Frieren takes over game cover art in viral meme trend 

Popular manga series Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End has become the unexpected topic of a meme trend. People have been reimagining what the cover art for various video games would look like if they featured the titular elven mage. Perhaps this is all part of Frieren’s journey to get to know humans? 

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is a fantasy manga series written by Kanehiko Yamada and illustrated by Tsukasa Abe. It tells the story of an elf named Frieren, who previously successfully banished a Demon King with the aid of a band of heroes. Returning fifty years later, Frieren finds that her human companions from the quest have aged significantly and one of them has since passed away. As Frieren is an elf with a very long lifespan, time passes differently for her. The manga and its recent anime adaptation deal with Frieren’s relationships with humans and how she must come to terms with outliving her companions. Although the anime only began in September 2023, it has already surpassed Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood to take the top ranking spot on MyAnimeList. 

The memes combining Frieren and various video games seem to have begun around the end of last year. On December 18, X user ononotsu posted a parody of the international cover art for 2011’s Dark Souls. Featuring Frieren striding purposefully forward with her back to us, the spoof of FromSoftware’s hit title is fittingly called Frieren Souls. The post blew up and has since been shared over 6000 times and received more than 30,000 likes. 

Whether it was because the first post did well or because they wanted to see what Frieren would look like in other game universes, ononotsu has continued to post even more parody coverart, for games such as NieR: Automata and Kingdom Hearts.  

This inspired others to post similar parodies- kicking off the meme trend. Stand-out examples include Frierentale, a parody of Toby Fox’s Undertale, and Frieren Crossing, which is of course Animal Crossing. The memes span a wide range of video game genres- with everything from Super Mario Galaxy  to Red Dead Redemption II getting Frieren-ed.  

In October 2023, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End entered a collaboration with the manga Unmei no Makimodoshi and the spinning toy line Beyblade. In the manga strip below, Frieren explains how she found out about Beyblade during her journey to get to know humans better. Although these cover art parodies are just X users and artists having fun, we can also imagine that they are part of Frieren’s journey to learn more about humankind’s video game collections.  

Frieren is currently available on various streaming platforms depending on your country (including Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Netflix and Disney+). The manga has been translated into English by Viz Media. 

Written by. Verity Townsend based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2024-03-22 16:06 JST)