Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? V

Episode 15

In the old pantheons, gods are almost more human than people. They're humans taken to their extremes – from the way Zeus pathologically can't keep it in his pants to the infighting between members of the Egyptian ennead, gods have always embodied the very things that make us human and written them large. DanMachi's Freya is no exception: her desperate search for her oðr and her overwhelming desire to feel something more innocent than a goddess of love and fertility is typically allowed in mythology, all making her, in many ways, more human than anyone else. She cannot be just a goddess anymore. She yearns to be human.

If we follow the series back to its earliest days, we can see that she's always wanted that. Knowing now that she and Syr are one and the same, it's obvious that she's been trying to be ordinary and chase an ordinary happiness from the start. When Ryu says that Syr saved her, she's not talking about her using any extraordinary powers – she just means that Syr reached out a hand in friendship and offered her a place to belong. Syr didn't offer to overwrite her falna and convert her from Astrea Familia; she just saw someone who was in pain and wanted to help. Based on what Hedin and Ottarl have said in these last two episodes, we can extrapolate that Syr was trying to offer Ryu what she herself wanted: someone to reach out a hand and see her. When Ottarl asks Bell if he can save Freya, what he's really asking is whether he can give her the gift of being an ordinary girl.

In the end, it wasn't only Bell who could give her that, although Hedin's carefully (and cringily) scripted speech makes that assumption. The people who truly save Freya are those who have only ever seen her as Syr – Ryu and Anya. Yes, Bell's speech fulfills some of her high school crush dreams, but what really makes the difference is when Ryu slaps her. It's analogous to when Hedin betrays Freya Familia to save it and when Welf heeds Lilly's call to stand up and fire off one last spell. It's a last-ditch effort to make someone see, to see that they're not alone, that they're not working in their own best interests, or that, quite simply, that nothing is over yet. When Hestia allows Freya to stay in Orario sans (official) familia, she's giving everyone else a chance to save the saddest of goddesses.

As a villain, Freya's uneven, but that's what makes her work. Her motives are selfish, but also pure-hearted, and while I can't condone what she's done, I can also understand why she felt she had to do them. She's backed into a corner by her own desire for normalcy and her familia's expectations, leaving the only people who really, truly believe in her her coworkers. They see her for who she wants to be, not as who others want her to be. In some ways, it's a play on the old shounen trope of the power of friendship, taken to the next level, showing Freya that “love” isn't any one thing or form. It's when Welf gets up, it's when Hedin betrays, and it's when Hestia sits on the battlefield cradling Haruhime. It's when the tavern offers Syr a place to exist, free from the burdens of her divinity, and perhaps that's the love she's been looking for all along.

We're not likely to get another season of DanMachi any time soon. With this ending, only two more novels are currently written in Japan. But that's okay. The disbanding of Freya Familia and her decision to live as Syr return things to a place where they can begin moving forward again at a normal pace. Regular life goes on. I think, deep down, that's what Syr would want. Maybe regular life is her oðr.

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Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? V is currently streaming on HIDIVE.