My point that you missed entirely is that the scene is not simply “kill every member of bad group” because ironically that take is some real “Curtains are blue” type shit
No. Frieren is explicitly a “kill demons on sight” enjoyer and is clearly explaining why demons need to be killed on sight whenever possible.
Are the Demons European and aristocratic coded on accident?
Everything is European-coded, the entire setting is deutscheaboo as fuck and wears that on its sleeve! It’s not like this is a Japanese setting and then in pop these Germans, everyone is German!
Is their social obsession with status and conquest just irrelevant because it’s inconvenient to your claim the author is antisemitic and is making an allusion to Jews?
My central claim is not that it’s antisemitic and I am explicit that I’m mainly using antisemitism as an example, though I note at the end that it’s possible that it’s antisemitic given there’s some antisemitism in other big deutscheaboo series.
That said, are you not familiar with what the Nazis said about Jews? Because the demons being obsessed with status and especially conquest is not actually a counter-argument. It’s a huge part of their narrative that Jews want to control the world and thereby are inclined to use whatever political and financial means they can get their hands on to accomplish that goal. I’m not interested in trying to argue that the demons definitely are Jews, but this attempt at a slick own is a failure.
I consider this a complete aside, but it’s also mentioned that status among demons is decided almost entirely by the magical power one personally possesses rather than any other factor, and this is contrasted with the way that humans need to signal status with things like clothes. I think it is therefore an inevitable conclusion that the one coterie of demons dressing as aristocrats are doing that to impress the humans, since we certainly see other demons (including Qual, who was an extremely accomplished mage in the Demon Lord’s army) not dressed that way at all. I don’t think this is very important, but I thought you might find it interesting to consider.
as in Demons engage in Genocide, False Appreance, False Overtures of Peace, The Importance of Status, Arrogant Sense of Destiny…any of this ringing a bell in a colonial sense?
Also things said about Jews by Nazis, though again I’m not arguing that that’s specifically what the author is going for. Part of the issue is that the rhetoric of fascism itself often heavily involves a sort of false anti-colonialism, both with the idea of resisting the colonization of one’s own land by foreign capitalists and pretending to be a liberator of other colonized nations (see Imperial Japan in Southeast Asia).
Another helpful reference point is accusation-in-mirror, the argument that “X group is trying to genocide us, so we must genocide them.” Even if X group as a political force are genocidal, that does not mean the correct answer is to commit genocide against X group, and the series sure would have a much easier time claiming to be anti-genocide if it actually analyzed demons as a political force rather than a racial group.
Apparently what matters is we take a scene in isolation, ignore the subtext and the context and then claim the series is saying the opposite of what it’s subtexually alluding to, because some chuds like it, like be for real
I don’t care what chuds think and never referenced anything they’ve said about it, so you’re just putting this on me without evidence. I’ve watched the whole anime that’s out so far multiple times and read most of the manga (I didn’t bother to keep up with it actively) and these are my opinions from the actual content of the show. The child example is the most egregious, but the mini-arc that it’s being used in does not contradict what I’m saying. The broad strokes of the arc (not the child sequence, but the rest of it) do not contradict what you’re saying either, but there are details that clearly do, like the repetition of the claim “Demons only learned to speak in order to lie.” They are clearly stated over and over to be ontologically sub-human and evil, which is why you have people elsewhere in this thread saying they’re actually like zombies or sharks or something.
The child is a stand in for the initial innocence and peaceful oveetures that arrive during the beginning of a colonial process
The child is also a child, and Frieren’s explicit ideology that she and the demons beat you over the head with is “demons learned to speak to lie, they are only interested in killing people”.
but that is the subtext expanded on later in the series
I await your explanation.
hmmm almost like
I know that I’m annoying, but I’ve been trying to rein it in in terms of completely useless affectations of smarmy gloating. I would appreciate if you did too (and feel free to point out where I have failed, of course).
Having gripes about the mechanism of delivering that subtext (a kid eating it) is fine, but the scene is not saying “kill kids of group you hate” it would if the scene was a short story totally in isolation from the rest of Frierens narrative concerning the nature of Demons
But it’s not, so you and the chuds don’t have a leg to stand on, despite your gripes about how the narrative is presented
It feels like you’re so interested in your interpretation of the scene that you don’t see what’s in front of you, most of all that demons are a species. There is no need to make colonizers an ontologically evil species. It is still literally the case that if Frieren encounters a demon child, she will kill the demon child and advocates that everyone do the same, and there is no such thing as a good demon, a good member of this species, not by nature and not by nurture.
