Helen: Warfare is a constant in Freya’s life. While even if her small village has mostly escaped the fighting and conquering, she’s seen her two closest friends join the fight and rise in the ranks of her country’s Prince Edvard.
But all is not going well and Freya herself might soon be called to aid in the war.
Freya’s story, or rather Prince “Freya’s” story begins and continues with some fairly rote beats in this first volume but it pulls them off pretty well. There’s a sense of inevitability in this first volume — after all we the readers know that Freya will end up needing to impersonate Prince Edvard since that’s the title after all, but the series progresses without the pacing feeling rushed, and it has a few more tricks up its sleeve in addition to this foundational “twist.”
I did have a little bit of trouble buying into how Freya is able to reasonably pass as Edvard after only meeting him for his last, dying five minutes, especially since it seems like he was very close with his men and Keiko Ishihara reminds the readers multiple times that Freya’s own nature is much more weepy. Obviously this is going to be a major point of tension going forward, possibly even bigger than the war that claimed Edvard’s life, but I hope Freya puts in the work learning all about him to make me believe that they can really pull this crazy plot off.
In a few ways this series reminds me of another of VIZ’s shōjo manga, Rei Toma’s Dawn of the Arcana. I only read a little of that series so all of the similarities are very surface level but part of the set-up, with the female main character being forced into a risky political position where even her “allies” seem poisonous half the time, felt similar to the start of that manga. This doesn’t mean that Prince Freya is a “dark fantasy” series; in many ways it feels very on-par with contemporary, American YA fantasy novels where secrets put the main characters at an even greater disadvantage than usual at the start of a story. While Prince Freya is rated older teen/teen+, after this first volume I wouldn’t have any issues handing it to a younger teenager; there is some physical violence (as expected of a series set in a war) but no sexual violence and at this point there hasn’t been enough violence that I would have been phased as a fantasy devouring 13 year old.
Prince Freya’s first volume feels like a solid start to a fantasy series with intrigue and will be sticking around to catch volume 2 and see what other dangers befall the country of Tyr and all whom Freya loves.
Helen’s rating: 3 out of 5
Krystallina: Could you impersonate someone of the opposite gender? Could you do it long-term? And could you do it if an entire country’s fate was on the line?
Freya, a crybaby village girl, has decided to try and take on the role of her country’s prince while her homeland is under threat from a neighbor.
But “decided to try” is probably not the best way to describe the situation.
In the opening chapter, Freya is thrilled her close friends/adopted brothers Aaron and Aleksi (Alek) have managed to visit despite being soldiers. Eventually, the truth comes tumbling out: they were supposed to send Freya to the capital to replace the dying Prince Edvard, whom she looks like. Edvard was supposed to meet a Sigurdian lord over the rights to Freya’s village, but they’d be happy with knight Aaron’s head. A desperate Freya meets Edvard, but death still comes to both him and Aaron. Freya does not want to see any more bloodshed, but she is Edvard’s opposite in just about every way, and not all of the court has Tyr’s best interest in mind.
Freya agreeing to be Edvard is more motivated by fear than a strong determination, and several times we see her fighting back tears — and only sometimes succeeding. But we also see sparks of the fire inside, turning a knight’s words back at him in order for Alek to be near her. But Ishihara’s notes make it clear that she knows that Freya has a long way to go and that Freya is very different from the strong-willed heroines in her other works. I hope this means the series will run much longer than her other series, which have reached a max of four volumes. That’s not a lot of time for Freya to take on more of the confident, mischievous, and whimsical traits of Edvard as well as save Tyr. I’m not saying Prince Freya should reach Yona of the Dawn lengths, but I am a bit concerned since this first volume is already ending with “the beginning of events that would shake Tyr to its very foundations”.
The manga has promise though. From what we see in flashbacks (and Freya’s short study of him), Edvard was quite a character, and impersonating him is going to be quite a job. Alek is dealing with the loss of Aaron, and now “Freya”, in a sense, is lost too. And both who know of Freya and don’t have their own frustrations with the current Edvard.
There were several details that left me wondering. Obviously, there’s the question of Freya’s appearance, but beyond that, things like what happened to the king and queen or how a chained Aaron is suddenly wielding a sword. And at the very beginning, the narration says that Tyr “was seized by Sigurd too”, but if Tyr is already under Sigurd’s control, why do they demand Freya’s village? That could be a translation issue, but the other gaps in story and art are more significant. Ishihara is going to have to address those in order to make Prince Freya the epic journey it’s supposed to be.
Krystallina’s rating: 3 out of 5