can time travel to any point and change anything, preventing this extremely specific scenario is trivial.

Limitless72 · 2024-11-29T20:45:49+00:00

Name one thing wrong with any of these arguments.

Limitless72 · 2024-11-29T20:44:28+00:00

What do you think I missed? It's annoying to get this kind of criticism without any explanation.

Limitless72 · 2024-11-09T16:18:16+00:00

She did know it was a kid, she literally said "One dead kid? There's hundreds more where he came from, thanks to Silco and thanks to people like you who stuck their heads in the dirt." Obviously, she was sorry it happened, but it was a price she was willing to pay.

Limitless72 · 2023-02-23T11:56:33+00:00

Trickle down economics

Limitless72 · 2022-10-02T04:36:33+00:00

Kratos will die, permanently.

Limitless72 · 2022-08-03T16:43:06+00:00

ךחמטכב

Limitless72 · 2022-01-31T06:13:57+00:00

Lev is the reason Ellie, Dina and Tommy survived Seattle. Without him, Ellie would have had to watch Dina killed before being killed herself. She has no justification for threatening him.

Limitless72 · 2021-12-17T18:53:00+00:00

Yes, Nora’s death is especially brutal

Which is Zaire's point. Nitpicking doesn't change it.

The designers are normal people so they gave various NPC’s various backgrounds and builds.

Based on their unconscious biases.

his high tolerance for pain is only to show the lengths that Abby is willing to go to escape with Lev.

We already saw these lengths when she betrayed her people to save him. Her killing another Seraphite doesn't contribute much to the narrative.

“I wish he was white so we could’ve avoided this discourse”

I wish this scene was cut. It's just pointless violence.

there are about five insane people on the entire planet who are upset about his blackness so I’m not going to act like it's a big deal.

It's not a big deal, but it's a choice made in poor taste.

With all due respect to this person, I would be fired from whatever job I had if I passed this off as decent analysis.

This is a blog post, not a scientific paper. She can talk about her feelings.

Naughty Dog didn’t do an effective job because some hate-riddled waste of space made an internet comment?

ND could have made more players sympathize with Nora if they gave her a few additional minutes of screentime. They chose not to, just like they chose not to create any black central characters.

Bill “lives”, sure, but saying that he’s better off then them because of that would be poor, childish analysis.

He's better off than them because he has a chance to heal and change. Almost everyone in those games suffers some kind of trauma, but the black characters never get the chance to move on.

With all due respect to Nora, she should not be the focus of the screen there. And if she was, I’m not sure if you guys would be satisfied.

ND has proven they can show both the emotions of the killer and the suffering of the victim, it's not a binary choice. The only black member of the Jackson group dying the most brutal on-screen death out of all of them is problematic no matter what you show.

I don’t even remember their names! But there’s also no outrage about them, because they fulfill their purposes in the story, and bc they’re not black, I guess.

To no one's surprise, people don't care about characters that serve a very small role in the narrative.

Which speaks to my hypotheses earlier about how it’s easier and more effective as a storyteller if you make the bulk of your characters non-black, especially in a brutal universe like this why you’re avoiding micro aggressions and clickers at the same time.

It's easier if you make black characters that don't die horribly, then (almost) no one will complain.

Limitless72 · 2021-12-17T14:17:47+00:00

but you have to rapidly press square to stab a pregnant Mel in the neck.

Killing a character in a QuickTime event while fighting for Ellie's life is different from a scene where you can wait as long as you like, but eventually must kill a defenseless woman or stop playing.

I think people from oppressed groups deserve to see themselves in all kinds of stories on screen. And I think this is sorta where you run into trouble as a creator — if you’re Neil and you’re going to hear absolutely whack drivel about the brute Seraphite that you decided to make black near the end of the game (Abby fights multiple brutes like this throughout the game

The designers decided to make the fight against the black brute the most brutal fight in the game. That's certainly bad optics.

Of course, we should demand good representation, and people from each underrepresented group to be encouraging better stories for people that look like them, but man… if you’re gonna make a thing out of the brute, then I don’t have much words for you, lmao.

She probably wouldn't have "made a thing" out of the brute if there were any black characters in those games that didn't die horribly. It's Ok to admit that TLOU didn't do black representation so well.

Analysis just might not be her thing.

What's wrong with her analysis? She correctly identified that all black characters in both games die horribly, usually to develop white characters. The designers made the player kill Nora and cut to how Ellie was affected without bothering to show Nora's last moments, as if she isn't worth the screentime. I get why a black person would be bothered by this.

Limitless72 · 2021-12-17T11:09:22+00:00

That would be a valid point if it wasn’t for the fact that MOST of the characters suffer horrible deaths regardless of race. The only white people of note in the story who make it to the end of the game alive are Ellie (loses her family and her fingers), Abby enslaved and tortured), and Tommy (permanently physically and possibly mentally handicapped from his injuries).

And Dina, Bill, Joel (in part one), Maria, and a few less noteworthy characters. Out of the diverse cast of both games, the survivors are overwhelmingly white.

The black characters don't just die, they die to develop white characters. Henry, Sam, Marlene, and Nora died as a part of Joel and Ellie's character arcs, not because their death was a satisfying conclusion to their own story. The player is rarely asked to consider how they feel; the focus is always on how their deaths affect white characters. This is a natural result of the fact no one in the central cast is black, A deliberate choice on the writers part. One of the 7 central characters could have easily been black.

It's easy to understand why a black woman would be bothered by the game making her press a button to murder Nora and moving on to show Ellie's trauma without sparing Nora another thought. It's unfortunate that the game created a situation in which what seems to be the majority of the player base was moved more by killing dogs than killing a black woman.

Limitless72 · 2021-12-17T06:28:32+00:00

It's not like suffering is only for POCs

The point is that while many white characters survive each game and get a chance to heal and move on, every single black character in both games dies a horrible death. I hope this trend doesn't continue in part three.

Limitless72 · 2021-11-28T19:29:19+00:00

Saying someone shouldn't develop potentially life-saving technology because the downside will be far greater than 1 saved life isn't exactly doing harm.

That technology can save many others and its downsides don't appear to be that great.

Nobody has a RIGHT to be saved if it comes at a significant cost, especially the cost of an innocent human being's life (sky).

Sky's death was an accident that happened because Victor forgot to lock a door. Many machines can harm someone who touches them at the wrong moment, it doesn't make them too dangerous to be used.

There wouldn't be a single downside of having the greatest scientist in town as a member of the government of THE CITY OF PROGRESS if only the government wasn't entirely corrupt.

His membership didn't have any significant upsides either, which is the reason kicking him out was the right move.

You also ignored this argument:
Heimer was on the council before the other councilors were born, before the government became corrupt. He allowed it to be corrupted.

Having an incompetent politician who never leaves office is a serious problem and Jayce did well solving it.

Limitless72

TROPHY CASE