A lot of my argument can be summarized that fascists have a history of claiming to be victims of colonization and portray their enemies in what is sometimes a very similar way, which logically causes a little bit of an issue with distinguishing the validity of your account and mine (hence my mention before of ways your reading is not contradicted). Perhaps in the last dozen chapters of the manga that I haven’t read there’s a smoking gun for your interpretation that you haven’t seen fit to show me, but so far I can confidently say that the closest thing to a smoking gun is in my favor, which again is that the demons are a species rather than a political faction, and there is no segment or even member of the demons who sincerely sympathizes with people and fights the other demons. This is exacerbated by the fact that some of the demons (the members of the demon lord’s army) are in a political faction, but explicitly many are not and generally don’t have a “society” as such, but live independently and all nonetheless possess the same basic malevolence that they can never be disabused of.
Your argument is therefore forced to claim that “This fantasy race of creature isn’t actually a fantasy race, it’s a political orientation and when the protagonist looks at the camera and says ‘kill every member of this race, even crying, helpless children,’ it’s a metaphor for rejecting the diplomacy of those political factions.” As for why no demon can ever be rehabilitated? I guess the claim is “colonizers are tricky, so it’s a metaphor for how the colonizers will always trick you.”
I just think it’s the sort of attempt at interpretation that goes too far in picking out details to make an interpretive narrative while ignoring the actual events of the story. If this is supposed to be a metaphor for colonialism, it’s the most catastrophically poorly-written one that I’ve ever seen because there was literally no reason to make the colonizers racially essential. It would be so easy to make them an actual political faction and not a 2000 IQ allegory for how this child is really a personable diplomat who must die, so let’s kill the kid (especially since I don’t think the kid is even an agent of the Demon Lord, just a kid left behind by some other band of demons that was wiped out already). What does them being a species add? Because I can only see downsides if you’re hypothetically correct. There are so many things the author could do to destroy this narrative in one speech bubble, but they don’t (pending the subsequent elaboration that you alluded to but haven’t shared yet)
clearly explaining why demons need to be killed on sight whenever possible
Yeah because they’re hell bent on genocide, conquest and their mana farming obsession prevents them from seeing humans as equals, sound familiar? The Demons are the bourgeois, not minorities
Everything is European-coded, the entire setting is deutscheaboo as fuck and wears that on its sleeve! It’s not like this is a Japanese setting and then in pop these Germans, everyone is German!
German AND aristocratic, German and genocidal, German and obessed with status, German and convinced of their manifest destiny. The German-ness of the Demons isn’t their only attributes and I never claim it was and you know I never claimed that. You’re simply cherry picking my words and ignoring anything I say that contradicts your claim
My central claim is not that it’s antisemitic and I am explicit that I’m mainly using antisemitism as an example
You claim it’s not antisemitic, then you send three paragraphs outlining how it Actually is antisemitic (while butchering and ignoring the actual narrative of Frieren)???
You’re waffling and you can’t have it both ways, saying “yes this is exemplary” of antisemitsm while at the same it isn’t really antisemitic, is just an untenable and contradictory position
Either the Demons of Frieren are an allusions to Jewish people or some other marginalized group or they’re not, it’s not a claim you get to waffle on, make up your mind
Is Frieren antisemitic or not?
If its not then you wasted your time on those paragraphs and you need to substantiate what’s actaully wrong with the series without ignoring the subtext and narrative
I just think it’s the sort of attempt at interpretation that goes too far in picking out details to make an interpretive narrative while ignoring the actual events of the story.
Yeah I’m the weird one for paying attention to details, subtext and how they connect to the narrative, meanwhile my take is repeated and comprehended wholesale even by libs on the massive Frieren subreddit, while everywhere else people (chuds and pop leftists alike) who are claiming Frieren Demons = Jews, are ruthlessly made fun of
Even libs understand the Demons = The rich
It would be so easy to make them an actual political faction and not a 2000 IQ allegory for how this child is really a personable diplomat who must die, so let’s kill the kid
But that wouldn’t capture the totalizing nature of colonialism and the brutal realism that manifested as a result of those conquests though deception, again you may not like the presentation of specific scenes. But calling Frieren nazi propaganda is such a radical violation of the “Be Normal” and “Touch Grass” clause most leftists understand is important to our appeal and worst of all its not supported by the narrative or the subtext that the narrative explicitly outlines while it’s explaining the nature of Demons;
“they’re descended from monsters who cried help”
“they don’t give dignity to those with little mana”
"They’re individualists who form the barest connections necessary to fight humanity
Hello, that’s how the narrative outlines the subtext, this isn’t nazi dogwhistles, this is a fictional partially essentialized version of the capitalist class tearing its way thru a feudal world
COOL
I guess the claim is “colonizers are tricky, so it’s a metaphor for how the colonizers will always trick you.”
