At this point, I'm just waiting to see where the journey ends up. The manga is all over the fucking place. I thought it was going to be a slice-of-lifey, occasional conflict -> peaceable resolution on-the-road sort of story, but the way it's looking now this empire arc looks like it's just derailing the "journey" part of Frieren.

The author put his foot in his mouth since the Macht arc, which wasn't bad at all but felt out-of-place, and he totally fell in love with a bunch of his background characters and is now wasting time developing this growing cast of characters by giving them their own trials and adventures, rather than actually telling a story based on Frieren, Starke, Fern, and sometimes Sein (whose own arc looks like it'll be wrapping up in the very near future).

I just don't understand what the point of the empire arc is, why there'd be a hitlist on elf women, or how this arc is going to resolve in a way that does not permanently alter the course of the story. There are enough red flags throughout chapters 130-140 that you just know something terrible is going to happen, and that seems to really go against the grain of the tone of this series.