🎲 The third Frieren: Beyond Journey's End character popularity poll listed the Mimic, a treasure-chest monster, as entry number 140. It has no lines. It has no will. It bites Frieren. That's the whole act. In the first poll, it came third. Behind Himmel and Frieren, ahead of everyone else. So how did it do this time? The answer is "21st, but also 6th," which is about as Frieren as an answer gets.

Note: this covers content from both anime seasons.

Entry No. 140 Was a Box

The third poll ran from midnight on March 8, 2026 to 23:59 on March 29, on a special page at WEB Sunday, Shonen Sunday's official site. It covered 140 entries, up from 100 in the first poll and 116 in the second. You could vote as many times as you liked, and anyone landing in the top 10 was getting merchandise made.

The Mimic is a monster that disguises itself as a treasure chest. Frieren can never quite rule out that there's a grimoire inside, so she opens them, and gets eaten. A mage over a thousand years old, arguably the strongest alive, has exactly one weakness and it is boxes. It's the series' signature running gag.

And there it sat, in the final slot of 140. The voting page's artwork showed Frieren halfway inside a Mimic's mouth. Fans noted the official account was pretty transparently fishing for the Mimic vote.

Genau Ended Himmel's Streak

Results landed on the official X account on March 30. Total votes: 12,700,122.

First place went to Genau, a first-class mage, with over 1.39 million votes. Then Himmel, then Aura the Guillotine, Frieren, Macht the Golden, Serie, Stark, Fern, "Demon 2 Attacking the Lauphen Region," and, in tenth, "The Bone She Bought."

Himmel had won the first two polls. Not this one. Genau's arc landed in season 2, and the votes followed. And yes, ninth place went to a thing whose entry name is a description of a thing.

So what about the Mimic? Twenty-first. Out of the top ten. Except there's no cap on how many times one person can vote in that tally. A separate "one vote per person per character" count was published afterward, with 796,433 votes: Frieren, Himmel, Stark, Fern, Methode, Mimic, Genau, Übel, Sein, Flamme. Sixth.

The same thing happened last time. Tenth in the unlimited count, fourth in the one-person-one-vote count. Which means the Mimic isn't being propped up by a small pile of obsessives clicking all day. Lots of people, individually, genuinely like it. For a creature whose entire résumé is "bites Frieren," that's a real achievement.

The Bone She Bought Actually Made Top Ten

Half the fun is just reading the entry list. "The Bone She Bought." "A Stupidly Huge Hamburger." "The Little Brat Who Flipped Frieren's Skirt." "A Demon Who Died From Idiotic Arrogance and Carelessness." Where a character or object has no formal name, the publisher just takes the in-story context and staples it on as the name.

And one of them, the bone Frieren impulse-bought, actually finished tenth this time. Top ten means merchandise. There is going to be a bone.

During the second poll, the official account posted running interim rankings for selected entries with a completely straight face: "33rd: The Bone She Bought." "39th: A Stupidly Huge Hamburger." The publisher is the one setting this tone.

Meanwhile, the Manga Has Stopped

While the poll was a party, the source material wasn't moving.

Frieren went on hiatus with issue 46 of Weekly Shonen Sunday, published October 15, 2025. According to the editorial department, it was to accommodate the health of writer Kanehito Yamada and artist Tsukasa Abe while adjusting the serialization pace and format, with a return date to be announced in the magazine. Both creators are still working. The most recent volume is number 15, out December 18, 2025.

Season 2 of the anime ran January 16 to March 27, 2026 on Nippon TV's FRIDAY ANIME NIGHT block. The poll overlapped with the back half of that run, which is the obvious explanation for both Genau's win and Methode's climb.

The manga has taken the Manga Taisho 2021 grand prize, the 25th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize New Creator Prize, the 69th Shogakukan Manga Award and the 48th Kodansha Manga Award in the shonen category. Cumulative circulation hit 35 million copies in February 2026. The story is paused. The popularity isn't.

Does your country run official character polls for anime or manga? And if one of the entries were "a piece of furniture that eats the protagonist," and it placed near the top, would the publisher let it stand?

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