Yeah colonizers never engaged in tricky shit, never used deception, never broke treaties, never made false overtures of peace, never engaged in Genocide
No the only people who were accused of doing deception in world history were the Jews, so obviously anytime someone writes about a species of man-eating monsters they must be talking about Jewish people, great take
While I’d certainly humor an argument about antisemitism, I don’t think there’s that much reason to render such an accusation except for the deutscheaboo thing, which I think is not enough reason. My specific point in using it as an example is that I’m pretty familiar with it and hope that I can either use it as a common reference point or at least that you can pretty easily find what I’m talking about. My general point in using it as an example is that it functions as a counterexample to your inferences, that x set of traits precludes them being about y subject (some scorned race), so here’s an example of an ethnic group about which all of these things were said, demonstrating that your inference is inadequate, and also that your claim that it’s not about Jews is so far inadequate (which is not proof of the antithesis, just a disproof of your proof).
If you claim that P -> Q, me arguing that P does not imply Q does not say anything about whether or not Q is actually the case, just whether your inference is false. One way to disprove it would be to establish that Q is not the case even though P is, but that’s just one way and I don’t think there’s really adequate evidence for making that argument. If you want my feeling about Frieren’s demon depiction, it’s that it isn’t about any particular race/ethnicity, but is evidently informed by some underlying element of chauvinism because it’s still a pogrom fantasy even if it doesn’t correspond to any race and isn’t meant to either.
I’m sure we can agree that this conversation is a poor use of time, so we can stop here, I just wanted to explain that one point because you asked.
If you want my feeling about Frieren’s demon depiction, it’s that it isn’t about any particular race/ethnicity, but is evidently informed by some underlying element of chauvinism
But what are you basing this claim on besides vague intuition? The Demons in the setting are the chauvinists, their entire society is stractured around elitism and domination, they’re not a put upon minority ethnic group
The concept of monsters or even races of monsters is not inherently tied to real world realities concerning race and ethnicity, you need the allusions that actually form that connection to make that claim, and you can make those claims about AOT and some other suss anime, but not Frieren
The allusions that define the Demons of Frieren are those of imperialist Europeans and the deprivations of European nobility, that’s why the Demons are always ridiculously dripped out, they’re what the rich in the real world want to be, their ideal platonic form
because it’s still a pogrom fantasy even if it doesn’t correspond to any race and isn’t meant to either.
The Demons are the ones committing pogroms, they explicitly genocide the elves because the Demon King ordered it, Frieren is literally a victim of genocide, that’s the source of her hatred, her character has more in common with the popular imaginary of a post war Nazi hunter than some Gestapo thug looking for “demon” girls hiding in an attic
No. Frieren is explicitly a “kill demons on sight” enjoyer and is clearly explaining why demons need to be killed on sight whenever possible.
Everything is European-coded, the entire setting is deutscheaboo as fuck and wears that on its sleeve! It’s not like this is a Japanese setting and then in pop these Germans, everyone is German!
My central claim is not that it’s antisemitic and I am explicit that I’m mainly using antisemitism as an example, though I note at the end that it’s possible that it’s antisemitic given there’s some antisemitism in other big deutscheaboo series.
That said, are you not familiar with what the Nazis said about Jews? Because the demons being obsessed with status and especially conquest is not actually a counter-argument. It’s a huge part of their narrative that Jews want to control the world and thereby are inclined to use whatever political and financial means they can get their hands on to accomplish that goal. I’m not interested in trying to argue that the demons definitely are Jews, but this attempt at a slick own is a failure.
I consider this a complete aside, but it’s also mentioned that status among demons is decided almost entirely by the magical power one personally possesses rather than any other factor, and this is contrasted with the way that humans need to signal status with things like clothes. I think it is therefore an inevitable conclusion that the one coterie of demons dressing as aristocrats are doing that to impress the humans, since we certainly see other demons (including Qual, who was an extremely accomplished mage in the Demon Lord’s army) not dressed that way at all. I don’t think this is very important, but I thought you might find it interesting to consider.
