"Oh but also the peasant levies are made out of unarmed women and children, damn life sure sucks huh" and I was like, excuse me, what? Am I even watching the same show?

Given the rest of the what we see of character who claimed that's arc I can't help but wonder if he wasn't just bullshitting or doing something like misrepresenting a desperate village continuing to fight after losing most of its adult male population as some galaxy brain human shields nonsense to turn the blame away from himself and onto others.

Honestly tho I think the last part of the show really worked only because "Oh shit I need to defeat a clone of myself" is just such great narrative shorthand for the need for self-reflection.... which is kinda undercut by the prior arc being Harry Potter Death Game, where the protagonists only survive by being such total badasses.

It really felt like it was trying to channel Hunter x Hunter and BNHA there. It also felt like it was trying to backtrack a bit on the cutthroat brutality stuff, cause even in the first trial it backed off and was like "wait no actually most of them were bluffing and are actually uncomfortable with the idea of just casually murdering each other for status, but they want to intimidate the others into backing down so they play psycho" for most of them except Ubel.

For what it was it wasn't terrible, but it really did ruin the feel the first bit had. Like Frieren being this horrifyingly powerful bag of repressed trauma whose whole life has been some weird deep cover sleeper agent shit is entertaining, and I honestly think the show could have ridden a lot more on the having her give up on subtlety and just casually murk some horribly threat before continuing on with something silly and trivial bit a lot more, like its slowly revealing that it's just One Punch Man, but Elf. That was a funny enough gag and they could have gotten way more mileage out of it than they did before miring themselves in the snails-pace blow-by-blow shonen fight scenes.

Really a mixed bag of a show, idk Dungeon Meshi is doing it more for me rn.

Yeah. It doesn't hit as hard as early Frieren, which actually brought me to tears repeatedly because the whole "endless churn of people you may never see again as time slips inexorably away" shit strikes a nerve hard, but it is overall the better work.