Also things said about Jews by Nazis, though again I’m not arguing that that’s specifically what the author is going for. Part of the issue is that the rhetoric of fascism itself often heavily involves a sort of false anti-colonialism, both with the idea of resisting the colonization of one’s own land by foreign capitalists and pretending to be a liberator of other colonized nations (see Imperial Japan in Southeast Asia).
Another helpful reference point is accusation-in-mirror, the argument that “X group is trying to genocide us, so we must genocide them.” Even if X group as a political force are genocidal, that does not mean the correct answer is to commit genocide against X group, and the series sure would have a much easier time claiming to be anti-genocide if it actually analyzed demons as a political force rather than a racial group.
I don’t care what chuds think and never referenced anything they’ve said about it, so you’re just putting this on me without evidence. I’ve watched the whole anime that’s out so far multiple times and read most of the manga (I didn’t bother to keep up with it actively) and these are my opinions from the actual content of the show. The child example is the most egregious, but the mini-arc that it’s being used in does not contradict what I’m saying. The broad strokes of the arc (not the child sequence, but the rest of it) do not contradict what you’re saying either, but there are details that clearly do, like the repetition of the claim “Demons only learned to speak in order to lie.” They are clearly stated over and over to be ontologically sub-human and evil, which is why you have people elsewhere in this thread saying they’re actually like zombies or sharks or something.
The child is also a child, and Frieren’s explicit ideology that she and the demons beat you over the head with is “demons learned to speak to lie, they are only interested in killing people”.
I await your explanation.
I know that I’m annoying, but I’ve been trying to rein it in in terms of completely useless affectations of smarmy gloating. I would appreciate if you did too (and feel free to point out where I have failed, of course).
It feels like you’re so interested in your interpretation of the scene that you don’t see what’s in front of you, most of all that demons are a species. There is no need to make colonizers an ontologically evil species. It is still literally the case that if Frieren encounters a demon child, she will kill the demon child and advocates that everyone do the same, and there is no such thing as a good demon, a good member of this species, not by nature and not by nurture.
A lot of my argument can be summarized that fascists have a history of claiming to be victims of colonization and portray their enemies in what is sometimes a very similar way, which logically causes a little bit of an issue with distinguishing the validity of your account and mine (hence my mention before of ways your reading is not contradicted). Perhaps in the last dozen chapters of the manga that I haven’t read there’s a smoking gun for your interpretation that you haven’t seen fit to show me, but so far I can confidently say that the closest thing to a smoking gun is in my favor, which again is that the demons are a species rather than a political faction, and there is no segment or even member of the demons who sincerely sympathizes with people and fights the other demons. This is exacerbated by the fact that some of the demons (the members of the demon lord’s army) are in a political faction, but explicitly many are not and generally don’t have a “society” as such, but live independently and all nonetheless possess the same basic malevolence that they can never be disabused of.
Your argument is therefore forced to claim that “This fantasy race of creature isn’t actually a fantasy race, it’s a political orientation and when the protagonist looks at the camera and says ‘kill every member of this race, even crying, helpless children,’ it’s a metaphor for rejecting the diplomacy of those political factions.” As for why no demon can ever be rehabilitated? I guess the claim is “colonizers are tricky, so it’s a metaphor for how the colonizers will always trick you.”
I just think it’s the sort of attempt at interpretation that goes too far in picking out details to make an interpretive narrative while ignoring the actual events of the story. If this is supposed to be a metaphor for colonialism, it’s the most catastrophically poorly-written one that I’ve ever seen because there was literally no reason to make the colonizers racially essential. It would be so easy to make them an actual political faction and not a 2000 IQ allegory for how this child is really a personable diplomat who must die, so let’s kill the kid (especially since I don’t think the kid is even an agent of the Demon Lord, just a kid left behind by some other band of demons that was wiped out already). What does them being a species add? Because I can only see downsides if you’re hypothetically correct. There are so many things the author could do to destroy this narrative in one speech bubble, but they don’t (pending the subsequent elaboration that you alluded to but haven’t shared yet)
Yeah because they’re hell bent on genocide, conquest and their mana farming obsession prevents them from seeing humans as equals, sound familiar? The Demons are the bourgeois, not minorities
German AND aristocratic, German and genocidal, German and obessed with status, German and convinced of their manifest destiny. The German-ness of the Demons isn’t their only attributes and I never claim it was and you know I never claimed that. You’re simply cherry picking my words and ignoring anything I say that contradicts your claim
You claim it’s not antisemitic, then you send three paragraphs outlining how it Actually is antisemitic (while butchering and ignoring the actual narrative of Frieren)???
You’re waffling and you can’t have it both ways, saying “yes this is exemplary” of antisemitsm while at the same it isn’t really antisemitic, is just an untenable and contradictory position
Either the Demons of Frieren are an allusions to Jewish people or some other marginalized group or they’re not, it’s not a claim you get to waffle on, make up your mind
Is Frieren antisemitic or not?
If its not then you wasted your time on those paragraphs and you need to substantiate what’s actaully wrong with the series without ignoring the subtext and narrative
Yeah I’m the weird one for paying attention to details, subtext and how they connect to the narrative, meanwhile my take is repeated and comprehended wholesale even by libs on the massive Frieren subreddit, while everywhere else people (chuds and pop leftists alike) who are claiming Frieren Demons = Jews, are ruthlessly made fun of
Even libs understand the Demons = The rich
But that wouldn’t capture the totalizing nature of colonialism and the brutal realism that manifested as a result of those conquests though deception, again you may not like the presentation of specific scenes. But calling Frieren nazi propaganda is such a radical violation of the “Be Normal” and “Touch Grass” clause most leftists understand is important to our appeal and worst of all its not supported by the narrative or the subtext that the narrative explicitly outlines while it’s explaining the nature of Demons;
“they’re descended from monsters who cried help”
“they don’t give dignity to those with little mana”
"They’re individualists who form the barest connections necessary to fight humanity
Hello, that’s how the narrative outlines the subtext, this isn’t nazi dogwhistles, this is a fictional partially essentialized version of the capitalist class tearing its way thru a feudal world
COOL
Yeah colonizers never engaged in tricky shit, never used deception, never broke treaties, never made false overtures of peace, never engaged in Genocide
No the only people who were accused of doing deception in world history were the Jews, so obviously anytime someone writes about a species of man-eating monsters they must be talking about Jewish people, great take
While I’d certainly humor an argument about antisemitism, I don’t think there’s that much reason to render such an accusation except for the deutscheaboo thing, which I think is not enough reason. My specific point in using it as an example is that I’m pretty familiar with it and hope that I can either use it as a common reference point or at least that you can pretty easily find what I’m talking about. My general point in using it as an example is that it functions as a counterexample to your inferences, that x set of traits precludes them being about y subject (some scorned race), so here’s an example of an ethnic group about which all of these things were said, demonstrating that your inference is inadequate, and also that your claim that it’s not about Jews is so far inadequate (which is not proof of the antithesis, just a disproof of your proof).
If you claim that P -> Q, me arguing that P does not imply Q does not say anything about whether or not Q is actually the case, just whether your inference is false. One way to disprove it would be to establish that Q is not the case even though P is, but that’s just one way and I don’t think there’s really adequate evidence for making that argument. If you want my feeling about Frieren’s demon depiction, it’s that it isn’t about any particular race/ethnicity, but is evidently informed by some underlying element of chauvinism because it’s still a pogrom fantasy even if it doesn’t correspond to any race and isn’t meant to either.
I’m sure we can agree that this conversation is a poor use of time, so we can stop here, I just wanted to explain that one point because you asked.
But what are you basing this claim on besides vague intuition? The Demons in the setting are the chauvinists, their entire society is stractured around elitism and domination, they’re not a put upon minority ethnic group
The concept of monsters or even races of monsters is not inherently tied to real world realities concerning race and ethnicity, you need the allusions that actually form that connection to make that claim, and you can make those claims about AOT and some other suss anime, but not Frieren
The allusions that define the Demons of Frieren are those of imperialist Europeans and the deprivations of European nobility, that’s why the Demons are always ridiculously dripped out, they’re what the rich in the real world want to be, their ideal platonic form
The Demons are the ones committing pogroms, they explicitly genocide the elves because the Demon King ordered it, Frieren is literally a victim of genocide, that’s the source of her hatred, her character has more in common with the popular imaginary of a post war Nazi hunter than some Gestapo thug looking for “demon” girls hiding in an attic